handshake

i always figured if i ever met johnny cash i would cry so hard i'd probably fall down. i grew up with that man's voice in my ears as early and as constant as anyone in my family. you get that way sometimes about things, where you know enough about someone, where you feel the prsence of someone in your life so intensely you feel like you know them and they are somehow yours, even if you've never met them. there's always a danger that someone like that, someone famous, will be less than what we think and we'll be disappointed, heartbroken. i felt like that when i saw jimmy smith at a show in syracuse years back. he was a complete jerk on stage and i felt like i knew why his baby done left him by the end of the show.

but there are some folks who are as wonderful as you imagine. i spent some time years back going to see old blues musicians with a friend who always went up to shake hands with and thank the band as they were packing up. at first i teased him about trying to get to meet famous folks but he was too serious about it to notice. he was genuinely grateful to see these old guys he had grown up with and was raised to say thank you when given a gift. when this same friend took me to see maceo parker at the haunt in ithaca, i was surprised when, after the show, a man in the parking lot reached for my hand and thanked me for stopping by. he was wearing the nicest suit i'd ever seen up close and he smelled of sweat and electricity. it took me several steps toward the car to realize maceo parker had thanked me. he thanked us all, stood out there in the parking lot in the dark shaking hands with everyone who came out of that place.

when i worked at a bookstore i met plenty of famous folks coming in to sign books or do little shows. sara weddington came to sign her book and when she asked my name i was unable to tell her. i didn't know. she looked like my high school home ec teacher. she called me honey. she patted my hand and signed my book. you hope everyone will be so gracious, but it's hard to know for sure.

so i was a little nervous about meeting the newest supernatural nephew for the first time. partly because he's a baby and babies are just weird. also because everyone in my family has been throwing around the word "perfect" a little too freely in conjunction with this particular child. it's suspicious. i have spent plenty of time around small children and frankly, they are far from perfect. they are tiny hurricanes, always spewing something and flailing and sending things flying. they are scary. he's a good baby, they kept saying. what on earth does that mean? good baby.

we arrive christmas eve at the house of the good baby. he is teething, we hear. i wait. i know what teething babies do. their heads spin around and the room is bathed in an ominous red glow as they howl at pitches that can shatter eyeballs and do damage to spinal nerves. but the room is not red and the sound that comes out of him is more like the sound of a small stream on a hillside. but he is teething, his parents say, feigning frustration at what appears to them to be cranky behavior. there is no evidence of this crankiness. cranky for a child just under one involves a face the color of a beet and wailing that sounds like strangulation. i look for the cranky. they hand me the child to hold. he has never seen me so i know he'll cry. he does not cry. he smiles. this is what he does. he smiles all the time. they had been telling me this for months and i just figured they had that hypnotic baby idiocy that happens to parents, grandparents and some aunts and uncles.

he does not cry ever. this is unsettling. we stayed in his house five days and i am absolutely certain we never heard more than a total of 73 seconds of anything that sounded like disgruntlement. in five days. he sleeps at night. he takes naps without a fuss. he eats whatever his parents feed him and eats all of it. he is not afraid of dogs or cats. he laughs a lot. and he loves any sort of interactive play. he's a good baby, his mother says, smiling. good? is she kidding? he's ridiculous. he's not even real. he really is all those things i said over the last few months- supernatural. he really can fly and email and use the phone. he can speak seventeen languages and can read twelve. it will wear off as he gets older. not the talent, but the fascination with it. with supernatural powers come difficult choices and overwhelming responsibilities. he will find perfection tedious in his teen years and will shrug it off without even noticing. but right now, today, he is unsettlingly perfect.