Zane is our youngest son. He is four years old. He’s still innocent – but he’s not at all a baby. He’s tough. He holds his own with his big brothers.

He’s my last kid, and this makes him special to me. He’s my last chance to go through the innocence and awesomeness that exists in the beginning years of life.

It’s sad when we lose our innocence. Callahan was innocent when he was younger. Jake was too. Now when Aspen and I look at their old pictures from those innocent days, we are really sad. They’re not innocent now. They’re caught up in all those trips that seem to plague the human race. They have trouble sharing. They want it all. They play folks for attention. They need to be the center of it. They say what they think we want them to say, that sort of thing. Oh well.
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Zane has red hair. He’s the first redhead in our family. Neither Aspen nor I have any redheaded ancestors. Actually I was what they call strawberry blond when I was really young. But Zane isn’t strawberry blond. He’s a redhead.

Zane has a peanut allergy. We suspected this was true for awhile without being sure. But we finally took him to an allergy specialist. He told us that Zane is definitely allergic to peanuts.

On the way home from the doctor that day, we stopped at the store to buy some food and get some donuts to take with us to the nearby coffee shop. Two bites into his donut, Zane hurled all over himself, Aspen, her knitting, her daypack, and the floor. Yes, he does have a peanut allergy. The words of the doctor came back to me then. “You have to be very careful and read all the labels before you let him eat anything.” He had been eating donuts from that store for years, but that day we found out just how lucky we had been all those years. We learned never to trust our luck again.

After we knew he had a peanut allergy, we got all the emergency things he might need – the Benadryl strips and the Epi-Pen Jr. (an epinephrine injector in case he goes into anaphylactic shock.)

One night, he and Jake got into the bag that contained the Epi-Pens and played with them. Jake stuck himself with one of the pens and, before it was all over, his finger had started to swell and turned blue. Too much epinephrine in too small a part of his body. We had to take him to the emergency room, where they gave him something to counteract the epinephrine. Otherwise, the doctor said, he would have lost his finger.

Kids are definitely hostages to fate. Between the three boys, we have visited the emergency room dozens of times. Callahan and Zane have both been hospitalized with serious pneumonia. Jake’s future continues to loom over us. We’re fortunate so far. All our kids, including my older ones too, are still alive and healthy. Knock on wood.

All in all Zane is a charming little innocent rascal. I wish we could all be like him. As I’ve said about my other two boys, I really want to be around when Zane is a young man. I am almost seventy-seven now and will be in my nineties when the boys reach young manhood. I can do it. I want to live to be one hundred and eleven anyway.