My Baby
When our youngest child was born we felt that with two older children he would likely be the last, and he was our baby. Over the years he's never been anything else. No matter that he's a responsible adult over forty years of age, a scientist, a homeowner, an environmentalist, a vegetarian, a social activist. He's our baby. Coincidentally, he's also the only one of our three children who never needed help from us. He made his own way, through scholarships, and hard physical jobs to take him through to his doctorate.He it was who spent time with us, when he was a young adult. We three went on endless canoe-camping expeditions to Algonquin Park, sharing adventure after adventure. With him we did a nine-day circuit of the Bowron Lakes in the Cariboo Mountains of British Columbia. With him we snowshoed wintry scenes in North Carolina and Tennessee, in Georgia and New Hampshire. We began to slow down as we got older and he began to hit his stride. When he was a teen, and as a family of five we spent hours hiking trails or clambering up mountainsides and we rarely turned back because of fatigue simply because we hated to disappoint his sense of adventure. One had to reach a summit, the end of a trail.
When he was a baby, I used to sit him in a jumping chair in the backyard of our little bungalow in Richmond Hill. Like his brother and his sister before him, he exercised his little legs by pumping up and down in the chair. His tiny legs were stout as oak trees, brown as nuts from the sun. One day years later, when I'd left him for a few moments to do something inside the house, he wandered out of the backyard and up the suburban sidewalk-less street, and a neighbour speedily scooped him up and brought him home. I cried, stifled him with hugs and spanked him simultaneously.
When he was in elementary school he had some really nice little friends, and they used to build little model airplanes and then fly them. For years we kept some of those models, their lightweight bodies suspended from the ceiling of his bedroom by a nylon thread, whirling in any breath of air. He made an interesting transition from paper-covered airplanes to butterflies as he became interested in biology. Equipped with a soft net, he sat motionless until a butterfly afforded him the opportunity to capture it. He amassed a wonderful collection of butterflies, carefully labled and pinned to a presentation board. Then he developed an aversion to killing such beautiful creatures, and he began netting fish. In the local greenbelt's creek he netted dace and kept them in an aquarium. At Lac la Peche in Gatineau, he netted small-mouth bass and learned tragically that they should not share aquarium space with dace.
He once brought home a jewel of an insect. It was the voracious huge black waterbug. An ugly killing machine, but a real coup to find one. He placed it in a deep pail, covered it with netting, planning to study it and placed it temporarily in the backdoor closet. I found it wandering menacingly about the kitchen and my hysterical remonstrations caused it to be returned whence it had come. He was quicker in movement than the many small garter snakes we came across on our hikes and insisted that we touch it so we could experience its dryness, it muscular strength.
As a young teen he persuaded me to start a compost heap. Anything that was leftover in the kitchen could be dropped into it, a wire-mesh square. I was amazed, over time, to find within its confines green gold to be spread on the gardens. Once, he came home from school and found me in the backyard, raking up the multitudinous leaves that fell from the three mature maples there. Could I, he asked, do him a favour? Could I please touch my toes? I did better, I laid my palms flat on the ground before me, knees straight. Funny, he said, his gym teacher had bet them that none of the children's parents would be able to touch their toes.
He took a one-year sabbatical between his initial degree (Bsc) and his Master's, then his Master's and his Doctorate. $0,000 NSIRC grants gave him the luxury to take time off, then resume where he'd left off. Oddly enough, he did research work on his year's "time off", and that too gave him additional opportunities to amass experiences that were so vital to him.
Now he lives in Vancouver and although we find the distance painful, it is as it should be. This is his life. British Columbia offers him adventures that cannot really be replicated elsewhere. In the summer he hikes, mountain climbs, canoes, kayaks. In the winter he skis, camps and makes the most of his surroundings, and he loves every minute of it. Those old-growth forests so approachable in that venue are breathtaking and he's close to the portals of pure nature.
For our 50th marriage anniversary he sent us a lovely piece of porcelain pottery he'd made. We have many vases, teapots, bowls, platters, dishes, cups of every description and colour, all inscribed on the back with his name and the date he made them. What a baby, what a man.
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, June 22, 2005
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