5
Love You Too
THAT DATE, JULY 6, when Michael arrived in the United States, became a day our family would celebrate every year, but not just because of our new Romanian import. You’ll remember our original intent was to adopt a baby girl, and the prospect of having a little sister around the house was something four-year-old Maggie was off-the-charts excited about. And while she and Eric were absolutely wonderful with Michael upon his arrival, Cheryl and I heard incessantly over the next couple years from our only daughter that she would like to lose that “only” label. It was an idea Cheryl and I had brought up in passing, but it was back burner stuff. We had too much going on with Michael’s health to even consider expanding our family.
Much of Michael’s first year was spent at various doctors’ offices and hospitals. The casting and recasting of his lower left leg over the course of a few months eventually removed the limb’s sharp right turn at the ankle, and it looked, well, normal. But his digestive system was far from that. He had been given little, if any, solid food in the orphanage. In fact, we had to basically teach him how to chew. He would take food like those vanilla wafers I’d brought to the airport and just let them dissolve in his mouth before he swallowed. We couldn’t tell him how to chew—he couldn’t speak and had no understanding of our language. We just had to show him, making exaggerated chewing motions, and in time he caught on.
His system was ravaged by parasites, which required weeks of testing by a gastroenterologist to determine exactly what the problem was and how it could be treated. That process was no treat—I’ll leave it at that. And then there were the neurological tests. How severe were the developmental delays? we worried. Would there come a time when we would not be awakened in the morning to the sound of this child rocking on all fours, rhythmically banging his head against the crib? Would he ever speak? These were just a few of the questions we peppered the specialists with for months. The answers were not encouraging. One doctor told us Michael would never talk, would never bond with another person. In short, what we were seeing now was not going to change appreciably.
What did encourage us was that physically Michael was making some progress. He was walking. He didn’t put one foot in front of the other but had more of a side-to-side, waddling gait, but hey, considering he had not walked in the first three years of his life, we were thrilled. In fact, the way he moved was kind of similar to the way the legendary manager of the Atlanta Braves, Bobby Cox, would stroll to the mound to make a pitching change. The first time Michael went trick-or-treating with his big brother and sister, we put him in a Braves uniform and wrote the last name Cox and the number 6 on the back of his jersey. It was a hoot. Until it wasn’t.
When our pediatrician watched him walk in the hallway of his office, he recommended a visit to a neuromuscular specialist. His suspicions led to surgery—a muscle biopsy that left Michael with a three-inch scar on his left thigh. The diagnosis left us speechless. Michael had Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a genetic disorder in which the muscles gradually weaken and deteriorate. There is no known cure. All we knew about MD was what we’d seen every Labor Day when Jerry Lewis would hold a telethon to raise money for research to help Jerry’s kids. Now Michael was one of them.
Because there is no cure, for many of those afflicted, kids are all they will ever be, especially if they have Duchenne. Cheryl and I were numb, confused, heartbroken, you name it. Yet we were determined to do what we had set out to do in the first place—make this child’s life a better one than what he had before. Friends would sometimes say something that I found curious, but then with repetition it really bothered me. The statement was usually prefaced with “I’m so sorry to hear about Michael.” Then the speaker would continue, “I guess if you guys had known he had muscular dystrophy, you wouldn’t have adopted him.” Nothing could have been further from the truth. In as understanding a tone as I could muster, I would explain that we had adopted Michael not with an eye on what he would become but for who he was, a neglected, forgotten child who deserved another chance.
We knew he had a variety of problems, but we knew nothing of his birth parents, who had abandoned him shortly after his birth, or if doctors had ever taken the time to truly diagnose everything that was going on. All we knew was that he needed a home, and we were going to provide it, no matter what the doctors in the States would eventually discover about his issues. And to take it to another level, in my view, we had no guarantees that something catastrophic wouldn’t happen to Eric or Maggie. Would we then take the stance that we should never have had them in the first place? Never. We would face that crisis head-on and do whatever we had to do to get through it. And that’s what we were going to do with Michael.
Now back to Maggie and her never-ending quest for a little sister. After about a year and a half, we had settled into a new normal, for lack of a better term, and Cheryl and I were pulled toward the idea of adopting again. There were two ground rules. It was going to be a girl, obviously. And because of Michael’s situation and all it entailed, we were not in a position to adopt another child with special-needs. We contacted an agency and went through the same exhausting but necessary regimen of paperwork and home studies used to determine if we were candidates to adopt. We passed the audition and waited for a phone call.
