BC, my foster son, moved to his new home nine days ago. Those nine days have been filled with a disorienting swirl of mixed emotions. This morning I’m enjoying a welcome pause in the swirl as I remember two of my favorite, funny moments with that delightful boy.
BC loved to search our backyard for lizards, grasshoppers, caterpillars, and butterflies. A book about lizards became a mainstay at bedtime for several weeks. One day, as I weeded a flower bed, BC called out from the porch, “I see one of those big black lizards!!!”
“A skink?” I asked.
“A skink! He stinks!” There was a short pause. “Is he a reptile?”
“Yes, he’s a reptile.”
“Is he…a Baptist?” BC had attended a Southern Baptist church with me for about five months at this point, and he also attended a Baptist preschool. I couldn’t really tell from whence this reptile theology question came, so I hid my smile and said, “No, Baptists are people.”
There was a longer pause.
“Is he a basilisk?”
“Oh, one of those lizards that walks on water! No, skinks are not basilisks.” BC went right on enjoying his lizard hunt, and I went back to weeding the flower bed, thinking all kinds of funny thoughts about the implications of lizards being Baptists…or Baptists being lizards.
Around the same time, the water filter at my kitchen sink was due for its annual tune-up. One of the side effects of this maintenance is that the gasses used to make the filter work seem to be affected by the rest of the plumbing in the house. For a few months, a pretty loud, high-pitched flatulent sound bursts forth from the sink from time to time. BC thought it was great when I answered his questioning look the first time he heard it by saying, “It’s the gasses in that filter in the sink. It’s like the sink is farting. Who ever heard of a farting sink?!”
A short time later, a similar sound burst forth from BC as he worked on a craft at the kitchen table. I said, “I don’t think that was the sink.” Having been absorbed in his work, BC apparently hadn’t noticed what his own body was doing. He did, however, file away the comment. That night, getting out of the bath, the same thing happened, but I didn’t hear it. He looked me in the eye, smiled, and said, “I don’t think that was the sink!”
I can still see the twinkle in his eye as he said it, and hear our laughter together over a new shared joke. I miss BC’s sense of wonder and sense of humor; both brought joyful and free laughter to our home. How I miss that delightful boy!
For all its joy, bewilderment, love, anger, grief, laughter, wailing, mourning, exhaustion, jubilation, wonder, doubt, fear, questions, rage, surrender, and hope, 2013 was the year in which a little family was born. Forever took on a new and surprising shape as BC and I began to become son and mom.
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