"It's a Boy!"

Eight year-old Katie just could not keep a secret. Thus I learned the gender of my new child, whose birth I had missed because of an airplane.

For the first six months of 1992 I did the geo-bachelor gig as a recently commissioned naval officer and  student flight surgeon in Pensacola. Pregnant Kathy and her two children remained in Texas to the challenge of a newly blended family with an even newer baby/sibling on the way. The obstetrician-recommended induction was scheduled for Friday, June 12, 1992. I was in the flight training phase of the naval flight surgeon curriculum, the same as bona-fide student naval aviators. To reach my goal of a final solo in the T-34, I seized every possible flying opportunity. So I booked an early morning commercial flight from Pensacola to DFW on the morning of June 12. I could get in one more training flight the Thursday before and still arrive in time for the newborn's scheduled arrival.


As would often happen in the next 18 years, Matthew had other ideas. Kathy called me early Friday morning. "Just come from the airport to the hospital," she said. "I'm in labor." Kathy's mother and young Katie picked me up at the airport later that morning and whisked me straight to the hospital, where newborn Matthew awaited the belated arrival of his father. So there I was, wearing my Navy summer whites for reasons I don't remember now, viewing my new baby through the nursery window. "You must be the grandfather," said a well-meaning onlooker. "No," said I testily, "That's my son."


That was 18 years ago tomorrow. Yesterday Matthew graduated from high school. It's been quite a week.


In the 18 years since his Dallas birth to his Japan high school graduation Matt has moved nine times. He's attended nine different schools in five different cities in two countries. Since starting kindergarten at age 4 in Florida, he's completed 14 years of formal education. That includes five Catholic schools and four public schools. He attended seven schools in K - 8th grade alone, and two different high schools in Japan and Virginia.


In addition to moving so many times, making new friends and adjusting to new school systems and teachers, his life has been challenged in other ways. The periodic absence of a father whose Navy career took him away for months at a time was just one of those challenges. For three years, Matt shared a household with his nonagenarian paternal grandfather whose life was gradually consumed by Parkinson's disease. He saw his maternal grandfather battle cancer and his active grandmother's life dramatically altered by two major strokes. He personally witnessed the deaths of three grandparents. All of that occurred before high school.  


As a graduating 8th grader he cried when we told him he would start high school not in Norfolk with his friends, but in Japan with strangers. But just a short while later, as a junior at a Catholic high school in Arlington, VA, he begged to return to Japan for his senior year. We figured out a way to make that happen. It's been arguably the best and happiest year of his life, punctuated by a series of impressive accomplishments and healthy relationships.


Yesterday the Matthew who spoke from the podium with such presence and poise, the Matt who strode confidently across the stage to receive his diploma, who was afterward cheered and lauded and hugged by genuine friends and girlfriend, was no longer a child but a young adult.

I looked down from the audience with such pride, and saw what that newborn baby of 18 years ago had become.


"It's a man," said I.