On July 6, 1993, God winked. That’s right—July 6—exactly two years to the day that Cheryl had pushed Michael through the international concourse at the Atlanta airport, the adoption agency called Cheryl wondering if we were interested in adopting a baby girl from Paraguay. Timing and luck, right? Cheryl told them she had a phone call to make. I answered the call in St. Louis, where I would be calling the Braves-Cardinals game with my dad the following night. Cheryl jumped right in.
“I just got off the phone with the adoption agency.”
“And . . .”
“There’s a baby in South America . . . Paraguay. Her name is Carmen Esquivel. She’s a healthy six-month-old. They want to know if we’re interested. Can you believe we got this call on this day?”
I was shaking with excitement and shaking my head in disbelief. “July 6. Let’s go to Paraguay.”
Compared with the Romanian adventure Cheryl had endured two years earlier, this was cake. With our two sets of parents again playing the role of babysitters/lifesavers, Cheryl and I went together for a week to the capital city of Asunción. We had already been told that the adoption would not be finalized for three weeks, so our plan was to spend a week there with Carmen and then leave her in the care of a foster mother while we went back to Eric, Maggie, and Michael and waited for word on when to go back.
Arriving on Saturday, we were told by the Paraguayan attorney who was handling the adoption that on Sunday afternoon she would bring Carmen to our hotel. And so on Sunday we waited, and we paced, and we read, and we watched some TV, and we strolled through the hotel’s garden area, where among other things we could stare at a caged monkey. Having exhausted our list of things to do to kill time, we paced some more, and Sunday afternoon became Sunday night, and it started pouring. And then, as we stood near the driveway of the Grand Hotel del Paraguay, we saw headlights, and a black sedan with its windshield wipers going full throttle eased to a stop underneath the covered entrance to the hotel.
The attorney emerged from the front seat, opened the door to the backseat, and reached into the child seat. As she stepped toward us, we saw Carmen. And now the tears were pouring. If there’s one thing adoption has taught us, it’s that we have absolutely no understanding of the capacity to love that resides in the human heart. Just when you think you can’t possibly love anybody more than you love your spouse, you have a child, and you tap that reservoir of love. We’ve learned that reservoir is bottomless. Can somebody please explain to me the instant bond that is formed when you hold a baby for the first time? Didn’t think so. But for us, it was unmistakable and unbreakable. We were taking turns holding our new daughter. And amid all the thoughts that were colliding in my head, I thought, “Man, is Maggie gonna be thrilled.”
The next four days were filled with doing baby stuff—making her laugh, letting her fall asleep in our arms, pushing her stroller on walks near the hotel or in a shopping area in Asunción, showing her the monkey in the cage, and discovering her insatiable appetite for mashed potatoes. Or as the hotel restaurant waiter Santiago told us in Spanish, “puree de papas.” By the end of the week, whenever Santiago saw us coming, he would immediately bring a bowl to the table.
We were dreading Friday, because that’s when we would have to give Carmen back until the rest of the adoption paperwork could be finalized in three weeks. I don’t need to paint that picture for you—it was a tough morning, saying good-bye to Carmen while the foster mother waited to take her away, but there was no getting around it. The other kids needed us too. So we flew home, eager to share all the pictures we’d taken and the stories we’d collected. And we waited for the phone to ring. When we got the call that everything was official, Cheryl flew solo back to South America while I stayed with the kids. This time when the attorney handed Carmen to Cheryl, it was for good. Forever.
So now we had this mini United Nations right there in the Atlanta suburb of Suwanee. Let me take just a second to heap some praise on Eric and Maggie. Never did they differentiate between their being our biological kids and Michael and Carmen being adopted. To them, we were simply a family, and their sensitivity to Michael’s situation in particular was good for the soul.
They were protective of their little brother and bristled when he would draw stares from other kids who were wondering, without verbalizing it, what was wrong with him. Why was he making noises, walking funny, and sometimes just gazing skyward? Why was he in a stroller when he wasn’t a baby? Sometimes we’d catch a glimpse of somebody staring out of the corner of an eye, and we’d just invite them over and tell the Reader’s Digest version of Michael’s story. Maybe, we thought, they’d walk away with at least a bit of an understanding that we’re all different in some ways, that there’s nothing in writing that says we all have to play by the same rules, that there is value in everyone, not just the physically gifted, or the most popular, or the best looking. If strangers didn’t get it, our kids certainly did. And through the years, we marveled at the impact Michael had. His physical limitations were no match for his indomitable spirit.
