Maybe someday I’ll be able to say goodbye, but not today

It was the first time I’d seen my son play baseball. Little League; the summer before he started middle school. Just a practice, not a game.

We’d never been sports guys, my son or I. Nothing against sports, the topic just never created much of a blip on the Taylor family radar. To the best of my recollection, the closest we ever came to sports was tossing a Frisbee at the beach. Which made it all the more impressive that Jordan was good. Real good.

His coach took me aside prior to the start of practice to complement me on all the work I’d put in with my son. He was surprised when I asked him what work he was talking about. Jordan was a natural. He could pitch, he could hit, he could run like the wind. None of that came from my side of the family.

But like I said, he was good. I stayed the entire practice. As the team ran through its exercises, Jordan kept watch on me from the corner of his eye, gauging my reaction, making sure I was paying attention. I was. I was about as proud as a father can be of his son.

I was proud of him long before that, though. Not for his sports prowess, but for something far more important: Jordan was a genuinely good kid, a good person. He had a big heart, a giving nature, empathy that stretched for miles. If the people around him weren’t happy, Jordan wasn’t happy.

By way of example, I began giving Jordan and his sister an allowance when he was six or seven. Just a couple bucks; a fortune to kids that age. That first week, he and Aubreii walked to a little gift shop two blocks from our front door. He came home with a small, plastic statue of a puppy. For me. He’d spent the first real money he’d ever had on a gift for me.

I still have that puppy and I hope to one day be buried with it.

Many years later, while working in New York City, Jordan risked his life to buy me a knock-off Rolex from a shady-looking guy in a truck parked in a back alley near Canal Street, home of shady-looking guys selling bootlegged luxury items. His phone went off while he was making the deal and the shady guy pulled a gun on him, thinking he might be a cop, or working for the cops. Jordan managed to convince him otherwise and purchased the “Rolex” for $45.

Why would my otherwise intelligent son do something so stupid? Because when he’d asked me if he could pick me up a souvenir from the Big Apple, I’d said, “Sure, get me a Rolex!”

It was a good knock-off, too. Even fooled the jeweler who resized the band for me. But it was nothing for which I was willing to risk my son’s safety. It was that important to Jordan, though, because he wanted to make me happy. He cared what I felt, what I thought of him.

He was like that.

Last Sunday, I listened as weeping friends and relatives shared similar stories. About how much he’d meant to them, how much kindness he’d shown over the years, how many people he had helped, how many lives he’d made better just by being the kind of guy he was.

The next day we buried him. He’d just turned 37 and the world is a poorer place without him in it.

His sister, younger brother and I perched on metal folding chairs in the cold, grey morning light of the cemetery as they lowered his casket into the frozen earth. The best of me went into that hole with him. I’d always thought of Jordan as the me I should have been; kinder, less self-absorbed, more caring. What sort of universe takes someone like him while someone like me lingers?

It’s not fair and I’m mad as hell. I don’t want to hear about faith, a “better place,” being called home … any of that. Maybe someday, not now. Now all I want is to see my boy again. For a day, an hour. A few minutes.

That’s not going to happen. Ever. And I just can’t come to grips with that.

I want to tell him, one last time, how much I love him. How proud I always was of him.  How much I’ve always cherished that plastic puppy statue, the video I shot that day at Little League practice, that damned Rolex.

But he’s gone where I can’t follow, that place where phone calls, texts, emails go forever unanswered. He’s gone. He’s gone. I could write that a million times and I still wouldn’t believe it.

I’ve had friends over the years who have lost children. I’ve never understood how they manage to go on. Now I know. You go on because you must, because you have no choice.

If you have little ones, even if they’re 37, don’t wait to tell them — to show them — how much they mean to you. We are, each of us, allotted only so many days on this green earth and when they’re gone, they’re gone for good. All we’re guaranteed is now, and even that is as ephemeral as an early morning’s mist tenuously clinging to a cornfield.

For my part, I plan to be better than I’ve been. Kinder, fairer, more loving. My son’s passing has left the world a little short on goodness. I hope to do my part to pick up that slack, in his memory. I don’t know how successful I’ll be at the task — God knows it doesn’t come naturally to me — but I want to try. For my boy.

MTaylor325@gmail.com

(616) 745-9530

When it comes to geese, it’s us against them

This is the one, the column certain to bring down the wrath of the PETA people. 

PETA, for those of you just visiting our planet, stands for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. (Which, technically, should be PFTETOA, but that makes for a lousy, difficult to pronounce acronym.)

I’m generally an animal lover myself, by which I mean they taste great! Kidding.

Well, not entirely kidding; some of them really do taste great. Though I have to admit it sounds kind of barbaric when you come right out and say it like that. But I’m a carnivore and that’s not going to change, no matter how many pictures of dewey-eyed piglets the animal rights folks post on Facebook.

Despite my omnivorous tendencies, I do for the most part love animals. Most animals.

Some I don’t like at all.

I think some animals, just like some people, are just plain bad. (Or, in the case of nefarious goats, baaaaaaaaad.)

