September 27, 2022. Roughly 4:45 p.m. Derby, Kan. (pop. 24,000). I’d just left work to meet my son, Sam, at Blue Sky Storage. We were clearing his storage bin and closing it
up so I wouldn’t have to pay the rental fee anymore. My plan had been for Sam to pay the rent each month, but you know how it goes when you have kids. We loaded our cars and half the stuff would be at Sam’s place, half at mine.
I gave him a birthday card
and a book, On the Road by Jack Kerouac. “You’re just the right age to read it,” I said.
Inside, I’d written a message. “Happy 21st birthday, Son. This book will take you places.”
Childhood
It all started around the 11:30 p.m. time slot of Sept. 27, 2001 in the Wesley Hospital birthing unit in Wichita. He turned sideways in his mother's belly and doctors had to perform an emergency C-section.
There was a board to shield his mom's and my view but I saw some flesh moving. The obstetricians cut away, while chatting jocularly. "And it always turns out to be a Jehovah's Witness who needs the blood transfusion," one doctor said. Then I heard a baby cry. The first thing I saw was his butt. His birth was recorded as 11:37 p.m. It was a Thursday night.
He was Baby Sam. Samuel Morris Guy.
Samuel because I thought actor Samuel L. Jackson was a badass. Morris after my grandpa Richard Morris Guy.
I remember playing Nintendo 64 with my boy when he was 3-years-old. I taught him the pieces on the chessboard. I showed him a book with pictures of all the U.S. Presidents up to that time. I tried to pique his interest, telling him stuff like how William Howard Taft was so fat he got stuck in his bathtub. I told him how James Monroe created the Monroe Doctrine & was skinny except Sam talked funny then. He would see the picture, point and say, "He made the Monroe Doctrine & he was thkinny."
Sam’s eyes crossed so he got glasses when he was 3-years-old. They had a strap around the back. His vision later corrected itself when he was 12 or 13.
He played T-ball, then wanted to take a class in karate so we signed him up. I think it taught him teamwork and calmness.
His mother, Maria, and I noticed when Sam was 4 and playing soccer, he couldn't go running down the field with the other kids. He'd grab the hands of the goalie on the other team and swing his arms around. We took him to the doctor and found he had exercise induced asthma. Started giving him an inhaler. His pediatrician, Dr. Nichols, said he could do sports as long as he took his inhaler.
We lived in the town of Rushing Waters, Kan. (pop. 1,000) You could hear the high school games from our house, and one night, Maria and I thought it would be fun to take Sam to a high school football game. The team there at Circle High School was called the T-birds, and I assumed I'd always be married to Maria, that we'd always live in Rushing Waters (where I knew the town postmaster by name) and our kids would be Circle T-birds.
I had him out for wrestling when he was 8, but there weren't enough kids out so he often got partnered with this kid who was 30 pounds heavier than him & a bully who liked to use the chicken wing on kids at school.
One night I could tell something was bothering my boy. “Sam, what’s wrong?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said and started quietly crying. So I lifted him up and carried him out. “It’s okay, buddy,” I said. I wrestled in junior high & high school, but if my boy didn’t want to do it, I wasn’t going to force it on him..
One Saturday when he was about 10 or 11 and Kenzie was 7 or 8, I took them to the Y MCA to do these kid exercises. But the adults had him running too hard. When he came out, he was gasping more than I’d ever heard. I didn’t have his inhaler with me. I had him drink from the water fountain for a while. I was terrified, but it finally settled down. I recalled this to him recently and said, “Your mother would’ve been mad as hell at me. I didn’t want her to find out.”
“I think you told me not to tell her,” he said.
I thought about high school wrestling and the times Coach Gaston thought we were slacking off and made us run - sprint - 15 laps around the gym. My son wouldn’t be able to do that, but it was alright.
We went to a lot of special breakfasts at the school in these years because Sam always made the honor roll. His second grade teacher said, “I wish I had a whole class of Sam’s.” His fourth grade teacher said his reading and vocabulary skills were “off the charts.” Maria and I tried to raise our kids in a home, rich with language.
The next year, we moved to my hometown of Jett, Kan. (pop. 4,000 in the ‘70s). Sam played trombone in the fifth grade band. For his 11th birthday, some of the new friends he'd made at school came to our house for a party.
