Nothing the Police Need To Know About

"Hey Griff, what's going on?" my MBA teammate Jamie asked last night as he stood in our kitchen.

"Nothing the police need to know about," Griffin quipped and then turned and left.

"Now THAT was funny," Jamie said, turning to me. "That is a kid with one wicked sense of humor."

"Yes he does." I replied. And if you only knew the half of it, I thought silently.

On my desk at work is the picture above. It's a picture of Griffin right around his first birthday. It's an unremarkable photo of a cute kid on a swing. But when we first got it back from the photo developers (isn't THAT a quaint concept) in late 1998 it took my breath away. You see, as Griffin approached his first birthday we had already endured three neurosurgeries, numerous trips to the hospital and our first incredibly frustrating and frightening trip to the emergency room. What we hadn't experienced yet were any words. Just a very few gurgles, a generally blank stare and maybe a smile from our little man. Our pediatrician at Doernbecher was concerned enough to refer us off to a neurologist. The prognosis was not good.

"There's obviously a significant level of delay," he told us. "At eleven months old he is performing at one month milestones. And a look at his MRI shows an abnormally dysmorphic brain. I think you can expect this to be at some level a fairly permanent developmental problem." In other words we were looking at some level of what used to be called, when we were kids, mental retardation. It was a blow to the gut. We were already ordering his first wheelchair and now this.

What we didn't know at that time was that one of the surgeries performed just prior to our meeting with the neurologist had unlocked a significant source of Griffin's delay. A large pocket of fluid called a syrinx had formed and was pressing on his spinal cord. It was causing more difficulty than we understood in Griffin's fine and gross motor development. Kids learn with their hands at this age and Griffin was barely able to roll over much less grab all of the things in his grasp.

So a few months later on a visit to Laurelhurst Park in Portland we snapped a few photos of Griffin on the swing. It was an unremarkable day. I handn't noticed anything different. Griffin was his generally lethargic self and as I packed him up and drove home I thought, "Wow, this is the rest of my life." When the pictures showed up in the mail a few weeks later I saw this picture. I hadn't noticed Griffin's reaction to being on the swing. It was the first time in his first 13 months with us that I had seen that kind of emotional reaction to anything. I wouldn't know it for years but this was the beginning of Griffin overcoming those early developmental delays. And I would look at this picture during that period of time and grieve that this was the boy I could have had but didn't get. I was glimpsing into Griffin's future and seeing through the filter of my own present.

So as I look tonight on Griffin and his wicked sense of humor I am reminded of my stubborn tendency to want to take the present circumstances and project them into the future. Be they good, bad or indifferent it is in my nature to project what I see in front of me into the forseeable future. And a picture taken in a park offered me hope I would not hold on to for lack of faith.