Miracles

There were few times that my brothers and I moved faster than when we were changing from our church clothes to our beach clothes.  With holy water still splashed on our foreheads and the recessional song fresh in our ears, we promised to hang-up our collective Sunday Best “later”, piled high on the unluckiest brother’s bunk bed (he would get stuck with the job that night after sleeping boys were carried in from a long day in the sun).  An eclectic collection of towels, fishing rods, and beach toys was dragged to the van, everyone took his favorite seat, Mom counted 6 noses in the rearview mirror, and we were southbound on the I-5…

…except on this particular trip, we had a few stops along the way.  Before we trod upon the sand that day, we added a few more noses to the car--friends and cousins who would fill the Ackermobile to capacity, and become unwilling witnesses to one of our family’s great near-misses, and perhaps, one of our greatest miracles.

Our destination for a balmy summer Sunday was as it always had been on many post-church beach days:  San Onofre State Beach.  Fully 80 miles from our house in Pasadena, Mom and Dad preferred the wide-open sandy stretch of coastline, devoid of the urbanization, crowds, and riff-raff (as Dad called it) that could be found at beaches like Santa Monica and Venice.  I think Mom liked it because she could look out across the seaside expanse of sand, do a headcount, and know that all was well with her kids.  Cleaner water and fewer people—save for the ever-present longboarders—made surf fishing much easier at San-O, too.

After a particularly painful round of Slug-Bug on the Five (there must have been a Volkswagen convention in San Diego that day), dad pulled into the dirt lot right on the beach, and the doors exploded with a storm of boys, toys, and beach gear.  Dad waited for the dust to settle, then carefully pulled out his rods and sand spikes from beneath the van seats.

Fishing that day was great.  I don’t recall the tides, but they must have been a strong evening incoming, as the usually good fishing in sight of the power plant domes continued to improve throughout the afternoon.  By the time our shadows stretched out behind us on the sand and the ocean glowed orange in eyes squinted against the sundowner winds, we had caught several nice corbina, spotfin croaker, and a four foot leopard shark…all destined for our family table.    

      

The sun set on a perfect day together as a family, and the fiery hues of the sunset cooled to violet, then blue.  Dad was having trouble seeing his surf rig to re-bait. Eager to get his bait back into the darkness of the surf—and whatever hungry denizens of the deep might still be lurking in the waves—he set the rod in the sand spike, lit the lantern, and pulled his hooks down towards the light, just a foot from the sand.

About the same time, my youngest brother Jonny, about two years old, came running up to Dad. As toddlers running in sand (or anywhere, for that matter) are apt to do, Jonny fell forward at my dad's feet.  Instantly, the rod took a heavy load and bent well, as if a leopard shark or a 10 lb. spotfin had taken the bait and turned towards Catalina…only problem was, the twin baitholder hooks and three ounce pyramid sinker were not in the water.

Mom turned pale—no—it was more than that.  I watched her soul age just a bit in that moment—something flashed across her face in the darkness of the night, a strange light in her eyes that appeared with great urgency and disappeared just as quickly, as if her guardian angel had snapped a Polaroid at that exact moment so that he could forever capture the instant when he failed her.

When Jonny had fallen, one of the 1/0 barbed baitholder hooks had caught him in the corner of his left eye.  He immediately started pulling at the line and clawing with sandy hands at his face.  Dad acted quickly and instinctively, cutting the line and holding Jonny’s arms down at his sides.  I remember seeing the shank of the hook sticking out of my baby brother's eye, and I feared the worst. 

How Mom and Dad collected everyone up in the van in such a short amount of time is still a mystery to me to this day, but leaving our fishing rods, gear, and beach equipment on that dark, desolate stretch of beach probably helped their cause.  Dad put a cloud of dust in the air as he sped from bonfire to bonfire along the beach, frantically pleading with people for directions to the nearest hospital.  After some questionable information from a rather inebriated group of beach partiers (my parents still half-laugh that we really must have been a buzz kill for them—their directions were flawless) we were northbound on the I-5, lighter for the lack of our belongings laden heavily with stowaway sand, and quiet not from the satisfied fatigue of a day in the sun, but in solemn vigil for our youngest brother.  I was convinced he would lose his eye, and remember wondering how many pirate jokes he would have to endure in school wearing an eye patch for the rest of his life.

