Niagara

"I have a son, who is my heart. A wonderful young man, daring and loving and strong and kind."

-Maya Angelou

Jim had noticed the gulls drifting below us in the rainbow-tinted mist of Niagara Falls a few minutes before.

"Soft duty for a seagull, I suppose."

I replied, "It's May, Jim. I wouldn't want to be any sort of outdoor bird here in January."

Even now it was chilly, if sunny. Tourists crowded the promenade looking down at the thundering cascade, a tour boat bobbing in the wake of the falls, passengers shivering along the rail in matching red slickers.

A few minutes later, after we scanned the gift shop for the perfect memento for P and started back to the car, we encountered a diminutive south Asian woman crawling up onto the rail so a companion could take a full-body pic of her with the river boiling a couple hundred feet below. Jim and I winced, both a little afraid of heights, the stones of the retaining wall on which she stood slick with mist.

"At least she probably believes in reincarnation," Jim quipped with a grin.

"But it's reincarnation as a gull. See all those birds down there? Folks who crawled up on the wall for a photo, and didn't make it. Spending all eternity as a seagull in a place with no sea."

"I guess it could be worse."

"Worse than spending a bird's lifetime living on discarded soggy french fries and poutine?"

Which leads to a discussion, initiated by JR, of what animal we'd want to be if we were reincarnated. I go with fox squirrels--they seem happy, and maybe too big to be eaten by a hawk.

"I'm thinking killer whale," Jim replies. "An alpha predator. Top of the food chain."

"But it's a food chain comprised of fish. I never much liked fish."

"Well, Dad, there is the occasional seal."

"Okay, you got me there. If there's a mammal on the menu every now and then, I guess being a killer whale wouldn't be so bad."

Twenty-eight years ago, a little boy kicked his legs in the child safety seat next to me in the cab of my little Chevy S-10 pickup. We had our silly rituals riding home from daycare and the UGA campus, and one was approaching as we crawled through traffic on the Atlanta Highway, crossing over the Athens perimeter road and past the Bennigan's knock-off we couldn't afford to visit.

Ahead on the right was the sign for the Georgia Square Mall, which featured a giant outline of a piece of nondescript fruit in its logo. For the record, Georgia is and has always been the Peach State.

A smile crept across the little boy's face. He points at the orb.

"Apple."

I cast a sideways glance at him. "Peach."

His big, goofy smile broadens. Game on.

"Apple!"

I adopt a deep, authoritarian tone.

"Peach."

"Apple."

"Peach."

"Apple."

I lunge at him with my free hand, tickling his belly without mercy. "PeaPeaPeaPeaPeach!"

He wriggles and giggles and finally screams with laughter.

Last night we sat on the front porch at Tara, this little boy turned young man and I. We smiled at recalling apples and peaches and Indian women tumbling into the waves and being reincarnated as gulls.

"Don't ever lose your sense of humor, Dad. It's what makes you who you are. It's what makes you my Dad."

I won't, Jim. I won't.