Any given Sunday

For the past few weeks, whenever Samson has seen a dump truck [which is a lot more often than you'd expect, trust me], he has exclaimed, in a tiny voice brimming with excitement: "Dumbf---." Which was sort of an improvement over the word's earlier incarnation but still required immediate subtitle/translation to keep people from thinking he was being raised by Hell's Angels.

Put simply, we have been working on "tr" for months with no appreciable results.

In any event, on Sunday we were sitting in church and Samson was being preternaturally good (i.e., sitting still, not trying to tickle the people in front of us, quietly munching his goldfish), when he opened one of the books we'd brought for him to read. It's called "The Road Builders" and is his new favorite book.

There, on the first page, is a list with pictures of all the trucks it takes to build a road. And in that list, of course, is a big old dump truck. He sat scanning the page, quietly naming the trucks he knows: digger, loader, backhoe [which always gets a big shout-out and ends up sounding like PAKHOE], roller, bulldozer (bulldozer)...

Time slowed down as he moved his finger toward the dump truck.

I should note at this point that sitting in front of us was an old colleague of mine from my previous job. Really nice guy, with a very nice wife and three nice kids, the youngest of whom is a few months younger than Samson.

How nice are these folks? Former Maryknoll missioner nice. Their little boy was reading a board book on the story of Daniel in the lion's den. So you can imagine the chill then ran up my spine as young Samson moved his little pointer finger in the direction of the dump truck.

And there, in the quiet of the church, a small miracle.

From somewhere in that little mouth, the "tr" sound appeared, and it was like the chorus of Beethoven's Ode to Joy, as he proudly proclaimed "DUMP TRUCK."

Obviously, this was no big deal to him. He probably thought he'd been saying that all along. But I was pretty excited about the whole thing.

If ever there was a time when it would have been appropriate for church ushers to dump a cooler of water/Gatorade on someone in the pews, this was such an event.

Didn't happen, of course, but if I ever make a movie about my life, I'm adding that scene.