Martin Luther-King Day
About a month ago I started receiving photos via email from some dear friends in Tennessee. At the same time those same photos and others began to appear on Facebook. They were photos of their infant son, Martin.
Some of the photos were beyond poignant. One photo was of Martin lying on his stomach with his arm folded under him with his chin cradled on the back of his hand staring into the camera’s lens as if to say “so this is life?”
I laughed at another photo when I first saw it; the angle of Martin’s head, and him being a newborn, caused him to look like an alien baby—his eyes were big like dark almonds and he had about as much hair as his dad, Jerry.
I cheered at another photo which showed Martin wearing Pittsburgh Steeler slippers!
Martin is one of life’s gifts that make you smile; he makes you smile big and wide and long like a Mayflower moving van. He makes you smile sentimental smiles because he stirs memories of your own sons.
And, his parents make you smile big and wide and long too. They make you smile because they’re people who are smiling on the inside.
For many years Judy and Jerry Day were unable to conceive children. I have to imagine that Judy and Jerry felt something of what Hannah in the Bible felt. There was a barrenness anchored inside of Hannah that was as profound as the barrenness of her womb. She would go to the Temple to talk with God about her barrenness, and her groaning to God was deep, guttural and silent. I imagine Judy and Jerry had a few moments like that.
I’ve not met Martin personally yet, but I’m guessing he’s quiet like his dad. Jerry listens more than he talks; it’s a quality I wish I had. Inside of Jerry’s brain, which has now pushed its way through his hair, gray matter is spinning like the cars on a Tilt-A-Whirl. Somehow Jerry manages to keep it all inside his mind, while mine flies out my ears, oozes from my nose, seeps from my eyes and is vomited out of my mouth.
Other photos of Martin seem to depict him as tranquil, just observing sights, sounds and smells; that’s what Jerry does too, and he does it well. There’s a photo of Martin wearing a plaid jumper and smiling so big his head almost disappears; he looks like Judy. Judy has a smile so genuine it makes you question whether your own smile is genuine.
For many months I joked with Judy and Jerry about what they were going to name their baby. Jerry’s answer was always the same, and he would say it with a laugh, a laugh like a sinister clown—funny but scary.
Every generation has a set of popular names that they give their children. My grandparents’ generation named my parents earthy names like Robert and Mabel. They named my aunts and uncles Marvin and Ruby and Rachael and Opal. Those were solid names; solid like the bricks in a four-story warehouse.
My parents gave their kids names like Wanda and Donald and Alan; they were names that were different than those solid names of the previous generation. These were names that seemed more like the mortar between the brick; useful and unassuming.
My siblings and I gave our kids names like Christopher and Ryan, Dawn and Troy, Jesse and Brittany, Caleb and Brandon. They were names that could be worn nicely, like a good pair of designer jeans. They were names that lots of our contemporaries were naming their kids.
Martin, at first blush, seems like a name out of place in 2011. Martin was one of those useful and unassuming names of my generation. Martin isn’t trendy like a pair of designer jeans. Martin was the last name of my boyhood friends, Noble, Marty and Morris.
Martin is a throwback to the 60’s. Martin was a name that Dion sang about in the 1968 song “Abraham, Martin and John.” Judy and Jerry threw a line back over forty years and pulled Martin into today.
Martin Luther-King Day. It’s the name that elicited that sinister clown laugh from Jerry. Who’d ever name their son, Martin Luther-King Day? Judy and Jerry Day would.
I think Judy and Jerry are the only people I’ve ever known who could pull off naming their son, Martin Luther-King Day. They could pull it off because the very thing Dion sang about in his 60’s song Judy and Jerry embody. “Abraham, Martin and John” has a few lines that go like this…
Anybody here seen my old friend Martin?
Can you tell me where he’s gone?
He freed a lot of people,
But it seems the good they die young.
I just looked ’round and he’s gone.
Didn’t you love the things that they stood for?
Didn’t they try to find some good for you and me?
And we’ll be free
Some day soon, and it’s a-gonna be one day…
I want to dream that Martin Day will “find some good” for the world which he’s been thrust into.
I want to dream that he will be the kind of person his mom and dad are.
I want to dream that he’ll make a difference in the world for the better.
I want to dream that his name will open doors into the lives of people that need the message that his namesake carried about God; “I just want to do God’s will.”
