Baby Boy

I encountered a man named Baby Boy today.

No really! I did! He had to get his name changed!

I didn’t know life could be so cruel. Every time I think I’ve found the cruelest, here comes a man named Baby Boy.

See, the story goes that when a child is left at a hospital on the form it just says “baby boy” or “baby girl” with the name to be filled in later. Usually someone fills in the name. That almost always happens. You’ve almost never heard of this because it usually happens. However it makes sense, they’d have to put something on the form. Anyone who has worked around hospitals knows there has to be a form if there’s a patient. That baby is a patient, someone will be billed. The hospital doesn’t lose patients and the only way is to attach them to forms. Those forms keep moving until they hit billing, that’s how they stay attached.

So that form was used to fill out his birth certificate. Then his social security card. Then every form for the nezt twenty eight years of his life. Until he walked into our office.

He called himself the nickname he’d been referred to for most of his life, because most people had been too kind to remind him of the beaurocratic mixup that had been his birth. Then we accused him of identity theft.

Poor poor Baby Boy. We accused him of stealing an identity. How were we to know that the name on every form ever attached to him was wrong, had to be wrong, and was impossible up to now to try and get right?

So we made him march down to that social security office and change his name. I’m omitting the new name, because I’m happy for his new freedom. No longer Baby Boy.

And I met him and said goodbye to him before I heard this whole story. I saw him and said that’s a fine man. I saw him and said that guy can provide for his family, he’ll be alright.

He’s no longer attached to that anchor.

If he can shake that, the rope we tied around his waist at birth and made him untie himself twenty eight years later, what excuse have we not to shake our lesser woes? I can find no burden unshakeable, from awful circumstances any seed may bloom. Even to wilt and go to seed again. But which seeds we water we may never know. What comes to bloom beyond our time may yet inspire the dreams of generations yet unseen.