Sprung

It's hard to believe, but hurricane season is only two months away.

I heard this on the TV news this evening. Yes, it's April 3. Yes, it's 40-something degrees outside with daylight still left. And, yes, hurricane season is (only) two months away.

I'm not here to rant on about the news. They've got a difficult job, having to communicate with few words and curious selections of images.

But, kind of indirectly, it makes me think about something I've noticed after 34 years living in South Carolina. Something about the idea of springtime in a place that everybody assumes has to be warm all the time.

This is the Deep South. When you think of April 3 in the Deep South, you don't think of 40-something-degree highs. I would say, "Well, that's if you don't live here," but that's not the case.

For whatever reason, people who have lived here their entire lives seem to live under this delusion of expected warmth.

The truth is, it starts getting warm here in the spring ... but each and every year, there are plenty of days that it's cold. Cold as shit, in fact, if shit is cold.

Yet people who should know better say all the time when it's cold in March and April and even a bit into May that they "thought it was supposed to be springtime."

It took me awhile to realize this. When I was 19 this time of year, I distinctly remember shivering in shorts and t-shirts in denial of the fact that just because the sun had officially crossed the equator didn't mean it was license to so-easily put winter behind me.

Because putting winter behind you is work, an uncomfortable, plodding transformation.

Something that I've grown to like about where I live is the changing seasons. It's like a liturgy that binds you to a fundamental understanding. Each year, we live through a symbolic-yet-very-real cycle of life and death.

The dead, brown leaves that a March wind blows seem like ghosts hissing when the first blooms are emerging. On a day when the sun feels like a merciless taskmaster, you can't imagine that the ground your sweat drips on was and will be again covered in a sheet of ice.

It's taken me three decades, but I've learned that no amount of thinking otherwise will change the fact that spring is a season I just endure.

It's a harsh time, much like birth seems to be (though I neither remember being born nor have to bear the burden of giving birth).

I don't like the flowers of spring.

I don't listen to music in the spring.

I don't try to actively enjoy anything in the spring.

A 65-degree is not ideal to me. Nor is a 75-degree day.

I like it 85.

Or more.

Or 35.

Or less.

Spring here in South Carolina is a reflection of the general rawness of our culture.

It's ironic that the people of a state so used to dysfunction wouldn't recognize the bi-polar nature of its most-misunderstood season.

Double Time

Eight years today he's breathed life on this planet -- beginning at 1:12 a.m. April Fool's Day 2000.

My first son. No more or less loved than my youngest son but presents to me a unique second-to-second series of revelations, because he and I are treading this path first together.

And after eight years, I've begun to see a pattern in how I lament each birthday that comes.

I've found myself indulging in a masochistic equation:

Age x 2 = a factor that increasingly scares me.

The equation takes into account a restrospective comparison on much time has actually passed, related to the sobering reality of how the fact that "they" said it would all go so fast was a cliche, but that cliches are recognizable because they are so true.

At first, it was easy.

Age 1: 1 x 1 = Yeah, whatever.

After all, when they're babies, I just look ahead to the time when they can wipe their own ass and cook their own cheese toast without waking me up in the morning.

Age 2: 2 x 2 = Cool.

Four? That sounds great. Maybe he'll be wiping his own ass and cooking his own cheese toast by then. And still, he's off the public school system grid, which means he's still a baby -- but without all the menial responsibility.

Age 3: 3 x 2 = Neat to think about.

Six? That doesn't sound too old. Sounds like it might be fun. I bet you can throw him a fastball. And I bet he still will give you a kiss and still call them "spoiled" peanuts. And that tooth-line will have a few gaps.

Age 4: 4 x 2 = Where we find ourselves today.



I bet he'll think a lava lamp is cool, and I bet he can appreciate and will remember forever his first Jack Johnson show in Atlanta. I bet his teacher will say during his cookie-cake party that she calls on him last when asking a math question because he always gets it right. And I bet he'll prove to be an all-star-caliber baseball player when he practices on his birthday and his coach tells him the only way to throw him out is to cheat. And I bet he'll still curl up with a stuffed animal that causes him to become severely distraught if it were left at a car wash.

Age 5: 5 x 2 = A decade. Hmmm. A decade. Have we talked about sex yet? I was 9. That was a little early, but not too bad. But maybe 10. We'll see. Whatever's natural.

(The 15-year-old down the street who plays baseball with him already told him that taking steriods causes your junk to shrink and that "you want that to be as big as possible." Not a bad lesson).

And I bet he's graduated to cooking a grill cheese sandwich over a stove.

Age 6: 6 x 2 = Middle school. And another stick of Right Guard to buy at the store. And hoping that the steady chipping away of my faults that I've tried to engage in have been enough and at a fast enough pace so that my glaring weaknesses are at best not obvious.

Age 7: 7 x 2 = "Yeah, high school's weird, son. And, no, you can't have that girl over at the house with you two all by yourself. I hate to do this to you, but I need to talk to you about that thing they call 'safe sex.' It sounds paradoxical, I know: telling you how to do something that I'm telling you that you just shouldn't do yet. I promise, your time will come. And when it does, realize that it's ideal to wait for marriage -- but good luck with that, man. Just have some self-respect. And I know Google is the name of a state now, but do you remember when we first realized it could be a verb, too?"

Age 8: 8 x 2 = "You might have a driver's license, but I told you when you were 8 that you had better start saving that piggy-bank money to buy your own car. Of course, that wouldn't have done you any good, because I stole all that money so that I could render your driver's license a distinction signifying nothing. Yes, I know you hate me, but you told me when you were 8 that you extra-promised you wouldn't."

Age 9: 9 x 2 = On to college. "Did you manage a baseball or math scholarship? Because that would really help us out a lot, kid."

Age 10: 10 x 2 = ... 20.

OK, no reason to go any further than where we're headed next.

Though watching him sleep, and thinking of his day today and who he's become in a short-yet-long eight years ... I'm hoping I'm correct in thinking that the worst problem I'll have is that I'll miss him.

I already do.