No Cigars, But I'm An Uncle Again

John Clifton B. was born around one o’ clock on Tuesday morning, May 18, 2004. My sister was awakened and told about it on the phone shortly after. She asked her son if the baby was healthy, then went right back to sleep. Gary's seven-year-old daughter Shauna, who was spending the night with her Grammy and her Pawpaw while her parents were at the hospital, raised her fist in the air and yelled "Yay!" Then she too fell back and went back to sleep. You and I probably slept through the whole thing. There's a lot of sleepyheads in this world while new and important things are going on.

When daylight came and the crowd went down to see the new baby, the nurse who brought the baby to the room understood how things are with very small Big Sisters. She made sure that Shauna had washed her hands, and then put John Clifton in Shauna’s lap before anyone else. Shauna, the former baby of the family, was a very happy little girl.

“She just beamed!” my sister said.

And, oh yeah—Lisa, the mother who did the hard work and the straining and the difficult maintaining of patience under pressure is doing all right, too, though I guess she’s pretty tired. Which is a relief to people like me, who did no work at all except to keep explaining to forgetful Shauna how her new little brother is named after her Pawpaw’s father John and her Grammy’s father Clifton, both of whom are long deceased. She never knew them and probably only has the vaguest notion of what death is, but now she’s gotten this chance to see something of what birth is. Let’s hope she doesn’t feel she has to be mean to her little brother until he’s at least as old as she is now. From what I remember of being a little brother, he’ll be starting the domestic fights and quarrels by then!

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THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.” -- Stephen Jay Gould

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