Almost two years ago I recorded this experience and these reflections. If they are too personal or political for some readers, please pardon my oversights, take note of my motivation, and accept my effort to provoke thought.

t is early morning, January 28, 2003 and I have given up on sleep. I am haunted by an image, less than a day old, of my two-year-old son standing at the top of the stairs, crying, in his naturally benign manner, reaching out with his tiny right hand for Mom or Dad to help. We assume an older brother has taken something, making him unhappy. Cathy is doing the wash. I am at work on the computer. We check with his older brothers, both downstairs, but they don’t admit to any offenses. We invite Sagan to come down. His crying persists as he comes but a single step. Finally, I bound up the stairs with the intention of bringing him down.

His out-stretched hand is bleeding profusely from a nasty gash on his pointer finger. There is lots of blood on his clothes, on the stairs, and upstairs on the carpet. I quickly wrap a clean cloth snugly around his finger and try to comfort him while I am racked with feelings of guilt for having initially ignored his pleas.

He is a good little trooper and soon quits crying as Cathy and I hold him and pour out our sympathy and love. He does not cry as I rush him to the doctor. He insists on wearing his fireman’s hat, the red one. He whimpers and shrinks from my delicate efforts to expose the wound to the nurse. As the time approaches, I give him fair warning of an imminent painful shot in the leg to anesthetize him. My candid words produce no concern in Sagan; after all, he knows his dad is there to protect him. But then, it does hurt; it really hurts. Once again it brings back his tears and genuine little cry.

His sobbing ceases soon after the needle is out and a band-aid—of great medicinal significance to his young mind—is working its magic on the newly inflicted wound. Once he becomes a little loopy from the anesthetic, the gentle Doctor Lytle pokes him again with a local anesthetic, in the finger this time. Again it hurts, as his legs tense up, his hand pulls back weakly, and he sticks out his tongue all the way. Thankfully, he is too doped up to care very much. Then he just covers his eyes with his left upper arm. Soon he has four stitches in his tiny finger and is recovering from the anesthesia. Mom comes to take over, staying with him until he can come home. For the rest of the day his left hand handles all tasks while his right hand is held out and away from all the action.

Of his twenty-nine months of experiences, this is one of the more significant events. He tries to talk about it with nearly intelligible sentences that include the words: car, daddy, doctor, ouch, and band-aid. He complains a little that his finger hurts and calls attention to his leg where the round band-aid remains, but he is once again his normal, playful, singing, sweet little self.

Tonight, I wish every parent in America could go through a similar experience sometime this week.

I wish they could be reminded of the love and passion they feel for their little ones and then multiply it by one million as they ponder the talk of war, which threatens, among others, the children of Iraq.



I wish American parents would contemplate distraught Iraqi parents, who experience the same love for their children, who share the same desire to shelter their children from pain and discomfort and provide them with a few of the sundry riches of life. I wonder why we so easily forget or justify the hellishness of war when life is so fragile and precious. I wonder why we so easily risk putting others in the way of hunger, disease, homelessness, lawlessness, and shattered lives. I wonder why we take such atrocious short-cuts to achieve our own peace of mind, insulating ourselves from the misery of others. Surely, there is a better way.

Was it 9/11? Has it impaired our vision? Maybe Osama is drawing us over to the dark side. Maybe, like the call of the sirens, we have heard an appealing chord in Osama’s music. Maybe it is more simple and innocent than that. I recognize how easily I succumbed to my own propaganda, dismissing the tiny outstretched hand at the top of the stairs, convinced that my agenda was more important than Sagan’s unnoted needs.

But hold on . . . at 2:00 in the morning I am being interrupted by my little hero.

It is 2:30 A.M. now and I am back at keyboard and monitor. Thirty minutes ago the little patter of feet down the stairs produced Sagan in his pajamas and fireman’s hat (the black one this time), looking for a hug, a dance, and a little sympathy. He crawled up into my hospitable lap, pointed to his bandaged finger, looked into my sympathetic eyes, and said “Wook!”—as if he were showing me for the very first time. He explained something about, “caught ins,” referring to the lid on the piano bench. After a few dances and a little more talk, he is now sleeping peacefully with his Mom.

I realize that my overwhelming feeling of love for the little fellow is no more special than that of tens of millions of moms and dads in every walk of life all over the world, whether they like me and my kind or not. The image of an ignored little boy, pleading for help at the top of the stairs, continues to haunt me, along with a host of other imminent possibilities across the waters—much more horrifying than one tiny bloodied finger—as we prepare to employ our unholy, indiscriminate arsenal upon another nation for our “God ordained” purposes.