Happy Birthday Forest

A couple days ago, some jerk cut me off on the I-5 on-ramp. He was in an old, medium blue America sedan and he was bald. We were merging, but I was clearly ahead of him and he sped up. “Don’t be an asshole,” I said, as I floored it and my mommy van ripped just enough head of him to cut in before the ramp narrowed to one lane. I merged fast on to I-5, just to prove that I wasn’t going to cut him off and lollygag. To prove, really, that I was just as fast and aggressive as him. Then I felt a little disgusted with myself. Decided that I was over it. Imagined him, now coming up on the right, needing to get into my lane and how I would slow down and wave him in with a magnanimous, languid, maybe just a little bit sexy wave. I was feeling very Buddha. He came up on the right, his face contorted in rage and pressed to the glass, yelling at me. He was almost past me when my Buddha bubble popped and I flipped him off.

And then he slowed down. Dropped right back into my blind spot. I tried to see him in my rearview mirror, flicking my eyes so he couldn’t se me looking. My heart was thumping a little bit. Was he next to me? I looked in the fisheye in the side mirror. Yes. Right there. Pacing me. He pulled up a little. He had a bright yellow ear plug in his left ear, like one might wear at, say, a firing range. He dropped back again. I needed to merge right. I dropped speed fast, darted behind him then over. Then I lost him, merging right and exiting on Lakeview Blvd. But when I stopped at the sign at the bottom of the ramp, there he was. One car ahead of me. He turned right. I turned left. All the way to my writing group, I watched my rearview mirror. Did he turn around? I made a second turn. I imagined that he had my license plate number. I went inside. And all of this was different than it would have been two years ago. When the man in the blue sedan slowed, when he started pacing me, my first reaction was what it always was: “Fuck you. If you are coming after me, come on.” But right on the tails of that, like a new eraser over old soft lead, came this: “What about Forest?”

The day before, Forest had turned two. All day long, I sang Happy Birthday to him. Every one of the 27 different times , his face split wide open with the very first words. Last year, he was barely talking. This year he stared at my slice of Palermo pepperoni, gorgonzola and mushroom pizza with extra sauce and garlic crust. I could practically see his cogs turning. Then he looked at me and beamed and said “The steam is coming UP!”

He has changed so much. And he has changed me. Not just cured my macho death wishes, (although apparently this change is still making its way to my accelerator foot)  but softened me like meat tenderizer on a bee sting, and toughened me like fruit left long in the sun.

Now, he is two. I am almost 40. These 38 years that are between Forest and I will never change. They are an iron bar, separating us on the racetrack, forever holding us that much apart, and somewhere up there is a cliff, and I will go over first. Please, please, please Gods, let me go over first. I survived ten years of environmental politics like a daily vaccination of despair. I survived walking home along through San Francisco’s lower Haight every night after work, 2:30 or 3 am, smoothed out by the shot and beer back I got from my fellow bartender, walking past all those dark doorways with nothing but luck and my belief that a confident strut would unmark me as a target. I survived teaching myself to drive on the highway at 14, bored after school and later, driving so drunk on the dark Arizona roads that my best friend in the passenger seat braced both feet on the dash board.

“Am I swerving?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t tell if it’s me or the car.”

“Me neither,” I said, and we both laughed, alive with our stupid fearlessness. I am not fearless now. I don’t mean to be a downer, but I’ll tell you this: Back then I thought the worst thing that could happen was that I would die. Now I know that the worst thing is that I would survive Forest. 

"What about Forest?" 

This question is a new compass, a shift in my North Pole. It is the awful and wonderful power of this love and it just keeps getting bigger. Happy Birthday, Forest.  I love you so very, very much.