His boy’s birthday is next week. So when the little fourth-grader pulled him aside the other day, seeking an answer to a question, Ricky Sisk figured it was probably about a toy.
He is a sensitive kid, kind and caring and always has been, Sisk said. So the question shouldn’t have put his father in the spin that it did, Sisk said.
Yet, what to tell him?
“Dad,” the boy said, “does everything that happened mean my birthday is really a sad day?”
OK, I am partly responsible for Ricky Sisk Jr. asking the question, though I honestly don’t remember my part in it.
This is what you need to know: Ricky Jr. was born on April 20. Apparently, I knocked on Sisk’s door nine years ago, and sat with him and his then-wife awhile and chatted about their hopes and fears for their infant son, a child born on a day that so many young people died.
Someone last week handed the boy, a gifted student, the resulting column, and he read it, immediately setting upon his father to ask him about it.
Ricky Sisk and I caught up.
He remembers the day “very, very well,” he said. He was working at a snack company then and was watching television on a break in the lunch room when the first reports came in.
“I got tears in my eyes because I couldn’t believe this was going on, especially that it was actually going on here,” Sisk, 44, remembered.
Just before quitting time, he received a page from his wife. It was time.
His son was born at 10:34 p.m. at St. Joseph’s Hospital.
“I remember standing there and just staring at him. I couldn’t believe it,” Sisk said. He remembers the doctor joking that he looked like he was holding a miracle.
“The nurses walked up and told me I was really holding a miracle, that every child born that day is replacing the children who lost their lives that day. I had totally forgotten everything until I stood there holding my son.”
Ricky Jr. is a big boy now, his father said, “4-foot-7, 115 pounds, a solid kid.
“He’s silly, he likes to joke around, playing practical jokes just the way I was,” Sisk said.
He is in his fourth year playing the line in midget football, and is a mathematical whiz, who gets in trouble not because he ever gets an answer wrong, but because he doesn’t show his teachers how he got there.
Ricky Sisk repeats a question he says I asked him nine years ago.
“I am not really afraid for my son. I am teaching him about the world, about family and about people, how you can’t trust everyone, that a friend becomes one not just because they are nice, but because they earn the title.
“I am teaching him to be a great child and a good citizen. I am raising him to be responsible in this life and to be a good person to people, teaching him that you can’t control what this life does, but you can control what it is you do.”
He plans to take his son to the Columbine Memorial this weekend to give him a better understanding of April 20, 1999, and what happened.
He finally answered his son, but not before asking if any other kid in his class was born on the same day. One was.
“I told him that he represents life after death, that his birthday is very special for that reason, and that he should celebrate it fully.” Ricky Sisk said.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
