We were married in October. Nine months later my mother passed away, and nine months after that our first child was born, in April, now twenty five years ago to the day. Countless times I have thought about that day and the days, months and years that led up to it.
As a little boy, I never thought about having a child the way I have observed my daughters tend to their baby dolls; Claire pushing her tiny bear in a makeshift yogurt cup swing hung from the bathroom door frame or Phoebe snuggling with her butternut squash baby doll with a magic marker face. I don’t think I much imagined growing up, and perhaps I never did.
As a young adult, I told myself that there were too many babies being born with no way of their being provided for: the population bomb apocalypse. My cousin had a child around age thirty, and that was when it first occurred to me that what life was all about might just be, as he suggested, life itself.
That was just as I was entering into a dark period that would last almost a decade before I began to recover in my late thirties. When I had regained my balance I met Kathryn and began to imagine life as new. It was time for me to get a life.
Kathryn got pregnant in July just as we were completing a two bedroom addition to our little home in Point Reyes. In October, when she was three months along and getting round, the Vision Fire of 1995 exploded. Ramon and I were working on the entry deck that day and he turned and asked, “Do you smell smoke or something?”. I am given to denial in all its forms and responded that it was probably nothing, but, being prodded, I called the fire station to see if there were any alerts. I was told that there was a controlled burn on the ridge and that things were well in hand. Back at work, Ramon was still suspicious of my report and walked over the ridge to see a towering thunderhead of white billowing smoke headed or way. I don’t remember what I did next except that a sheriff pulled into the drive and shouted “Get out of here, NOW!”. That was a simple enough instruction and not hard to follow.
I found Kathryn downtown. She had found a place for us to stay at Lorraine’s house and we watched from there as the smoke approached our house on the ridge. As evening closed in, the sky behind the ridge turned orange, silhouetting the notch in the ridge where we lived. With a baby on the way, the house seemed unimportant. The next morning we went to the Red Barn where the fire department had set up a communications center and found our address among those lost. Grateful that we and the baby were safe, we waited a couple of days until we were allowed back up the ridge to assess the damage. The fire had missed us by a hundred yards. We were still safe and sound. Expecting a child changes priorities.
Kathryn’s Labor Days approached. Had the job involved lumber, plywood, glue and nails I could have been of use, but the idea that I might have an impact on the process must have been dreamed up by a dreamer. Just as doctors pledge to “first do no harm”. I decided the best I could do was to stay out of the way.
The first pressing signs of Labor found us on the twenty mile road to Marin General, a winding path through the redwoods and almost an hour’s drive from home.
To be continued.