Dylan Stafford

Originally published April 25, 2009. Re-published January 22, 2025. Comments welcome.

Our son’s first birthday took a week.

Birthday morning, my wife Marisa and I bundled up Jackson and we boarded an 8:30 a.m. plane in Los Angeles to fly across America. We switched in Atlanta to a teeny, tiny second plane, where I felt like an NBA player, even though I’m not quite six feet tall. We landed in South Carolina at 6:00 p.m. to celebrate with my wife’s family.

Grandpa Szem picked us up at the Charleston airport in his new Lexus, with a big trunk for all our baby-gear. My father-in-law Brad is a loud, proud New Jersey man who raised five kids working as a high school physical education instructor for thirty years and making golf clubs in his basement. To “retire,” he and my mother-in-law Barbara moved down to South Carolina and they bought two Dunkin’ Donuts stores. They have baked donuts around the clock for a decade. I married into a hard-working family.

Each morning of our visit, I drink coffee and listen as Brad reads the paper and they comment on life in South Carolina.

“Do you know happens when it rains down here?” Brad asks me.

“No, what?”

“My employees won’t come to work – because it rained! Can you believe that? It’s amazing. They don’t think nothing of it. They just don’t come in. That would never happen in New Jersey.”

“Brad spends half his time bailing his Dunkin’ Donuts staff out of jail,” says Barbara, adding more. “He gets calls at 1:30 a.m. on a Saturday night. ‘Mr. Paul [Brad’s other name] can you come get me out of jail? I can’t make it to my shift unless you help bail me out.’ It takes ‘Gotta make the donuts’ to a whole new level, I tell you.”

These are my in-laws, enjoying their “non-retirement adventure decade” in the south. I haven’t been back to visit their South Carolina refuge in seven years. The last and only time I visited here was when Marisa and I were dating. Instead of coming here for the holidays, the family all gather in New Jersey, where two of Marisa’s siblings, Chris and Bonnie, and all their respective children, live. Now with this visit, we were back in South Carolina, the returning heroes, married, with child and car seat and all the doo-dads that go with it.

We saw Marisa’s other sister Sue later in the week. She works with Grandpa at one of the Dunkin’ Donuts and helps manage the store. “Mommy told me one of the staff used to be in prison for killing someone. Is that really true?” Marisa asked Sue. It was funny for me to hear Marisa use the word “Mommy.” My powerful, corporate wife sounded like a little girl for a moment, talking to her big sister.

“Well, yeah, but he is a really nice guy as long as he stays on his meds,” Sue replied, smiling.

Sue is Marisa’s oldest sister. She is quieter than many in the family and she was always a refuge for me in the early years joining this big family. I was in my early sobriety, this family was booming and boisterous, and I often felt like a dork for not drinking anymore. I wish you all knew me when I used to drink, I’d think, I used to be cool. Sue always reassured me with her calm presence. The whole family was actually always respectful of me not drinking, but I was self-conscious in my early sobriety.

Sue went to culinary school. She oversees the Dunkin’ Donuts night shift with the rain-avoiding, post-prison staff. She likes it. It reminds me of something my own sister Lisa would enjoy, the adventure of life at night, away from “regular daytime life.”

I’m amazed at what my new family has signed up for, running these stores. I bet when the Dunkin’ Donuts team makes the franchise pitch, about the freedom of owning your own business and being your own boss, they don’t talk about emergency midnight calls to your home phone to drive down and spring your staff from the county lockup so that everyone can have their morning crullers.

To make it worse, my mother- and father-in-law are living on Kiawah Island, a beautiful, manicured and gated world, designed for people who are all-the-way retired, not energy filled people like by Brad and Barbara who only pretend to be retired. It is a 40-minute drive “off island” to get anywhere, to do anything. It is great for a vacation but tough for daily life. Brad has two different Dunkin’s in two different cities. He logs a lot of miles.

“This is a really nice car,” I said as Grandpa picked us up at the airport.

“Thanks. I got a great deal on it. It only had like 5,000 miles and I got it for a song. Look at this, it has air-conditioned seats,” he said, pushing a button. All of a sudden, there was a breezy blowing under my butt.

My first air-conditioned seats. I was jealous and happy at the same time.

When I was a kid in Texas, my mom’s parents lived in Tempe, Arizona. My memories of visiting my grandpa Martin are a lot like Jack’s grandpa Szem. My granddad had a second-hand Mercedes, which was ultra-luxurious to my little kid self. Now it seemed like history was repeating itself and it made me smile.

The drive from the airport to the island takes 45 minutes and we made it in two hours. We had to stop at a Wal-Mart for some diapers and other baby items. Grandma had borrowed a crib and a high-chair and lots of other baby tools from her friends, but we still needed a run through wally-world. One of the sacrifices of West Los Angeles living is that there isn’t a Wal-Mart anywhere.

The last 10 minutes of the drive to the island are my favorite part. The long, straight two-lane is called Bohicket Road and you feel like you’re in Gone with the Wind. Both sides are lined with gigantic live oak trees with huge reaching branches that completely canopy the road and drip with Spanish Moss.

The first and only other time I visited, seven years earlier, Marisa and I had driven all the way from New Jersey in one day and we arrived at 3:00 a.m. That night, after we exited the highway, Marisa pulled off on the side of Bohicket Road, under a huge live oak. We were dating then and I immediately got the wrong idea as to why she stopped the car.

