The NSLDB was born at seven minutes past midnight, November 20, 1990. It was a difficult labor and birth – several ER visits and one hospitalization due to dehydration caused by severe hyperemesis gravida. All of this while I was finishing law school and studying for the California bar exam (which I passed, I might add).
He was nearly three weeks late – it was an induced birth
that lasted thirty hours. He was a
beautiful, wonderful baby, a fact I failed to realize three weeks later when I descended into postpartum psychosis and had to be hospitalized.
He talked early, and fluently, and was consistently aware of
the things going on around him. He told
me at five that television commercials were no good because all they were
trying to do was sell you stuff. I know
adults who still don’t seem to have figured that out.
He has never shied away from expressing himself. When his youngest
brother was born, I was trying to cope with the exhaustion of having a newborn
by sitting watching old Looney Tunes cartoons.
The NSLDB was watching with me. (Yes, I know I was being a bad mother by
having a six-year old see such violent fare.
I was too sleep-deprived to care.)
“Duck season!,” said Bugs.
“Rabbit season!” said Daffy.
“Duck season!” “Rabbit season!” “Duck season!” “Baby season,” growled a
quiet voice sitting next to me.
When he was eight, he was hit while crossing the street by a
speeding SUV. By the grace of whatever
God there is, he survived. (In one of
the worst memories of my life, the ER doctor cheerfully told me, “He’s a lucky
boy, if that car had hit an inch higher he would be dead.”) While he was in the ER, through a bloodied
mouth that was now absent three front permanent teeth, he tried to tell jokes
to make me and the nurse laugh. (“ ‘Ell, I ‘ould always ‘e a
‘entriloquist….”). Instead, both of us
had to fight back tears. “I’m supposed
to try and make you feel better, not the other way around,” I responded.
The NSLDB was never a kid that blended in. A friend visited us once when he was ten and
commented that it must be like living with a Borscht Belt comedian. A counselor told him in middle school – much
to the dismay of his father and I – that he should stop using such big words,
that he should try to be more like the other kids. That was a little like asking a peacock to
shear his feathers.
When the NSLDB discovered the drums, he was in nirvana (we
ended up in city mediation due to his practicing.) He loves music, and by the time he was in
high school had more music than anyone else I knew. He was interested in every aspect: I remember
on a band trip I was chaperoning, hearing him discuss a band with a classmate.
The classmate had mentioned a current group he liked, and the NSLDB took off:
he discussed the music, then the production, the other albums with the same
producer, and the audio techniques he particularly liked… The other kid looked
a bit shell-shocked.
When he went to the orientation for the Mountain View Los
Altos High School District’s Freestyle Academy, he walked up to the audio instructor
and said, “So, how much Pro Tools do I need to know? I haven’t worked with it.” The instructor hemmed and hawed and said,
“Well, we generally start people out on GarageBand.” The NSLDB had been working with GarageBand for
two years already.
It was at the Freestyle Academy that he discovered art and
design. He has carried that love into
his work at college, and I know that it will be with him the rest of his life.
When younger he did not handle boredom well. During his eighth grade band, when he was
better than most of the other (younger) drummers and hence not being challenged enough, he led a
mutiny about the uniforms. (I got a call
from the his band teacher about that one.)
When he was a freshman in high school, he was assigned in an English
class to write an essay about a “heroic figure.” He was in fact quite bored with the class,
and not particularly taken with the rather humorless teacher, so he chose as
his heroic subject the pot of petunias in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Universe. I did not actually hear about
that from the teacher directly, but at parent-teacher conference the young
woman did express bewilderment about how to deal with him.
There is no one I would rather go to an art museum
with. He is his own person, he likes
what he likes, and is willing to discuss why intelligently. He does not see the art as sacred cows or the
museums as temples: in the Musee d’Orsay he walked up to Degas sculpture of the
little ballerina girl and said “What a brat.”
You could hear a gasp go around the group of art-lovers clustered around
her. He was talking in an art museum! He
was criticizing a beloved work! Then he went on… “Look at how smug she is. I know this girl. I went to school with girls just like
her.” “Oh, yeah,” said another observer. And soon, people were discussing the statue
as if she were a person, and is that not the most any artist can ask? To have
their work come alive for people?
When we went to the Art Institute of Chicago, I of course
went for the famous works, especially Seurat’s “Sunday on La Grande Jatte” and Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.”
He, on the other hand, fell in love with Ivan Albright’s “That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do.” Without
him, in my rush to see what was “important” (read: well-known), I would have
missed this fascinating, dark work.
He makes people better just by knowing him. That’s not just the opinion of a doting
mother: I once got a call from a
high-school English teacher telling me how much he loved having the NSLDB in
his class, and that a girl in class had said that knowing him had changed her
life. This same class always had a
contest at the end of the year, to decide who had been the most insightful and
valued contributor to the class that year. “It would have been unanimous, Mom,”
he told me, “but I decided I’m not the type of person who votes for
himself.” In his evaluations at college,
one of his professors called him “a credit to the college.”
He’s not perfect: He
procrastinates sometimes, and is disorganized (he gets that from his mother –
although unlike her he seems to be getting better) and has an occasional
tendency towards cynicism (he gets that from his father). He has other faults,
but they are more than compensated for by his virtues.
I miss him terribly.
He can discuss politics, and art, and culture, and philosophy with a
clear-headedness missing in those much older and ostensibly wiser than he is. Having Thanksgiving without him is tearing me
apart, even as I recognize that he is a grownup now, with a grownup’s
responsibilities that will mean that I see less and less of him.
So, here’s to you, kid.
I love you very much, and I am prouder of you than you can ever
know. I hope that you have a marvelous
birthday.
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