Wrangler Dani

He’s two years old, and it feels trite and hollow to say that he’s “all boy” but he just is. He loves nothing more than tractors and his cowboy boots, he has never met a bug or a frog or a creepy-crawly  he didn’t want to investigate.

He looks remarkably like my husband, which wouldn’t be surprising except their ethnic and genetic makeup is completely unshared. We adopted him, and I wonder sometimes what you would have thought of that. We flew across the country and his birth relatives cried when they heard his name – “that’s a good people name” they said. I hope we can live up to that sentiment. At any rate, he and my love, his wonderful dad, have the same dark brown eyes, both set deep, looking out from below certain, decisive foreheads and expressive eyebrows. They have the same walk, the same arm-swing, the same quiet observations as they move through the world, taking everything in stride.

He also makes me think of you, with your dark hair and easy laugh, your sense of adventure and your broad, easy-going views of other people. He waves at everyone and crows out his husky little “hi” and “bye” to all living things – I think you would have liked that habit. Some of my memories of you have grown hazy with time, but I remember clearly your friendliness, your love of people, your willingness to tell a joke or pull your glasses down your nose to twinkle your hazel eyes at us.

Maybe as he grows up he will be the boy you were – fearlessly wading into Sierra streams and dreaming of becoming a forest ranger. There’s a photo of you on a snowbank somewhere in the California mountains – this would have been the mid-1930’s? In this image you have a stocking cap shoved back over your impressive dark hair and a boyish grin on your face. You are youthful in the best sense, hopeful and buoyant, unafraid.

My son’s toes fascinate me. They are plump and babyish still, but he is starting to move and walk like a little boy, and I fear I won’t be able to kiss them much longer. Did your mom long to kiss your feet, when you were suddenly laid in a hospital bed at age 15? Did her chest constrict at the thought of losing you, the way mine does when I lose sight of my son at a park?

I can’t imagine my child with a disease as horrifying and terrible as polio. My healthy child coughs in the night and I roam the hallways, a nervous maternal ghost, an insomniac who believes that my anxiety can protect the ones I love most. But I can’t see your mother being as wimpy as me. She sternly sat beside you in the children’s hospital for three years while you fought for your life and I imagine that she would have loved you back from the dead, or beat the tar out of you if you dared to die, whichever worked first. She and your stepfather, the kind and quiet man who has only and always been referred to as Grandpa Frank, dug a pool in their backyard for your rehab, designed and built ramps into the house, and eventually took you camping and fishing in your wooden wheelchair. They plunked the whole shebang right in the middle of a creek for optimum fishing performance. They were not daunted by disability or hardship, these were familiar companions, things to be conquered, not cried over.

Sometimes I wonder what you would think of my chosen profession, since you refused to let the paper write about your family. Your family existed because you willed it to, because you bought a business and married the love of your life and built a house with wide doorways and ramps and benches in the showers and had four children. I am a journalist, I know a story when I hear one and that is a heck of a story. But you didn’t want the attention, you thought your life was sensible, not reporter-worthy. It was just another mountain, and you’d been climbing those all your life. I hope that you’d see the words I write as a way of climbing my own mountains, of mapping out new trails and finding where the crevasses of my own history might be. I hope you know that I only write about you because I think the story matters, because you shouldn’t be forgotten.

Sometimes I marvel at the way that a man who had lost the use of all but one arm could be as protective and essential as you were, the building block of a tough, proud family. Perhaps that’s what made me believe that we could be a family through adoption, through unrelated genetics, because you showed such strength with powerless muscles. You made us who we are – it’s not just genetics, the obvious scientific through-line that I would not be here if not for you. No, it’s more than that, you gave us a deep and profound pride of ownership, a sense of self, a fearless determination. You hummed in the car and you delighted in feeding your grandchildren hamburgers and french fries, you patted me on the shoulder with your good hand and called me “darlin’” and I felt infinitely valuable, and protected, wanted and seen. “Have fun with it,” you’d say, when you handed us crisp dollar bills as children, when our parents opened sizable checks, made from decades of frugality and work. You saw your duty as a privilege, you saw life as a gift to give away.

Sometimes I think about how you said “mom”, the deep well of devotion and power that went into one syllable. I hope he always calls me “mom” with the level of kindness and care that you had for yours. I hope he fearlessly tackles anything life throws at him as you did, with courage to laugh.

I hope I can love him the way she loved you, the way she loved all of us who came through you. She was whiskey in a teacup, a tiny woman who wore blush and lipstick that amazed me, it came in peony-colored plastic containers, scattered over her bathroom counter and matching her beautiful rose-embroidered hand towels. She laughed like a trucker and swore like one too, she told stories peopled with neon-colored characters, described vividly, mad men and country doctors and fearless cowboys. I sat on her worn beige couch and listened to her raucous yarns of Prohibition-era California, when it was still the wild west of railroads and oil rigs and homesteaders, when folks went skinny-dippin’ and rode their barely-broke horses on beaches now reserved for the rich and connected. I remember the signature scent of her almond lotion, listening entranced to her wild tales and trying to remember to ask my mother about words I didn’t understand, like “moonshine” and “bastard”. Now, I look back with older eyes and admire how she managed to be a ferocious mother without losing herself, how she fought for justice without bitterness and how she saw her life with clear-eyed realism and faith. She gave you that, you passed it on without cynicism or malice.

My son confidently strides down our gravel road and I am so taken with him – even though he’s still a toddler I feel I can see the future. I can see him as you were, standing with impish joy and broad-chested adventure on a snowbank as a teenager, holding the hand of your wife as a young man, nuzzling your daughter’s blonde baby head as a new father.

I can’t wait for you to meet him. It’ll hopefully take many decades, but I hope to hear your warm laugh when I cross that threshold, and see you standing. l realize I never saw you stand, although I always assumed you would be dashing, handsome, vigorous if you could, just like in that burnished sepia photo from long ago. I hope you wear the checkered shirts, pressed trousers and worn leather belts you loved and grin as broadly as I remember. Then when he comes across, hopefully many decades after me, you’ll know he’s yours. One glance at his good-humored face and his strong hands, and you’ll know the heirlooms you left in your granddaughter’s heart, the way that I strive to honor the life you lived, and raise children worthy of your legacy.