I don’t know if they’re born bad or if society is responsible for making them that way. The point is, I have little sympathy for bad critters.

I’m thinking specifically of a goose I met over 30 years ago. Geese, as I’ve since learned, are the grumpy old men of the animal kingdom. If they could speak, most of their conversation would consist of yelling at kids to get the heck off their lawn.

They’re cantankerous, ill-tempered fowl and the best thing you can say about them is … they’re delicious.

I knew none of this 30 years ago, however. Having been raised in The Big City, the only avians I had encountered were pigeons. Pigeons are basically rats with wings, but they for the most part mind their own affairs and leave members of the human population to tend to theirs.

My son, Jordan, was only three then. A sweet, trusting kid with even less knowledge of waterfowl than I possessed. 

It was only natural he should be curious about the geese wandering around the small pond at the park where we were picnicking. They are, after all, beautiful animals; graceful (at least in the air or on water — on land they move like badly-made windup toys) and to a small child, they are interesting.

While I lay out our picnic lunch, Jordan approached the largest of the geese. Being an ignorant city boy, I assumed the goose would retreat into the pond and that would be the end of it.

But no. Jordan toddled closer, hoping to make friends; the goose held its ground. It wasn’t until it actually began advancing on my son that I smelled trouble.

A cobra couldn’t have struck as quickly. Before I realized what was happening, Jordan was sitting on the ground holding both hands over his eyes as the towering bird moved in for the kill.

It turned out the goose wasn’t the only one that could move with cobra-like speed. In less time than it takes to read about it, I crossed the 30 feet or so separating us and — here’s the part the PETA people are going to grouse about — punted that goose farther than any NFL placekicker has ever moved a football.

The goose reentered the atmosphere safely and landed in the middle of the pond, where it sat honking accusingly at me. It was smart enough to stay away from shore, however. 

My son’s black eye served as a reminder, for the next couple weeks, that the animal kingdom maintains no organization dedicated to the ethical treatment of humans.

I don’t know if that goose still hangs out at that park. But every year, a week or two before Christmas dinner, I’m tempted to find out.

Lousy parents (like me) can scare their kids to death

Just when I thought I couldn’t feel any more guilty about the lousy job I did raising my kids, along comes the news that children can actually be startled to death. I don’t know whether this is really true; I read it in someone else’s column and columnists are notorious liars.

But even if it might be true, this news is going to put a big crimp in millions of games of peek-a-boo.

If it is true, well, all I can say is it’s a miracle my son lived into adulthood.

I didn’t really do a “lousy job” of raising my kids, but I was for the most part a young, single parent and I made my share of mistakes. The worst of these was teasing Jordan—the most “believing” kid who ever lived—whenever the opportunity presented itself.

By the time he was seven years old, Jordan believed the following things: 1) round bales of hay lying in fields are actually giant rabbit pellets, left there for the benefit of giant rabbits residing in nearby woods; 2) a fierce gorilla lived in a locked garage near the restaurant where we dined every Friday evening; 3) fried chicken was made in a factory and definitely not in any way related to the cute, little birds; 4) Care Bears were real and watched over us daily from their vantage points on fluffy, cumulous clouds.

He believed all these things because his father (me) told him so. For all I know, he believes them still. Jordan was a smart kid, but he definitely put the “bull” in gullible.

Anyway, as a natural born prankster, I delighted in playing little tricks on my trusting son.

The best (or worst) of these took place one night at my dad’s restaurant, an older building requiring a lot of after-hours cleanup. Jordan often accompanied me to do the floors; he liked racing donuts with his remote-controlled car on the just-washed tiles.

The old furnace there made creepy ticking sounds for a couple minutes prior to firing up. During the day these were barely noticeable, but at night, echoing around the big, empty dining room, they were scary-sounding, even to me.

While Jordan happily raced his RC hotrod between table legs, I set a loud kitchen timer for three minutes.

“I’ll be back in the office for a sec,” I told Jordan. “If you hear an alarm, come get me right away, because that means the furnace is about to blow. The whole place could go!”

Jordan responded as he always did: “Really?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It should be OK, though, so long as you tell me as soon as you hear the alarm go off.”

I retreated to the office and watched through the one-way glass looking out over the dining room. Jordan continued to pilot his car, but now kept glancing nervously at the heating vent, from which the ticking sound ominously emanated. This went on for a few minutes, with Jordan becoming increasingly uneasy.

The timer went off with a loud beep. Jordan jumped and began edging backward toward the office door, his eyes never leaving the heating vent.

Four feet, three feet, two…just as he reached the door I leapt out, yelling KAPOW! at full volume.

My seven-year-old son burst into tears.

We stopped at the ice cream shop on the way home and Jordan was allowed to order whatever he wanted, up to and including the entire store and the vehicles of each and every employee. This did nothing to assuage my much-deserved guilt, but it did help slow Jordan’s quivering lower lip.

OK, maybe I was a lousy parent after all. I’m just glad I didn’t kill the kid.

More Reality Check online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.mlive.com. Email Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.