Out Of The Old Black Bag
OUT OF THE OLD BLACK BAG
The Return of the Magi
AHN Pediatrics — Pediatric Alliance Arcadia
“So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Smiling for the Magi!
Musical accompaniment: “True Love” written by Cole Porter. Sung by Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly.
In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born for we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” […]When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
— Matthew 2:1-12 (New International Version)
The old grandfather had always revered the solemn irony and tenderness of O’Henry’s classic short story, “The Gift of the Magi.” In this yuletide tale, two young newlyweds are so blindly in love that they sacrifice the little they possess in worldly goods to prove their love for each other. The wife cuts off and sells her beautiful hair to buy a watch band for her husband, who in turn sells his very watch to buy a clip to adorn her very beautiful (but no longer existent) hair. They laugh and cry tears of utter joy as the tale ends.
Smiling for his prenatal sonogram!
So when enough time had elapsed after the birth of Baby “Bumpy,” the grandfather Tony and his wife Mary arranged to journey east across the state of Pennsylvania to witness, adore, and pay homage to the new grandson in person.
“We are like the Magi,” remarked the grandfather. “We three kings of Orient are/Bearing gifts we traverse of far.” So the three of them embarked for Danville, PA after loading up the SUV with gifts both material and supernatural.
The grandfather was still disappointed that the baby had delayed his worldly entry for two days beyond the target date of August 18, 2021, one century to the day from the birth of Great Grandfather Anthony George Kovatch. Unlike the machinations of Nature where high category destructive hurricanes like Katrina and Ida cycle exactly 16 years to the day, the chronicles of the human generations avoid such precision. The grandfather Tony felt he had been deprived of a fantastic story line for his blog, “Out of the Old Black Bag,” but he did rapidly get over it since all of his children, as well as himself and his beloved daughter-in-law, Ashton (see below), had birthdays in the twenties of their respective birth months.
Although the Great Grandfather and this baby were born not far in location from each other in the anthracite coal mining district of Northeastern PA, they would never meet, as Anthony had died a half century before of a broken heart from unrelenting grief following his wife Virginia’s premature death. Having foreshortened experience as both a son and a grandson, the socially underprivileged Tony often sought out surrogates; for much of his later life, he had dreamed of meeting his Hungarian Kovacs ancestors at Ellis Island as they finished their escape from persecution in Europe at the turn of the 20th century. How proud they would be of this baby, whose name had changed from Bumpy (or Mister Potato Head) to Kenton Lehmann Kovatch.
Anthony George, who grew up essentially fatherless and penniless during the Great Depression, became a medic during the Second World War and started a cascade of medical professionals down through the generations. Anthony married into a family of Italian immigrants fleeing persecution in the southern part of the peninsula. The ambitious family of 13 children included the premier family practitioner in the district, a ground-breaking engineer, a dentist, and a pharmacist. Throw in a four-letter high school athlete, a Manhattan lawyer, and a possibly-connected 15th century mathematician who created the internationally-renowned “Fibonacci” sequence.
Following suit with the ancestors, Anthony’s son became a pediatrician and his grandson became a specialist in Head and Neck Surgery. The grandson became known as “Mister Clutch” because of his heroic exploits as a pole vaulter and a surgical resident. Legend has it that because he was born prematurely by emergency C-section, Tony and Mary were not prepared for his homecoming, so he had to spend his first nights at home sleeping in the bottom drawer of a dresser set in his siblings’ bedroom wrapped in a bath towel!
Mister Clutch also married into the medical profession, falling deeply in love with a former ballet dancer, Ashton (“Tiny Dancer”), who also happened to dance her way into the best Ivy League medical school on this planet. They met during an interview tour for their respective Ear, Nose, and Throat surgical residencies and their love endured for five years of grueling training in distant locations.
“Baby Kenton will want for nothing,” thought the Magi Tony out loud while the three were on their trek across the state. “I wish him supernatural intelligence and overwhelming opportunity!”
The Magi Mary interrupted his reverie: “You are a fool, my dear husband! These things are absolutely meaningless if he does not have good health and a strong sense of meaning in his life. Kenton must never lose sight of how lucky he is and of his ineffable responsibility to fill the shoes of his ancestors.”
Woke, the Magi Tony conceded that the Magi Mary was absolutely correct. There were no gifts that the two of them could bestow on Kenton that were not already running though his tiny veins and the “instruments” of his childhood; there was no song they could sing that was not already in his soul! Indeed, there was only a single gift of any impact and it was riding silently in the SUV with them.
On arrival in Danville, the epiphany was triumphant. As he had almost supernaturally done in the womb, the Baby Kenton smiled without provocation as if he were being spoken to from deep within. I, Tony, wondered how he could do this! And who was this Third Magi whose presence he could sense during the pilgrimage to Danville?
Suddenly, while we and the maternal grandparents were enjoying a dinner of Chinese delicacies with Baby Kenton sleeping near us in his car seat on the floor, a baby deer — a yearling — looked into the dining room of the recently purchased home. I was astonished to see that there were two other yearlings in the distance, but no mother. As soon as I wrapped on the window, all three of them fled into the woods. Disheartened, I rejoined the others at the table.
Coming to pay homage?
“This reminds me of The Yearling,” I told the parents and the grandparents of Kenton.
“It is a touching story but is quite sad,” said Roxanne, the mother of “Tiny Dancer.”
“It is sad,” I replied, and then tried my hand at amusement: “The three deer are like the shepherds of Bethlehem, also coming to pay homage! I will name them Flag (the deer from the story), Maggie Mae, and Mick Jagger. Flag, Mag, and Jag!”
In the face of overwhelming sleep deprivation, even the corny remark elicited some laughter — enough that the sleeping infant suddenly awoke and cried vigorously. Then just as abruptly as it had started, the crying ceased, he drifted back to sleep, and his face beamed with his supernatural precocious smile.
And then I finally realized that the gift that the unidentified Third Magi brought was the ability, strength, and courage to endure in the face of the worst of suffering. That in experiencing all suffering we are most human, and in prevailing we are supernatural. The yearlings had jarred in my distant mind the concluding lines of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ novel:
“You’ve seed how things goes in the world o’ men….Ever’ man wants life to be a fine thing, and a easy. ‘Tis fine, boy, powerful fine, but ’tain’t easy. Life knocks a man down and he gits up and it knocks him down agin. I’ve been uneasy all my life…I’ve wanted life to be easy for you. Easier’n ’twas for me…. But ever’ man’s lonesome. What’s he to do then? WHAT’S HE TO DO WHEN HE GITS KNOCKED DOWN? WHY, TAKE IT FOR HIS SHARE AND GO ON.” — Pa “Penny” Baxter
I am still not completely sure of the exact identity of the Third Magi, but I imagine it was a divinely-assigned Guardian Angel.
Disclaimer: The facts are fictional, but the spirit of the story is authentic. It is, however, true that “The Alchemist” is Ashton’s favorite book!
Smiling for his Guardian Angel!
source http://www.thepediablog.com/2021/09/16/out-of-the-old-black-bag-10/
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