CREATIVE NONFICTION 31
control, which is tightly orchestrated and pre-
cisely timed.
My son David’s neurogenesis failed to follow
the prescribed plan. Instead, a few of his primitive
neural ectoderm cells formed a rogue alliance that
became medulloblastoma, a tumor that originates
between the cerebellum and brainstem and
grows to invade them both. Nobody realized this
until he was nearly four. Then, his skull growth
slowed. The tumor grew. He couldn’t stand on
just his left foot. He began projectile vomiting.
Fluid pressured his brain as the fourth ventricle
became blocked. His head hurt and he refused to
go to preschool.
He turned four in the hospital, two weeks after
the growth was partially removed in an opera-
tion that left a nine-inch incision down the back
of his head. Four months after his first surgery,
I graduated college with a major in biology.
Science did not ease my grief, but it did give me
perspective.
As a mother, I found it impossible to believe my
child’s body was flawed.
As a biologist, I recognized that genetic
variation, so necessary for species survival, also
produces morbid combinations.
Your children are not your children. They are the sons
and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
vii. beauty
The kids in David’s classes struggled to read,
write, do math, or all three. Their letters were
upside down and backward; their numbers didn’t
add up; their bodies relied on wheelchairs, walk-
ers, or medications. Some would listen quietly;
others were studies in motion and sound. Each
carried a label; most, more than one. David’s was
“Other Health Impaired,” a blanket covering
his struggles resulting from cancer therapies that
had eradicated his tumors. Learning issues aside,
he was intelligent, gregarious, insightful, and
weirdly sophisticated from his unusual travels and
experiences. Too, he displayed the empathy of
those who have known difficulty.
The summer he turned nine, David and I were
both in school. Every morning, he attended
enrichment classes with children from all over
our rural county while I taught undergraduate
labs. I picked him up at lunchtime and, together,
we pursued my thesis project, which concerned
sea urchin larval behavior.
Before our research began, we collected two
dozen spiny and flat (sand dollar) sea urchins,
which stayed in aerated aquaria in the Biology wet
lab. They would be artificially spawned when my
test equipment was ready. Until then, David liked
to watch them creep along, scraping algae from the
aquarium glass with their bottom-side triangular
teeth. They would cover themselves with sea
grasses, small shells, and sand, like modest spinsters
dressed for tea in green lace and pearly brooches.
We took them to his class for show-and-tell
one day. With a sloshing bucket between us, we
arrived to find his classmates in a hushed semi-
circle. Taller kids stood behind shorter ones, who
sat cross-legged in front. They craned to see into
the bucket, with its spiny urchin balls and velvety
brown sand dollars.
I held up a spiked purple Echinometra while
David told what he knew, which had nothing to
do with reproduction. The urchin crept across my
palm and waved its long spikes. The kids inched
forward, a T-shirt-and-denim wall scented with
playground, soap, and sweat.
One front-row boy peeked into the bucket,
where the tan-spined Lytechinus wore angel-wing
shells and eelgrass. “Why’s that one got stuff on
its head?”
David answered that it was camouflage, then
reached in to pick it up. The boy skittered back-
ward. “You crazy! That thing will poke you!”
David rolled his eyes, smiled, and gently touched
the spines.
The class held their breaths, their bodies tensed
with excitement and hesitation. A blonde girl in
the back row followed David’s every move with
somber gray eyes. She touched the spines gingerly
when he stopped in front of her.
“Did you see her?” he said later, in the car. He
scanned the bus ramp where his classmates waited
for rides. The bucket’s aerator hummed on the
floor beside me.
“See who?” I asked.
“Lenore.” He described her and I said, “Yes, the
girl in back with gray eyes.”
“She’s beautiful,” David said.
The prophet says, Beauty is life when life unveils
her holy face.