Dear Evan:
It’s almost your first birthday! Tomorrow, you’ll be one year old. I am unable to compare you now with pictures of the tiny, thin almost alien boy I saw that scary day last October.
You may be walking by your birthday. Already you stand, feet spread cartoonishly wide, toes pointed outward, balancing on your upper legs and hips. You push up, look around with a huge grin, accept the adulation (“Good job, Evan! Good standing!”) we heap on you, then lower yourself, push back up, repeat. After two or three stands, you slowly fall backward onto your diaper-cushioned bum.
Have I mentioned how much you love to dance? Any snatch of music from the television or the radio, and you’ll be bopping along, bouncing from your knees up whether you’re sitting or standing or being held. And the grin on your face! I’ll be honest, I hate to dance, but only because we didn’t have much rhythm in our house growing up. (I remember hearing lots of easy-listening, but that’s it. Hard to learn to keep a beat to that.) I’m so glad you love to dance.
You have rhythm, too. You’ll stand with one hand on the ottoman for our couch or the footrest to your old glider and with the other hand smack perfectly in time: smack-smack-smack-smack. Sometimes you dance along to your own beat, and definitely you dance along when your mommy or I join in.
Yesterday, you and I had bonding time while your Mommy napped. (She’s got a nasty sinus infection, but you seem not to have caught it, and I don’t often get sick.) I was worried about taking you into a Halloween store, but instead of being frightened, you just goggled open-mouthed at the life-size zombies and skeletons. Not even the spooky noises got to you. I know, you’re probably too young to even think about being scared, but I hope you inherit my love of haunted houses and ghost stories. When I say Halloween is my favorite holiday, it’s not Goth or anything; I just like the otherwordliness that goes along with it. The sense that there’s something still left to discover. Something beyond what we know. Maybe I’m putting too much on a night that’s more about candy than anything else. And maybe I can explain better when you’re older.
One more bit of news: Last week, I started your college fund. As bad as the economy is, I hope it grows alongside you, as tall and as broad as I think you’ll be. I hope that by the time you’re ready to use it, that money has given you the freedom to choose where you go and what you study. But I also hope you won’t stop working even with the cushion there. You may fall on your bum a few times, but if you push back up and keep at it, you’ll get where you need to go.
I love you,
Daddy
