it’s about time. i’ve now got my own journal here. and i’m not yet six months old./

that last ./ thing is an exclamation mark, by the way. i don’t yet have enough coordination to hold down shift with one hand while i type with the other.

anyway, i’m eli. i’m being held prisoner by these two people, ‘bath giver’ and ‘the milk jug’. they don’t let me go see a lot of people yet so i’m going to use this journal to meet more people. i’m very excited./

Your body didn’t look like you, lying in the casket. I can’t fault the funeral home, really. The accident did far more damage than makeup and putty alone could repair. Mike told me that the hospital covered most of your body with towels, including half of your face, before they let him see you.

I still can’t believe Mike walked away from the wreck. I am terribly, selfishly glad that at least one of you is still alive.

Writers with a Master’s in creative writing and a love of overly-precious ironic metaphors could have chosen no more appropriate time for this to have occurred. It’s Easter as I write this, two months after Eli was born. Birth, death, and rebirth have been on my mind a lot.

I’ve spent the last two weeks thinking about our friendship. Did you realize that we’ve known each other for almost twenty years? I’ve known you for two thirds of my life. Outside of family, there are few people I can say that about.

I bet you don’t even remember how we met. It was at church one Wednesday night. I was thirteen. Knowing how suave and debonair I am now, it might be hard for you to remember how geeky I was, and how I didn’t really have a lot of friends at that point in my life. The local PBS station had started showing Dr. Who episodes: the Key of Time ones starring Tom Baker. I’d just discovered the show. I loved how the Doctor could always pull whatever he needed out of his coat pockets. I wanted to do the same, so I filled the pockets of my blue windbreaker with string, a yo-yo, Band-Aids, everything I could think of that might conceivably be useful or entertaining.

The pockets bulged a lot. There were only two, so I couldn’t spread the stuff around much.

Anyway, I was probably wearing it that night when I was hanging around on the church lawn. There were two new girls there that night, you and Yvonne. You must have come over to talk to me, since I wouldn’t have thought of talking to you. But talk we did, the three of us.

I don’t remember what we talked about, only that at some point you asked me, “Do you watch Dr. Who?”

Your funeral was passable. Your old friend Dr. Vizer gave the eulogy. I have to admit that he made the funeral much more bearable, since I didn’t recognize the person he was describing.

You had a lot of friends, you know. The little funeral home chapel was packed. The entire Crown Store you managed closed for the day and the staff came to the funeral. Walt told me that they put a picture of you sitting in the Easter Bunny’s lap on the door. It seems right, really.

Mike had filled the foyer with pictures of you. Some of them I recognized. There was that really goofy one from school where you’re dressed up like an American Indian and have this incredibly resigned look on your face. There was a montage from your wedding, including one of the three of us. I’d forgotten about that picture until I saw it.

The best part was seeing everyone from college. Scott and Andrea, Shawn, Brian and Gail, Tony — hail, hail, the gang’s all here. Walt came down from Fayetteville. I hadn’t seen him since we went to see Pink Floyd. We reminisced about you until the funeral home staff informed us that we had to leave.

Even then we malingered. We pulled the old “two steps” dance, where we all take roughly two steps towards the door, then stop in order to keep talking. The trick to actually leaving is to be close enough to the door that the first or second set of two steps you take actually carry you over the threshold.

I haven’t kept up with you as well as I wanted to. Misty and I got to see you and Mike a few times when we’d come back to Little Rock to visit family, but we didn’t make many visits to Arkansas while we were in North Carolina, and our families demanded most of our attention.

I wish you could have met Eli. You saw pictures, of course, but we weren’t due back in Little Rock until the summer. He’s a pretty great kid. He wiggles and wriggles so much that I’m sure he’ll be as hyperactive as I ever was. You would have loved playing with him.

It seems like everyone has stories about how good you are with children. You’ve always kept a child-like spirit. You can be serious and grown-up when the situation demands it, but you play with kids like you’re a kid yourself.

Many of my memories of you are from when you were a kid. So many of them involve you, me, Gene, and Yvonne. I remember going to Murfreesboro in his old Mustang. We dug for diamonds all day, and Gene was silly enough to climb up on a large rock, jump off, and twist his ankle. Yvonne was the only other one of us who could legally drive, so she drove us home. At least, she did until Gene couldn’t take her erratic driving any more and made her pull over. He grimaced all the way home while we enjoyed the fishbowl effect of having the Mustang’s sun roof off and all of the windows rolled up.

