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the Pritchards had waited so long, praying for a baby; now they had a disabled child. (Some of us knew this wasn’t exactly an enlightened viewpoint.)
Someone ˗ I can’t remember who – finally decided to tell Eileen and Richard about their son. Eileen cocked her head and said, “We know. So we are starting his education very early.” And so they did. It wasn’t unusual to greet Eileen on the street and have her say, “Today is our B day. Ralph is in a b-b-buggy, holding his b-b-bear and b-b-bunny, and looking at a b-b-bucket.” It turned out that Ralph knew all his letters by kindergarten, and actually was an average student. The only possible signs of his disability were a lack of coordination with sports (not too much unlike a math whiz) and his highly affectionate behavior, which might just be a byproduct of the overwhelming affection he got at home. Being firmly in the half-full camp, I thought that the Pritchards were very lucky to have such a wonderful son.
Now that I’m thinking about all this, this wasn’t the Pritchards’ first episode with a tree – specifically a tulip poplar. Maybe a year and a half ago, Richard was driving his truck out past the Lamberts’ farm, and one of his tires blew. The truck hit a tree just about head-on. Richard wasn’t outwardly hurt, but they took him to the hospital for x-rays to make sure no ribs were broken. The x-rays revealed no broken bones, but rather some kind of large growth in his lungs. The doctors said he needed a bronchoscopy. Oh my goodness, a bronchoscopy! Even I said to friends at Danny’s, “Richard has to have a bronchoscopy!” It was after I heard this a lot, including from my own mouth that it became apparent that no one actually knew what that was. It turned out that it was an outpatient procedure – took a half hour – that doctors used to insert a scope into your lungs to get a good look at – and maybe a piece of – that growth. Everyone assumed the news would be bad, specifically cancer, but nobody wanted to say it. And naturally there was a debate about whether the car accident had perhaps been a good thing - whether the cancer had been caught in time. Then we got the news that it was