| 24 years tomorrow, I woke up and found the house in a commotion. My mom was very pregnant, a week away from her due date, and she and Dad were rushing around in a panic. I asked if the baby was coming. "Mommy's water broke," was the reply. I was 8 days away from my fifth birthday and I had no idea what "water broke" meant. I asked again if that meant the baby was coming. With some effort, I got the answer out of my parents. Yes, the baby is coming. I would go to Mom's friend's house that day, for what felt like an endless wait.
Some time after 4:35pm the phone call came. Mom's friend got the phone, and I stood next to her, desperately eager for the news. After all this was MY baby. I was going to be the big sister, not Mom's friend. I must have made myself enough of a pain in the butt because Mom's friend gave me the key piece of information I was demanding: It's a boy. "Dammit!" I thought. All these months waiting for a little brother-or-sister and it ends up being a boy. What a ripoff! At least now I'd get the pink blanket my grandmother knit for the new baby. It was kind of itchy but I loved blankets and felt cheated when Grandma knit it for the new baby and not for me.
So that's how the day of Adam's birth went, as I remember it. In the following day or two, Dad picked me up from preschool and took me to the hospital to see Mom and meet the new baby. The new baby who didn't yet have a name. I was pushing for Jeffrey because I liked playing with a little boy in my neighborhood boy named Jeffrey. Mom liked Grant or Evan, which Dad hated. Dad liked Ian, which Mom hated. They settled on Adam and they let me pick the middle name. Thus my brother became Adam Jeffrey Richardson. I remember Mom and Dad asking one another about the spelling of Jeffrey as they wrote it down and I got worried. It hadn't occurred to me that maybe they wouldn't know how to spell it. Fortunately, they got it right.
At some point in that first few days, I received a "Big Sister" present of a doll I wanted really badly. I'm pretty sure that it was Baby Brite from Rainbow Brite. The morning after they brought Adam home from the hospital, I woke up to the news that he had peed all over the wall the first time they changed his diaper. That was kind of funny. More proof that Mom should have had a girl.
This is the first year since 1985 that Adam has not been around to celebrate his birthday. He would have been 24 tomorrow. I want to commemorate his life, but somehow baking a cake feels wrong. Lighting 24 candles is more appropriate, but I don't have money for something like that. I might make a dish that he liked - he called it "Colon Blow" because it's packed with fiber and his poor little digestive tract was not used to a high fiber diet.
I went to a concert the other day and I couldn't stop thinking about him. He was so into music and he knew so much about it. He would have been happy I was going to a concert. During it, I wondered whether or not Adam would approve of Regina Spektor (the artist I saw). I decided he would. Either one of two scenarios would play out. Most likely I would tell him I saw Regina Spektor and then he would say he liked her and proceed to try to have a really intellectual conversation about her music with me, when really I know nothing about her and had only heard one of her songs, twice, four years ago before going to the show. But he'd try to have that conversation with me, even though I'd be frustrated and short tempered and kind of refuse to participate by giving him one word answers and saying "I don't know" a lot. Or, I'd tell him who I saw, and he wouldn't know her, and then fifteen minutes later he'd come back and say he liked her and then load me down with all kinds of information about her and try to have a real conversation about her with me. Then he'd probably tell me that I was boring for being only into politics and nothing else, and that his friends were better because they talked about other things. Like music.
I wish he were here. I'd even put up with one of those conversations about music or other crap I couldn't care less about that he loved (like baseball). I wish I could get him a birthday gift. And a card. I found a really funny card several months ago and if he were still alive, I would have bought it for him. Now I can't remember what it said. I wonder what I would have bought him as a gift? |
