Written Late 1990’s

            The January sun was warm upon my back as I drank my morning coffee and contemplated the new garden area.  Its design was still in process, but I had already laid out a wagon wheel design in the center with used bricks and rounded scallop edging to see how I liked it.  If I go with this, what do I plant in the center?

            “Are you going to move Jarrett’s rose?” my wife asked.

            I hadn’t thought of that.  The rose was a yellow floribunda, actually my favorite color, but I felt the center needed a more dramatic piece.  Perhaps a grandiflora, tall and bushy, with vibrant red or a deep, deep pink.  Still, it was Jarrett’s rose…

            When Jarrett, our only son, died shortly after birth, our bible study wanted to give us something to plant in memory of him.  Our friend, Gertrude, had asked me what I wanted.  And even though the only thing I really wanted was my son, I told her a rose, a yellow rose.

            When it arrived, I realized there was not a really good place to plant it.  Every place sunny already had a rose, or two.  My wife and I finally agreed on a place in the back lawn, by the swing set that Jarrett would not climb or play upon, near the apricot tree I planted the year before.  I surrounded it with yellow irises and curved red scallop edging.

            As hard as I tried, I never took an overwhelming interest in the rose bush.  I was ambivalent about caring for a rose memorializing my son; there was this reluctance and sadness in continually trimming and pruning a rose with bright yellow flowers, like the sunlight that my son never beheld.  In time, the apricot grew, my favorite fruit, and shaded the rose, its benign neglect now made easier by its lack of vigorous growth and very few blooms.  It had been so now for years.

            Did I want to move it, knowing what it represented, to the center of my new herb and vegetable garden?  Did I want to see it every time I sat on the bench of bricks and a thick slab of wood I had just installed so I could contemplate and enjoy my garden with my afternoon cup of English tea?  Should the rose be in the center of the garden as a constant presence, when my son was centered only briefly in my life as my precious living boy, and a little boy struggling to breathe at that?  Private thoughts, private musings.

            As I pondered the issue – after all wasn’t it just a matter of roots and stems? – I thought of the day before at church, and the blessing I had prayed for and received in Michael.

            For more than a year now, I had noticed Michael and his father at church.  We seemed to be on the same restroom schedule.  I would rush in between our Fellowship Group hour and the Worship service – the urgency of borrowed coffee – and Michael and his father would be there, or going in or coming out.  Michael was a pleasant looking child, about eight, I thought, but slow of movement and needing much attention.

            One time he came out of a stall without his clothes pulled back up, and his father, who always had an eye out for his son, had to hurry and finish his own business to help Michael get fully dressed before he headed out the door.  Michael did not say much, but he smiled, at no one in particular, as he moved through the tiled space of the restroom.  One naturally averted one’s eyes in such a delicate situation, but I never averted my ears to the words of Michael’s father.

            “Michael, let’s get your pants up,” he would say, or, “Let’s go to your class” or “Let’s wash your hands”, as he gently brought him to the sink to wash his hands under the facet water he turned on for his son.  All his words were just the common ordinary things any father would say to his son, a much younger son, yes, but it was the way in which he said them that drew my ear.  There was always kindness, never impatience, never a hint of embarrassment or irritation, frustration or anger, with the limitations of his son and the external behaviors it produced.  There in the restroom, Sunday after Sunday, always shone, the bright light of a father’s love.  And I always thought of Jarrett.  He was born with deformed arms, and at his birth, I knew I would have to make an adjustment of mind and heart to take him out in public.  For a father, carrying a child with physical problems is like carrying one’s heart naked of flesh into the world, and the world can truly be a fairly brutal place.  Michael and his father had always been a blessing to my heart and mind, and I had prayed for the opportunity to tell them so.  This Sunday, as it was, I exited the restroom with them.

            “Is this your son?”  I asked as our eyes met at the door.

            “Yes, this is Michael”, the man said.

            Michael stopped just a few steps outside the door and pointed to the drinking fountain against the outer wall of the restrooms.  A sound like “waa” came out of his mouth.

            “Do you want some water, Michael?” his father asked.

            “He’ll never get any water out of those fountains,” I said.  “Too much flushing going on inside.  No water pressure there.”

            It was true, there never was any water coming out of those fountains between services.  They, and their obvious promise of cool water, always confused unobservant adults, first time visitors to the church, children, and, yes, now Michael.

            Since I never really knew how to begin conversations with strangers on issues of a sensitive nature, I just decided to go ahead and take the plunge.

            “I’ve been noticing you and your son for about a year now”, I said.  “And I’ve always wanted to tell you how much I’ve been blessed by the way you treat your son with kindness.  Michael seems to have special needs and I had a son born with handicaps, but he died, but I’ve always hoped I would be as loving and patient as you to him if he had lived.”

            The man looked at me and listened with interest and alertness upon his face.  Did many speak to him thus?

            “Thank you,” he said and soon we were deep in words, the service starting without me, and with Michael and his father being late for their classes.

            “How old are you, Michael?  Can you tell the man?”  Michael just sweetly smiled and looked away, a smile upon the face of a boy I thought eight, but whose father said was thirteen.  He was not Down Syndrome, but retarded somewhat and autistic.  He had been born such and, well, when his wife left not long after Michael was born, it had been just he and Michael together alone.  The father’s name was Ken and he was thankful for the class Michael could go to, or otherwise he couldn’t come to church.

            At one point in our conversation, Ken introduced me to Michael.  Michael looked up at me; he was small for thirteen.  His round face with its soft and gentle features, framed by deeply black hair, looked up at me, and the eyes, large and seemingly all seeing, focused upon my face and I felt truly beheld.  Without taking his gaze from me, he reached for my hand and put his hand gently into my mine.  Such trust, such hope.  After a moment, his head nodded slowly from side to side and the dream-like gaze shifted away.  He slowly removed his hand from mine and started to move off.

            “I don’t want to keep you or Michael from your class,” I said.  I was conscious that the patio had cleared as everyone had hurried to worship or to class.

            “We’ll talk again”, Ken said as he hurried after Michael, already ten feet ahead of him.  Michael ran his fingers gently along the bricks of the church, as if testing, as if using them to guide his way, as if in blessing.  Ken and I shook hands.

            As they parted, I watched them for a moment.  Ken took Michael’s hand, a thirteen year old in the body more of an eight year old, but somewhere within, there was Michael, the boy who gazed with trust into the face of a stranger.  I thought of Ken – it must not be easy for him.  I thought of his love for his son that had to be constant.  I thought of Michael.  I wondered of his life.  I wondered of God’s wisdom who gave us Michaels to love and learn of our own Heavenly Father and His love for us.

            Again, I contemplated the space in the garden before me.  Yellow did not make a strong color statement, that’s true enough, but would any rose other than Jarrett’s make as deep a statement?  And Michael, maybe one day he and his father would come to visit the garden.  Then I could say, “Here is Jarrett’s rose, my son’s, and I moved it here so it could grow in the sun.”  I think I understand that his father is Michael’s sun.