Boys Birthday Map

Greetings from the cartographer,

Alexander says to me:  “So this is our map?”

“Yes.” I say.  I sometimes forget what he has not been shown.

He runs his hands over the lines on the paper, and I see him pause at the creases, and he is concentrating for a moment.  He wants to ask if this fold is important.

“Where are we on this?” he asks.  He looks at me.  There is a small furrow between his eyebrows, exactly where it appears on my own face when I am curious. 

The table is littered with things.  Books his brothers have read.  A photo album from his sister’s life before there were brothers.  An old LP record.  A DVD with a movie that Harrison made.  Crayon drawing from grade school.  A folding knife with the Eagle Scout emblem.  A copy of a valedictorian speech.

I place my hand near his on the map and point to where our lines have met and stopped.  He knew, but this is how he draws me closer to him, by asking me about our lives.

He glides his fingertip across the towns and counties and rivers and backroads.

“These two lines, where these cross here,” he asks, “That is where Katherine met Tim?”

I smile.  He loves asking this question because he likes the rest of that story.  We trace our fingers along the two lines running tandem across the map. 

“This is Monarch Pass.”  he says.  “She loved climbing that. Well, she loved having climbed it.”

I refill our mugs with coffee and he sits back to sip his, black and strong.  It is the middle of the night for some people but he is an early riser.  Because that’s when we have time to visit.

He leans back to the table and runs his hands over the maple, the planks scratched and creased from thousands of meals, from homework and tax forms and newspapers and plates with birthday cake.  And maps.

“You made this table for us.” he says.  I nod.  His fingers touch the braille left by his family; finds the edge of the table where his brother dented the wood with something.  He is counting the chairs and I see a shadow cross his face.

“There is room for more chairs.” I tell him.

“I know.” He looks up, the shadow is gone and he is smiling.  “I can feel us in this wood.”

His hands absently move back to the map.  He is not looking at it but I see him tracing the red line.  “He runs a lot of miles.” he says. 

“Yes.”

He follows the line to Montana and Wyoming and back.  The red line spirals in and out, twists up with other lines, zig zags between Detroit and home.  “He’s upstairs sleeping right now.” 

“They sleep a lot, it seems.” I say.

“They fill their days up to the brim, they need the rest.” Not defensive, but protective.

The blue line stops in Ann Arbor.  He moves backwards along the map, to D.C. and Texas and a little town where there was band camp and across the state to Ludington.  There are a lot of stops. 

“I can tell that a lot of thought went into these routes.”  He is shaking his head slightly, amazed.

I say nothing.  He knows more about the routes his brother took than I do.   His forefinger taps the map.

“He is at a fork in the road. Wonder where he is headed?”  He looks at me, still smiling, as if he knows something he’s not telling me.

We sip our coffee, elbows on the table.  He sometimes traces my line back before his was on the map, but we have had those conversations many times, and this morning he is thinking about his brothers. 

The green line has crossed with the blue and red, at home, in Ludington.  Here was our camping trip, just the boys, to Canada.  He laughs, remembering the rain.  The green line runs close parallel to the others, but it is in its own direction, making its own way, stopped at this moment in a small side street near Allendale.  He traced the line backwards a ways, south.

“Why was he in Atlanta?”

I tell him it was a service project he did on spring break. I say: “He took some amazing pictures.” 

“He has an eye for capturing a moment.”  he says, nodding.  “You know, he might be a genius.”

I don’t argue that.

We don’t have to talk about his own line on the map, the black line, a blend of all of the other colors that track his sibling’s paths.  If you looked casually at the map you might not notice it; it looks like an outline or a shadow of the other lines.  But it is there, tracing the same travels taken by Katherine, Harrison, Carson and Sawyer.  He is with them, and me, at every turn.

We fold the map and put it where we always put it.  He leans back and sips his coffee, looking up at me over the brim.  His eyes have the passion, the kindness, the intelligence I have seen in the other children around this table.  We sit in silence, both of us savoring the flavor of the moment.

After a while I ask: “What would you like for your birthday?” 

He doesn’t say anything right away but he already has the answer in his mind. 

I rest my hand on the table.  He was right.  I wait, watching him, looking at my father’s eyes, my son’s eyes.

He answers at last: “A map of the world.”

Hope this finds you exploring,

David

Copyright © 2016 David Smith