I Love You Too, Ollie
Seattle, 1999
“Liz, I want some Froot Loops. Liz, please get me some Froot Loops.” I rolled over to my left, meeting two summer-sky blue eyes looking back at me. “I want some Froot Loops, Liz.”
I looked at the clock. 7:53 a.m. “Okay, Ollie, lets go get you some Froot Loops,” I said with a sigh. Frazier was still asleep, on the other side of the bed, so Ollie and I crawled over him. I picked the toddler up, and he clasped his chubby arms around my neck. “Is that my good morning hug? Thank you. I like getting good morning hugs.”
As Ollie ate his cereal in his booster seat at the table, I started making myself a pot of coffee. “Liz! You got to not make that noise, Liz,” he told me as I used the coffee grinder to grind up the coffee beans.
“I’ve got to make that noise in order to make my coffee, sweetheart. What’s coffee got in it that is bad for little people like you?” I asked him.
“Caffeine!” he said excitedly. Then he chomped down another spoonful of cereal with a smile, waving his spoon in the air like a magic wand, before returning it to the Winnie the Pooh bowl for another bite.
“That’s right, coffee has caffeine in it, which is why Liz insists on drinking it every morning, especially when you get up as early as you did today.” I sat down next to him at the table in my flannel pajama pants and tee shirt while I waited for my coffee to brew. I was still waking up, still finding myself staring off into space at absolutely nothing, while my mind put my body on auto-pilot.
“What did you dream about, Ollie?” I asked him, suddenly waking up from one of my staring sequences.
“I dreamed about bad guys and nasty pirates, but they didn’t get me, because there was a big crocodile who chased them away,” he told me.
“Oh,” I said understandably, recognizing his story as the fate of Captain Hook in the Peter Pan book I had read to him three times yesterday.
“Liz, I love you.” His head was cocked to his right, my left. He’d paused between bites of cereal to tell me those four little words.
I stopped for a moment, halfway in shock. That was only the second time he had ever told me that on his own, out of nowhere, in the middle of a non-existent conversation. I gathered my wits and told him happily, “I love you too, Ollie. Thank you.”
I jumped up from the table and ran to the bedroom where Frazier lay dozing. “Frazier, wake up. Wake up. He said it. He said it to me again.”
He opened his eyes, squinting at the light in the room. “What? He said he loved you again?” He smiled with me. He could see the joy in my eyes.
“Yeah. He said it again. That’s the second time.”
“Well?” Frazier asked me.
“Well, what?” I asked him back.
“Well, how does that make you feel?” He was as happy as I was.
“How does it make me feel? How do you think it makes me feel? It’s indescribable.”
Oliver was struck and killed by a deputy’s vehicle in Beaverton, Oregon on April 15, 2021. He was 24 years old.
