A Wedding Story, Sort of…

My son was married yesterday. Derek and Vina Steffen laugh well together. It was, indeed, a happy event.

I planned to share one of my rambling stories about the passage of time between father and son and how certain memories surface at the oddest times, but then came tequila shots… so I will bare my soul today.

One day last Century I did a version of the alligator crawl faster than 200 other men in a competition of sorts. The reward was a three-day pass from basic training in the Army—unfortunately, I had to come back after three days.

Later a drill sergeant asked me to demonstrate my technique which was based on fear. He said he’d never seen anyone move as fast as I did, crawling under barbed wire with a fixed machine gun and the “sound” of whizzing bullets overhead. I had never done the crawl prior to being drafted. It was a motion that came naturally. That was 1969.

Seventeen years later my son decided to rival my crawl. He was a one-year-old who, rather than walk, favored sliding on his belly to get from Point A to Point B. A doctor put him in a large room with two-way mirrors. We observed him speeding around on his stomach. “He’s very fast,” said the doctor who concluded that my son did the alligator crawl (exact same movements as I had done) because it was “naturally” his most efficient method of transportation. Oh, yes, my son started walking a few weeks later.

Weddings are about new beginnings, but for a moment yesterday I went back to the time I looked through that glass at a small person on his belly and wondered about his first steps .