But while he made new friends, Sam also got picked on because he was the new kid. The next year his mom took him out and started homeschooling him. It wasn’t a good decision. We regret it now.
Adolescence
The next few years are kind of murky. I was hospitalized for depression and we moved to Park City. My stress, depression and anxiety were too much for Maria. She’d lived with it for years. One weekend she took the kids and went to her mother’s house to catch a break. She never came back. I took a job with a paper in Western Kansas and there was some hardship in our lives. As it did when my parents divorced, as it does when all parents with kids divorce, the sadness and upheaval in the lives of the adults trickled down to the children - Sam and his little sister, Kenzie.
When I returned to Jett where Maria and the kids were living, Sam’s grades were bad. He felt isolated and his self esteem plummeted. I almost started crying when I saw his grades. He said he probably wouldn’t go to college. Years later, he confided to me that, at the time, he didn’t think he was good enough for college. I remembered how ambitious I was at his age and I sadly wondered if my kid had any ambition. Then he said he wanted to return to public school.
So we enrolled him at Jett High School. His grades improved. He had also gained weight. Dr. Nichols suggested to Sam that he become more active. Sam took him up on that. He decided he wanted to go out for wrestling again. He had outgrown his childhood asthma.
He hurt his shoulder and didn’t move quick enough during one practice so Coach Terry made the whole team stay work longer. Back in the locker room, guys were threatening to kick his ass. One kid threw an empty water bottle at him. But Sam stuck it out. At the end of the season, he’d lost 40 pounds, more than anyone else on the team. When coach told the wrestlers this, they all stood up and applauded Sam. He’d won the respect of his teammates. Some of the boys who’d picked on him in grade school, he now had a camaraderie with.
His mom remarried and Sam was sad when they had to move to Derby. He went out for wrestling there but was out most of the season after getting a concussion.
Because of his earlier bad grades, he had to do his junior and senior years at the same time. He felt he didn’t have time for wrestling that last year, but he did go out for debate and forensics and was in a school play, in which he showed a keen knack for comedic acting. Then Covid came. He didn’t get a high school graduation ceremony.
Adulting
Sam started attending Grossmont Community College in nearby Beulah, Kan. He got sick of living with his mom and step-dad. He thought they were too rigid. He made a deal with his girlfriend’s dad to rent a room from them for $500/month. He’d worked at Dairy Queen in high school before COVID. He was now working at Chick-fil-A.
But one weekend, he went with his girlfriend, Ashtyn, to her cousin’s wedding. A co-worker who had promised to cover Sam’s shift didn’t show up so Sam was fired. He spent the rest of the day, going up and down the strip, looking for a new job. “That was a terrible day,” he said. He finally got a job at Panda Express where he has since gotten two raises and been named head chef.
This is where I most identify with my son. I’ve met with adversity a million times over in my time. I’ve had to start over, change, reinvent myself - whatever was necessary to overcome the dark valleys of life. My son has gotten a bitter taste of that too, but he’s answered every challenge, getting back in the saddle, stronger than before.
My fears several years ago that he lacked ambition and gumption proved to be unfounded. Actually, I had a similar story when I was a teenager.
We recently got into a conversation about movies and Sam talked about the importance of the director, camera angles and writing in film.
“Does this interest stem from your taking Mr. Laner’s Film Appreciation class in high school?” I asked.
“A little bit,” he said. “But I’ve done a lot of reading up and studying it, on my own.”
“My God! You are sure as hell my son.”
The truth is my son, Sam, is a better man than I’ll ever be. But I raised him to be better than me.
He looks more like a man every time I see him. He’s gradually becoming adjusted to “adulting” and he talks like an adult – about things like Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and European history. LGBTQ, racial and reproductive issues in the news. He subscribes to the United Nations’ YouTube channel.
Around 5:30 p.m., Sept. 27, 2022. We’d loaded everything into our cars. “How ya' gonna celebrate your birthday,” I asked.
We walked to a liquor store on the strip. “I’m gonna have a wine and cheese party with Ashtyn and her family,” he said. He didn’t have his new “21” driver's license yet so he gave me the cash and I bought him a bottle of Montaudon Brut Champagne.
“Have fun tonight,” I said. “And, uh, life is gonna go pretty fast from here out. Enjoy every minute of it.”
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