Going to the Riverglen Ward in Boise with Dante, age 5. Date wrong.

John Lennon said, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." That's certainly true. It was certainly true for him, right up to his unplanned end. I'm certain he had no plans for some clown to call his name and then stick 5 rounds of .38 Spl. in his back. The things some folks do are really unthinkable, aren't they?

When I got married on 26 August 1975, I was certain that we would be together all our lives and that we would never be parted, not even in this life. We were simply going to cross through the veil simultaneously, because that was what we wanted. Nothing could ever separate us, not even temporarily. Perhaps it was that certainty that made it so hard for me to wrap my mind around what was happening between the diagnosis in 1987 and Shayne's death in January of 1992. To this day I still have trouble believing it sometimes.

I married in too much haste later in 1992, foolishly seeking to immerse myself in a situation in which the pain would not be able to reach me. Of course, that didn't work. It was unfair of me to do such a thing to my new wife and to my children, but perhaps I can be forgiven forgiven my stupidity on the grounds that I literally didn't have a clue how to approach the living of a life that was so hugely different from anything I had prepared for or planned.

As that second marriage faltered along, having good and bad times by turns, I began to miss the sweet old days of having babies in the house. I still adored my children, but Imissed little people, those who can be picked up and squeezed and tossed into the air. We discussed adoption, specifically of one of the precious, unwanted little girls which are thrown away in China. We were assuming that everything my wife had been told by doctors since she was very young was true. She was not going to be able to have children. I didn't really care where it came from, I just wanted a baby in the house again, so I began to pray for that. I prayed for it frequently, not really having any idea of how or whether the Lord would provide a baby to a middle-aged guy and his medically incapable wife.

We went to the doctor's office one day to have my wife's case of flue looked into. It was really hanging on, and we felt it was time for some help. The physician's assistant who took the blood and went out to get it tested was gone for some time. When he came back, he was grinning as if he were about to tell us that we'd just won the lottery, an unlikely event given the fact that we don't do that in my family. He said, "Well, you don't have the flu, but you are pregnant."

I had never seen my wife drop her jaw so far. I, however, was elated. I grabbed her by the shoulder and said, "Did you hear that? Wow!" Or words to that effect. But it took her a while to get excited about it. I can understand that. Then came a second blow for her. She had been imagining that it would be a little girl. That was OK with me, because I didn't care one way or the other. It was going to be a baby and I was going to get to squeeze and kiss it and show it off and sing to it and read to it and take innumerable pictures of it. But the ultra-sound indicated it was a little boy, and she was depressed about that for a while.

But again, she got over it. Her mother moved in preparatory to the birth which was determined to be best done by what the Germans call "Kaiserschnitt" and we call Caesarian Section. I was in attendance along with my mother-in-law, a sturdy little German lady who had been a nurse for many years. When little Dante was delivered, his German grandmother took him from the doctor's hands, showed him to her daughter, and said, "Look, Un! Look vat ve got!" Un was a nickname from her childhood in which she had loved the cartoon Underdog and was called Un by her little brother. She didn't bother to show me the child or offer to let me hold him, but I finally got to do so when we were back in his mom's room.

The next day I got to take him down to have his ears tested. A nurse took our picture while I was rocking him. As with all the others, I was already completely in love with the little man.

Everyone else in the family took quite a shine to him, too. I was really basking in the new life with the new baby.

When he was two months old he went with his mother to visit her mother. And stayed.

There were rare and brief visits, but they were living "over there," and I was alone in the house, my other children all being either out of the home or old enough that they could go and come pretty much at will. I wore out two cars going back and forth to see him, running up huge gasoline credit card bills. They never came home to live with me and I was eventually divorced from his mom. But nine years later I'm more crazy about the little fellow than ever. Here are a few photographic reasons why.