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During last July’s 5.8 earthquake, 3-year-old Bronwyn told her 1-year-old sister, “We’re going for a wiggle.” READ MORE
Fatherhood
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By Greg Blake Miller The air was cool and gray-blue and I suspect if the sky were a thing one could lick, it would have tasted like mint. This was our first vacation in five years and the first of a lifetime for our 2-year-old boy. On night one, he'd had the croup; by night three, there was a stomach virus and its attendant joys. We secured the medicines he needed, bought a humidifier, wrapped him in a blanket and let him breathe the night mist. A drive home across the desert seemed inadvisable; we would stay here, on the central coast, and weather the week as best we could. So it was that under the mint sky I was hiking alone down a steep pine hill while my son was in a hotel bungalow, clinging to his mother and sleeping a virus away. I reached the village and bought a lamp that looked like a violin. The store was filled with fountains and aromatic fog and string music. I hiked back up the hill. I saw a doe in a clearing. "Hi," I said. "You're pretty." She looked at me and loped back into the forest. I returned to the bungalow and there was a blue jay on the roof. My wife and my son missed all of this. The day's pleasures mingle with the sense I've stolen something. Is it fair to experience alone what was to have been experienced together? My son wakes up. He wants to go in the car. The explorer in him is weary but not extinct. We drive to an oceanfront grill. My wife and I visited this place years ago, on our first trip together. My son does not want to sit at the table. I take him to the patio and we look at the ocean and sing the "Thinking Chair Song" from "Blues Clues." He goes to bed before 7. He is curled up with his mother and his new plush puppy, which he has named "Puppy." He is, my wife says, almost transparent these days, angelic. He is forbearing, brave in the best sense. There are, I think, moments he loves, moments when it's clear we're in this together, and we will not part. These, in any case, are the moments I love. He falls asleep. My wife comes to me in the living room. We watch a movie on TV. Later, when the room is silent, we turn on the violin lamp. We light the fire. In the bedroom, our son wakes up and calls his mother. She goes to him. Greg Blake Miller of Las Vegas has completed his first novel. He is a regular contributor to this column. |
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