“Watch this,” Marisa said and she unhooked the latches and put the top down of her VW Cabrio. “We can turn up the heater and drive the last leg to Mom and Dad’s in the moonlight. You’re gonna like this road.”

She knew I love trees. We popped the top and cranked the heater and drove that last, long stretch in the moonlight. It was a magical introduction to the island, one more magical Marisa moment to add to my list.

This time wasn’t bad either. Maybe not Spanish moss in the moonlight, but carting our new baby boy to see Grandma in Poppy’s big new car was special too. Grandma Szem greeted us with hugs and squeals and love. We ate a delicious meal of homemade eggplant parmesan and garlic bread. It was a Friday night and the beginning of a long and yummy weekend.

Later that night, Uncle Ken and Aunt Alicia arrived from North Carolina. They’re not native southerners either. Alicia is Grandpa’s sister, and she and Ken left Rhode Island and came down south a couple of years after my in-laws did. They are youthful and energetic and always planning some outdoor activity. The first thing Alicia did was rally some of us to go walk on the beach and look for ghost crabs by flashlight. The crabs scurried sideways and we ran and laughed in the salty nighttime air. Grandma stayed back and watched Jack.

Saturday morning, we helped Grandpa spread a massive mound of shredded bark groundcover he had delivered on the side of the house. Ken and Alicia were all over the task as they love the outdoors. The bark was red and we had wheel barrels and shovels and after a sweaty two hours we had spread it all around the house among the shrubs and bushes. Jack sat in his stroller and watched, with mommy and grandma both hovering over him monitoring sunlight and watching for mosquitoes.

Saturday night, I overate again, this time linguine and clam sauce with fresh ocean clams. Uncle Ken cooked one of his favorite recipes.

All Saturday we were waiting for my mom to arrive from Texas. She had flight trouble and ended up having to delay and arrive on Sunday. She dealt with it as only a grandma on her way to see her new grandchild can do. She was in much better spirits when she arrived Sunday than I would have been.

Sunday was the all-out, first birthday party for Jackson. Marisa’s sister and brother came, along with several cousins and my mom too. We played corn hole in the front drive for hours while the grill cooked and the drinks flowed. Jack took it all in as he was passed from person to person all afternoon. Marisa never totally relaxed. In my mind, I thought that the one time she would be able to let down her guard would be around her mom and family, but I realized that she is hard-wired to be protective, to make sure that life doesn’t play too roughly with our little Jackson.

We gave Jack his first taste of cake and ice cream. We’ve been good about keeping processed sugar out of his diet but today was his birthday. He responded tentatively, which he often does with a new taste. But after he got used to the sweetness, he did his sign language gesture for “more.” Marisa felt proud. “All the Szems are good eaters,” she said.

I was exhausted by Sunday night and we still had a whole week in front of us. Things slowed down after the weekend and we did more naps and aquarium visits and lower impact activities.

We took a family photo on the beach one evening at sunset. Marisa chose the location and arranged a photographer to come. In South Carolina, the thing to do is to wear white shirts and khakis and take photos on the beach. We all got dressed accordingly. It was rewarding to see my mom in the photo with all of Marisa’s family.

I’m grateful for my mom making the trip here. When I was a boy, I never got to have both sets of grandparents together. They lived in different states and travel was expensive.

Jack’s borrowed crib is squeaky. He is sleeping in a big, long dorm room on the second floor. We sleep in the adjacent room with the door ajar. Marisa still doesn’t sleep consistently. She hasn’t slept much so for his entire first year. She has breastfed him his whole life, four months naturally and since then with bottles and the pump that we take with us everywhere. His body is healthy and strong. At one year he is 23 pounds six ounces and 32.5 inches long, which are 60^th percentile and 95^th percentile respectively. He is our long, little guy. Marisa has put her everything into him; she’s a super-mommy.

Our South Carolina TV evenings are Dancing with the Stars and NBA basketball games, always after another delicious dinner. It is great for me because I can watch the western conference late basketball games after everyone else dozes off. I brought some MBA applications with me and I squeezed some reading time into the week. (I work at UCLA as an admissions director in the business school.) But I was torn between knowing that this is my busiest time of the year at work and wanting to participate with my family. The applications in my bag are a dull background distraction the whole week.

The end of April and May is my busiest season at UCLA. I work a lot of twelve-hour days. Last year when Jack was born it was tough and now a year later he’s having his birthday and the timing isn’t any better.

Today, April 25, we have been parents for 365 days. Jack is doing great. He’s big and bubbly. At the family dinner Saturday night, we were all teaching him to shake his head, either “yes” or “no.” He got the “no” side-to-side shake twice, but we never coaxed an up-and-down “yes” head shake from him.

I squeezed in two twelve-step recovery meetings through the course of the week, enough to keep me balanced and being a pleasant father, husband and house guest. There is a church every half mile along Bohicket Road, each nestled back among the live oaks. One of them has a small recovery meeting. I went one night and it was good to sit around the “recovery campfire” and check in and share both my joy at having such a lively family and also my own need to decompress and take a break. There were knowing nods and I realized that family is tough for everyone sometimes.

Happy birthday Jack. One whole year for you. One whole amazing year of being a daddy—a married man with a new son—for me too. Happy birthday mommy and daddy too.      

We’re all in this together.

We love you buddy.