Family album

It's a darn shame Barbara's eyes are closed because you can't see how perfectly robin's-egg they are. Big smiles always appear to catch her in a blink, so we have lots of pics where she looks just like this, which still, her husband says, isn't half bad.

But we aren't the feature in this shot. This image wouldn't be stuck away in our old slides if there weren't a baby in her mother's hands, our first, a tiny little girl who just two days ago celebrated a birthday. The year is 1976, America's Bicentennial, and we're on the Vander Ark's porch in Phoenix, Arizona--that much I know, that much I remember. We're already starting to pack I'm sure, because we're moving to Iowa, "back home," I would have said, all three of us. Soon enough, those two will fly, and I'll take the VW and the cat.

More than that I don't know, More than that seems so far behind me that it's hard to believe the three of us have a 2015 manifestation at all, hard to believe any of us was ever that young.

It's not a good picture of little Andrea Jane, and Lord knows I took tons that are better, so I'd better drop one of those in to ward off the inevitable criticism. Here's one. 

Because it was her birthday, I scrambled through dozens of them a couple days ago, trying to find a good one for Facebook. When I did I couldn't help but think how ridiculously innocent we were. Andrea, of course, has an excuse--she was a month or two old. But her parents were pushing 30, and getting pregnant hadn't been all that easy as a matter of fact. We were thrilled. We were blessed. But my goodness, we were pitifully young.

What did we know? The hospital was downtown. We lived on 35th Avenue and Thunderbird Road. I remember watching the clock beside the bed, timing Barb's contractions. Finally, we left, drove all the way into the heart of the city, checked in, only to have the doctor tell us we might as well go home because Andrea wasn't ready to make her debut. 

So we did. A couple hours later, we got back in the car. By this time it was rush hour, and I remember actually standing still on the freeway, Barb in what certainly seemed to me to be real labor. When we got back to the hospital, this time our little Andrea didn't dawdle.

What did we know about having a child? Really, nothing. I look at these pictures and I can't help but shake my head.

Or this one.

It's shamelessly out of focus, but it was a lot easier to mess up in the olden days. Here's Barbara and Andrea near Slide Rock, somewhere in the vicinity of Sedona, Arizona. I remember thinking it would be good for everyone to get out of the house for a while; and that's probably what I told Barbara, even though I was using the editorial we to cover the real truth: I was the one who wanted to get out. 

So this was the first time we went away with our new daughter. I remember thinking vaguely that things had changed. We're in Sedona, but I got the sense that we could just as well be at Grand Canyon or Carmel by the Sea, Diamond Head, or Las Vegas. Didn't really matter to either of them. 

Look for yourself. I got a glance in this picture, half a smile from a distance, because my young wife is blessedly preoccupied with that darling baby. This is "mother-and-child," a relationship every male on earth has to struggle to understand. This old shot is sadly out of focus. But then. so was I.

There was so much I didn't know, so much in front of both us we couldn't begin to imagine.

Last night, just a floor above me, she lay on a couch beside her grandson, a five-year-old, who had mentioned as she spread out his bed that he missed his mom and dad on this little sleepover at grandma's house. For two hours, she laid there beside him, trying to coax him into sleep. Two hours.

We're older now, but some things haven't changed.

She probably won't like me saying that, but last night's sleepover is already there somehow in the Sedona picture. 

It's just that I couldn't have known and still can't. 

That old Sedona picture is out of focus some, but it's still a beautiful portrait.