“What if we named him Fletcher?” Paul asked. I liked it. “And Paul as a middle name,” I offered. And it was settled. He would have my name (Fletcher is my maiden name), his father’s name (Paul), and our name (Abbott). His siblings were old enough to have opinions and less than enthusiastic. “You can’t name him Fletcher.  It’s not a real name.” But Fletcher it was.

His birth was the most traumatic of the six. Over two weeks late and with complications developing, the doctor wanted to induce. The kids cried foul. We had a lottery set up – everybody had contributed something: a week’s worth of chores, $5 worth of candy, a favorite book, something – and the loot would go to the person who had chosen the day of the week he was born. The doctor had said Monday – which just happened to be Paul’s day. I was in no mood to negotiate – the sooner the better. I arrived at the hospital about 4:00 p.m., they prepped me, set me up with the IV and started the Pitocin. With the first hard contraction, the fetal monitor registered severe distress and only a few minutes later the room had filled with people. “Mrs. Abbott, if we’re going to save your baby we need to do an emergency c-section. Now.” In the confusion of it all there was miscommunication – someone told Paul to put on scrubs and a mask and he could accompany me to the ER. There was lots of hurrying, lots of chaos, and on our part – lots of praying. When we got to the Emergency Room, the anesthesiologist took one look at Paul and the last thing I heard before they put me under was “Get him out of here!!!”   Paul left the room, walked down the hall, removed his gown and heard the baby cry.

As I fought my way out of the general anesthesia, I was aware only of the searing pain. “Why?” I asked Paul. (Because he can read my mind and finish my sentences, he knew I was asking – ‘Why am I in this hell-hole of pain?’) “Because you had an emergency c-section. But the baby is fine.” “What?” I asked him, (translation: What did we have?) “We have a boy.” And I would drift back to sleep. A few minutes later: “Why?” “You had an emergency c-section. The baby is fine.” “What?” It’s a boy.   And I drifted away. And so it went. . . . over and over and over. . . Even from those first days we took to calling him “the boy”. There were now four girls and the bookend boys.

Paul spent the night at the hospital that night. Until security asked required him to leave in the early morning hours. Turns out he can be a bit of a trouble maker when he thinks the nurses are not following the doctor’s orders to provide pain medication every four hours. The hospital air conditioning was on the fritz and we were in the throes of a stretch of 98 degree days, the room was crowded with the three little kids of my roommate who was also recovering from a c-section and whose husband did not want to pay for babysitting, and Paul was caring for both of us and keeping the kids from killing each other. So we took “the boy” and went home early.

Probably because he was the youngest of six and five of them significantly older than he, he was a pack animal – always the happiest when surrounded by the rest of the pack. An introvert by nature, he didn’t even need their attention – just their presence. When he was three years old, his only brother joined the Marines. It was the first tearing apart of his pack but the girls were not far behind. The day his sister got married, I found him in tears at the reception. In all the talk about her getting married, he had somehow assumed that this meant that she would move back home and bring her new husband with her. He sobbed as he learned that in fact, this was not the case.

He was a home-body by nature – so much so we wondered if he would ever leave home or just take up permanent residence in our house. As his siblings moved out and left him behind, one family in particular sort of took him in and he spent a great deal of time at their house, soaking up the chaos and the mischief of a large family. They would often invite him to spend the night and we would load up his backpack and send him off with his sleeping bag under his arm. It was usually before midnight when we would get the phone call: Can you come get me? And so we would make the 15 minute drive to their house, bring him home, and tuck him into to his own bed with his Beagle, and they were both the happier for it. One night it was later when he called – maybe around 1:30. When we pulled up in the drive he was waiting on the front porch with his backpack and sleeping bag. “Problem?” “No. I just wanted to go home to sleep.” The next morning around 9:30 Mary Lee called me: “Sharon, this is really awkward but is Fletcher there?” “He is. Is there a problem?” “Well, when the kids came down for breakfast and Fletcher wasn’t with them, I asked where he was. They didn’t know. I asked them how they could not know. ‘ummmm, when we woke up he wasn’t here.’ ‘And you didn’t think that might have been important to tell somebody? How am I going to tell the pastor that I lost his son?!’ Not wanting to bother anyone, he had simply made the phone call, gathered his things and slipped out to wait on the porch while the family slept. He was like that. In all fairness, when he announced he wanted to go away to college, none of us saw that plan working out very well, but he took to it and to dorm life like a fish to water and he never looked back. Who knew?

I think he might have been about four when he wanted his sisters to take him shopping so he could buy me a Mother’s Day present. They made some suggestions as to what might be a good gift (within his budget). He thanked them but was clear that he knew exactly what he was looking for – he simply needed a ride. They obliged and drove him to the store where he was accustomed to doing all of his shopping – The Dollar Store. It took a while, but he finally found it. He brought it home and headed off to his room with a roll  of wrapping paper and a roll of scotch tape and spent the afternoon behind closed doors. On Mother’s Day, he handed me his well-wrapped and tightly taped offering. “ I knew I wanted to buy you diamonds because I really wanted you to have diamonds, but then I found BLUE DIAMONDS and I knew you would love them even more!!!” And I do. And they are one of my most treasured possessions to this day. So a note to my daughters – when you are going to through my stuff after I die and you come across the blue diamonds – remember how valuable they are and do not say to one another, “Now why do you suppose she kept a pair of plastic, clip-on earrings?” I kept them because every woman should feel so loved. Give them to Emily. She’ll know what to do with them.

