One word sums it up for me. “Momentous.” The election of the first African American as President in our history made sure of that. As long as anyone will care about American history, the year 2008 will have its special consideration—as the year Barack Obama got elected. It was also a year that the high flying U.S. economy started unraveling, but let us hope that that end-of-year phenomenon will be short lived under the management of a new Obama Administration.
Second Bone Marrow Transplant
For me, 2008 was a year of special significance for several other reasons. It was a year during which I underwent the second bone marrow transplant of my life. The bone marrow transplant, which I had first gone through in 2002, was again urged on me to fight the reoccurrence of the blood cancer called lymphoma. It was also a year during which I managed to publish two books of poetry (see my website for more details: http://www.sasaftwrites.com), and it was the year that I was reunited with Stephen Johnson, my godson. In fact, the latter proved to be the most dramatic event of all for me.
I was lying in my bed in the bone marrow transplant ward on the ninth floor of the Reynolds Tower of Baptist Hospital, Winston-Salem, North Carolina sometime in mid July when the phone on the stand next to my bed rang. I picked it up, and the caller on the other end introduced himself as someone I had not spoken with in many years. He said his name was Stephen Johnson. He said he was my godson.
Hearing Name Is Enough
As soon as I heard his name, even before the word “godson” registered, I knew who he was. The emotion surged in me. Indeed we hadn’t spoken in many years—over 20 in fact. When we were last in touch Stephen wasn’t quite a teenager, probably 12 years old. And yes indeed he was my godson, my godson who I had abandoned for reasons, however misguided, around 1987.
His mother, a single black woman who had worked for my first wife and me as a cleaning lady in Brooklyn by name of Martha Jean Johnson, had asked me to serve as Stephen’s godfather just before he was born in 1968. He was a baby boy coming into the world in Harlem Hospital without a father, and it seemed to me that the least I could do was say “yes” to Martha Jean’s request. My assumption was that a godfather was expected to serve as a role model, and this was a responsibility that I felt flattered to be asked to fulfill. How could I refuse?
Share Room With Stephen
Even after I moved away from New York City, first to New Jersey, then to Maine, and then to the Washington, D.C., area I had kept in touch with Martha Jean and Stephen—at the very least sending them presents at holiday time. At some point when my first marriage was falling apart I fled Maine for New York City and spent at least one night with Martha Jean and Stephen in their Lower East Side apartment where Stephen let me share his room with him.
Just before wife Harriet and I were married in 1980, the second marriage for both of us, we met in New York where she was taking computer training. By then I had relocated to Washington, and both Harriet and I were working for a Washington, D.C. corporation in the satellite communications business. During that visit, we got together with Stephen and Martha Jean in Brooklyn Heights, and as best I can remember the four of us walked around this old Brooklyn neighborhood together, a neighborhood famous for its Promenade overlooking the Lower West side of Manhattan and New York Harbor. Brooklyn Heights had been the first place in the city where I had lived just after leaving graduate school at Yale in 1963.
Go To The Boat Show
Even earlier Stephen remembers my taking him to the New York Boat Show at what was then called the New York Coliseum up on Columbus Circle when I was still living in Maine and working for a publication called National Fisherman based in the Penobscot Bay town of Camden. National Fisherman would have an exhibit booth at the New York Boat Show every year as a base from which to sell advertising space in the publication and to drum up subscription sales, and those of us on the editorial side of the operation would also have our chance to be present at the show and to take advantage of what the big city had to offer.
The break with Stephen and his mother occurred in the mid 1980s, and it was entirely my fault. I fell on hard times, first losing my job with the satellite communications company, then a little more than a year later losing a new job as director of communications for an association in Silver Spring, Maryland. I had been sending Stephen and Martha Jean presents at Christmas time, as I indicated, but with the loss of the second job I felt devastated. By this time I had taken on the responsibility of trying to put my son through an expensive eastern college, and I had no idea how I was going to be able to manage it now with the loss of the second job.
Low Opinion of Myself
Not only did I stop the presents to Stephen and Martha Jean, but the communication as well—an act of extremism that didn’t have to be. I felt embarrassed that I was in such dire straights financially, and I’m afraid I overreacted. In my mind at the time, presents and caring about another human being were one in the same thing. It didn’t occur to me that Stephen needed the continuing attention of an adult male far more than he needed some extra dollars at Christmas time. Yes, I was suffering from a very low opinion of myself at the time. The loss of jobs will do that to you.
Now we jump ahead to July 2008. It struck me as a miracle that Stephen had gotten in touch with me. It struck me that I was being given a second chance to make amends to this man, now in his early 40s, to make up for my failures as a role model the first time around. I didn’t want to mess it up. I wanted to be the godfather now that I felt I had not been before.
Hyatt Hotel Jersey City
In the course of that fateful telephone conversation from my bed in Baptist Hospital, I learned that Martha Jean had died at least five years before. Stephen was married now, he told me. In fact, he had an 18-year-old daughter, but amazingly he was still living in the same Lower East Side apartment where I had once stayed and shared a room with him. Yes, I was older now with a much stronger idea of the responsibility that we bear each other. I wasn’t going to be so cavalier about my relationship with Stephen Johnson ever again.
Since then we’ve been together twice, first in Greensboro, North Carolina, where we met after one of my follow-up sessions at Baptist Hospital, then in New York during Thanksgiving when Harriet and I stayed at the Hyatt Hotel Jersey City and were treated to the breathtaking views of Lower West Side Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and where Stephen played the role of chauffeur and drove us all around the city. During the first visit we met Stephen’s adopted sister Melissa, and during the second Marsha, his wife, Camille, his daughter, and Cita, Marsha’s mother from Trinidad as well as Melissa, all wonderful people who we thoroughly enjoyed being with. And now we are just about to go to the Big Island of Hawaii with Stephen where we will be getting together with son Scott, his wife Yumiko and our grandson Sebi (Sebastian).
38 Year Reunion
As best I can figure—and I took the photographs that are a record of the event—Scott and Stephen were last together in 1970 when Scott was four and Stephen was two. Now they’ll be getting together again 38 years later.
Thanks entirely to Stephen’s courage and initiative, I’ve been given this second chance to make a whole new relationship with him, and I’m not going to squander the opportunity this time. This time I’m going to be the godfather that fate has meant me to be.
Thanks for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my two latest books, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems are now available online. They would make wonderful holiday presents for people you care about. They’re both available from the sasaft website. Have a healthy and happy 2009.
Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Alan Saft
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