“So,” asked a friend of mine as he, my wife, and I sat around the dinner table shooting the breeze, “what have you guys got planned for this weekend?”
“Oh, not much,” I answered.
“Not much?” interjected my wife with disbelief. “Your first-born son just happens to be graduating from high school on Friday night, remember?”
“Oh, that,” I said, trying to act like it was no big deal.
“Congratulations,” said my friend “You must be very proud of him.”
“Actually,” I said, “he’s had a really bad case of senioritis the past few months, and he’s lucky I haven’t tried to strangle him.”
“But don’t you think that’s pretty common,” he said in my son’s defense. “I know I sure goofed off a lot in my last year of high school.”
“Maybe so,” I said, “but Ty has more or less turned it into an art form this past semester.”
“Don’t you pay any attention to him, Eddie,” my wife told my friend. “He’s been grumpy like this for weeks. Daryl is in denial.”
“Denial?” I blurted out. “What are you talking about?”
“He acted just like this when our daughter graduated from high school a few years ago,” my wife explained. “It reminds him that the kids are all growing up, and that he’s getting ancient.”
After Mary and Eddie had a nice little laugh at my expense, they turned their conversation in another direction, and I suddenly found myself wandering all the way back to the very first time I ever laid eyes on Ty Robert Dylan Fisher. He was bundled up in one of those see-through plastic carts that they put newborns in at the hospital now-a-days, and he was, without a doubt, the homeliest, scrawniest little guy I had ever seen. After the nurse had assured me (twice) that the right name was on the basket, and that she hadn’t somehow accidentally put some other couple’s infant in the Fisher cart, I went back to my wife’s room to break the bad news to her.
“Well,” I informed her as gently as I could, “you can definitely forget about sending everybody his baby picture,” to which she quickly replied, “He’s going to grow up to be sweet and gorgeous! You just wait and see.”
The first thing my wife and I noticed when we got Ty home from the hospital was that he didn’t require a lot of sleep (he still doesn’t), just four or five hours a night. He wasn’t fussy or anything when he woke up, in fact he just wanted to play and have a good time, but it wasn’t long before everyone else in the house was exhausted.
“Isn’t he so happy,” my wife used to mumble when I would find her collapsed on top of a pile of toys in the middle of the night.
“I’m going to strangle him,” I would mumble to myself as we traded shifts.
As the years began to slide by, it became obvious that if there was an illness with a high fever to be caught, or a finger to be slammed in a door, or a gash that required stitches, it would belong to Ty. He was also so active that he never seemed to gain any weight and his mother and I began to question if he would ever stop looking like a survivor from one of those World War II concentration camps.
Then, when he became a teenager, he began to wonder about his name. “How in the world did you guys come up with the name Ty?” he asked me one day. “Nobody has a name with just two letters in it. Everybody thinks I’m lying when I tell them it’s not short for something. And why do I have two middle names instead of just one like normal people? And what were you thinking when you stuck Dylan in there?”
“That’s because I’m a big fan of Bob Dylan,” I explained.
“You mean that old fart who nobody can even understand when he sings?”
“He’s a genius,” I assured him.
“Right,” he said, totally unaware that within a few years he would be an even bigger Dylan fan than his father.
Anyway, as I was still wandering down memory lane and wondering why Ty always insists on dating girls whose names I cannot pronounce, Eddie suddenly pushed his chair back from the table and announced that he had to be getting home. “Tell Ty I hope he has a really nice graduation,” he said, standing up.
“You better not even let him know you know about it,” I warned him, “or he’ll be hitting you up for twenty bucks.”
“Chill out,” said Eddie with a smile. “They all have to grow up sooner or later.”
“All I know,” I said, “is that if he calls me `dude’ or `Holmes’ just one more time, I’m going to strangle him!”
Later that night, after everyone had gone to bed, I found myself sitting alone in the dark asking myself how in the world my son could already be graduating from high school. I mean, it just didn’t seem possible that the same little guy who never wanted to give up breast feeding was now about to start college. And then I took a moment to once again remind myself that it is our children who teach us maybe the two most important lessons in life; that it’s okay to love unconditionally, and that there really are others on this earth more important than ourselves.