What I learned about my son
I sat at the counter of the Bluebird with a cup of coffee I never drank and I watched my eight-year-old son move through that crowd like he had been born to it. He climbed up on a motorcycle and honked a horn and a dozen leathered-up bikers laughed. He sat in Carol’s lap and told her about his dinosaur collection. He listened, really listened, the way he had listened to Roy, when a young man with tattoos up both arms knelt down and told him, quiet, that he had lost his own little girl the year before, and that Eli reminded him of the good in the world, and my son patted that man’s hand and said, “She misses you too, I bet. From heaven. That’s how you know you loved her big.”
I do not know where he gets it. I have asked myself that a thousand times since. I am an ordinary woman. I clip coupons and I fret about the water bill and I lose my temper when Eli tracks mud across the kitchen. Ray is a good man but he is a quiet one, not given to speeches. We are not remarkable people. We did not sit our son down and teach him to walk across a schoolyard and hand his sandwich to a stranger in a leather vest. If anything, I have spent his whole life telling him to be careful of strangers, to stay close, to come straight home.
But somewhere in all of that ordinary living, something took root in that boy that is bigger than anything Ray or I put there on purpose. He looks at people and he sees the part that is hurting. He always has. When he was four he cried at the grocery store because an old man was eating alone at the little snack counter, and he would not settle until I let him go sit with the man and tell him about his shoes. I was mortified at the time. I apologized to the poor fellow six ways. And the man, I remember now, had tears in his eyes too, and told me I had a special one, and I said thank you and hurried Eli out of there, embarrassed, not understanding.
I understand now. I understand that my son carries something the rest of us lose somewhere along the way, some ability to walk right up to a person’s pain and sit down beside it without being afraid. And I think, sitting at that counter, watching two hundred grieving strangers laugh and eat pancakes and stand a little straighter than they had that morning, I think I finally understood that my only job, my whole job as his mother, is to not talk him out of it.