John’s Blog

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about watching the Little League World Series — and in particular, how it was fun to think about Sam growing up and participating in sports (or whatever he decides to participate in).

What I’ve discovered over the past couple of weeks, especially in watching the coverage of Katrina, is that Sam has in many ways become a lens through which I view the world. Here’s what I mean: the effects of Katrina were indisputably horrible. The human toll was (and is, and will be for a long time) horrendous. I think that with or without Sam I would have felt that way. But with Sam everything becomes more vivid, more real. Makes me think about how hard daily life would be in a situation like that. Pregnancy & childbirth & the first 8 weeks of Sam’s life was tough enough here in the Bay Area, and we’ve got everything, really. Support from people who love us, a stable home environment, jobs, etc. Not to mention little things like hospitals, doctors, diapers, water or an environment mostly free of disease & bacteria.

And that’s such a simple, obvious example. It seems funny/amazing to me that such a little guy, without a lot of the abilities that we typically call "human" — being able to talk and communicate, really, or sympathize, or some of the more sophisticated emotions — that he’d lend such a profound humanity to everything I see.