eighteen

My first baby is grown.

Gavin is as patient and kind and funny as you could wish for when ordering your hypothetical child. He’s a solidly good person, hard working and unselfconscious. In elementary school, he was the only person who would wear the worm costume for the class play of James and the Giant Peach because it looked like a giant dick, and he killed the audience with his comedic timing. On a robotics trip, he won a novelty giant squid hat and wore it to all the meets for the rest of the season. Nobody bullies him because he’s just the kind of guy who pulls that kind of thing off, and all the elementary kids loitering around the high school can identify him as the “the kid in the cat headphones who knows the WiFi password.” When his robotics team kept forgetting to turn off their robot at night, he put a sensor on it and programmed it to scream when the lights went out. He gets through things with a relaxed humor that attracts like-minded friends, and I love his assortment of gentle nerds and techie surfer boys.

This year the boy earned his driver’s license, applied to colleges, and sat his SAT in a pandemic. His best friend’s parents panicked about the end of the world and moved to Idaho, and the boys conspired to wire the off-grid Big-Brother-proof cabin right back into the digital age in order to play games and trash-talk together every night until they can reunite in college. There is no avoiding the Eye of Sauron with teenagers playing with the palantirs, sorry folks.

He loves cats, he tinkers with computers, he wants to work in AI so he can thwart the Boston Dynamic dogs when they get turned to evil. He sends me cute kitten videos when I'm stuck at the library door, builds sword holders and small furniture with his dad, and would like a full suit of armor, please. Which he would wear. 

He's the best kind of person. He'll support your endeavors, join you in boring chores just to make you feel better, protect lizards from the feet of stomping playground kids, and climb into a highway ditch to save a baby animal.

I love him so much.

Happy Birthday, my grown son!