captain bagel
Once upon a time, there lived a boy who struggled to talk, and because he struggled to talk, he also struggled to make connections, even with the people he loves.
“Adam, tonight you pick the topic of conversation,” Kevin says, as we, The Blessed Ones, gather around our table at the end of the day.
I sit back, drawing my leg up into the chair, absorbing the goodness of sitting across the table from my children, of being able to read so much in their tender faces. I watch Adam consider what to say, and I am thinking that what Kevin has done feels a bit like what God does with His kids all the time, choosing the least likely one so that the interaction with Him, being more crucial than execution or eloquence, takes priority.
After a moment–searching, sifting, what-what-what behind his eyes, Adam finally firmly offers, “Captain Bagel.”
“What?” Kevin asks, because surely we’ve misheard. Adam’s deep-voiced words come out halting and clipped, so impatiently sharp-edged we can miss the swoop and swell of the vowels in the middle. We don’t really expect an actual topic; we expect Adam to unhelpfully repeat some part of Kevin’s imperative or to emphatically refuse to try. NO, that’s usually what we get when we ask a little too much of Adam’s late-day weariness. But God is always doing a new thing, and the ruts in our expectations tempt us to miss it.
See! A stream springs up in the wasteland.
“Did he just say, ‘Captain Bagel‘?” I glance toward Zoe, who nods, a quirky smile playing on her lips.
“Captain Bagel,” Adam repeats firmly, his voice rising a little as if he thinks the problem must be that we’re hard of hearing.
“Who is Captain Bagel?” Kevin asks. We shake our heads, laughing a little, surprised that Adam has not only offered us a topic, but one that shows imagination. Adam isn’t technically supposed to be imaginative, but then, there isn’t supposed to be water in the wilderness.
“Superhero.” That’s all he says, and with a tone that suggests we should already know.
“Maybe they made up superheroes at school,” I suggest. I don’t ask, because Adam’s default answer for questions he doesn’t know how to answer is always yes. He will say yes even if Captain Bagel is something he saw on YouTube, even if this story just sprung from his imagination.
“But Adam doesn’t even eat bagels that much,” Zoe says logically. “Why would he choose ‘bagel’?”
Riley just smiles, says chirpily, “Come on, Adam, tell us who Captain Bagel is.”
I chuckle, because wherever the idea came from, Captain Bagel has indeed become the topic of conversation. Even better, with two words, Adam has begun a story. And as usual, we, The Blessed Ones, will tell it together. I think of something beautiful that Odie O’Banion says, in William Kent Krueger’s This Tender Land, that in the end, every good story is about hope. This story is about our hope that Adam will one day talk with us.
“What is Captain Bagel’s superpower?” Kevin asks, but the meaning of the question baffles Adam; I can see it in the furrow of his brow.
“Like, does he fly? Or, can he be invisible? Or…,” I try.
“Oh, fly,” Adam says quickly, with finality. The End. Once upon a time, Captain Bagel, the illustrious (?) superhero, flew. Story complete. Or, the topic is check, Adam would say, because even his brief fictions apparently come with a ticking box.
But I’m not quite done. “Does he wear a cape?”
“Yes,” Adam says bluntly.
“What color?”
“Green. Oh, green,” Adam says. I see that green cape fluttering, hear it snapping in the wind; I can’t help it.
“Where do the bagels come in?” Kevin asks, and I look at Zoe and mumble my mystery: “Did he make this up?”
She immediately begins to type on her phone, searching the magical Google databases.
“Breakfast,” Adam says. The bagels are for breakfast. Of course.
Once upon a time, Captain Bagel flew though the pre-dawn sky, his green cape snapping as he looked for some starved soul who could use a bagel for breakfast.
“Yeah, he made this up,” Zoe says. “I don’t see anything.”
But it will be a story we tell now, only more like this,
Just when we had begun to despair of the emptiness in our exchanges with the boy, of his frustration over talking, of the short irritation in his communication, a new thing happened. Do you see it? He told us about a superhero with an unlikely name and a green cape; a superhero who could fly and who cared about truly essential things, the things the boy cares about too. Like breakfast.
