Y Chromo-Tomes

Boys...such a discordant mess, though I really love their songs.  Like Anne Fadiman in “Coleridge The Runaway,” I too find myself enamored by the charms of those Silas Tomkyn Comberbache’s I know.  And I have spent my share of sleepless nights being “affrightened by, as a terror of itself, a self-subsisting separate Something.”  My little S.T.C. sleeps in Poughkeepsie when he is not calling from the ER.

He’s fine now, but you can imagine the terror when a tear-sotted stammer and a heaving breath admits over a far away phone, “Mom...sobbing choke...I made a mistake.”  Good lord, how can this be?  It’s only three in the afternoon—not trouble time.  I had just hung up the phone hardly an hour ago.  We were talking about classes...his upcoming trip to Ireland...Dad meeting him in New York this weekend...tickets to see Christopher Walken on Broadway...some dark comedy about losing hands...the Rugby Club reserving the boxing room for some last minute fun.


That’s right.  Boxing room.  Two fights.  Both lost.  Dropped straight down.   Eyes to the back of their sockets and blood pouring to the ground.  One half hour completely gone.  Yes Samuel, “O my God!”   Then the EMT comes on the phone, assures me that he will be fine, good hands and all that, and they need his insurance information.  They ask me to e-mail it to them.  That would be better.  And I’m trying to type out little numbers that I can hardly see, while they’re telling me what Saint Something-or-Other they’re taking him to.  The whole sound is unbelievably jarring.

It’s not as if I had no warning about our younger one.  I still remember watching him on the playground after school...shaking a can of soda as hard as he could...piercing a hole...letting it loose right next to the yard duty lady.  Then he proclaiming to the Principal that he knew full well it would get him in trouble, “but it was worth it just to see the can go!”  As Coleridge says, this is my “vista of infinite possibility."  But my goodness is this boy adored.  

You just can’t help it.  Like Comberbache, he is kind and generous of spirit, and outrageously funny.  He has a gift for language because he's never met a person he's not interested in talking to.  He sings in German and now swaggers in Russian that his advisor cautioned him against until succumbing to his relentless pursuit.   I gave up the advising role a long time ago.  Actually, I gave up believing my advice would be taken up.  I keep trying, and he keeps trying.  On the important things he listens, but fun presents his problem.  The interesting thing is that he is steadfast in his respect for rules.  His base clef anchors his treble.   Oh, but those variations.  Someone should advise his advisor.

Be safe with Yeats, Kristofer. I love you...Mom