Like It Was Yesterday
By Mitch Berg
MLP at Casual Sundays with Mr. Curry and I have so many “one degree of separation” links, it’s hard to even count ’em all.
This story takes us back to my sophomore year of college:
Twenty six years ago last night, Jay and I were in Jamestown, North Dakota, at a Christmas party at the home of Jay’s boss, Mike Olsen, the athletic director of Jamestown college, where Jay was in the first year of his first job as a college head coach.Lots of info in that sentence, yet none of it pertinent to the story.
Jay was the head coach of JC’s basketball team. He also taught the mandatory, perfuntory one-semester phy ed class that was part our general requirements. So I took Tennis. I don’t think he knew tennis any better than I did (my dad, by the way, was a tennis coach for many years).
But it was a fun class, mainly because Jay was a hoot. He was also the only other Southside Johnny fan in North Dakota.
I did not remember this bit and,indeed, don’t recall ever meeting MLP when I was at JC – but that’s not unusual. Most College faculty didn’t hang around town that much.
Yes, we were in Jamestown. But what I didn’t tell you, what nobody knows yet, is that I was over nine months pregnant.
My due date was the 14th. Like most first timers, when my due date came and went, I simply assumed I would be pregnant forever. That’s right; it was all a cruel joke perpetrated by Mother Nature, that bitch! and that I, formerly svelte and athletic, was doomed to spend the rest of my life waddling about like an arthritic blimp.
So we went to a Christmas party at the home of Jay’s boss.
Where my water broke all over their living room couch.
EEEEEWWWWWW!!!!
On the other hand, I never liked Mike Olson much, so – cool!
(Although Olson brought JC a slew of national wrestling championships. Might as well give the AD his due…)
Many entertaining tangents ensue.
Then:
Back to the past…Jay and I stayed at the party long enough for him to open his present, before we headed to the hospital to meet our future ohmygod, I just Carrie Bradshawed!! I loved the show Sex and the City, but come on! That girl was the worst writer ever. Cutesy the Twat should’ve been beaten to death with her own laptop.Anyway… Jamestown is small so it took us all of ten minutes to run home, grab my night bag and get to the hospital. We checked in at about 10:30 and Tyler Patrick was born around 3:00 a.m. That’s remarkably quick for a first timer, but in my family, slow as molasses. My Mom has nine kids and I had already logged more cumulative hours in labor than she ever would.
Somewhere in the middle of it all, Jay decided that that was it; he could never put me through such an ordeal again. Yeah, that worked out. Have you met our three other kids?
Having babies is amazing. When you are in the thick of it, you swear nothing could possibly be worth the trouble. Then, at the height of the awful, they hand you the most wonderful, awesome, fascinating and beautiful thing you’ve ever seen, felt or imagined; your own child.
The world literally changes.
Okay, the world doesn’t change, the world doesn’t even notice. Here’s what’s important; You change.
Observations…:
If it had been up to me, Tyler would never have been allowed to do anything out of my sight. It was Jay who convinced me to let Tyler and Katie walk the four blocks to the ice rink at Lake of the Isles when they were five and seven. I stood at the window and watched the spot where they’d disappeared around the corner until they came back, two hours later. It was Jay who convinced me to let Tyler roller blade from our house near Lake of the Isles to Gramma’s house on Lake Harriet when he was nine. I made him carry identification and call me from my folk’s house the second he got there. It was Jay who got Ty the job as ballboy with the Timberwolves when he was in seventh grade, and Jay who decided Ty could catch a bus from his school to the Target Arena downtown. Boys need Dad’s to grow up to be men. Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.In the blink of an eye, that’s what happens. They grow up to be men. I miss that skinny, excitable, energetic little boy with the huge blue eyes. Sometimes it makes me sad to know that he’s gone and he’s never coming back. But the truth is that every year he becomes more of the kid that I love.
Once they get through that teenage stuff, anyway. Grrr.
December 19th, 2008 at 8:48 am
Once they get through that teenage stuff, anyway. Grrr.
Hang in there, Mitch. My 18 year old is beginning to make the turn. He knows he’s out of here come next September and that reality is making him more human.
Would you believe that the biggest change has come from his having a car now? It’s my car (an ancient beater of a truck I picked up dirt cheap when gas was expensive) and he can (and has) lost it at any minute for appropriate infractions., But he has to do all the operating expenses and can’t mooch gas since he’s the only one who drives it.
Having to be completely responsible for something he’s very interested in, having found out failure and disappointment when he didn’t have enough in savings to cover the repairs and had to denigrate himself to walking and taking the bus to school, and finding out the value of maintainence has really changed his outlook. I look at it as one of the better teaching moment’s the kid’s had, especially since economics is so hard to teach kids..He doesn’t look at credit and a lack of savings the same way anymore, and most folks don’t learn that lesson until too late if ever.
December 19th, 2008 at 9:22 am
I concur with nerdbert…hang in there and you’ll see. I have a son who, when he was in 7th grade, stole a carton of cigarettes with some other boys so they could smoke them in the tree house they had built. We were mortified. He is now a very decent man-an Investigator with the Sheriff’s Dept who has been in law enforcement for over 10 years. He’s a loving, involved dad to 4 kids and a wife….yes, it all comes out in the wash. And I can’t stress strongly enough how important faith is in a family. It is no guarantee (look at some pastor’s kids!), but it lays a foundation that is of supreme importance. Now if he would just quit chewing….(moms can always wish, can’t they? Well, wish and nag.).