Treasury of Joy & Inspiration by Editors of Reader's Digest

Author:Editors of Reader's Digest
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781621450689
Publisher: Readers Digest

Quotable Quotes

If you’re lucky enough to do well, it’s your responsibility to send the elevator back down. Quoted by Kevin Spacey

• • •

Joy is one of the only emotions you can’t contrive. Bono

A Family for Freddie

by Abbie Blair

December 1964

I remember the first time I saw Freddie. He was standing in his playpen at the adoption agency where I work. He gave me a toothy grin. “What a beautiful baby,” I thought.

His boarding mother gathered him into her arms. “Will you be able to find a family for Freddie?” she asked.

Then I saw it. Freddie had been born without arms.

“He’s so smart. He’s only ten months old, and already he walks and talks.” She kissed him. “Say ‘book’ for Mrs. Blair.”

Freddie grinned at me and hid his head on his boarding mother’s shoulder. “Now, Freddie, don’t act that way,” she said. “He’s really very friendly,” she added. “Such a good, good boy.”

Freddie reminded me of my own son when he was that age, the same thick dark curls, the same brown eyes.

“You won’t forget him, Mrs. Blair? You will try?”

“I won’t forget.”

I went upstairs and got out my latest copy of the Hard-to-Place list.

Freddie is a ten-month-old white Protestant boy of English and French background. He has brown eyes, dark-brown hair and fair skin. Freddie was born without arms, but is otherwise in good health. His boarding mother feels he is showing signs of superior mentality, and he is already walking and saying a few words. Freddie is a warm, affectionate child who has been surrendered by his natural mother and is ready for adoption.

“He’s ready,” I thought. “But who is ready for him?”

It was ten o’clock of a lovely late-summer morning, and the agency was full of couples—couples having interviews, couples meeting babies, families being born. These couples nearly always have the same dream: they want a child as much like themselves as possible, as young as possible and—most important—a child with no medical problem.

“If he develops a problem after we get him,” they say, “that is a risk we’ll take, just like any other parents. But to pick a baby who already has a problem—that’s too much.”

And who can blame them?

I wasn’t alone in looking for parents for Freddie. Any of the caseworkers meeting a new couple started with a hope: maybe they were for Freddie. But summer slipped into fall, and Freddie was with us for his first birthday party.

“Freddie is so-o-o big,” said his boarding mother, stretching out her arms.

“So-o-o big,” said Freddie, laughing. “So-o-o big.”

And then I found them.

It started out as it always does—an impersonal record in my box, a new case, a new “Home Study,” two people who wanted a child. They were Frances and Edwin Pearson. She was 41. He was 45. She was a housewife. He was a truck driver.

I went to see them. They lived in a tiny white frame house in a big yard full of sun and old trees. They greeted me together at the door, eager and scared to death.

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