Editorial
Front Page - Friday, June 25, 2010
I Swear...
The rehearsal dinner toast
Vic Fleming
(Last week’s column contained a puzzle. The column ended by saying that someone had expressed envy to have her name in the column. Go back to that column and look at the first letter of the first words in all the sentences.)
Last weekend I recited the following at a rehearsal dinner in Asheville:
My little boy is getting married.
Where do I begin to find and offer words of praise and honor to a young man who, to me, has meant more than life itself? And to his soul mate, whom Susan and I have come to know and love as though she were our own?
Last year at this time, when someone would ask, “Is Ted going to marry that girl from Atlanta?,” my past response was, “If he doesn’t, we’re going to adopt her!”
I began in the scrapbook. Ted was the subject of a newspaper article when he was two days old: “City Manager is New Mother” – Since Susan was Little Rock’s first female city manager, Ted’s birth was news in our city. He was born at 12:25 a.m. on a Tuesday. Later that same day the Little Rock Board of Directors adopted a resolution declaring themselves “the official godparents, jointly and severally, of the child Edward Davidson ‘Teddy’ Fleming.” When contacted 18 years later, the members of that elected board declined to pay his college tuition.
When Ted was six, Susan described him to someone: “Teddy is all boy. He takes things apart, puts them back together. He has Transformers and G.I. Joes – all the things I swore my children would never play with.”
At nine years old, Teddy applied for a program called SLUFY, Summer Laureate University for Youth. I wrote on the application: “Teddy is a creative thinker, fast with a witty word. He is more apt to apply what he learns than many nine year-olds are. He interrelates well with adults and with children.”
On that same application, Ted wrote: “I’ll contribute my time, my effort, my attention, and my best behavior. I want to learn all I can and get my parents’ money’s worth.”
Ted had been logging time on the home computer for a couple of years when, at about the age of 10, he was with us at a gathering in Hot Springs, 50 miles from Little Rock. For some reason, it fell to our friend Conner Limerick to drive Ted home. When Conner brought Ted to the house, he said, “I can’t believe what I’ve just been hearing for the past hour. He’s like a little adult. He talked about current events, politics and business on Wall Street!”
In a similar episode, our across-the-street neighbors, Chester and Janie Lowe rescued Ted one afternoon when, at the age of 11, he was locked out of the house. When Susan asked Ted, what he and the Lowes had talked about, he replied, matter-of-factly: “The situation in Bosnia.”
Ted was always good with little kids. Without Susan or me pushing him in this direction, by the time he was 13, he was baby-sitting for six or eight families in our neighborhood.
I’ve truly admired my son’s ability to pick up and develop, completely on his own, talents and skills in activities to which neither Susan nor I were connected. Talking about Bosnia with the lawyer across the street and making money for watching over two year-olds are just a couple of examples.
(Next week: More of the Rehearsal Dinner Toast.)
Vic Fleming is a district court judge in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he also teaches at the William H. Bowen School of Law. Contact him at vicfleming@att.net.
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