A novelist I once knew used to say that if there was a birth in a novel it had to come at the very end because nothing--absolutely nothing--could out-climax brand new life. Think that's a stretch?--watch a two-year-old take over an Old Folks Home.
In art as in life there's simply no accounting for taste, so the rule that novelist set up can't be cast in stone. But the idea he sold us on has stuck with me ever since that writing workshop forty years ago. Even if what he said about birth isn't true, I like to think it is.
And yet, birth is not an end. It's only ever a beginning.
Meet Olivia Lynn, daughter of David and Kristina, from Stillwater, Oklahoma. She's their firstborn and much beloved. Every last human being old enough to see anywhere into the future knows this little package of darling-ness will soon occupy their lives in ways that no one can explain until new parents experience that diapered occupation for themselves. It's coming. No, it's already begun.
If Olivia hasn't already begun to make music, soon she'll sing while she nurses, hum her way through some baby praise song, a line or two of her own sweet composition--and they'll love it. Then, once those eyes open wide enough to sweep over her mother's face, the two of them will be star-struck when she addresses the world around her for the first time. Then there's that first smile--oh, my word, was there every anything more beautiful? they'll say. She'll simply have taken over.
If they're truly blessed, in a week or so this pudgy little cherub will sleep through the night. Don't count on it. Right now, she's still in IC for a slight case of jaundice, but this morning, for the first time, she'll go home to a freshly painted room with a changing table beneath a window alongside a book rack that once belonged to her mother and is also freshly painted. Oh, and did I mention the name Olivia up on the wall above the crib?
This child will go home to a place her senses will recognize long before she can say the word or begin to understand its meaning, a place she'll soon know is like none other, peopled by faces and lovingly outfitted with hands and voices she'll come to know and love in ways babies do.
Her father went to Oklahoma almost as if on assignment. He'd been living for too long in the darkness, so long that the counselor he was seeing made an application to graduate school something he simply had to do as an investment into a future he couldn't beg himself to see.
When he got in, he determined to go. We worried a great deal. Just a few months after he'd arrived, his apartment complex went up in flames, most of what he owned, most of what he didn't have in his school backpack that day, was gone. The Red Cross gave him money to go to WalMart for socks and underwear. Students he knew--and many he didn't--got him what he needed to get by.
We worried a great deal. It took a couple years, but he shifted graduate programs when he determined that film theory wasn't going to get him out. He transferred over to professional writing, a course of study that held some possibility of employment.
His assistantship assigned him to a mentor who'd been teaching for a while. The two of them got along, got along better, even began to date and eventually got engaged, then married. She kept teaching, but he took a job writing educational materials for a fire safety program run out of the university. He liked what he was writing so much he got interested in the profession. Today, he's a fireman in the city where his first apartment burned to the ground.
And today, he and his teaching mentor will bring that blessed child home to a house with three cats, a dog, and a freshly painted room that belongs to someone whose name is up there on the wall above the crib.
I don't know if that old novelist friend of mine was right or not, whether new life can't be outdone as a climax of a novel. But in life, it never is. It's only ever a beginning.
Praise the Lord.
And please forgive me for yet another picture. This Olivia is, after all, my brand new granddaughter.
End of story.
No, just the beginning.
No comments:
Post a Comment