When Eric and Maggie moved into their teenage years, they volunteered as counselors at a wonderful summer camp an hour outside Atlanta. Camp Twin Lakes in the town of Rutledge welcomed kids with all sorts of illnesses for a week of swimming, horseback riding, canoeing, arts and crafts—all the summer camp staples. One week the camp was reserved for cancer patients, another week for kids with autism, another for young people with diabetes. Then there was our week—“Camp Walk and Roll” for children and teenagers with muscular dystrophy. Eric and Maggie didn’t volunteer to take care of Michael there; he already had an annual guardian angel at Twin Lakes, a man by the name of Chuck Otto, who used a week of vacation time every year to go to camp. He became Michael’s counselor and his buddy. In the meantime, Eric and Maggie took care of other campers who were dealing with the same things they saw Michael deal with in our home. They pushed wheelchairs, held the hands of those who could still walk, carried kids into and out of the swimming pool, took them to the bathroom, helped them shower. They had become the kind of young people Cheryl and I wanted to brag about, like I just did. And Carmen, though younger than Michael, would demonstrate that same selfless heartbeat as she grew older and Michael began showing more and more the effects of muscular dystrophy. Truly, with each passing day, all of us were living lives increasingly enriched by the boy a Romanian nurse had once said was “no good.”
Remember the words of the neurologist who told us Michael would never talk and never bond with people? He was wrong. After years of speech therapy, Michael did speak for the first time, at the age of eight, and then we couldn’t shut him up!
One development was especially curious. I cannot for the life of me give you a reason for what started happening, other than to point to one doctor’s assessment that Michael had a kind of autistic quality when it came to his memory and his fixation with cars. He would flip through brochures from auto dealerships, and though he could not read, he would look at the pictures and we would tell him what they were: Honda Accord, Ford F-150 pickup, Toyota Sienna minivan—the list goes on and on. If a vehicle was on an American road, Michael knew it from sight. And it was always the first question he would try to piece together when meeting our friends. “What car . . . what you . . . what drive?” And when you answered, you entered his memory bank. The next time you saw him, even a year later, he would rattle off a detailed description. “Jeep Cherokee, black outside, gray cloth inside, has lift back, V-6, 2001.” And then there would be a jaw-dropping, stunned silence from the owner of that Jeep.
When he wasn’t amazing folks with his memory, he was melting their hearts with three words he’d heard a lot around our house and was particularly fond of saying. “Love you too.” You didn’t necessarily have to tell him you loved him first; he would say it anyway. This from the kid who was never supposed to bond with others and now had a legion of friends and acquaintances who never missed a chance to spend a few minutes with him.
His spirit, his innocence, and his appreciation of even the smallest kind gesture drew people to him in a way we never could have imagined. Phil Bollier was one of those people who felt that attraction, that pull. His chance meeting with Michael became one of those blackberry moments that would change the course of a basketball team, a high school, and dare I say the world.
Phil was an Indiana high school basketball coach who moved his family south so he could become the varsity coach at the newly opened Mill Creek High School in Hoschton, Georgia, a few miles from our home in Braselton. By this time, Michael had been in a wheelchair for a few years, with muscular dystrophy having stolen his ability to stand. As the school year began in 2004, Michael was driving his motorized chair into a special-needs classroom. The gentle whir of the motor caught Phil’s attention as he walked down the hallway, and so he poked his head into the classroom and the two struck up a conversation that centered on, you guessed it, what kind of car the coach drove. Michael got the specs, Phil turned to leave, and Michael hit him with the sledgehammer. “Love you too, Bollier.”
That afternoon, after the school bus dropped Michael off and as he drove his chair up the driveway, I checked his backpack and found a note from this coach, Phil Bollier. He loved meeting Michael, it read. And he wanted Michael on his team. Why? Because he wanted his players to learn two things from this kid in a wheelchair. One was maximum effort. He knew how limited Michael was physically but also noticed that he used every ounce of energy he had just to get around. And he wanted them to learn what it meant to have a heart for others. Phil had been pierced by those three words: Love you too.
