I’ve been writing about this boy for his entire life.

That time he brought me flowers in his grubby four year old hands.

His obsession with soy lecithin and BHT that sent our entire family down a new food direction.

The lessons he has always been teaching me.

If I spend too much time reading back through old blog posts and looking at old videos and photos, I’m afraid my heart will implode and I’ll be a blubbering mess.

From his first breath in this world to this very evening when I tucked him into his bed, his last night as a twelve year old boy, Bergen Hawkeye has been easy to love.  

He arrived in the evening, the first boy after three daughters, and he was a charmer instantaneously.  Seriously, his nickname was The Model Citizen.  Life could be happening all around us – and it always was with three big sisters (two of them being both toddlers, for the love) – and the noise never stopped and yet, when I would carry that swaddled burrito of a baby to his crib and would lie him down, bright blue eyes still alert and happy, and when I would tell his tiny newborn self that it was time for bed and when I would sing his special song (from the Curious George soundtrack), he would obediently close his little eyes, insert his tiny thumb and drift off to sleep as if he was a car and his ignition had been shut off.

This lasted until he learned to walk.  Which was a little bit before his first birthday.

Now he was still a great kid, but the nickname The Model Citizen fit a little less.

Bergen lost his first tooth traumatically before he was even two years old.  He fell across a toy box with only his tiny toddler face to catch him. We sat him on the counter of our Virginia home and watched as he used his tongue to feel inside his mouth and then accidentally launch that jarred tiny tooth across the blue kitchen counter, skipping like a little rock across a lake.  (There’s still a scar on his lip.)

His second front took he also lost traumatically.  He was just over two.  We had moved to South Carolina and I asked him to put a pillow back on the sofa for me.  Before putting the pillow away he assumed a good skid across the wooden floor on said pillow was in order.  He missed the pillow and caught his face on the wooden floor by his one remaining front tooth.

Again, clattering across the floor, same skipping rock image.

So before he was even three years old he was completely void of front teeth.  He learned to work around this – eating apples in a way only a three year old toothless kid can figure out.  Because of the tooth trauma, he was late in getting his permanent teeth and we all grew accustomed to his gap smile.

Not long after the second tooth injury Bergen was swimming with all of us at a lake.  He cruised over to the dock’s edge, hoisted himself up onto the wooden dock and looked a little alarmed.  “Dad,” he said, “My shirt hurts.”

Upon further examination his “shirt” hurt because he had basically snagged his tiny bird cage chest on a rusty nail under the dock and unzipped his chest.  We had lived in South Carolina maybe two months.  “Maybe you should ask someone where the nearest hospital is,” Kevin informed me, all calm like.

There’s a scar there too – with scar dots running down either side where the stitches went into his taut little skin.

The scar under his right eye is from the time he was about five and walked directly into the open truck bed of our friend Jane’s truck, barely missing his eyeball.

Our friend Jacob thinks Bergen’s bones are made of rubber because there aren’t many humans who collapse, fall and roll with such frequency as this boy does.

He’s agile and lean and fast and I could talk about him all day.

Today he turns thirteen years old.

It’s a new phase.  A new age.  (The count of teenagers living in my home is up to three, if you’re wondering.)

His mind is sharp and he’s more tender than you would imagine and his heart is a bit of closed book and I’m always making it my mission to peer inside.

I love this kid.

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