The Son Turns 21!

Today my son turns 21. How can this be? All I did was feed and hydrate him, and he’s grown to 6’6.” Miracle Grow indeed!

Thank you, Mr. Son, for 21 wonderful years. It’s your birthday, but I’m convinced that I’ve received the gift.

From the first time I saw you on the ultrasound film, I felt a connection. Following your birth, the alien being that you were felt a kinship with the alien being that I have always been.

As you grew and began saying the remarkable things that all young people say, I listened, unlike most parents, who are too busy fiddling with their cell phones or watching TV, or who simply dismiss their progeny’s wisdom as nonsense or lies. And so you told me about fairies—where they lived, what they did at night, and why not everyone can see them. You let me in on what had happened before you were born and about the beautiful ghost who floated down the hall in front of the bathroom. You revealed your theory of “why there is so much fighting on this planet” and how “men have arrows sticking into their hearts that make them sad, and they don’t even know they can take them out” and how the whole world is “like a piece of beef jerky, and all the people and the cars and the buildings are the pepper on the jerky.” You spoke of how you want to have a “girl child someday” because you’re a boy and you want to “learn about the girl energy.” You said that you had seen Jesus at the swimming pool and behind you in line at Disneyland. You spoke of the “shadow people” whom you saw in the corners of your eyes—“they’re not scary, they’re just there sometimes, you know.” And you pointed to George Bush Senior on a television screen and wondered, “Why is that man always lying?” But you countered that pointed realism by turning and waving to all the people in a donut shop, calling out to them, “Have a good life!” then exiting without a look back.

Throughout your two decades here, you have continued to impress me. I remember you as a preschooler, kneeling before rocks and kissing them, telling them that you remembered them from the last time you were at the Japanese Gardens. Or talking to ants or singing songs that came to you “from inside somewhere” before you dropped off to sleep or jumping about in the ocean, chanting “what a jolly good day to be a frog.”

Your insights into people and the workings of the world have become deeper and more refined with age. A few years back, I asked you what you thought of God, and your answer amazed me. I have found the world basically divides on this point: Those who have had some mystical or religious experience believe; those who have not, don’t. But you, who have seen ghosts and fairies, who have dreamed the same dreams I have on the same nights, who have seen “the other side,” did not fall into either camp. You said that beings such as angels and ghosts simply occupy different dimensions; that in no way indicates that there is some overarching force at work here. Wow, I thought, my son is truly a free-thinker. I had never before heard or read of someone take this stance. An agnostic in the noblest sense.

You are an interesting guy, to be sure. A history major who is fully grounded in the present. An optimist who sees the utter nonsense of humanity—how nothing ever changes, just one group of power-hungry people replacing another, over and over and over again. A full-on man who is the most evolved feminist I have ever encountered. A pacifist and a gentle soul who surprised me yet again last summer, when he saw a man “play-strangling” his girlfriend and said with the intensity and single-mindedness of a kamikaze pilot, “If I ever see a man hurting a woman, I’ll kill him.”

And so, as you celebrate the magical 21, knowing that all the world’s your oyster, let me be one of many who raises her glass to you today. May you continue to impress and surprise me—and all who have the pleasure of knowing you.