I am half a continent away now, in a small Missouri farm house. Yet the red tiled kitchen and little helper stools leaned up against the worn kitchen counter, as I sat at the tiny toddler table with Zeke, now five, rises like an audible shadow in this addled mind’s eye. Wetzel paced, a bit nervous about the contents of the manual journal in his hand, a tall, lean T-shaped figure looming with ginger hair over his memoir; the records of an earlier man whose judgment he did not seem fully to trust.

Dully curious, I drank water after our boxing workout. Then, outside on the patio gym, Zeke, had grown upset that his father and Uncle James were hitting each other, and used a stick to get between us and pry us morally apart…

We retired here, with Wetzel looking down at his son, wondering if reading this out loud was the right thing for him. I recall that, decades ago, whenever a parenting chasm was approached for the first time, wondering, was I making the right decision? Was the bridging material at hand the best? Would it even do, or make things worse for the little fellow that trusted me so?

Mother, Gloria and baby Rudy were in the other room doing Mom stuff. Zeke, as always, is adamant that he belongs with Daddy, and when Daddy is not around, then whatever this visiting man, whatever “he is doing, I am doing!” When I go into my suitcase Zeke asks, “What are you doing?”

“Oh, Buddy, I forget what I do with things, like my boxing trunks, so I check.”

“Oh, they are in your gear bag, right there—I saw! Don’t you know you have the gear bag?”

“Well, it’s new, only a year old—still getting used to it…”

“A year! That’s a long time. What are you looking for now?”

“My pills.”

“Mom says that pills are bad.”

“Oh, she is right. Pills are bad.”

“Then why did you just swallow that pill?”

“Because, Buddy, I was a bad man, and these pills, they are my punishment. If I want to walk, I must swallow the bitter pill. When I met your Dad this time last year I was crippled, on crutches.”

This is all in the narrow children’s study with its canvas bunk beds that serves as guest room. The tweezers had not worked, so out came the skinning knife to work on the splinter I had earned while building Zeke ramps to ride his yard car, and his father’s remote stunt car, over the day before. His mother had been horrified as he demanded ever more dangerous ramps of his aged engineer.

“Still the splinter—let me see! That knife is way too big for that tiny splinter…”

Zeke stood on a chair pulled over from the desk, looking down into the palm as I scraped at it with a knife, “That looks worse—the hole is much bigger than the splinter ever was… I can’t see the splinter.”

I felt for the splinter and found none, “There you go, Ezekial, problem solved in classic American fashion, by making a bigger problem.”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, Buddy, lets just say if you end up running a small nation and America says, ‘Do this or do that,’ then you do it, or the you that was the splinter is replaced by the hole that was the solution.”

Zeke grins, “That’s funny—you know Gloria is sneaking gummies right now—want some?”

“Oh, it is unseemly for the elderly to sneak. But I will have some coffee and attend the party.”

“Mom says you drink WAYY too much coffee!”

“Mom is right…”

We were then in this kitchen where the tiny woman named Gloria stood on a helper stool, face in the snack pantry, cheeks puffed full, hand in a bag of gummies clutched in the other, and admitted, “I’m sneakin’!”

“Oh, I don’t see a thing—us old folks are near to blind, you know.”

Gloria handed the bag to Zeke, now fully implicated in the crime, who winked at me, grabbed three gummies that he counted out, as a proper sneak portion, and hissed, “I sneak at night!”

These few hours later, Zeke was not sneaking now. He was pacing in between his father, leaning on the counter with long legs, and this guest squatting a tiny bench on stunted legs, not wanting to miss any man stuff going on.

Wetzel read from a journal he had recorded the day after Ezekial’s birth. I cannot recall the wording. It was, I think, five hand written pages in a 6 by 9 note book, which I think was of some off red maroon, mauve color. He held it with a mixture of reverence and contemplation, still studying it like training notes considered after the fight, looking for a lens of self-evaluation, a further lesson on the progress of his undertaking.

I do recall the sympathy of terror I felt. Recalling myself, in 1990, sitting in the hospital room with my wife as she was fixed with monitors stuck to my son’s head who was still inside of her, nurses and doctors coming and going. She needed my to be cool, as her mother was flipping out and had to be ushered away by her father. I was reading a bloody science-fiction novel titled A Cat Of a Silvery Hue, post apocalyptic butchery, as the entire team descended upon her. Putting the book aside I attended, was hastened out of the way when disaster loomed…

From that reference I had a sense of the near useless support role Wetzel described himself being in as he attended his wide in their home birthing pool, trying his own methods of distracting himself into a calming presence for his wife, but with the need to act as a nurse if necessary…

She needed him to be calm. He struggled with this in various ways; held her hand at the times she most needed, and heeded her directions as to what other measures of him were required. The reading, taken in slow lines, infused with the calm that he had wished to embody five years ago in a deeper way, shone like a mirror on his face. He has since assisted in Gloria and Rudy’s births, and peers into his own first time as a form of deeper assessment.

I was not seeing any of the performance anxiety that creeps across the faces of intelligent men who try and learn boxing at the advanced age of 30. In terms of parenting, Wetzel is well into an advanced self-coaching mode. He makes certain to deepen and even his voice a bit more clearly for us as his younger self writes of the need to be stronger and more calm in the future and the awe he felt for his little wife in suffering so much. Wetzel concludes his reading with final lines that remind him that a commitment to support and guide her and their children through a life each was a small debt to owe for what she suffered there in the birthing pool. He then rubbed Zeke on his tawny head and said, “That is how you came to us.”

It was an honor to be there, in that kitchen, for such a moment.