Chapter 9 SUNNY BOY
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The Sunny Boy was three years old. I had had the presence of mind to realize this was an occasion Chuckie might like to remember when he was all grown up. As best I can remember it was the Millennium Year, Y2K, 2,000 A.D. I was 48 years old. I said three years old, but Chuckie was a precocious three years old hangin’ with Sigurd who was twice his age. I asked if I could take with me and keep some of the paintings the kids had made that day at Sigurd’s 6th Birthday Party. Sigurd’s mom, Anne-Grete, who was Linda The Hon’s Best Friend, said OK.
A week later I was surprised when Sigurd’s father, Morten, an accomplished photographer, gave me three photos he had taken of Chuckie and me at the Birthday Party as we were painting little flowerpots.
As I had a friend with a trophy and plaque business, I took him one of Sigurd’s evocative paintings of the Southern California scene of sunshine and palm trees and asked him to mount the photos together with Sigurd’s painting on a double-sized plaque pressure sealed under a glossy clear coating to preserve and display them.
It makes a bright remembrance of the event.
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One day when he is stable in his own life and home he will probably appreciate to have it and to know that way back then when he was a tyke his Bestefar loved him.
Bestefar, sometimes pronounced Bedstefar by Norwegians from a certain rural district of Norway is a peculiarly Norsk, and perhaps Dansk and Svensk too, term.
Do you know the Norwegian Fishing Village Boat Law? The entire crew for a boat cannot all come from the same village.
The loss of the boat and its crew to the North Sea would strip a village of men, leaving a shattered cold place full of nothing but Sea Widows.
Even with a provision of law such as that in effect, still men from here and there are always, every year, lost at sea. A widow with a child will often go back to the home of her Mor og Far, (Mother and Father).
(Incidentally, this is a kind of loss and grief for a nation which, if they really believe the one they worship is merciful the Islamists waging World War III by terror against The West would do well to think they should eliminate their attacks on such countries as Norway, Denmark and Sweden as they already have endured many sufferings.)
A Sea Widow’s far will become morfar (mother’s father, grandfather as we say) to her child. Sometimes, though, there are no grandparents.
It is a country of not too much population and historically isolated communities (although not isolated so much now as there are modern roads and communications.)
The people are physically separated from each other by great distances of mountains, fjords, snows, glaciers and so on.
This moving back to live with grandparents is true not only for the children of Sea Widows but of many Norwegian children caught fatherless through a variety of circumstances not of their making.
Then, often enough, a cousin’s father or even just a good neighbor friend with no children of his own takes a kindly interest in the child.
Occasionally it may be one of those legendary Norwegian Bachelor Farmers.
A farmer may have one or two of those wonderful gentle tawny fjord horses with thick winter coats a child can easily love too – good for winter sleigh rides you know or just bareback riding with fingers digging in and gripping onto the mane. The Norwegian Bachelor Farmer is in fact a real type of a figure, not just one made famous by the fine work of Garrison Keillor in A Prairie Home Companion.
Perhaps he and the mother of the child will marry.
Often he just becomes the child’s mentor.
Such a man, whether he is really the child’s grandfather or he is just a man in the right place when he is needed will be called Bestefar as long as he lives by the Norwegian boy or girl with no father.
I was not Chuckie’s grandfather.
That would be the man my wife was married to long ago and divorced from some years before she and I met.
Linda The Hon and I are both members of the Frank Sinatra song Love’s More Comfortable The Second Time Around Club. Somehow, by God’s grace we found and married each other.
For Linda’s son Chuck’s son, sonnesonn in Norwegian, Chuckie, Sunny Boy in this story, I am Bestefar.
Sunny Boy Chuckie knows I am married to his grandmother, that is the mother of his father, but he does not know the whole reason I love him.
Linda’s son Chuck, Chuckie’s father, had a condition known as ADHD.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is a condition affecting many Americans, especially during school age years, what should be the wonder years of one’s youth.
Sometimes it is improperly shorthanded in news reports as ADD meaning Attention Deficit Disorder or misnomered as HADD. Linda tells me the correct term is ADHD. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, is caused by an inborn, completely involuntary, slight chemical imbalance of some kind in the human body, including and perhaps especially activated in the brain, which affects the perception functions of the brain. The world seems to go by in a wild uproar at a hundred miles an hour, perhaps a bit like living in the tornado in the film The Wizard of Oz.
Chuck had this condition from childhood, perhaps from birth. As I understand it, although I am no medical expert, Chuck experienced the stream of consciousness we all live in at a speed perhaps one hundred times faster than most people. One may imagine it was a wild ride.
It was always a heart-wrenching struggle for Linda to know: yes to Ritalin or no to Ritalin? The drug would slow down his perception of the stream of consciousness to resemble that of most people. Chuck did not like it, though, because he had been going 2,000 miles per hour mentally for so long that regular life became boring beyond belief to him. So he usually decided not to stay on the medication regime.
That whole thing just devastated Linda.
For it seemed she loved Chuck more fiercely, more intensely than any mother loved any child I ever saw. She sometimes says she would not let anyone else even touch Chuck until he was two years old.
In fact, they both always showed a deeply connected love for one another, even when things were at their worst.
I remember a certain phase when the only word Chuck would use in an entire conversation with his mother face to face was the F word repeated over and over dozens of times.
As they had often had cats, which they both loved and shared experiences with, sometimes when the situation was near its worst, Linda and Chuck would break through the horrific barriers that seemed to try to separate them from the love they have for one another and they would communicate with the kinds of verbalizations cats make, meow and purr and so on. It was one of the incredible things I have witnessed in my life where good love triumphed over chaos.
The love they had for one another seemed to be of an especially fine quality, perhaps precisely because it had been so difficult.
When I met Linda and we ultimately married a few years later Chuck was a Special Ed 16 year old going into his final years of high school.
At one point Chuck had 29 professionals on his education team, several of them police of various sorts and ranks.
The State Law of California required such a team be formed just expressly to get him to graduation.
Then suddenly he had this stunning, really Miss America kind of Beautiful girlfriend, and, guess what, she was pregnant.
They sat down on the sofa across from me – why was it me? I have no idea, I was not either of their father – and said as easily as you please “Don’t worry we’re going to get an abortion right away. Can you pay for it? $2,500.”
Just like that.
I spoke with them.
Just five or ten quiet minutes together.
They decided to have the baby after all.
Linda’s sonnesonn.
Now I am Chuckie’s Bestefar.
I love him so much.
Sunny Boy.
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John W. Stevenson and The Sunny Boy
The mothers of both of the men in these photographs sought to abort them. One of these men is now a Candidate for President of the United States. One of them is a precocious boy who in his life may well do greater things than that. I recently heard on the television news that Americans have aborted 45 million babies since the mid-1970s decision of the U. S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. That is equal to the population of three of our west coast states, California, Oregon and Washington. Robert Woodward in his fine book about the Court titled The Brethren said the Court decision was based on nothing, no legal principle, just made up out of thin air. It is cause for reflection. What have we lost? How much more are we willing to lose? Have we so stripped our own citizens' labor pool that we are left open to becoming what Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington terms in his book A Clash of Civilizations a cleft country?
Disclaimer required by the Federal Election Commission Rules:
This web site has been paid for by the Principal Committee To Elect John W. Stevenson President of The United States of America in the 2008 Election.
John W. Stevenson approved this web site and intends it to comply with all relevant laws.
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