So many of the one-liners that made it into our family lexicon came from “the boy”:

“I’ll take a coke/fries” (said all as one word – think hashtag) – which is what he hollered from his car seat in the far back seat of the van every time we pulled up to a fast food drive-thru.

“I’ll take a twenty” – which is what he hollered every time we went through a bank drive-thru.

“STOP!!! I lost my tontact (translation: contact lens)!!” which is what he would randomly yell from his carseat as we drove down the road at which point we would send someone to “retrieve” the imagined tontact from the floor of the back seat. They would offer up an imaginary lense they had recovered but more often than not would be told “No, that’s not it.”

“What’s the plan?” – always wanting to be kept in the loop of the family’s coming and goings and afraid that he would be cut out of the festivities.

“Go Skins! Hot Dog! Beat the Bears!” – a mantra his father taught him to aggravate his sister who was a die-hard Chicago Bears Fan.

“I’ll bet that’s a small church,” – a muttered response to himself when he overheard a conversation about a pastor who said, “Anyone is welcome here. Except complainers. They should go somewhere else.”

None of us can hear the song God Bless America without hearing his little voice belting out the lyrics:   ” to the lotion, white before“

When Fletcher was an RA (Resident Assistant) in college at the same time his brother was a Drill Instructor in the Marine Corps, we laughed that they both had the same job:  babysitting boys away  from home for the first time. “Yes,”  Fletch said, “but he gets a gun.”

When he was about three, he loved to answer the phone: and raced to answer it before anyone else could get there. “Hello. This is Fletcher Paul Avvott. May I help you?” At which point someone would say, “Oh good grief! He’s got the phone again.” Which of course was a problem because he was not capable in any way, shape, or form, of taking a message.

So excited to join a t-ball team, he left for his first practice dressed in his shirt and his hat. When he got home he was heartbroken. Sensing something had gone terribly awry Paul asked him how it had gone. “Dad, I’m out of t-ball.” We could not imagine what had happened. This was the sweetest, most gentle child you could ever hope to see. What had he done to get himself thrown out of t-ball???!! Paul probed further – why, what happened? “Well, I hit the ball and then they said, ‘RUN!!’ and I did and when I got there they said, “You’re out!” Such a literalist he was.

By the time he reached high school, the other five were gone and it was just him. . . and his Beagle. His siblings complained about how easy he had it – when they were growing up they had to share bedrooms, stand in line for the bathroom and an even longer line to get access to a car to drive at any given time. He had the whole upstairs to himself – a suite of rooms really, or as one of the older ones put it – the only thing that keeps it from being an apartment is a kitchen which doesn’t matter anyway because he doesn’t know how to cook anything. He had a car sitting in the driveway which was his to drive whenever and wherever he needed to go. What he did not have was the rest of the pack. And those were lonely years for him.

We wondered often in those years before he left when the little red-headed boy had disappeared and left in his place this approaching-adulthood young man with facial hair. When he was little, he was an early riser and every morning he would come into our bathroom where Paul was shaving. He put the toilet seat down, climbed up and leaned against the sink to watch his dad cover his face with the white, billowy cream and then scrape it off again. “Watcha’ doing?” he asks. “I’m shaving,” is his father’s reply. “Can I have some shave?” he wants to know. Paul  squirts a handful of shaving cream in his tiny little hand and he smears it over his face and then scrapes it off with a hand-me-down safety razor (sans razor blade). When they have both finished this task, he drys his face with a towel and toddles to the kitchen for a bowl of cereal. It was a daily ritual that they kept religiously from the time he was two until. . . . when did it end? Not after a year. Maybe it was sometime in  the second year he began to miss days – he would sleep in a little late or get busy playing or go to get his breakfast first and forget about what was happening down the hall. And then he would return for a day or two . . . until eventually the days he came were fewer than the days he missed and then one day he just never came back. We don’t know when the last time was. Thank God for small mercies. It would have been too hard to know it was the last day.

I do remember the day we packed him up and took him to college and I knew – this part is over. I grieved the loss even as I celebrated the person he had grown to be. But in that person, I could still see the essence of “the boy” he had left behind: kind, polite, generous, funny, sensitive to the feelings of others, a thinker and a lover of Jesus and His church. One morning when he was little (probably one of those days when he was showing up less often for the shaving ritual),  Paul found him at the kitchen table by himself eating a bowl of cereal, lost in thought. “Daddy,” he said. “When we cry down, here does God cry up in heaven?” Giving voice to the question that matters to us all – Does God care? We started Cedarbrook when Fletcher was a year old. He grew up during the hard years when we were planting and growing a church and he had seen behind the curtain – he bore witness to the sacred beauty and the ugly sinfulness of ministry. And yet. After all that – he chose ministry as his calling and his profession. God cares.

And here’s the interesting thing. There are days now, 27 years later, when I swear “the boy” is back. I catch glimpses of him from time to time. It’s Easter Sunday and I see the picture of him dressed in his Sunday Best with tie and dress shoes and beaming from ear to ear. I see him following Paul out to feed the fish and imitating his every move. I watch him track the movements of the rest of the family and try to account for each one, hoping they have not scattered too far – always looking for his pack. And though his hair is blond instead of red and his name is Ezra instead of Fletcher,  for a minute time warps and I expect to see the Beagle trailing along behind him. I watch “the boy”, now grown big, singing the same songs to his boys that we sang to him so long ago and it makes my heart happy.

Happy Birthday, Fletcher Paul Abbott!  So what’s the plan?