Grey Days
By Mr Lady | October 3rd, 2011 | Category: Featured 2, Friday 1, Memoir, Mr Lady | 6 comments{by Craig Lesley, Bad Chemicals}
I’m zoned out most of the time. The world rifles by and I shuffle and daydream and stare at my shoes and don’t notice much of anything as weeks speed past.
But every so often I catch a sliver, the words “Forgive Me” spray painted on an overpass, the color of my eyes reflected in a shop window, my wife Sally making peanut butter cookies with our kids in the kitchen.
A few nights ago, rooting around for something to read on my night stand, I unearthed a picture, under a pile of magazines and books, taken last autumn at the neonatal intensive care unit. The whole family is in the photograph—Sally, our four-year-old, our two-week-old, and me. I’m holding the infant, who’s wrinkled and weighs barely three pounds. It looks like we’re all smiling, even the baby somehow.
The picture sent my head back, to those grey days, to the fluorescent lights in the sterile hospital, to that tiny boy with the tubes and the wires and the sensors.
That was a tough time. Sally had lost all that blood and our baby was teetering and the leaves were falling and every day I had to walk past the nursery with the plump babies and their proud relatives staring through the glass. Most days, I wanted to growl at those happy gawkers at the nursery window. I wanted to punch their grinning mouths.
But looking at that picture the other night, I realized the anger and worry had dripped away and what remained of those grey days was longing. I visited the newborn every afternoon in the hospital, and I told him about his brother and the pets at home as he laid in the incubator. I mentioned that the nice lady who kept stopping by and touching his feet was his mother. “You’ll like her,” I assured him. “She’s the one who knows what’s going on.”
I found myself missing those quiet afternoons together and the mystery of that wrinkled baby who I needed so desperately to grow big like the newborns in the nursery.
I drove the four-year-old to preschool that fall, and we discussed big trucks and soccer and hard rock as we cruised in the station wagon.
“Dad, do monster trucks like Metallica?” he asked one cold morning.
“Son,” I explained. “Monster trucks adore Metallica.”
I found myself missing those talks, too, as I gazed at that picture.
Yesterday, almost 10 months after the baby crashed into the world 10 weeks early, he crawled for the first time, grunting and stretching out and inching across the playroom to gum a toy. I called Sally in, and as she watched him crawl, she cheered.
Then she looked at me. “And so it begins,” she muttered, almost ominously.
Monday, the four-year-old, who is now the five-year-old, started kindergarten. He lugged his oversized Superman backpack down the stairs and all the way to his class without any help. “I’ve got it, Dad,” he told me.
Tuesday, in the school parking lot, he asked, “Dad, can I not hold your hand? I’ll be very careful.”
Today, he walked to class by himself. I stood at the school entrance as he rolled his backpack down the hallway, shorter and thinner than the other children bobbing along. A few steps in, the boy turned around and waved. Then he continued straight and confidently away.
I wish I could do that. I wish I could just walk away like my kindergartener did. But that’s not me. That’s not how I’m put together.
These boys are growing up, and they need to. They need to crawl. They need to go to school. They need to travel to sunny cities. They need to fall hard for pretty girls.
And I need to let them walk down those hallways and drive away in those cars, but I know I can’t completely. Some part of me will linger there, puttering along in the station wagon with the bad heavy metal cranked up, watching the five-year-old weave his way to class, rocking the infant in the hospital on those grey days last fall.
And that part of me will know that sadness is also a gift.
