Life

Last night, I held a little newborn baby that was less than 24 hours old. She weighed all of 6 lbs and 11 oz, was 19 inches long, and looked like an adorable little alien. Her eyes were big and grey, but she didn't open them very often. Her skin was olivey but pink and soft, so smooth that my substantially older and tougher-skinned fingers barely perceived any texture at all to her immaculate cheek. I thought to myself, "Just a few hours ago, you were a mystery wrapped tight in a bundle of water, blood, and muscle. Now you are perhaps the greatest gift to your parents, and perhaps to the world." But she wasn't thinking about all that; she was just sleeping and occasionally following her instinctual desire to turn towards my chest with an open mouth. "Sorry little one," I said, as it was not my child, "Nothing to see here."

It's the second time in my life when I got to hold a child less than a day old. I've held LOTS of babies, but to gaze upon the face of a true newborn is one of those experiences that is hard to put into words. We were all babies, we all have seen babies, and we know that a million babies are born every five seconds, or something like that. But until you touch, hold, and really see a baby that barely made it's way into the world, you've not understood how powerful of an experience it can be. The only thing I believe now that can top it, as far as intensity goes, is having that child be my own. I watched the video of this baby's mother looking at her child for the first time; her genuine and glowing exclamations of "I love you! I love you!" hit my emotional core like a punch to the face. I cried, a lot, but I was smiling the whole time.

Life really does hit you, and sometimes with violent intensity. Another set of related experiences I've had in my life involve dialing 9-1-1 "in case of emergency". The first time wasn't much of a big deal; I witnessed a head-on collision while I walked down the street. I happened to be standing next to a pay-phone, and was able to alert the officers. Another time was because of a fight I witnessed, and a guy got a bottle broken on his head. Ouch. But there have been those times when dialing those numbers was perhaps the most important thing I've ever done; I would venture to say it even saved a life or two.

Most recently, I witnessed some idiots racing on the freeway (I was doing 80-85, and they FLEW past me, so I estimated maybe 110, maybe 120+ mph) and then crashed horribly about 25 yards in front of me. I hit my brakes to avoid making it a pile-up; I slowed down enough to get a good look at the aftermath. One of the cars, a very nice Subaru Impreza WRX, had been knocked across 4 lanes and onto the shoulder. The passenger side of the car was destroyed, but it looked like the driver was OK. The second car, a silver sporty Lexus convertible (with the top up), wasn't so fortunate. The car had slammed driver-side first into the Jersey median, spun out of the control, hit the Subaru, and spun some more to finally rest in a cloud of burning rubber and smoke in the middle of the freeway. I couldn't see the driver, and the driver's side was entirely accordioned into itself. I didn't stop; to do so would have been to cause most blockage and perhaps another accident. But I did slow down enough to call 9-1-1, and report the accident. I don't know what happened after that. The freeway wasn't crowded, but it did have a regular stream of cars...I just prayed that no one else got hurt. I was pretty shaken up all day and cried a little, just without even thinking about it, but I wasn't smiling that time.

Calling 9-1-1 in a life-threatening emergency is both a very helpful, and a very helpless, feeling. I've been trained in first aide, CPR, and lifeguarding since I was 15. I know how to take a pulse, how to dislodge an object from a baby's throat, how to keep blood pumping on a person them to get oxygen into their lungs. However, when someone I loved stopped breathing, I could only sit terrified in the front seat of the ambulance and wail prayers to anyone that could hear me while the paramedics intubated and physically forced air into their lungs. I felt as helpless as a newborn baby, useless and powerless, completely at the mercy of more capable hands and wires and tubes. Needless to say I cried, and cried, and didn't stop crying for about 4 hours. Thinking about that day gets me choked up even now, even though this person pulled through and made an incredible recovery. Heck, even THAT part of the story is a little lip-quivering.

Life is so delicate and precious, and I don't just say that to sound like a greeting card from the local Christian bookstore. Holding that baby I could only think about how amazing her life would be...I tried to take a snapshot of the moment, so I could maybe one day tell her when she was old enough to understand, "I held you on the day that President George W. Bush's chief of staff stepped down; I gave your mom 6 celebrity gossip magazines and nearly all of them had some guy named Nick Lachey on the cover." It's kind of like how when I look back at newspapers from the day I was born, and I look at all those hairstyles, and I realize the joy my mom felt in forgetting all of that for just a minute, to look at me for the first time and cry "I love you! I love you!" as I took those first breaths of my unknown and yet-unlived life.