Above the trees, you can see for miles and for years

With the coming of autumn, I get philosophical.

On Labor Day, my wife and I enjoyed breakfast in nearby Blowing Rock. We’d just celebrated our umpteenth wedding anniversary. Her birthday approached. The 25th anniversary of 9/11 loomed. Waiting 30 minutes on the chilly patio beneath umbrellas in a drizzle felt momentous.

After one of the best breakfasts ever, we strolled the resorty main street, then drove down the mountain through fog to visit a sick church friend at the hospital in Morganton.

We passed a convenience store covered in kudzu. You couldn’t find the gas pumps. It doesn’t take long to be erased.

Sue had been bitten by a playful cat. No malice was intended, but infection caused her arm to swell like over-ripe fruit. Cats and chickens carry this stuff, she said. It’s quite common.

The only chickens we have at home are quartered in the freezer. I considered emancipating our cats. Rounds of IV antibiotics were finally showing signs of working in the 37th hour. She wasn’t feverish anymore or throwing up.

Sue has a happy smile and my wife and I felt such relief she was going to be OK, though I privately wondered how she’d turn pages in her hymnal at church if they had to amputate that purple arm.

Though she’s a retired obstetrician, she had never been a hospital patient. She spent most of her healing career as a mission coworker in Africa. She marveled how good the hospital food was here.

She appreciated the care she was getting. She was amused by the forms she had to sign incurred by a stay in a modern, western hospital.

Such forms don’t exist in Malawi or Congo where she worked. In both countries, hospital clerks wrote the bill by hand on a piece of paper. In Congo, patients might present a bicycle or sewing machine as a promise to pay later. Once a patient presented avocados as a guarantee.

I wondered how many babies she welcomed into the world during her brilliant career.

I was born on Friday evening, July 3. The doctor induced my mom because she was close enough to being ready, and he was in a hurry to kick off the holiday weekend.

He was scheduled to race in a July 4 sailing regatta and was not returning to the hospital to welcome me. Dr. Nelms was just as eager to get my birth off his calendar as Barbara Burriss Matthews was ready to get her baby out of the oven.

Already I was subject to other people’s agendas.

Had she not been induced, Mom would have delivered while her doctor sailed a Hampton One Design over the shallow Hampton Flats.

If I came on my time, probably on Saturday, I would have been delivered by the on-call doc or by a nurse at Dixie (yes, Dixie) Hospital or in the driveway of my parents’ modest Baxter Street house by an EMT who doubled as an undertaker.

But I was born at 5:30 on Friday, in the sight of water, three shaded blocks from the seawall on Chesapeake Avenue, and my birth would interrupt nobody’s Saturday plans.

Mom’s room might have had a view of the harbor. She might have watched, with a kind of exhilaration, those white sails carving up blue-green waves. Sun rifling on water calms the brain.

Mom might have held me by that window pointing out the harbor over the green treetops, cooing to me, telling me not to worry, the worst was over, none of life’s passages are as harrowing as the birth canal. There, there, there.

This wouldn’t be her last well-intended lie.

The Beach Boys’ song “I Get Around” topped the charts.

I didn’t drive in those days, but my 11- and 13-year-old sisters toted me around on their hips. They and our Fox Hill neighbors were glad to hold the Cute Baby. Two sets of grandparents lived close by in Merrimac Shores and Wythe. Church people opened their hearts.

The first time I ever slept with a girl was at church. Dee Soule, another newborn babe, and I shared a crib in the nursery while our parents parsed Rev. Andrews’ sermons in the sanctuary down the hall.

For a little guy, I got around just fine.

I escorted Dee to her junior prom. She had just broken up with Alec and pined over him the whole date. I wouldn’t have minded making out or, at least, changing the subject, but she groused about what a loser Alec was for allowing her to slip away. They eventually got married, of course. Nowadays, they have grandkids and a beautiful life thanks, possibly, to my good listening when Dee and I could have been slow dancing to Barry White. We cut striking figures in blue formal wear.

I don’t know what it cost for me to be born or how my parents settled the bill. I never saw Mom ride a bike. Perhaps she traded her 10-speed for me.

One summer in high school, I raced in the Hampton One Design Nationals. This was a big deal for a kid. My skipper was a Washington lawyer.

We took a big lead in the first race, hugging the shore to avoid the swifter current mid-channel. We aimed for what was then called Hampton General Hospital. Sun flashed off its windows.

If Mom gazed out one of those windows on the day after I was born in 1964, could she have seen her boy crewing one of those boats? Could she have made out his sunburned face? I was trimming sails, reading the tide, learning to anticipate shifts in fickle breeze.

Could she have ever guessed how dangerous those waters would be for her only son, how healing, how inspiring and deep and enigmatic? There would be close calls on those waters, moonlight sails, lonely days, fierce tempests. Did she know how memories given birth on that harbor would burn forever?