Today is our youngest son’s thirty-first birthday. Stuart was born in the labor room, rather than the delivery room, of the hospital and for that you can blame me, as my wife, Judy, still does.
Three years earlier, when our other son, Ben, was born, Judy
was in labor for what seemed like days. We left for the hospital at 8 p.m. on
Thursday. Ben wasn’t born until a few minutes before midnight on Saturday.
So, the night before Stuart’s birth, when my wife said it was
time to go to the hospital, I assumed that, based on her previous drawn-out labor,
it would be a long, long time before we saw the inside of the delivery
room. As planned, we dropped Ben off with friends, Barry and Debbie, then
headed to the hospital. The doctor on duty informed Judy she wasn’t in labor, wasn’t
likely to go into labor anytime within the next week, and told us to go home.
Ben was asleep when we got to Barry’s and Debbie’s house, so
we decided to leave him there. I told Barry and Debbie I’d come in the morning
to pick him up.
Exhausted from all the hoop-de-do, I immediately fell asleep
when we got home, but Judy didn’t. She lay awake all night, convinced she was,
despite what the doctor had said, in labor.
When, at 6:30 a.m., she shook me awake and said we had to
leave for the hospital that very minute, I felt no sense of urgency. Just hours before, after all, the doctor had said we were at least a week away from D-day. I took a shower,
walked and fed the dogs, helped her into the back seat of the car, and headed
for the hospital, four miles away, at a leisurely pace.
About a mile from the hospital, I finally got the message
loud and clear: she wasn’t joking. The kid was about to be born. Moments after
I dropped her off in front of the ER – I had just come in from parking the car –
Stuart arrived. Had we had left home five minutes later he would have been born
in a Volvo station wagon and we could have named him Sven.
I got to Barry and Debbie’s house shortly before noon to find that Ben wasn’t there. Barry had taken him to the supermarket. When they arrived,
Barry was carrying several bags of food, including a giant bag of potato chips.
I took Ben onto the sun porch off Barry and Debbie’s living
room and told him, “You know that baby in mommy’s tummy? It came out this morning
and it’s a boy! You are a big brother! What do you have to say about that?”
Ben’s response, delivered in a monotone only a single-minded
three-year-old can muster, will forever be legendary not only within our family
but within Barry’s and Debbie’s, who were listening at the door: “I’m hungry
for potato chips.”
Twenty-eight years later, moments after Teddy, Ben’s first
son, was born, I texted Stuart to tell him he was an uncle. Stuart texted back,
“I’m hungry for potato chips.”
Logging on to my email this morning, I found a note from
Ben, an attorney at a DC law firm. It contained a link to an article he had
written about oligarchy pricing within the airline industry that was published
today in a prestigious law journal. Ben told us last month the article had been
accepted for publication. When I read the draft I insisted he send at that
time, I had to read it s-l-o-w-l-y to absorb the gist of it, which is that five
index funds now own roughly 80 percent of the shares of publicly traded
airlines which is why some economists have opined – not necessarily correctly,
Ben asserts – that airline fares have increased over the last few years. While I
don’t even pretend to understand antitrust law, Ben's specialty, I do understand the airline industry
because I spent much of my career working within it.
Wanting to read the article again, I went to the pantry to
find something to eat as I savored every word along with my morning coffee.
Two days ago, Judy and I returned from D.C., where both sons
now live, on JetBlue. We had flown up for the weekend to attend a birthday
party for Teddy, who turned three, and his brother Isaac, who turned one the
day after.
There in the pantry was a single-serve bag of Terra Blue
potato chips, JetBlue’s signature snack. Judy wasn’t hungry when the flight
attendant came around with her basket of goodies, so she had tucked the
chips into her handbag and brought them home.
They were, on this fine and beautiful Florida morning, particularly delicious.
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