All These Things

The following is a short story I wrote as a gift to my son upon his graduation from college:

All These Things

Once, so long ago now, her son lay in an incubator, a precious baby-blue- and white-striped incubator hat pulled over his teeny ears. Precious because his mother said the hat was precious. Believing it was, made it so. That’s why, when he graduated from the incubator into the seemingly unenclosed world, she asked for the hat. She wanted to keep this little thing forever.

This was against hospital rules, as the hats were sterilized and used again for other incubator babies. But she insisted, and a nurse, perhaps one who also knew that some things that are meaningless to most of humanity are precious to a few or only to a single person, this type of nurse handed her the hat as if she were giving her illegal drugs, quickly, slyly, so that no one would notice her indiscretion.

And so Heidi kept the incubator hat that Aaron had worn as a jaundiced newborn in a box high in a closet. No one knew what this little hat meant to Heidi, just as no one knew of all the other things in her life that were precious, just to her: the orange tree she could see outside her kitchen window that seemed more like a friend than a member of the vegetable kingdom; the potted plants, one on each step, that led to her above-garage apartment some years later, plants that seemed to welcome her home at the end of a long work day: and a small pool of rainwater in which she saw the full moon reflected. So many things like these were seemingly there just for her, since no one else seemed to notice them—the dew on her mailbox, the light in an empty storeroom, an afternoon breeze that caused the grass to tremble, the evening sun on a factory wall, the headlight illuminating a row of cardboard boxes. Only Heidi stopped to take in this beauty, to thank whomever might be listening for the beauty that surrounded her. And so if she were the only one who noticed, was that such a huge leap to think that this dew, this light, this empty storeroom, this breeze, this grass, this factory wall, this collection of boxes had been created for her alone? Not such a leap, if you were Heidi.

Throughout his childhood, Aaron shared his mother’s slant on the world. He talked of faeries who lived underwater in secret caves, while his mother saw them illuminating the branches of a tree underneath which she slept one night at El Capitan State Beach and cavorting under a waterfall by which she hiked in the redwoods near Shelter Cove. He saw a ghost sitting on a chair outside the bathroom, while on the same night, Heidi dreamed of the same woman sitting in a chair.

Aaron and Heidi were kindred spirits and often when one had an experience alone, he or she thought it had occurred with the other person present. Aaron always included Heidi, even though she wasn’t with him, and Heidi always included Aaron, even though he wasn’t with her.

This was natural, since they shared a lot of interests. Heidi liked hole-in-the-wall restaurants, art museums, architectural tours, good coffee, reading, travel, witty conversation, prairie dogs, little boxes, hedge hogs, lichen and moss, philosophical discussions, the pursuit of knowledge, oddly shaped and strangely hued cacti, silliness, and gnomes. And sure enough, so did Aaron.

He did not, however, share her love of maps or of bizarre corners of the world like Kaliningrad Oblast, the Russian exclave bounded by Poland, Lithuania, and the Baltic Sea, or Point Roberts, an American town on the southernmost tip of Tsawwassen Peninsula in British Columbia. Heidi was fascinated by these geopolitical anomalies. Aaron wasn’t. This is something Heidi could not understand—her son’s lack of excitement over cartography and tiny outposts of humanity separated from their motherlands. But somehow she forgave his lack of interest in such things. Perhaps there was something amiss with him. Perhaps, she thought, this is the one chink in his perfection: his disinterest in geography. No one after all is allowed perfection, so this was Aaron’s failing.

Otherwise, he was simply amazing, as Heidi’s friends were quick to tell her. One friend who was 11 years Heidi’s junior and was about at her wits’ end with lousy guys had gone so far to contend, “You’ve created the perfect man, Heidi. It’s just that he’s nine years old and your son.”

Mothers need this kind of feedback to keep their own superlatives in check. Once in a while Heidi would step back from her son and eye him as one might a painting in a museum. “Yes,” she’d say after a moment’s reflection, “he is quite wonderful, and I would think so even if he were the clerk at Vons’ son.

This perfection began at a very early age. As a newborn, Aaron chose not to respond to sounds. As Heidi washed dishes, sometimes a pan would clang against the counter or a bowl might drop near his little head. Aaron was never startled, though sometimes he’d smile. A hearing specialist at UCLA determined that his neurons were firing just fine, he wasn’t deaf. She concluded that he just wasn’t ready to participate in the stuff of everyday existence, but, for now, preferred to ignore the outside world. Hmm, Heidi thought, isn’t this the state to which all mystics aim? And here was her son, already there before he hit two months old.

To give credence to Heidi’s theory, Aaron would often sleep in his baby seat with his forefingers lightly touching his thumbs, the position Heidi had learned to maintain during Zen meditation. When she told his father about this, he the atheist thought nothing of it. It was merely a random reflex like a dog running in its sleep, he said. But Heidi would look at Aaron as he slept. She knew differently. She knew he was receiving messages from the beyond and did not want to sully himself yet with the muck of this planet.

Heidi also watched Aaron as he began to crawl and to walk. Every so often, he would interrupt his play to lie face down and close his eyes for a minute, sometimes less, then bound up again, ready for action. When Heidi asked him what he was doing, Aaron said, “Praying, Mommy. What did you think?” He continued to prostrate himself before who knows what god until he was maybe five years old.

A year before he reached the cessation of prostration, he did something Heidi always thought of as his Jesus-instructing-the-elders-at-the-temple moment. Heidi and Aaron had just purchased a chocolate buttermilk bar at Lina’s Donuts. As they were heading out the door, Aaron turned and with a wide, sweeping movement of his hand, as if to encompass all those before him, he said, “Have a happy life!” and then marched off toward Heidi’s VW van. The old men who cut up the world as they drank round after round of coffee paused for just a moment to take in this young boy’s wisdom.

“Have a happy life, son?” Heidi asked.

“Yes, you, too, Mommy Dude,” Aaron said with conviction. “You have a happy life too.”

Heidi knew that her life was happier because of her son. She loved him so much that she wanted to tell him about the little things that no one ever talked about: how for a long while she had been mismatching her socks, failing to notice the subtle distinctions in their black-on-black patterns; how she had thought a brightly colored water tower was a hot-air balloon; how she had bumped into a tree while telling two guys who were drinking on their roof to be careful; how she had thought a dog statue in a plot of petunias was a real dog and had always thought it strange that the animal never moved; how holding a cup of hot tea against her cheek made her feel deeply loved; and how cupping her hands over the rim of the cup and breathing in the steam transported her to a jungle. She wanted to tell him of the joy she felt each day when she saw the tomatoes on the vine outside her back door or when she sat on the porch and took in the sanctity of objects, sensing something living within the sidewalk, cars, FOR RENT signs, and the garbage. Heidi wanted to tell Aaron how much better coffee tasted in a ceramic cup and how good it felt to hold her palm over the bubbles in a Jacuzzi and how she really liked the sucking of hungry koi fish on her hand, even though she jumped and shrieked when they did this. Heidi thought of how many hundreds—no, thousands—of these things she would like to tell her son, but just blurting them out didn’t seem right and listing them seemed even less right. Perhaps art might work, she thought.

She would write a short story for her son and through the words hint at all these things. And so she sat down to write: Once, so long ago now, her son lay in an incubator, his precious baby-blue- and white-striped incubator hat pulled over his teeny ears.