The four of us supported each other through the pain of high school. We partied after prom. We flew kites and raced remote controlled cars at your dad’s store. You and I even went to the same AEGIS summer camp, where we met Gene’s much dumber cousin and I tried to learn to draw by sketching you in profile.

You did well choosing Mike as a husband, just so you know. I haven’t come right out and said that to you before now, but I expect you knew. Mike and I were too good friends for you to have thought otherwise. Before college your taste in boyfriends was execrable. Thank goodness you and Mike were such a good fit that you dated all through college before getting married.

Your accident has made me a little gun-shy. Every time I drive on the interstate now I find myself imaging trucks flying across the median and onto my car. In case no one’s told you, the eighteen-year-old and her baby survived with no major damage. Cold comfort, but I would not wish for more death or pain.

Your death has left me with a lot of cold comforts. You died happy, killed so quickly that you probably had no chance to feel pain or anxiety. Your organs will help others. Your funeral gave me a chance to catch up with friends I hadn’t talked to in a while. I will see you again.

It was still too soon. Too soon to die, too late to change what happened, and I am left writing this letter to you and saying things that I hope you knew.

Two steps. We’re all taking two steps towards the door. I just didn’t realize how much closer to the door you were than all of us.

Stephanie McBrayer Self
1971-2004

It snowed on the day you were born. Not a lot of snow–just enough to swirl enticingly across distinctly non-icy streets. But this is northern Alabama, where snow is rare.

Right now you are a week old. I’ve known you for a week, and already it feels as if I have known you for a very long time. You have changed my life in so many ways. For example, I had no idea that I would learn how to change a diaper in less than a minute flat. I am the Bo and Luke Duke of diaper changing, though without the embarassing 1970s clothes or Confederacy-themed Dodge Charger.

You came out almost indecently healthy. You got two scores of 9 on the Apgar Scale. What most impressed me is how loudly you yelled upon being rudely thrust into the world. That’s a good sign. Both of your parents are notably strong-willed, and hearing you shout like that makes me believe that you will know yourself and be secure in your likes and dislikes. If there is one thing I’d like to teach you, it’s how to become your own person. You are not a clone of me or of mom. You are a distinct individual. We get a chance to help shape you while letting you discover your own path, and that’s something that both frightens and excites me.

Your mom is as excited, if not moreso, than I am. After we got home from the hospital I went to the store and got her ice cream and an egg of Silly Putty. Remind me some day to tell you the story behind that last item. Later we talked about how, even though you were so new, we were both ready to kill for you. I hope you will use that power for good. I suppose you can use it for evil if you wish, but you’ll have to be careful about doing so. History is littered with stories of those who used their powers for evil carelessly and ended up being brought down. If you’re going to be evil, put a lot of thought behind it.

I don’t mind saying that when you were born, I cried. They were manly tears, though, the kind that would not have been out of place on John Wayne back in the 1950s. That was going to be it, my one nod to extreme sentimentality, but the next day driving back to the hospital I heard Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World” on the radio and started crying again. Not only did your birth make me maudlin, it shorted my sense of critical judgement.

But that’s okay. A lot of things change when you have a child, as I’m discovering. It’s amazing, all of these changes. I can’t believe no one told me before, except they did and I couldn’t really understand what they were going on about. Now I do, and I tell everyone I can, and either they nod happily with me (parent) or nod patiently, hoping I’ll pick a new topic soon (non-parent).

I know without a doubt that you will never view your mom and I as anything other than suave, competent people who have it all together, so this may come as something of a surprise to you: we are as new to this baby thing as you are. We are all learning together, making mistakes, having small triumphs and tragedies. You have learned how to tell us what’s wrong with you, to a limited extent, while we have learned the value of a strategically-placed washcloth during diaper changes.

While you were in the hospital you had a lot of people visit you and call to see how you were doing. You may not remember all of them, but that’s okay. I want to tell you about them coming because if there’s one thing I’d like to teach you, it’s the value of relationships. Friends can be difficult; family, annoying. It doesn’t matter. Try to work through the inevitable friction. Life works so much better when you have companions on the journey.

Many of your visitors were from our church. What I said about friends and family goes double for church families: pick one where you are welcomed and fellowship is abundant. I hope and pray that you will share our faith, and your mom and I will teach you all about it. I know you will do a fair amount of seeking. Mom and I both did. But if there’s one thing I’d like to teach you, it’s how faith and fellowship can be a wonderful blessing.

