If you think having three children is a lot,
consider for a moment how many children I didn’t have.
Yeah.
I think of those unborn children sometimes,
when we tell our third daughter the story of how we were only going to have two
children, then changed our minds one morning after a single, reckless
conversation at the kitchen table. She stares off into space when I tell her
that story. She is thinking of her own non-existence. She almost never was.
I know how she feels, for I almost never was. I
remember when my mother told me about the miscarriage she had a few months before
she became pregnant with the child who somehow became me. I used to think of
that lost baby as my older brother. In my imagination he never spoke, but stood
by watching. He was shy and unbelievably kind to step aside for me.
The odds of me meeting the woman who somehow
became my wife were slim at best. Someone paired us together to lead a small
group during
freshman orientation at Baylor University in the fall of 1982. There were
hundreds of volunteers and someone took her paper and mine and put them together
with a paper clip. My God, this person was holding our lives in his hands. He
was shuffling children in and out of existence with no more concern than someone
tossing a salad.
Think of all those who never were. My beloved
Elliot is one of them. He reminds me a little of my older brother. He’s always
standing across the street in my imagination, pounding his fist into a tiny
baseball mitt. He’s not sad anymore and neither am I. Sometimes we even wave at each
other. I think he knows that I remember him every time Mars hangs low near the
horizon.
Yeah…
Did I ever tell you that my essays feel like
children to me? There are some high achievers, a few with
special needs, one or two with attention issues, and several that are just silly
rabbits. There is a nursery full of these children somewhere near the soft edge
of my heart. If I see someone reading one of them, it feels like a warm hand on
the back of my neck.
Sometimes I think of all the essays that might
have been but never were. My writing folder is filled with drafts in various
stages of completion that only had a brief moment in the sun. Some miscarried
for reasons unknown; others were aborted. Some tried so very hard, but just
never made it. These potential essays live across the street from my heart, and
they wave at me with little arms that are made of the precious titles that hint
at what they might have been.
The Prayer of a
Penitent Sinner
Madeline’s Silly Onion
Hair
The Opposable Thumb
Kicks Ass
Grape Soda and the
Little Black Fly
Let’s Put the X Back
in Christmas
For the Love of Xeno
I Suppose I Like the
Idea of People
Four and a Half Pounds
of Sunlight
So where do you suppose children and words come
from? Do you think of them as existing somewhere before, waiting to be born or
gathered together into paragraphs? Do you think of them in a giant queue with
only one out of a hundred chosen and the rest going into the abyss? Does the
possibility that they might have existed mean anything? Does the scent of these
broken dreams linger somewhere like the richest pipe tobacco?
And what of all the love and energy that would
have been poured into these fleshly and inked vessels?
Where does that energy come from, and where
does it go?
rlp
Click here to meet Elliot, the boy who never was
