January 19 - January 25, 1995

PRECIOUS SON: It all started with a tree.

I had taken the kids over to La Madera Park on a mild Sunday afternoon. First, they tried out the swings, gliding upward into space, until some teenagers came and pre-empted the territory. Then, my 7-year-old son dashed off to the Climbing Tree. A rarity in our desert world, this smooth-barked tree with low, spreading branches has no prickers to snare tender young flesh. I had just settled down on the Bermuda grass, my face turned toward the benevolent sun, when I heard the piercing scream.

At first I thought it was another of Will's Academy Award- quality performances, rendered with wailing and writhing some half dozen times a day at each of his many accidental shin bumps or elbow knocks or tongue bites. But after a split-second's gauging I recognized it, as parents do, as a shriek of a different quality. There really was something wrong. I ran to him and found a big, black stinger, wickedly curved deep into the fleshy part of his left palm. I pulled it out, and found blood on the end. His big sister took over, ushering him to the fountain to put some cool water on the throbbing wound. Then, the merciful sound of the ice cream man's bells wafted our way. The crisis, such as it was, seemed to be over.

It wasn't, though. Next morning, the hand was starting to swell. I put a little antibiotic ointment and bandages on it, thinking they would work their usual placebo magic. They didn't. When I picked Will up at school that afternoon, he fussed. When we got home he was running a fever. The doctor said to come right over. As we waited in the office the hand kept right on ballooning up to astonishing size. His forearm began to swell and a red rash crept up his arm. As soon as the doctor got a glimpse of it, he said, in his serious way, "This is worrisome."

Now, it doesn't take much to get me to worry about my children, but when a doctor tells me to worry, you can believe that I do. He thought the pricker, whether it was from bee or tree, had injected bacteria deep within the flesh. What was troubling was that Will was already on a heavy-duty antibiotic for another malady that should have fought off any infection. The only recourse the doctor saw was to put him right away on a still more powerful antibiotic. If that didn't start to work overnight, the doctor said, looking at me steadily, he'd put my son in the hospital the next day for a high-dose antibiotic given intravenously.

It was then that I went into my panic. The flipside of love, especially the kind of scary, savage love parents feel for their children, is the fear of loss. We imagine the worst at the slightest provocation. And the fact is, young children can slide down that slippery medical slope so quickly, from innocent park outing to emergency IV. I've traveled that path more than once before with this kid. This is a boy who had two spinal taps before the age of three; one middle-of-the-night dash to the hospital, at age 3 1/2 weeks, with a fever over 104; an emergency rehydration session at another emergency room another night, and so on and on.

Given the fierce attachment I have now for this boy with the baseball cap and the hair that always sticks up in back, it's funny when I think back about how dubious I was about having a son. My first child was a girl, a familiar female creature who, just as I expected, is growing into an intimate companion to me. A boy, I thought, would be an alien male. How could I ever help him, for instance, through the bizarreness of an American male adolescence? And it's true that in recent years Will does seem to be following some mysterious bio-social male prescription. He can easily while away a quarter hour flinging his little body vertically into the air like a missile, again and again, making rough landings on the couch. Or take endless pleasure in bouncing a ball repeatedly (and disobediently) from the living room ceiling to the Saltillo tiles on the floor. Or leap and tumble like a puppy with his first-grade buddies on the school playground.

But there's so much more, of course. Take the five quarters he gave me for Christmas, wrapped up in Scotch tape, to take the sting out of my frequent desperate searches for change. Or the I Love You sign he put on his sister's bureau. Or the way he jumps into his father's arms when he hasn't seen him all day.

There's no way I can do without him. I already knew that, but it was the near-calamity with the tree that pointed that fact out to me violently, painfully, yet again. And reminded me of how close to loss the path of love travels.

My husband and I spent about seven hours watching our son that evening, helping him soak his arm, surreptitiously checking the progress of that evil-looking rash, trying to get him to sleep. Chalk it up as one more outpouring of useless parental anxiety, one more draining episode that reminds us to appreciate what we have, while we have it. By midnight, Will was sleeping peacefully. The fever was gone and the bulbous hand, if it wasn't getting any smaller yet, at least wasn't getting any bigger. His forehead was cool to the touch as I kissed him goodnight and quietly slipped out of his room.

January 19 - January 25, 1995

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