Okay, okay, it’s true that I’m now up to three “one things” to teach you. It’s a byproduct of being a teacher by nature, nurture, and training. There are squintillions of things I’d like to teach you, actually. Why the alternate possession rule in college basketball is annoying. Where the microwave background of the universe came from, and what it means. How you need to breathe out gently before you fire a rifle at a target. Why you need to plane wood along the grain. But these are facts and opinions, not overarching themes that will wind throughout your life’s tapestry. Those themes, those “one things,” I can only teach by example and gentle instruction, letting you find them in your own time.

I’m writing you this in the hopes that someday you will read it and understand part of what I’m feeling. Even if you don’t, though, the act of writing comforts me. Like Papa Ray I often turn to the written word in comfort and solace, as a tool to help me understand life. If I’m lucky, you’ll gain some of the same appreciation.

I have another week with you, an amazingly brief period of calm before we all begin to be pulled in so many different directions. I cannot wait to see who you become.

Elijah Clark Granade

Born: 6 February 2004 8:13 A.M.

We had been pregnant for five minutes.

Sure, Misty had been late, but neither of us had been expecting this. We stared at the blue line, re-read the pregnancy kit instructions, and stared some more. I don’t think we said anything for quite some time.

“Maybe we did it wrong,” she said.

“Maybe.”

Those tests are seldom wrong, and this one wasn’t. We had planned to have children: nebulous, vague thoughts of some future time, as unformed as this new addition to our family.

It was a Thursday night. The next night we were leaving Durham, North Carolina to begin the fifteen-hour trip home to Arkansas for Christmas. We sat in the living room, packing and wrapping presents. Occasionally we looked up at each other. If my face looked anything like Misty’s, I must have looked very surprised.

We had been pregnant for a day.

I spent most of the day at work, swinging wildly between depression and excitement. I wasn’t ready to be a father. We weren’t ready to be parents. This is going to be one of the greatest events of our lives.

I wanted to tell someone. I wanted to run up and down the halls, shouting at the top of my lungs, “I AM A FATHER!” We had agreed that silence was best, but, oh, how difficult it was.

In the early afternoon I found myself thinking of something I wanted to tell our child. I suddenly knew I could do this. I could be a dad.

We began driving around 7 P.M. Our plan was to make it over the branch of the Smoky Mountains which lies across the western part of the state and on into Tennessee. We had a hotel room waiting for us in Newport, the first town I-40 takes you to once you exit the mountains headed west.

It was very quiet that first hour in the car. Misty was feeling bad and dozed on and off. I fretted. I wondered if we were really ready for this, or if this was some horrible mistake. Maybe I would wake up tomorrow and discover that, whoops, so sorry, this whole thing was a mixup, a by-product of a faulty pregnancy test.

We spent the last half of the trip talking about our child-to-be. We cried a lot; we laughed some. In the talking we learned that we were ready for this event, even if it hadn’t come on a schedule of our devising. We would be there for each other, and we would be there for our child.

We were ready.

We had been pregnant for just over a day, and now I was in an antechamber of Hell.

Emergency rooms are never pleasant. Even given my limited experience with them, I knew that. Once, when I was two, I cut my head open and had to have stitches. In college I had waited in an emergency room while my best friend, who had sliced his finger open with his pocket knife, got stitches. In my mind, emergency room equaled stitches.

We had arrived in Newport around midnight and collapsed into our hotel bed. At 2, Misty woke me up. “It…hurts so bad,” she sobbed between gasps of pain.

I bundled her up. “I hate being…such a cry-baby about…this,” she said, and, “Maybe this is…nothing.” I would have none of it. Back into the car we went, and back towards the hotel lobby. I told the man at the desk, “My wife is pregnant and in a lot of pain.” It was to become a familiar litany by the end of the night. Fortunately for us, he volunteered to lead us to the hospital.

So it was that, on a cold Saturday morning, I found myself reciting health insurance arcana to a tired woman while a man in dirty work clothes pleaded with a nurse. “Please…I’m his son, I just gotta go see him.” “Sir, they’re working on him now–” “But I just wanna see him, I won’t get in the way.” “His throat’s cut up real bad and–” “I know, I know.” “–they’re gettin’ ready to Medevac him to Knoxville.” A creased woman watched on, and what must have been a good dozen cousins, aunts, and uncles filled the lobby. TNN was blaring from the TV, and I hadn’t had more than three good hours of sleep in the last two days, going on three.

The people milling about no doubt belonged to the old man I had glimpsed in the operating theatre. By mistake Misty and I had barged in the entrance normally reserved for those arriving by ambulance. “Please,” I said as I stumbled in, holding up Misty. “She’s in a lot of pain.” I got a blurry glimpse of several nurses and policemen standing in a circle, looking quite surprised to see us. I also got to see a red-and-white form on a gurney. Later I would realize that, indeed, his throat was cut up real bad.

