The following entry has been adapted from a piece that was first posted elsewhere the summer before my son turned seventeen.
He would have been thirty-five this year.
His laughter. Deep. Loud.
I can hear it still.
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Our first home in Chicago was a spacious second-floor flat in a two-story greystone: hardwood floors throughout; an older kitchen and bathroom. What they call “a charmer.”
Charmingly enough, it had no air conditioning.
That first summer passed without too much discomfort, I guess, but during the killer heat wave of 1995, when I was great with my older daughter, we decided that perhaps it was time to install a cooling system. In an attempt to abridge this story to an entry of even passing interest to anyone but me, I will simply say that the charmer would have required prohibitively expensive electrical work to support our let’s-make-ice-cubes-in-this-joint air conditioning plan. (No need for chiding emails: The electrical system was safe. It simply had its limitations.)
Undeterred, we decided to install a (safely supportable) large unit in the master bedroom, which was (fellow Chicagoans may understand this best) located near our large eat-in kitchen. The unit cooled both rooms when the door was open.
During the killer heat wave, though, temperatures crested 105 degrees F several days in row. We lived on the top floor. The unit was performing a Herculean task simply by cooling our quaintly — our charmingly small bedroom. For a couple of days that summer of 1995, then, and during the worst days of each summer through 2002, we took refuge in the master bedroom, closing the door on heat and humidity.
We passed the time with books and games and conversation and, yes, with television. We put a small set on the dresser for those few days, storing it in the basement when the temperatures returned to bearable. The larger set in the living room served us — when we needed or wanted it — the rest of the year.
During those years, it wasn’t “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)” for us. Oh, no. It was, perhaps, nine tuneable channels… and, too often, nothing on.
He watched Baywatch.
Okay, dear readers? That’s where this pointle-, erm, rambling story is headed. He watched Baywatch.
It was hot.
Really hot.
We bought an air conditioning unit.
Cloistered in a small cool room, we made ample, some might argue indiscriminate, use of the limited programming available.
And from the age of six until the age of twelve, our now 16.75-year-old son saw, what? Six, eight, surely no more than a dozen (partial) episodes of Baywatch.
This experience, I learned yesterday, was life-changing.
Yes, it seems that when he pressed me for diving, water polo, and junior guard programs at the city college, when he leapt at the chance to teach in the community swim program out here on the prairie, when he dove into competitive swimming, and when he earned all of the certificates required to lifeguard, he wasn’t responding to the kind teachers who shepherded him through the Y’s swim program in Chicago (where, for a couple of seasons, I thought I might be mother to the world’s oldest guppy). Oh, no. He wasn’t motivated by tales of Olympians or even his father’s short stories of swimming long distances while away at Boy Scout camp a lifetime ago.
Nope.
Not my son.
It was Baywatch.
Yup.
Baywatch.
My son is 6’7″ and change and nearly two hundred pounds of broad back and seeded-first-in-his-division-in-two-events-for-the-season’s-opening-meet muscle. He’s a black belt in taekwondo. And he’s a scholar who reads Shakespeare and quantum physics texts while on break at the pool.
(Yes, to silence the voices in my head — “How could you? How could you?” — I am indulging in some less than artful boasting. He’s handsome. He’s smart. He’s a blend of the very best his father and I could possibly offer. And I let him watch Baywatch. Please. Take my parenting license. Raid my library. Strip me of my teaching credentials. I have squandered my son’s mental fortunes, and I deserve your scornful email messages.)
This mountain of mind and matter dons his lifeguard uniform, stands in front of the hallway mirror, and has the nerve to say to me — to me!? —, “It’s the total Baywatch package, huh, Mom?”
What?!?
“What did you just say to me?”
“The. Total. Baywatch. Package,” he says slowly, without a trace of irony. Or shame. “Isn’t it great?”
“Isn’t what great?”
“I’m a lifeguard! I’ve wanted to be a lifeguard since I was little, Mom! Remember when….”
Oh. My. God.
“… and you let me watch Baywatch in the summer? I loved that show. I thought….”
He says more. His lips move, but I can’t hear him over the roar in my head.
I have spent the last decade leading you to great literature, great music, great films, great art, and other great teachers (I did say I was indulging in some boasting), and you credit your interest in saving lives to Mitch, Eddie, Shauni, and company?
I am silently screaming.
Screaming silently.
Screaming and screaming and screaming….
The mind reels.
It’s an August day in 1997. My older daughter has fussily but finally succumbed to mid-afternoon slumber. I nestle her on cool sheets in my charmingly small bedroom. Large with my younger daughter, I, too, am in need of some mid-afternoon slumber. It is hot. Hotter than it’s been all season.
“Want to look at a little television?”
“Sure, Mom.”
“I’ll just rest right here.”
I see red swimsuits, beautiful women, muscled men, Los Angeles beaches, and then, for twenty minutes, nothing.
“Mom? Mom? Are you okay? Did you hear me? We’d better get going, or I’ll be late.”
He swings a large bag bulging with towels and books and snacks and water bottles over his shoulder and lopes over to the door.
The roaring scream. The screaming roar. In my head.
Baywatch.
I gather enough of my wits to counsel him. “If I were you, I would never. Ever. Ever. Tell another soul about that.”
He is silent for a moment, a heartbeat or two. A childhood — his childhood — passes before my eyes. He is six. No, he is sixteen. He’s a baby. No, he’s a man.
Then his laughter, deep and loud, rolls over me and his waiting sisters, around the little house in the tiny woods on the prairie, down the driveway, and into the sleepy sort-of-suburban silence of the still, still morning. It rolls and merrily it rolls.
Until I am laughing.
And crying a little, too.
I’m not upset about Baywatch. No, really. I’m not. If I could rewind ten years and do it all over, I would still let him watch those lifeguards frolic in the chilly California sand.
I’m crying a little because that day when he was two or six or eight, even ten, or older, and I hugged him and said, “You’re growing into such a kind, smart, handsome man,” I never really understood that he would.
He would grow into a kind, smart, handsome man whose laughter, deep and loud, would recall to me baby boy starfish hands, the world’s oldest guppy, and hot summer days when he dreamed of becoming a lifeguard because his mom let him watch Baywatch.
Nerdishly 