When Angels Dance

What do you know about the day you were born? What's the first sentence of the first chapter of the story of your life?

Most of what I know about my birth (place, date, names, etc.) appears on my birth certificate.

Not the snowstorm. My dad told me about that. When he left the hospital after I was born, he said, he found his car buried in snow. It took hours to dig it out. He blamed me. When the angels heard I was born, he said, they were so happy they danced all the snow out of the clouds.

I like that story a lot.

My mother never talked about my birth. It's one of many things I wish I'd asked her about while there was time. Why do we wait to ask someone questions that they alone can answer?

Imagine my surprise recently when my oldest child asked me to tell him about his birth. He isn't a child any more. I call him "boy" because I'm his mother. I can call him whatever I want.

I'm sure I've told him his birth story before, but I'll gladly tell it again. Here's the short version.

It started at a basketball game. OK, it started long before that, but this is a column, not a novel.

I was young, happily married, thrilled at becoming a mother. On the evening of my due date, I sat on the bleachers (picture a whale on a bicycle) in the gym at Monterey (Calif.) High School, watching my husband coach a basketball game.

His team was getting killed on the boards. But in the fourth quarter, they started making shots. I stood to cheer and felt my abdomen clench like a fist. And so it began. I bit my lip until the final buzzer, then waddled over to the coach.

"We won!" he shouted.

"I'm in labor," I said.

We drove home to get a bag I had packed with the blanket my grandmother had crocheted for the boy. Then the contractions stopped. Coach was hungry. He ate burnt toast and went to bed.

"Wake me," he said, yawning, "if you need me."

I woke him at 2 a.m. When we walked into the hospital, a nurse's aide came running. Not for me. For the coach. Her name was Virginia Jackson. He had helped one of her boys through a hard time, she said, and she would always be in his debt.

Finally, she looked at me.

"And who are you?" she asked.

"I'm the one in labor."

She laughed and gave me a much needed hug. "Don't worry, baby," she said. "I'm gonna take extra good care of you!"

Little did she know what she was promising. I would be in labor for the next 18 hours. The boy was big, almost 9 pounds.

When I tell him this story, I try not to brag about how hard I worked bringing him into the world. But between you and me? It was hard. Virginia Jackson made it easier. At the end of her shift, she went home to sleep, then came back to stay with me all the way. In years to come, she would do it again for the births of my other two children. I will always be in her debt.

But back to the boy. At long last, when I held him in my arms, I checked him out, all his tiny parts. Everything was there. He looked a little beaten up. His head was lopsided and one eye was swollen, like a boxer who'd had to fight his way into the world. But he wore it well. I'd seen a lot of beauty, but I had never seen anything like him.

The coach seemed especially taken with the boy's hands.

"They're huge," he said. "He'll be palming a basketball soon."

And so it goes. One day you're looking into a newborn's eyes. Then you turn around, and he's palming a basketball.

That night, after the coach went home to burn more toast, I nursed the boy to sleep, then lay there in the hospital holding him close, whispering prayers, listening to him breathe.

Soon it began to storm, a winter gale blowing in off the Pacific. Rain and wind and hail pelted against the window.

I smiled, blaming the boy.

When angels dance, they kick up all kinds of weather.

Sharon Randall
(TNS)

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Award-winning essayist Sharon Randall's weekly column has an estimated readership of 6 million nationwide. Born and reared in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North and South Carolina, Randall grew up in Landrum, S.C., and has lived for 35 years in "California of All Places."