A Gift

I don't have money to give my son a car for his 18th birthday. After working in the social service field my entire life, my son is my walking savings account; all my money has gone into his Catholic school education, kindergarten through high school. (I decided to send him to Catholic school kindergarten for a very illogical reason--paying day care costs as a single parent had been impossible but I'd done it--so, hey, why not Catholic school?). So, no car--but I do want to give him something special. I'm writing him a gift--a keepsake--detailing the highlights I remember of his eighteen years. Will I end up just writing highlights that strike me and leave out ones important to my son? If my son were writing his autobiography, he'd include specifics about grade school soccer and floor hockey and basketball and baseball games, goals and free throws and home runs scored. He'd write of Bulls and White Sox games and the one Bears game we went to, and he'd remember actual scores and names of the opposing teams. Me, I remember the rainbow that splashed across the sky after a rain delay, or the man selling Mexican corn, or the black towels we waved at the momentous blackout game, the electricity palpable as we clinched our division win in 2008. Will my list of memories be standard mom memories, resulting in a book he'll put aside, that gets buried under old textbooks in his cave of a room?

How should I write this gift? At first I thought, a la 100words.com, of writing 100 words for each year of his life. But some years--especially his first year of life--can't be summed up in a mere 100 words. Or should I use bullet points with a snappy sports-like title: "Momentous highlights of the formative first 18 years of T's life?" Should I include pictures? I groan at the prospect of going through the albums stored in my son's room--not only are the albums stacked topsy-turvy in no logical order, the pictures are arranged in no less haphazard way. I remember J scolding me for not writing dates of the back of photos. J, you're up there enjoying some celestial sport, seraphim against cherubim, maybe--take a minute to enjoy an "I told you so." How am I going to look at a shot and remember if Ty was three or four or five? It's hard enough compiling memories by specific year; I've spent the last few days finding and looking through old calendars and trying to decipher my scribbles.

But research is done; I'm going to look at each year at a time. Maybe some years will work better as bullet points; maybe a 100-word essay will be fine for others. If I were a poet, I'd try my hand at an ode! Let me begin.