With less than an hour before I had to go off to the kiddies, my world-famous sister, Bassey Ikpi and her son E, came through the lodge on a trip to the city up from Maryland. Bassey used to live here, strangely enough just a few blocks from me, and yet despite knowing each other for over 15 years we hardly ever visited each other. So as little E came through the door with Bas and her little cousin in tow, it was an exercise in seeing who could keep up with who. He even ate some of my second batch of El Pollo Benita. I took it as a compliment that he wanted to clean the plate when, according to Mommy, he never touches chicken at all.
He is a hungry young soul, hungry for experiences, for knowledge, for the kinds of energies that magnetize him to new faces. When he puts his hand to your throat it's a sign of love. He held mine for a long time.
It was timely for me to have a visit from a little one just a few months older than my own goddaughter, Isoke, whose first birthday party I volunteered to cook on my own this coming July, the first leg of a two-stop vacation that will hopefully take me to places where two-piece bikinis, good rum and countless photo subjects will thrive. I'm thinking DR hard but I could make it Barbados, or maybe even Costa Rica. Watching him reminds me of how we all learn in the beginning, clinging to our senses and intuition, his little Jordans pattering after me through my place, making sure that I didn't get away from him for too long.
He looks more and more like his mother everyday. And I will do my best as extended family to give him all that I can for his journey here. It's a wonder that my friends' children are coming to be at a time where the States are caught up in a typhoon of change: a crucial election, global warming, a shitty economy etc. But yet and still they will grow into a cybernetted world where they'll be able to talk to kids in classrooms halfway around the world via video messaging. They'll have cellphones before they have driver's licenses. And they'll be smarter than they're parents in one way or another, as Darwin says that they should be.
I have so much hope for children, even in the face of the ones that don't give me much hope. They have more time, more heart, and more energy than I will ever again. So if I don't have any of my own I'll do my best to leave a mark the circle of them that surround me. I love being a godfather. I love being the cool guy that rolls through households being just a little different than everyone else. It is these experiences that will frame the next set of stories I have to tell, as the days of bullets, the deaths of friends and familial catharsis are now behind me.
Like Mary before me I'm not angry anymore. I know what certain folks can and can't give me now. I won't let people blame me for things that aren't my fault. My Scorpio addiction to extremes will just have be to kept under wraps, as well as my voracious appetite for...other things as well.
With that being said I think the school bell's aringin' and Nirvana's asingin' through my earbuds. I have a treatment to work on. So I better hop to it. Out.
1 comment:
Beautiful!
& big-ups to you for recognizing the importance of just being there for the children that are already in your life. So many of us get so caught up in having our own and even when we do, those that have been in our lives all along are forgotten and rendered invisible...I owe my life to the grown-ups around me who assisted my parents in raising their children, cause it is not easy having a family when there is no help.
--lab
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