Skip to main content

Walking on water



   As I write this I’m getting ready to go to Syracuse to pick up my two oldest, James and Cate, so they can come visit us on Martha’s Vineyard for a few days. It will take about three seconds before one of them says, “Where’s Baby Jesus going to sit on the way there?”  They are going to say this because in our family it’s a tradition to call the favored male child “Baby Jesus”. I believe this extends to my cousins as well. In our family, they all think my youngest son, Danny, is my Baby Jesus. I’m pretty sure my cousin Jeffrey is my Aunt Sally’s Baby Jesus. At least that’s what his brothers say. My brothers, Eric and Steve, were my mom’s dual Baby Jesuses. It worked out for them because they’re about a dozen years apart.
   I’d argue with James and Cate but they have cited so many examples of me lavishing attention on their brother it’s hard to defend myself so I just hug them all the tighter, causing them physical discomfort so they’ll be distracted. I’m sure mothers don’t mean to pick a Baby Jesus, and oftentimes it falls on the youngest child in the family. That’s only because the mother realizes she’s aging and Baby Jesus was her last hoorah. Now she has nothing but gray hair and varicose veins to look forward to.
   My little brother Eric made a fine Baby Jesus. He actually got through it pretending like it wasn’t even happening. The rest of us remind him still as often as we can. And the older he gets, the more he evolves into our mother. The two of them have some similarities. My mom was fairly regimented about housework and her schedule and Eric brings the word “disciplined” to a whole other level. You don’t mess with the schedule. Eric retired from the Air Force a few years ago but even if he hadn’t been in the military, I think he’d still wake up at 4 a.m. like mom always did.
   All siblings have a good time picking on the one they perceive as the favorite. The reality is as siblings grow older they figure each other out a little better and usually stop holding a grudge about Baby Jesus. They may even find themselves with a Baby Jesus of their own someday.
    Personally, I never really much worried about Eric as Baby Jesus. Heck, it might not have been easy in those sandals.  If Cate and James look a little closer, they’d see that I am all over Danny like a fly on honey and maybe that’s not such a great place to be after all. By now I’m sure they know a little distance can be a good thing, and Baby Jesus still has to put up with me checking on his every move. They might even consider themselves lucky to not be the one who walks on water. That’s a pretty tall order.

    My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, "You're tearing up the grass"; "We're not raising grass," Dad would reply. "We're raising boys".
 Harmon Killebrew

Comments

Deb said…
Have fun with all your babies, the deities and otherwise. I'm jealous - mine have both abandoned me.
January 24, 2013 at 5:16 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I Like to Call Them Ow-Bows

   It’s a toss-up. Do I write about the fact that if you search “jobless goddess” in Google the dairy goddess and the library goddess come way ahead of me, or do I write about the fact that my husband is incapacitated due to a broken elbow? I guess I’ll go with the broken elbow. Besides, who the hell breaks their elbow anyway? My husband of course.    It started out innocently enough. I, in my desire to lose weight and become the wrinkly, thinner woman I was meant to be, decided we should start up the morning walks again. I prodded him while he was still under the covers. “Come on, let’s do it. You know we have to do this,” I said while tugging on my really sexy yoga pants (which, by the way, never get used for yoga).    To his credit, he got up, pulled on his pajama pants and went with me. We got about a 16 th of a mile past the driveway before he landed in the gravel. I’m talking a bed of gravel. Gravel embedded in the palm of your hand. Gravel ...
2 comments
Read more

He sells sea shells, I wish

   So now rather than being obsessed with fake fingernails I can’t afford, I’m becoming obsessed with checking this blog. I’m pretty sure all 52 views were made by either me or my husband.   That leads me right into the current situation at hand. We need friends. We’re desperate for them. I’ve started handing out my telephone number to people I meet while doing my meager freelance work. They think it’s for the story I’m writing but really it’s in hope that someday they’ll find a reason to call and then I can hit them with, “By the way, do you play cards? Bingo? Gin Rummy?” If I wasn’t so arthritic I’d throw Twister in there.    It’s not so much for me, it’s my husband who likes to have people around. I have become hermit-like since moving here while he has become convinced we could die here and not be found for months. He had friends back in Syracuse but he chose to stay home at night with his loving wife. Now all of a sudden I get the impression he’d h...
6 comments
Read more

Parish the Thought

     I love small towns. When I lived in Parish, New York, there was no end to the reverie, not to mention the constant parades.      We had a Halloween parade through town featuring people of all ages marching in costume along a rather abbreviated parade route. It all culminated at the fire barn where a couple of old draft horses would pull along a hay wagon. Most all town festivities featured the fire barn.       Monday night bingo held there. The caller was a volunteer firefighter prone to bringing on fits of laughter when he drew N 44…which he pronounced as "N farty-far," whereby producing great gales of cackling from the middle-aged women who showed up every week, I think maybe just to flirt with the caller and the other male volunteers who collected their money. Don't get me wrong, I'm not making fun. I spent more than a few Monday nights there myself.      The gas stations served as restaurants in Parish. You...
2 comments
Read more