Lydia’s line of the day

While watching Hall & Oates during the broadcast of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade: “They're really good at lip-syncing.”

Free, free / Set them free

From today’s Drudge Report…

CAUGHT ON CRAIGSLIST: Sting in Seattle nets 100 alleged johns...

I’m betting a certain pop star isn’t going to appreciate this much.

Context is everything

From today’s New York Times…

“Tony does it every time he has an opportunity,” said Yadier Molina, the St. Louis catcher. “And David is the best guy you can do it with.”

Are a certain former Cardinal catcher’s ears burning right now?

Evan’s first birthday

Today marks the day our son Evan would have turned one year old. At the time of his death, he had just started to roll over and attempt crawling. The thought that Evan’s death was entirely preventable haunts us, that he was so vulnerable that leaving him unmonitored in a playpen to suffocate was what ended his brief life, and that this would not have happened had he been in our care.

Evan Ross, we love you and miss you. I hope Grandma and Emily threw a great party in your honor. You and your sister were our heaven on earth.

Love,

Daddy

Headline of the day

More grist for the never-subscribe-to-America-Online mill comes courtesy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, whose Friday business section featured this stunning story - Even dead people can’t escape AOL. I guess when you’re as big as AOL, bullying and extorting the bereaved are forms of corporate recreation.

The spoils of dispossession

Despite all the waste they’ve already made, here’s how the Marxists of the American Left would further damage the United States if given the opportunity. Despite wrongheaded protestations of “libertie, egalite, et fraternitie,” legal plunder ultimately leads to this.

NO TRESPASSING

What’s with the bill recently passed by the Senate and eagerly awaited at the White House? Pundits have speculated; some feel that business-oriented Republicans look the other way in deference to businesses that depend heavily on cheap, illegal labor, while others feel that the U.S. is incapable of sending them all packing, and that our longstanding failure to secure borders and enforce existing immigration law somehow necessitates lenience or amnesty. The “guest worker program” has morphed into a looming rubber stamp for millions of illegal immigrants.

I’m certain some economists have advised the president, but I suspect even more political scientists have. Is it possible that Senate Republicans, along with many of their Democrat counterparts, see this, at bottom, as a vote grab? Once naturalized, immigrants who came here illegally will likely secure the privilege of voting. If Republicans go along with this plan, perhaps they’ll enjoy some gains within this new voting bloc. In this light, having enough newcomers’ votes, even if not a majority among the demographic, would beat a zero.

However, who really stands to gain from such an arrangement? Liberals have long favored extending “entitlements” to “undocumented workers” and other aliens who have entered the country unlawfully, just as they favor restoring voting rights to convicted felons. Their largest target audiences comprise those self-identified “victims” who favor getting from any and all taxpayers more than they themselves have earned—and sundry other supposedly progressive steps toward a socialist or communist system—and then the mega-wealthy paternalistic and patronizing celebrities and captains of industry who favor a nanny state that largely won’t inconvenience them personally. It’s virtually certain who scores politically here.

On this issue, conservatives are faced with impending abandonment by their own leaders on the purported right and pursuits of ruinous consequence from the transparently Marxist left. It’s time to let our unannounced “guests” know that they’ve really abused our hospitality and now they really have to leave. Expel them. Our credibility, integrity, security, and sovereignty depend on it.

What happened

We recently learned the official manner and cause of Evan’s death: the St. Clair County coroner, in conjunction with the medical examiner and the responding officer, found that the death was accidental, not natural, and that he suffocated after being placed on two blankets in a playpen and rolling over onto his face. Prior to the day he died, he had slept in his car seat, his swing, or our arms. The medical examiner found everything from the autopsy unremarkable and ruled out SIDS.

Yet, for some, the matter is still open. To them, denial and interminable searching are preferable to a reasonable, if not thoroughly proven, conclusion. It could have been Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndrome or Sudden Unexpected Death Syndrome. It could have been Long Q-T. I suppose. I suppose, also, that someone could have surreptitiously entered through a window and smothered our son.

Or worse, perhaps. The hand of God Himself could have turned Evan over to underscore a lesson already learned when we lost Emily Jane: that we cannot count on Him and that trying to do so is a waste.

I see no reason to contest the medical examiner’s findings. What killed Evan was an incomprehensible choice and an inexcusable failure to check on him. Wandering into the Land of If brings no peace. At best, it is merely an unhealthy obsession; at worst, a foolish desire to exonerate the guilty.

Perhaps no other comment—of the dozens of oblivious comments we hear—exemplifies this vacuity better than my own mother’s. When I informed her that Evan’s death was accidental, she responded, “Oh, that’s good.” Incredulous, I asked what she meant. With no hint of recognition in her voice, she replied, “Well, that means it was nobody’s fault.”

Mourning and remembrance

I last posted on February 1, shortly before I received a call from an O’Fallon police officer who said that our son, Evan, had had a medical emergency and was taken to Memorial Hospital. He told me that another officer picked my wife up at work and was taking her to the hospital, and he advised me to get to the hospital as quickly as possible.

En route to the hospital, I called our childcare provider to find out what had happened. She had put Evan down in a playpen for his nap, where he rested on his back as he had many times. After she attended to feeding other children lunch and watching children play outside, she returned to find Evan turned over on his stomach, flat on his face. He was blue and not breathing.

I arrived at Memorial with that same heavy feeling hanging in the air that I felt when Kristi and I followed an ambulance to St. Elizabeth Hospital two years ago, when our two-year-old daughter was taken unconscious, not breathing, likely already gone, to the emergency room. There was no helping her, no helping the situation.

On February 1, 2006, at Memorial Hospital, I met Kristi in an examination room near the emergency ward. As we waited, I gathered from the fact that a chaplain had been dispatched to us that Evan was dead or very near certain death. I asked a hospital staffer whether Evan had any vital signs. He did not. I began calling parents of my students, not wanting to call the students themselves, to cancel appointments. Within ten minutes, a staffer, perhaps the same one, came in hanging her head and throwing her hands up, “No, I’m sorry…”

I later learned from an O’Fallon detective that the EMTs found Evan cold when they arrived. He died in the home of someone who loved him and whom he loved. He was my happy, handsome boy. He lived only five months and one day. His death, like Emily’s, makes no sense, and as we continue to grieve for him, we continue to mourn the loss of his sister. Today Emily would have turned five.

Wherever you are, happy birthday, Emily Jane Nowels. Please give Evan our love. Please give your grandma a big hug from Mom and Dad and Maddie and Lydia. Know that we love you all. You and Evan and your grandma were angels here.

Lydia strikes again

Recently, Lydia and Maddie were preparing snacks. When it came time to put the spread back in the fridge, Lydia came up with a great twist on standard etiquette, asking “Maddie, would you mind if you put this away?” Kristi and I were howling. Unfortunately, after a recurrence of this “would you mind if you…” phrasing, I had to set things right.