Seven of Seven

DAVID ANDREW NAYLOR
Last, but never least! In fact we had NO LEASTS! Dave joined the Naylor crew some five years after No. 6, Jeff, arrived. So I like to think of him not as an afterthought, but as a BONUS! Because he truly livened up our lives. I was 42 when he was born, so the prior 9 months were not the easiest; suffice it to say that having babies is definitely for the young, or younger than 42, anyway!.Dave truly filled our lives with joy; (after a rocky first month or 6 weeks due to a lung deficiency which showed up mostly as a slight duskiness in his colour), he began to thrive and turned into an incredibly happy and contented baby. The whole family doted on David, and yes! spoiled him ridiculously! He never had to ask for anything, he just pointed at it, and BINGO, he had it! So, as a consequence, he never really bothered to talk as early as our other kids, but once he started, he’s never quit since!In school, David was the source of a great deal of riotous merriment on behalf of both teachers and students. His teachers never had to sing “Send in the clowns”, they already had one in the classroom. Consequently David had a very good time in school. For example, usually hours before Hallowe’en, David would come to me practically on bended knee, pleading, “Mom, can we whip up such and such a costume? I have to wear it to school in the morning”. One year in high school, he blackened his face, hands, etc., wore his hair in an Afro and went to school all decked out as a ni……..(whoops! Not allowed). His classmate, who happened to be a colored boy, had the locker next to Dave’s, both were rifling through their lockers at the same time, and the other kid gets a little worried, and says to Dave “Hey, man, whatcha doin’ in Dave Naylor’s locker?”
The next year, he topped it all off by going as a FAT ARAB! (I had a heap of sewing to do on that one….). Kids were taking his picture all over the cafeteria, in fact I have one somewhere in my thousands of pictures, some day I’ll run across it and post it for y’all to see how realistic he looked. Like he was First Assistant to Saddham Hussein.Dave was immensely popular in school, and to top it all off, if he didn’t join the football team at Bonnie Doon High! What were they called, seemed to me it was The Lancers, but maybe my memory’s faulty on that one. Anyway, I lived in constant fear that he would really get CREAMED, skinny 140 lb. stripling that he was, up against those big beefy 200 lb. bags of muscle and testosterone. I was immensely glad when that petered out, and he got back to normal. Or at least as near normal as David ever was. David’s “normal” was to say the least “Unique”.Dave’s name, if I remember right, means “Loved, Loving” and he SO lived up to that, he was dearly loved by his family, his skillion friends, and he loved everybody in return! I don’t think he ever had an enemy in the whole world. So helpful, so kind, helped me paint the whole outside of our house at 9257 just a few years back now…..plus the never-ending fence! Took his whole summer holiday that year just to help his aging parents.

YAY FOR DAVID! YOU ARE THE MOSTEST AND THE BESTEST, and your momma LOVES YA!