Within minutes, our family arrived at San Clemente State hospital...Jonny had fallen asleep on the way, and that seemed to worry my parents just a little more.  As we boys had that morning, my parents exploded from the van, and called over their shoulders to me—the eldest—to keep my brothers in the car as they ran towards the ominous EMERGENCY sign with their youngest son cradled in their arms.

My brothers, their friends, and I just sat there quietly. Really, what could we say?  It wasn’t the first time our youngest brother had been taken from us, and I think each of us held the same memory there in the parking lot. 

As the eldest of six sons, I remembered several of my brothers being brought home from the hospital.  The drill was the same:  the van would pull up in front of the house, and my brothers and I would wait on the porch while Dad helped Mom out of the car, a new brother cradled in her arms. (We were born long before car seat laws!)

Tommy, the third.  Then a fourth, Matt.  Zachary, the fifth. And then, Jonny… but there was no baby.  No baby at all.  No Jonny.  Just Mom and Dad, their arms around each other, heavy-hearted and with an emptiness in their eyes, as if there were no more tears to be cried.  They walked up on the porch, fell to their knees, and wrapped their arms around their five sons.  Tragically, it would not be the last time we embraced on the porch as a family missing one of our own, but it was the first.

I gathered my brothers together in our room, and instructed all of them not to ask Mom and Dad about the baby.  I didn’t quite know how to tell them what I knew must be the truth; that Jonny had died in the hospital.  Why else would Mom and Dad come home without our brother?

After a sullen week being babysat by aunts and uncles, Mom and Dad showed up that weekend with our youngest brother, who had needed a few extra days in the Neonatal Intensive Care unit.  Shocked, delighted, amazed… our little brother was home!  Jonny was our miracle brother, back from the dead.  He is, unanimously, our “favorite brother.”  It wasn’t for several years that I told my parents about our meeting in our bedroom. 

And now, in an instant, he had been whisked away from us by fate and circumstance…and I think each of us that remembered his homecoming said a silent prayer that somehow, he would be OK.

Inside the hospital, the ER staff took one look at my brother’s eye, and decided to call a specialist. Incredibly, the hook point was turned away from the eyeball when he fell—instead of impaling the eye itself, the hook had lodged in the bone of his eye socket.  If the hook had been turned the other way, tied the other way in the snell, hit by a gust of wind at the wrong moment…things might have been very different for Jonny; maybe not better, maybe not worse. 

Just different.

The ophthalmologist—who showed up an hour after being called, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and explaining that he had been at a luau—carefully anesthetized the area around Jonny’s eye, pushed the pointed barb back out through his eyelid, snipped off the barb, and then pulled the hook free.  The only signs that anything had happened were two small pinholes in the corner of Jonny’s eye, and the dried tears on his rosy, cherub cheeks.  “He was lucky,” said the doctor.  “It’s a miracle.”

Equally miraculous was our return to the beach, to find that our rods, reels, shoes, clothes, and beach toys were still there, being carefully “guarded” by the nice folks that had given us directions to the hospital.  We hugged and high-fived these complete strangers, thanking them for their help.  One of them (who was officially drunk upon our return to the beach) was having the time of his life fighting a huge fish on Dad’s fishing rod.  None of us had the heart to tell him the hooks and sinker were hopelessly tangled in a huge ball of kelp, 20 feet up the beach from the water.

And to this day, we still call Jonny “Hook-Eye.”

I’ve long believed that our Southern California beaches—places where you can stand with your toes in water that stretches thousands of miles in front of you, and your heels on land that stretches thousands of miles behind you—are a place of miracles.  It’s a boundary of sorts between what we can know through our senses, and what we can know with our hearts.  It’s the border between the ordinary and the fantastic, where mortal blends with miraculous, the way waves stir the sands along the coast, the way time stirs our collective memories of growing up with the sun on our shoulders and sand between our toes.

Our family witnessed miracles that day, but they had little to do with a fish hook in the eye.

Our miracle was Jonny himself.  Our miracle was the magic of summers spent in the company of family and friends. Our miracle was that years later, Mom managed to enjoy fishing again…slowly.  Our miracle continues every time a few of us get together along some fishy stretch of beach, wet a line, and celebrate how miraculous it is to be brothers.