When I shared that note with Cheryl, her mind went immediately to a day years before when we were watching one of Eric’s Little League games. Michael, wearing the leg braces he always wore before the wheelchair became a necessity, made his way into the dugout and reached for a bat. As Cheryl was about to scoop him up and bring him back to our lawn chairs behind home plate, he said, “Michael play ball.” We knew that being on a team like his big brother was on was never going to be an option. But you know the crazy thing about that moment? While Cheryl and I had already come to grips with it, obviously Michael had not. Apparently, in his view, he was at the ballpark, and his brother was playing. Why not grab a bat? Maybe he had never given up hope, even into his high school years. Maybe he knew something we didn’t. And now this—an invitation to be a part of the high school basketball team. We were all in.
In no time at all, Michael had memorized every car driven by every player on the team, and for those who didn’t drive yet, well, he knew what their parents drove. For fun in the locker room, they would quiz him, and they’d laugh, and Michael would hit ’em with a “Love you too,” and they’d say it in return. And since I was usually in there in case Michael needed something, I got to witness this interaction. It was such a blessing. There were times when Coach Bollier’s pregame speech would center on Michael. “How high can you raise your right hand, Michael?” the coach would ask. Michael would try to raise his forearm maybe an inch or two off the armrest for just a moment. “You see, boys, everything he does requires maximum effort on his part. Let’s make sure we do the same thing tonight. We hold nothing back. Hey, Michael, thanks for that. Love you too.”
“Love you too, Bollier.”
“Hey, Chase,” the coach would say as he looked at his starting point guard. “Love you too.”
“Love you too, Coach.”
“Hey, Travis, love you too.”
“Love you too, Coach.”
Hey, Kyle . . . Jermaine . . . Zach . . . the roll call went on with the same encouragement and the same refrain. And as tip-off approached, twelve players would gather around the kid in the wheelchair. One would gently hold Michael’s hands in his, and the others would place theirs on top. “One, two, three . . . Hawks!” And then Mill Creek would take the floor. I’d love to say this team wrote a Hollywood script and roared to the state championship. Truth is, this brand-new school lost more than it won. But some seeds were being planted; some blackberries were being enjoyed and shared, both on that basketball court and in the classroom.
When Phil wasn’t coaching, he was teaching, and in all of his classes, he would talk about this kid Michael Johnson and his fondness for those three words. He would talk about sign language and how for a lot of students there is just one sign and it involves the middle finger. Phil would say he had another one that should replace that. To say “I love you” in sign language, the index finger and the pinkie are held straight up, and the thumb is extended horizontally. The index finger is the I, and with the thumb it forms an l for love. The u is formed with the index finger and the pinkie. Phil taught this in his classroom. And for a little added touch, he would tip the index finger right at you to say, “Love you too.” You didn’t have to wear the cardinal and navy blue of the Mill Creek Hawks to learn from Phil Bollier.
This went on for three seasons, Phil coaching and Michael sitting right behind him in his wheelchair. Now let’s be clear—Michael didn’t really care about basketball, but he loved being a part of that team, being one of the guys. He would come rolling out of the locker room at halftime and fill me in on what had gone on in there. “What did Coach have to say, Michael?”
“Bollier mad. Break a clipboard.” In one game that had gotten pretty physical, the Hawks’ center, Spencer, fouled out in the closing minutes. He stormed to the bench, threw a towel, took a seat beside Phil, and buried his head in his hands. Michael attempted to cut the tension. “Spencer drive a Isuzu Rodeo?” There was a pause, and then the big man turned and mustered a half smile and a nod.
“Yeah, Mike . . . Isuzu Rodeo. Love you too.”
On the night of the final home game of Michael’s senior year, the players who would be graduating were honored in a pregame ceremony. They were introduced individually and walked with their parents to center court. They were cheered and given a gray blanket with their name and number embroidered in cardinal red next to the Mill Creek logo. The last name called was Michael Johnson. Cheryl and I walked behind him as he drove his chair to the middle of the floor. As with the other seniors, there was applause, especially from the student section, and when we looked in that direction, we saw them standing, arms raised toward the rafters, hands forming a now familiar message: the “Love you too” sign they had learned from Phil Bollier—a special basketball coach and an even better man.
Phil makes regular trips overseas, coaching with the group Athletes in Action. They’ve been to China twice, the Philippines, and Macedonia, just to name a few destinations, and no matter where they go, I always get an email. It’s always a team picture of Phil’s guys and their opponents standing together. And they all have a hand raised, with the index finger and pinkie pointing to the sky and the thumb horizontal, and I know that Phil’s been teaching again. And that is always a blackberry to savor.