They put Misty on a gurney and asked her to wait. The Cocke County Hospital is small, and all of their efforts were going into stabilizing the poor man I had seen. He had been in a wreck, and was a wreck: he was diabetic, and had more than a few too many before he drove his car into a tree and his throat into his windshield. I was bustled out into the waiting room, where I discovered new torments undreamt of by Dante.

The night passed, every moment drawn out indefinitely. For an hour I sat in the waiting room, reading a book I had brought. It wasn’t very good. Whenever I asked the nurse behind the counter what was going on, I was given no information and a platitude to take back to my seat. I began to understand what had driven the son to plead with the nurse.

Eventually they let me into the sanctum sanctorum to see Misty. She had been stretched out on a gurney, ignored by the harried staff. They had taken her blood; we were later to find out that it contained a hormone specific to pregnancy, confirming what our $5 pregnancy test had told us. I held her hand and tried to think happy thoughts. Someone had poured sand in my eyes.

Eventually things began happening. More blood was drawn. Misty was wheeled into another part of the hospital and an ultrasound was taken. Around 6 A.M. we found ourselves alone in a hospital room, staring at each other while we waited for Doctor Azima to talk to us. We each kept nodding off, then bouncing back awake.

The final report: maybe she was having appendicitis, although Azima doubted it. But he couldn’t take a CT for fear of damaging the baby. Perhaps it was an ectopic pregnancy. Perhaps it was a miscarriage, although Azima and the OB/GYN he had called, Dr. Kim (“call me Dr. Kim”) Puterbaugh, didn’t think so. They were ready to hospitalize Misty, but when they learned that we had a hotel room, we were sent back and ordered on bed rest.

Seven in the morning. We collapsed into bed.

We had been pregnant for two days.

We slept until three in the afternoon. I got up and went to a near-by WalMart. I got Misty’s new medicine, plus Sprite, juice, and anything else which seemed appropriate. As an afterthought I added an egg of Silly Putty.

A quick detour through Taco Bell for me, then I returned to our hotel room. I dropped off the supplies and went to the lobby to make sure that we could have our room for the rest of the weekend. The hotel staff was amazingly supportive and kind. I wished I could bundle them up in the trunk of my car and take them back to Durham with me.

We passed the time reading, watching TV, and browsing through the pregnancy book Misty had bought. “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.” As I understand it, that particular book is a standard one. I’m surprised they don’t hand them out to sexually-active teens like condoms.

The message we took home from the book is that there are millions upon millions of ways that pregnancies go wrong. We worried a lot, and prayed, and called parents. All of the calls began with, “Guess what!” It’s hard to hide a pregnancy when it’s the reason that you can’t come home for Christmas. All of the calls ended in tears.

Eventually Misty felt well enough to go get dinner. We ate slowly, looked around at all the children. It’s amazing how being pregnant sensitizes you to other people’s children.

In fact, amazement was the order of the day. We marveled at how Misty already didn’t want foods that were bad for her. From someone who never turned down a french fry in her life, she became someone who couldn’t even look at fried foods, and all in the space of a few days.

We had been pregnant for four days.

On Monday morning we visited Dr. Kim at her office. She was wonderful. Her manner was kind, she explained everything to us, and she had a wall full of degrees and OB/GYN awards from Johns Hopkins. I wondered if there was room in the trunk for both her and the hotel staff.

She had a long talk with us, and was in general very reassuring. She said that she wanted to check Misty’s level of the pregnancy hormone, so she drew more blood. Then she cleared us for travel back over the mountains and back home.

The trip home was a lot of fun. We talked, laughed, and made plans. The extra bedroom could become a nursery. Misty could quit her job and become a freelance designer, the better to spend time with our child. They don’t pay graduate student much at all, but you’re rewarded with flexible time, so I would be able to arrange my schedule around the new baby.

When we got home, there was a message on our answering machine. We were to call the OB/GYN’s office.

Somehow, we knew. Even before the call went through, we knew. Misty’s hormone levels, rather than rising, had been falling steadily since they were first measured Saturday morning. The woman on the phone was as kind as is possible in such situations. She told us that most likely the miscarriage had occurred on Saturday morning.

We hadn’t named the child. We hadn’t even made any concrete plans, just a bunch of imaginary structures. Cloud castles, as it were.

Not having a child would be so much easier on us. Nothing had to be changed. Our lives could go on much as before.

Still we cried. We clung to each other and cried and cried and cried.

We had been pregnant for a day.