“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life,” Oscar Wilde famously wrote and sometimes it is indeed the latter.
For example, my novel in progress features an enchanted typewriter upon which some things that are typed magically come true. To illustrate how this art imitates life, let me share something I typed in the spring of 1987:
“The storm clouds are clearing. From here on out it is going to be rainbows for Dallas. Life will be an endless string of tap-ins for birdie, 40-serving-loves, proms and roses and four-leaf clovers.”
The QWERTY keyboard I wrote that column on proved enchanted indeed. Sure, there have been some stone-stubbed toes and stepped-on thorns in Dallas’s field of four-leaf clovers – but mostly it has been a Rose Parade and Disneyland and a sunset beach walk for my daughter who was born three months prematurely weighing 2 pounds, 6 ounces.
Dallas came into the world by emergency Cesarean section because my wife’s preeclampsia, a life-threatening collection of syllables for fetus and mother alike, spiked rapidly. Santa Maria did not have a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, so a four-person team of specialists flew in from Fresno to perform the dicey delivery and – if prayers were answered – take the newborn back with them.
Lisa pleaded for anesthesia as she did not want to be awake and NOT hear a newborn’s cry, but because she had recently eaten this was not possible. Holding our new daughter also proved not possible because mother and child both required continued emergency care.
Hours crawled by with my fears rising before a doctor finally came to tell me I had a daughter. “She’s a real fighter,” he added assuredly and she needed to be.
While Lisa remained in the Operating Room, Dallas, in an NICU incubator-on-wheels, was rushed to the ambulance bay for a speedy ride to the airport and a flight to Fresno. En route, however, the four superheroes in scrubs paused briefly in the hospital’s hallway.
In one of the kindest acts I have ever experienced, and ever will, a surgical nurse opened one of the round portals and told me to place my hand on Dallas’s tiny, spindly, delicate torso. In the coming days, for two months, I would have to scrub my hands with disinfecting medical soap for a full three minutes before visiting Dallas in the NICU in Fresno, but presently there was no such time to spare.
With urgency, yet calmly, the angelic nurse said Dallas had not yet felt skin-to-skin contact because Lisa was unable to and the medical team, of course, wore surgical gloves. The nurse emphasized that such real touch is vital; her grave tone and penetrating eyes delivered an unspoken cold truth as well: This might be the only time your daughter ever feels skin-to-skin touch.
Thermal air escaped the open portal as I timidly reached into the high-tech Plexiglas womb, carefully avoiding a web of wires, tubes, and monitors, and ever so gently placed my hand on Dallas’s stomach. Her skin was warm and supremely soft and wondrous. It remains, to this day, arguably the most magical moment of my life.
That 15-inch-long baby girl now stands 5-foot-10 and has no heart or lung ailments as “extreme preemies” often do in adulthood. Indeed, she ran track and cross-country through high school and is an avid hiker today.
Too, Dallas has enjoyed proms and roses and four-leaf clovers; a wedding day and motherhood and dreams achieved; and today, May 29, celebrates a miraculously happy 39th birthday.
Yes, my enchanted keyboard induced some real-life magic.
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.
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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.