Stories: Once upon a time. . .
“. . . red-faced with the pure, foolish joy of the whole thing.”
Last year, on the twenty-third of April, my first and almost certainly only grandchild was born. Sometime in June or July I started telling him this story. I have told it to him, adding a bit at each telling, every time we have been together since then. It has been magic for both of us.
It is our story. No one else has heard it.
This year, for his first birthday, I put together a book of photographs. This story, written down for the first time, is the last page of that book.
“On ce upon a time, in a city by the sea, on a bright, clear Spring morning in the Year, marked on many of the calendars as 2015, this world moved aside to make room for an unexpected person.
Once upon a time, in a city by the sea, on a clear Spring day, already filled with sunshine just past dawn, this old world looked around, then stepped just a little to the side to make room for an unexpected person to be lifted into his life.
And once upon that very same time, in a busy port city close by a large, sparkling sea, on the twenty-third of April 2015, 451 years to the day after William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-on-Avon, this funny, wise old world, this pretty amazing old world, surveyed the situation and took a decisive step aside to make a space with room enough for an unexpected boy to be lifted right up into the beginning of his great adventure.
And, although this boy was entirely unexpected, still he was longed for, waited for, anticipated, and in a large room close by where his lifting would occur, there were the people who, though not expecting him, still–after all–were waiting.
So all those waiting people, though not exactly expectant, sat together in a large room, close by where the boy would be lifted, and their waiting wasn’t long at all. It wasn’t long at all until the boy’s father sent out the first photograph, taken just minutes after the boy arrived, howling into the world, howling his arrival into what was at that moment his world. Howling with life, ‘Here I am. Send me.’
And after they had waited, after months and hours when they had not dared to expect, the boy had arrived, red-faced with the pure foolish joy of the whole thing. And those waiting people, who had perhaps already begun to suspect, now knew that the boy would change everything, would alter the landscape.
And the boy, brought in to the large room, was among them now, looking-frankly-not much like a changer of worlds-and yet so very obviously exactly that. This baby boy—his name, “Baby Boy” printed on his hospital bracelet—looked remarkably like the other babies. And his parents, with all good intentions, his adoring, joyous parents, were very, very tired, too tired in fact for naming. So it was that, only sometime during that magical first night, this shifter of ground, this transformer of lives, this ordinary baby boy, became in a heartbeat: Vaughn Michael Pollard.
The adventure had begun.
Once upon a time, in a city by the sea,
on a clear, bright spring morning. . .”
Happy Birthday, Baby Boy.
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