Birth of a Risk-Taker, by Kurt G. Schmidt

Prose, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Despite previous surgeries that would likely preclude a viable pregnancy, Shelley gives birth to a healthy boy via a complicated C-section while Dad observes and listens as Doctor Vivian struggles with scar tissue, grunts, and utters statements like, “Shelley, don’t come to me for your next Cesarean.” The doctor’s sarcasm means she doesn’t know this birth is their last chance. A nurse transfers the baby to Dad’s arms, where a father-son love story begins. Once home, Dad volunteers to bathe Jesse each day, which begins their dialog. When Jesse refuses the bath one evening, Dad realizes the smiling baby has become a toddler whose refusals make him wonder why he became an older father at an age when calmness is a virtue.

Trying to answer his son’s five-year-old questions often makes Dad feel as though God is torturing him. “What are you afraid of?” Jesse asks. “What’s the F-Word?” Dad thinks loving Jesse means learning how to respond to his questions with wisdom and compassion. He feels troubled sometimes that he doesn’t have answers that might satisfy him, especially about God and death and complicated topics like sex. As part of a summer trip when Jesse is eight, the family visits a home that includes a teenage girl with a new baby. After the trip, Dad takes a four week leave of absence from his technical writing job to spend the rest of the summer at home with Jesse. They begin building a tree house using four trees as the corners. Up in the trees one day, helping Dad screw down the floor, Jesse says, “Do you have to be married to have a baby?”

Mom and Dad come to understand the positive nature of allowing Jesse to take risks. Dad recalls thirty years of Jesse’s risky pursuits, such as skiing, dirt bike racing, sports car racing, and earning a pilot’s license. Dad’s nerves calm a bit when he reads a newspaper article that says, “Some employers welcome job candidate résumés that include activities such as hang gliding, kayaking and rock climbing. Such interests indicate a person is likely to be an individual thinker, with a certain level of endurance and interest in pushing himself or herself. It also shows the person is likely to have a mechanism for de-stressing.” It makes Dad see what had perhaps motivated Jesse all along. The years with him take Mom and Dad on journeys that expand their world, making them more aware that his risk-taking has been the impetus for more adventures than they could have imagined.

Kurt Schmidt published the novel, Annapolis Misfit, with Crown Publishers thirteen years after being expelled from the Naval Academy. Two years after leaving Annapolis, he graduated from Michigan State University, had a brief engineering career, and vagabonded through Europe for a year. During his time writing the novel, he worked factory jobs and was also a janitor at a small college, an innkeeper’s assistant, and editor of a computer magazine. After publication, He had a career as a technical writer and helped raise a son who asked insane child questions such as "What's Mono Gamus?" Kurt’s nonfiction has appeared in the Boston Globe, Bacopa Literary Review, Barzakh Magazine, Discretionary Love, The Examined Life Journal, Eclectica Magazine, and others. His publications can be viewed online by accessing "Links" at www.kurtgschmidt.com