I’m Batman

Tomorrow—or today, depending on when I decide to post this—would be Gerred’s 45th birthday.

I have been thinking about Batman and so much more.

Gerred was a Batman boy from the time he was little. He had a white cabinet in his bedroom that I suppose was intended to be a china cabinet, but there wasn’t a china cup in sight. It was stuffed with Batman toys and figurines, books, clippings, and whatever other Batman treasures he accumulated.

We had seen Michael Keaton as Batman at the movies, and as far as I was concerned, Michael Keaton was the real Batman. There have been other good ones. Gerred especially liked Ben Affleck, which surprised both of us a little, and we agreed Christian Bale was good. But Michael Keaton was Batman in the same way that there is only one real Santa Claus. The others may wear the suit, but you know.

Gerred wore black a lot, and for a big boy he was remarkably graceful. A gym teacher, Kyle Dill, once called him “Cat” because of the way he moved. That made one of his favorite little performances particularly appropriate.

It didn’t matter where we were or what we were doing. It didn’t matter whether I was busy, aggravated with him, or trying to be serious about something. Gerred would sashay across the room, come right up beside me, raise one arm dramatically over his head, look me rivet eye to rivet eye, and announce:

“I’m Batman.”

And my heart would laugh.

He knew it, too.

There was another Batman day when Gerred was probably eleven or twelve. We were driving through Huntsville on what must have been one of those wonderful big-trash days when people put things out by the road that are much too interesting to drive past without looking.

And there it was.

It was an enormous cardboard Batman display, probably from a store or movie theater. It must have been five or six feet tall and ten or twelve feet long, folded in the middle—a whole Batman scene sitting out by somebody’s trash.

I hit the brakes.

“Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!”

I backed up right there on the highway, looked at him, and said, “Of course we’re getting it.”

Because of course we were.

My heart was thumping, and I know his was about to beat out of his chest. We wrestled and wiggled and waddled that enormous thing around until somehow we got it into my car and brought it home. Then we had to clear a corner of Gerred’s bedroom, which was no small undertaking. His bedroom was not Zen. Eventually we slithered our prize into place and pronounced it good. It was beautiful.

Gerred and I always considered that one of our great trash-day scores. His daddy had been a great repurposer, always able to see what some discarded thing might become and dreaming up another life for it. I think there was a little bit of his daddy in our excitement that day, too. Somebody else had thrown something away, and we could see treasure.

And then there was the Batman suit.

By this time Gerred was too tall and too grown-up-shaped for the children’s Batman costumes hanging at Walmart, but he still wanted to be Batman. He loved, absolutely loved to dress up in a costume.

Unfortunately, he had a mother who couldn’t sew. That isn’t entirely true. My Grandma Minnie was a wonderful seamstress. She made both of my wedding dresses, and when I was a girl in 4-H, I could sew quite nicely—as long as I was safely tucked under Grandma Minnie’s wing, with considerable supervision and occasional intervention.
Outside Grandma Minnie’s wing, my sewing ability deteriorated considerably.

But Gerred wanted a Batman suit.

So we repurposed a black sweatshirt and black sweatpants. He had black gloves and black tennis shoes. Most of Batman was therefore taken care of.

All Mama had to do was make the headgear. This turned out not to be a particularly beginner-friendly sewing project. It had to fit over his head and come down around his neck, and most importantly, it had to have those unmistakable Batman ears.

I made it.

He put the whole thing on and went wherever he was going—I can’t remember now whether he wore it for Halloween, Homecoming parade, or both. I do remember that he was terribly hot. Gerred ran hot anyway, and when he finally pulled that black headpiece off, his hair was absolutely wet and sweat was running down his face.
But he was grinning.

“I felt like Batman,” he said.

And then again:
“ I felt like Batman.”

That was all I needed to hear. My sewing had been a success. Then he looked at me, with that little Gerred grin, and added: “Thank you, Mama. It kind of looks like a cat, but thank you.”

Apparently I had made the ears a little too big.
He had wisely waited until after the event to mention it.

Years later, Gerred became a much better seamster than his mother and even made himself a Japanese hakama. Maybe that Batman costume helped convince him that somebody in the family needed to learn how to sew properly.

I don’t have many pictures to go with these stories. I may have one of him dressed more like a ninja , but this isn’t really about Batman. It’s about a little boy and then a young man who could make his mother laugh by walking across a room in black, striking a ridiculous pose, looking her straight in the eye and saying two words.

It’s about the day we found treasure in somebody else’s trash.

It’s about a homemade costume with ears that looked suspiciously feline, worn by a boy who didn’t care because, for that little while, he felt like Batman.

Gerred would be 45 years old on September 5.  I suspect he would still have had opinions about who wore the suit best. And I know that if the moment were just right, he might still have walked over, raised that arm above his head, looked me rivet eye to rivet eye and said:

“I’m Batman.”
And I think my heart would have laughed exactly the same way.❤️

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