To My Son in Celebration of His Second Birth Mama, do you think I’m weird? you asked when fourth grade had snatched from you any promise that the world could be counted on for its goodness. No, baby, precious. You know—weird, in a good way. I was young and not a talker. For these and oh so many other reasons, you didn’t get what you needed. Not even close. Tonight your question comes disguised as a joke, a child’s urgency cloaked in a man’s diffidence. Here, son of mine, is how you are weird to me. You are the blue moon, sneaking in at the end of a month too settled in its cycles. Who knows if the tides, plain exhausted or altogether too rambunctious, require lunar resetting, or if the earth seeks illumination of her other good side? You are predictably unpredictable, the Northern Lights, not viewed the same by any two creatures—or by my sister and me, bundled in parkas on the banks of the Yukon in early fall, somewhere north of Anchorage, deep in awe, and way down in the center of our father’s civil disobedience of our mother’s rules against skipping school for all-night fishing—old Aurora, observer of doings and undoings not even Service imagined, dazzlingly different each time you take the sky. Weird, see? You are the brindled or spotted pup in a batch of otherwise solid black or white, all squirming in blind search of their mother’s teats and she, though spent from a rainy night’s labor beneath a flickering 60-watt bulb in a leaky tool shed, notices and nudges you, her pink tongue gathering in your difference and scooting you closer to her, across the blood-soaked folds of a child’s favorite blanket offered in sacrifice to the miracle of your birth. And you are Toby Gordon’s eyes—one green, the other brown, each heavily lashed and almost unblinking, as phenomenal as his kindness, so that in junior high, no girl refused him a seat in reading circle, and no woman, starting with his own mother, would ever fear or reprove him.
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