Happy Birthday, Stephen!

Today is my grandson’s 23rd birthday – how did that happen? It wasn’t all that long ago he was graduating, eager to try a new life in a new place and gone from our immediate lives. Just a short time before that I was going to football games and track meets to cheer him on. And that was only a little bit of time after teaching him to drive the stick shift pickup his mother got for him – yeah and that he rolled over into a corn field after getting forced off the road by a vehicle that drove away – heard all of that on the scanner and was getting up to get dressed because I was sure from the location who it was, when his mother called to say he was all right – she’d called the guys in the ambulance that responded to make sure. Shortly after that he moved into my house, and for the last couple of years of school it was my job to get him up in the mornings. He wasn’t an eager student, and when he graduated the truant officer told me ‘now I can take your number off my speed dial’. That, btw, carried over from his mother. Gee, it was just a little bit ago that he was twelve and consoling Mom over the breakup with a guy by saying ‘since I’m the man of the house now is it ok if I have one of those beers he left in the refrigerator?’ Not long before that he told me, upon hearing me talk about donating a kidney to a friend, and donating blood after 9/11 “Geez, Meema, you gotta stop doin’ that stuff!” “What stuff, Stephen?” “Well, givin’ away blood, givin’ away body parts – you gotta stop doin’ that!” PS, neither happened. Going to California with me in the truck – he has inherited my love of travel and seeing new places, what’s over the next mountain and around the next bend in the road. Anguish on that trip when his game boy got broken – we had to time the stop for the night so that we were close to a Walmart in Oklahome to get a new one, and then find another Walmart in NY when that one malfunctioned. So much more…. Scares like when he fell from we’re not sure how high up a tree in the yard when he was just past a toddler, and when he drank some medicine and ended up in the ER. And now he’s 23 and 2/3 of the country away. When he’s here there’s never enough time to visit a lot, and it’s not like the too few years when a visit to Meema meant renting 3 movies – one for him, one for me and one for us to watch together. He’ll be here again in July for his mother’s wedding, and there will be a few minutes to catch up, and then I get to get up early to take him to the airport again-how come I get all those early flights? Part of the job. Happy Birthday, Boo – love you lots.