The Colorful Muse: September 2009

Well, your first birthday has come and gone. I can't believe you have been here a year. I'm attaching something your daddy wrote for you right after you were born that expresses how we feel about you and some pictures of how you've grown over the past year.

When they yanked Garner Jackson from my wife’s tired body, I returned to the wail of that calf being snatched from the rusted barbed wire surrounding a Jones county pasture. Fear and freedom, pain and pleasure, burden and relief—oh, how they so intimately collide. I was all-at-once-like struck by how much of life I’d yet to commune with. Every section of my life was weakened as he broke forth from Kim’s rounded home and for the first time I cried for life instead of death; good-God, what a relief to weep for a future and not for a past.

Who’da thought such tiny hands could curl around the roots of a sleeping family tree and wrench something so deep inside. With the whorl of a learning finger I stammer at the handspun design of God Almighty. Everything was sucked straight from me the first time I saw that life-struck boy; he took it all at once and he’s softly reviving my dead parts with each gaze. I do believe I just might die if I don’t see him. The open bend of his right side lip replenishes me and I start to wonder about things; like, what happens when you kill someone who has a baby or is a baby, or how come we don’t share with third-worlds the milk to energize the curl of a finger or the bend of a right side lip, or when exactly is innocence lost and who is to fault. And then I thank God for wherewithal.

My mind keeps beating a path of wonder and fear until I tiredly fall upon gentle grace. And I think, my God, how that angel must’ve kissed perfection all over that boy’s face while he swirled about Kim’s belly. How he must’ve been so gently crafted from the very mold of God’s rarest clay. Fingers wrinkled at the knuckle and palms printed with a map of good fortune, a chin doubled down to support a heavy-lipped smile, and silk brunette strands racing to meet blond-washed brows and blue-gray eyes. And that affable cry—I wonder how he’ll sound breaking English, accomplishing puberty, and singing his generation’s music? How I shudder with the thought of anything changing; if one thing in life could cause me to forsake God, surely it’d be the loss of my boy; when I pray for his safety I am also praying for my faithfulness.

I don’t know of a more precious and brilliant way to learn maturity. I mean, you’ve got something so valuable and so lovable and so incomprehensible that you forget he’s also so demanding and so dependent and so fragile. The eighth day of September will always be notched as the day we celebrate the life of Garner Jackson; it will also be the day I silently celebrate a lesson of maturity birthed into the lives of a husband and a wife seeking more love.