Oh Boy! A Nephew

The Boston Herald

He didn't cry this time. He grinned and handed his sister a baseball, an official major league one. "I've been waiting 26 years for this," he said hugging her, my son a man, but my boy still.

We were at Penn Station on the run - work, responsibility, places to go, things to do. Have to get home. Have to get to class. But before we  separated, some of us going to Boston, some of us staying in New York, we met briefly not just to say goodbye but to say congratulations and to celebrate a blurry black and white image.

When my youngest daughter was born, the one now holding the baseball, my son was seven and he already had a little sister who wore dresses and played with dolls and skipped down the street and had pretend tea parties. Just two years separated them but biology was their great divide. He was all boy and she was all girl and if someone had said he could trade her in for a toad and a pack of baseball cards, he would have. All my boy wanted was a brother to play football, baseball and whiffle ball with in the back yard. A brother to chase up the stairs and down the hall and across the school playground. A brother to share not just  his trucks and games, but his world. So he put in his order for a baby boy. And then he waited.

He must have been sure I was having a boy the night I left for the hospital. Why else would he have cried when his grandmother hung up the phone the next morning and told him, "You have a new baby sister."

He sobbed then, the way only a seven-year-old can. And though Grandma said all the right things - that girls can pitch and catch fly balls and run the bases and ice skate and dig holes and do everything a boy can do - he didn't believe her. He wanted a brother and that was that. And he might have a sister and he might have to pretend to like her but he would never, ever love her.

But of course he did. He loved her at first sight. Maybe it was Grandma's words. Or maybe it was biology again. She was so little and he was so big. She would cry and he would make silly faces and she would smile. She would look into his eyes and he would melt.

As she grew older, she did do all the boy things. She played softball and soccer and rode her bike everywhere and roller bladed and ice-skated and knew the starting lineup of every baseball game. And except for a few girl things - like dancing school and gymnastics and singing - she was a little brother.

Almost - but not quite.

They still play whiffle ball and basketball and football whenever they can. They still go roller blading together, too. But they won't be rollerblading for a while. Not until next spring anyway.

"It's a boy," this now very grown up little sister told her brother on the phone after the ultrasound last week. "Scott and I are having a boy. Can you believe it?”

And my boy dropped what he was doing and high tailed it out of the building where he works and hurried down the street to buy a baseball.

And in the middle of Penn Station he presented it to her.

He'd be the first to tell you that he loves his sisters, both of them, even the girlie one, and that he wouldn't trade either of them for anything.  He wouldn't trade in his niece for a boy, either.

And yet the idea of a boy is an old one, born when he was a boy himself "A nephew," he said out loud. "Are they sure?”

He smiled again. We all smiled and hugged. And then the train came and separated us. But only physically. And only for a while.