My new neph Aidan

My little neph Aidan was born Thursday night/Friday morning. I got a call from Moms during the middle of the 4th quarter of the LA-Boston Game 1, telling me that Aidan was on his way and me and my younger-bro Adam needed to get going immediately. The little nig had to rear his precious little head during the end of Game 1, didn't he? Ha. He was a couple days past his due date. I actually wanted him to drop the prior week, while I was in LA, so I couldve given him a shout-out on television. But he dissed me.

It's already apparent that the immediate family -- and extended fam to a larger extent -- is gonna revolve around this young dude. He has two significant distinctions. For the immediate fam, he is my parents first grandchild and me and the sibs first niece or nephew. For the extended fam, he is Lydia's first child, Lyd being the Queen Bee and Unofficial Favorite of the Thomas and Frazier cousins. She was the first girl and semi-perfect child of the first slate of kids, which included my big couzzes Rashaad, Jason and Ryan; Lyd, me and my twin-cuz Halima. Every new addition is met with excitement and affection, but Lyd's first kid is a big deal. It's never articulated that way, but you can sense it.

The sibs and I are a weird pack. There are five us: Lyd (30), me (29), P (27), Chrish (25) and A (23). Until Lyd got hitched in November, that question started coming up: "When are one of them gonna finally get married." And as our cousins and close friends started popping out kids with increasing regularity and my parents siblings and friends reveled in grandparenthood, there was some pressure building. Straight-up, I was thinking about going to a trailer park and seeding-up some pwt with low self-esteem or making my way back to the hood and giving some early-20s hoodrat her 8th illegitimate kid. But, alas, not even they were falling for my advances.

But seriously, not get too Freudian or Spockian or Philian, but there's something at work with me and the sibs. Our friends say it's a mix of "outrageous standards" or commitment phobias, the list goes on. But Aidan looks like he's gonna be the only grandchild for quite some time, unless one Christian's condoms malfunction.

I have two groups of blood-brother-like friends that are basically separate entities. The one group is all Jehovah's Witnesses. I kid you not, but every last one of them is married. Rek, Vino, Sheez, Nast, Swayz, Dubb, J, San, all of them. Two have kids, one has a seed on the way and I have all the rest on the clock. I am a martian in that group. My other crew is, basically, a crew full of martians. Up until a month or so ago, when Gee proposed to Meredith, we were a group of unmarried, childless black men closing in our 30s. You might think that college and careers were part of the reason, but not even that truly explained the bucking of the statistic/trend. And again, we've spent enough sessions debating why things are the way they are, but you can't really put your finger on it. These things kinda just happen the way they happen. And I'll probably be the last of that crew to get hitched and seeded, too.

So when the Thomas fam learned that Lyd was pregnant it was some wild news. I'm sure somewhere in the glee, my parents were also breathing a figurative sigh of relief, like "Finally!"

Mom and Pops, mind you, are from that generation that married early and started squeezing out kids almost immediately and with regularity -- at least that's how it was with black folks in Buffalo. So when they saw their children marching on without so much as a single, meaningful relationship that they could see lead to marriage and then, at last, a grandbaby, I'm sure it was unsettling for them. But, as always, Lyd to the rescue.

No joke, Aidan is kind of a savior in that way. My other sibs may not have even given a milisecond of thought to the grandchild issue, but i used to think about it occassionally in my reflective moments. And since I knew (hoped) I wasn't gonna be letting my sperm fly into any ovaries any time soon, I was hoping that, at some point, that grandchild would come -- but under non-stressful circumstances. For instance, if Adam came home and alerted the fam that he impregnated a Haitian immigrant with AIDS, well, that wouldn't be so dope. Or if P came home and told the fam that a one-night stand with a drunk Italian in a Jims Steakout bathroom resulted in a her mulatto fetus, well, that wouldn't be so sweet. Lyd, however, is happily married, with a healthy son and she even left NYC to come home for Aidan's first year or so. And my parents are giddy. They're saying all the ridiculous grandparent things. About an hour after Aidan was born, my Moms was standing outside the newborn room, with her palms and nose pressed against the glass, alerting us to things that are biologically impossible. things like, "Ooh look guys, Aidan's laughing at Najib." This is patently absurd, seeing as though newborns can't smile, let alone be amused and react by laughing. Moms is sure of it though. Pops says that Aidan already has a distinct personality. You gotta just smile and go along with them. They're going to be a handful as grandparents though...I'm sure of that.

I'll be gone soon, but for these last few months in Buff, I plan on spending a good amount of time with my neph. One of the few regrets I have about leaving Buff and visiting so infrequently (I was a once or twice a year dude) was that my young-young cousins practically have no idea who I am. I can't have it like that with my neph AD...that's my nickname for him, AD, like Adrian Dantley AD.

But anyways, another grand shout to the new Lyd-Aidan-Najib trio. Good times are ahead.