Once upon a time there was a boy, a beautiful boy.  And he needed to stretch and move and reach and learn and push past the limitations imposed by his condition. (Spina Bifida)  So his mom and dad set him on this blanket every day and enticed him with words and pictures.  He grew stronger and more determined to get to those stories himself.  Before long he was rocking, then crawling, then sitting and holding books by himself.  So our story began…

 

By four, he knew all his letters and had been a regular at library story hour for years.  We had only this grand plan: check out a few books from each section of the children's library every week.  So there were animal books and poetry books, fairy tales and cookbooks.  The Caldecott list was in the diaper bag.  Books by educational pioneers and reformers like Marva Collin's inspired and challenged the cartoon-y twaddle the local preschool offered.  Alternative medical books made their way into the book bag as well.  Those educated us and helped us to help him.  We read and read and read. 

 

By five, he was reading independently, thanks to copy of Alphaphonics another library mom shared.  Following that success there was a big box of first grade materials from Calvert School with his name on it.  He devoured that too and became an official homeschool student.  This proved to be a critically important choice because this busy, happy boy found himself in the hospital part of nearly every year.  His mom would find herself housebound periodically with pregnancy complications.  There would be a few of those too. ; )   And there were the relocations due to military life, 13 of them during his childhood.  

 

Despite all those odds seemingly stacked against success, school went on very consistently if non-traiditonally.  It was soon clear there was no reason why math had to be completed at 9 am.  Or at the table.  So books were read in lobbies, on hospital beds, at hotels, in the car, and on the way to sports practices.  When pain prohibited reading otherwise, they were read aloud. We adapted, adjusted.  We read.

 

Words and images filled his heart and his mind and carried him far beyond his physical confines. In one medically challenging high school year he devoured 32 books – Jane Eyre, Frankenstein, Up from Slavery, 1984.  Every week another novel, another continent, another era, another world. 

 

College came.  There were more challenges.  There was still that dogged determination.  All those magical words which culminated in a cum laude English degree, with much loved courses in poetry and short story composition.  

 

This is where we found ourselves on a warm Saturday morning in Denver.  I squeezed in close to catch him passing by in procession and my eyes welled.  All around me were people fanning themselves and idly texting, waiting for the endless line of graduates to snake their way through the grounds.  I could no longer see anything more than blue satin swirls.  In my mind there was only this picture of a beautiful baby boy on his blanket with his books.  There was hope and fear and worry and needles and anesthesia.  There were the two of us, reading Pearl Buck in a hospital room in VA one year, me fighting early pregnancy nausea and him recovering from surgery, coming in and out as I read.  There was a boy and his Dad maneuvering a chair through off road paths in Rocky Mountain National Park.  There was the crashing of wheelchairs against one another during basketball games. I was deluged with memories and the sudden realization that he did it, we made it. Against crazy odds. 

I can't possibly explain to you what that meant to me. To him. To all of us.