This would send me into raucous laughter. Every trip, no matter how far from home, started with my mother worrying that she’d forgotten to unplug some appliance and lamenting the catastrophic fire she was certain it would cause.
“The drive to Mercy Medical Center takes eight minutes, Samuel. I made it in five minutes flat,” my father would say with noticeable pride.
“That’s because you drove like a bat out of hell,” my mother would say.
My father would wink at me. “I’d mapped the route through the back streets.”
“You rolled through every stop sign. You’re lucky you didn’t get a ticket.”
“With a pregnant woman in the car? I would have received a police escort.”
It turned out the rush was much ado about nothing. As my mother liked to say, “You were early, but you took your sweet time.”
Her labor lasted thirty-two hours, a number she would remind me of whenever I acted up. Still, the wait turned out to be nothing compared to the stir my arrival caused. “You emerged with your eyes shut tight,” my mother would say, speaking in a hushed whisper that mesmerized me. In hindsight, I wondered if my entering this world with my eyes shut tight was a genetically predisposed instinct.
My father, who’d chosen to remain down the hall in the hospital’s waiting room, would at this point resume his narrative, explaining how the young doctor entered the room looking more perplexed than tired. “He said, ‘It’s a boy,’” but the doctor’s rote proclamation did not temper my father’s paternal instinct that something was amiss. “I sprinted down the tile linoleum into that room,” he’d say. “And when I entered, I found a crowd of nurses and hospital staff hovering around your mother’s bed like she was Marilyn Monroe.”
But my mother was not the object of their interest. It seemed that when the doctor had placed me upon my mother’s stomach to cut the umbilical cord, I’d finally opened my eyes. And that’s when the euphoria became bewilderment. The doctor froze, slack jawed. The attending nurse let out a yip, which she belatedly tried to cover by placing her hand over her mouth.
“Give me my son,” my mother had said amid the silent stares, whereupon the nurse had swaddled me in a blanket and handed me to her.
This was how my father found us when he waded through the crowd for a closer inspection and looked me in the eyes for the first time.
“What the Sam Hell?” he whispered.
3
My father turned quickly to the obstetrician, who had entered the room and retaken his position at the foot of my mother’s bed. “His eyes are red. Why are his eyes red?”
“I don’t know,” the doctor said.
“Will they stay that color?”
But back then the doctor didn’t know, and he had little ability to research the question. He could only shrug. Another silence ensued, those present holding their collective breath, uncertain what to say or what to think of me. That’s when my mother again took over. “Out,” she’d ordered. “I would like everyone to please leave.”
“That was our first private moment together as a family,” she’d say when recounting the story. “Just you, me, and your father.”
Finally alone, my father started to ask the pertinent question. “Why are—”
But my mother was not interested in why my eyes were red, and she put up a hand to stop him. “I don’t care why,” she’d said.
Several more minutes passed before my father, ever pragmatic, said, “Well then, what shall we call him? We don’t have a name.”
Because of my premature arrival, they’d failed to reach a consensus. My mother suggested Maxwell, but my father had never cared for his name. He’d lobbied for William.