Stories of Thanksgiving: Body Then Soul : * A baby’s brush with death reaffirms his life.

On Thanksgiving, I’ve always been quick to make a list of all the things I’m thankful for, ranging from world peace to “Baywatch” in syndication, because this, by definition, is a day to give thanks. But to whom? The NFL for football on Thursday? Grandma for the cobbler? Or, dare it be said, to God? This question wouldn’t even have occurred to me a couple of years ago. But now I think I know the answer.

Our son Cisco was born on Feb. 15, 1994. My wife Susan was only 33 1/2 weeks pregnant, and Cisco weighed only 4 pounds, 6 ounces. He was a tiny little thing--you could almost hold him in the palm of your hand--but he was healthy. We had to cut up diapers into four sections--each smaller than a postcard--to fit him. We fed him with a medicine dropper.

But there was something strange about him, something you can clearly see in the photos we have from that first month. We didn’t know what it was. We didn’t talk about it. But we both felt it.

We didn’t feel connected to him.

On March 15, the day he turned one month old, Cisco, in his mother’s arms, stopped breathing. Susan and I were sitting on the couch when she said, “Does he look blue to you?” He did.

We panicked. We started screaming. Susan was shaking him and I was trying to dial 911 on the phone. I screamed out the door for help, but no one came. Susan screamed his name over and over. I kept pressing the wrong numbers on the phone. Cisco was completely blue by then. Our baby was dying quickly, right in front of us.

Susan was yelling at the 911 dispatcher. “Tell me what to do! My baby’s dying!”

The operator didn’t know. She said to wait for the ambulance. Cisco couldn’t wait. We were in such a panic that we couldn’t think. Susan put our baby on the couch and started pushing on this chest, but it wasn’t working. She yelled for me to get the baby book.

I took “The Baby Book” by Dr. William Sears and started looking for the emergency-care section. Cisco had been blue for more than two minutes. He twitched and his eyelids rolled up. He was gone.

“He’s dead!” Susan screamed.

Just then I opened the book to a drawing of a man performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a baby. Mouth-to-mouth! I’d been in such a panic, I hadn’t been able to think of it. I nstantly blew into his mouth. He jolted and let out a scream, a beautiful, wonderful, amazing scream of life. It was the most joyous sound I have ever heard.

His heart started pumping. His lungs started breathing. His color came back. Our baby was alive! He was taken to Children’s Hospital for observation, and Susan stayed with him overnight. I went home to our other son, Dakota, then 19 months old.

The next day, Susan said the doctors hadn’t been able to find anything wrong with Cisco. Then she smiled. “I think you should go in and look at him.”

I walked into Cisco’s room, leaned over to him, and said “Hi, baby. I love you.”

He opened his eyes to look at me. And he was in there. That was it! My baby was looking at me for the first time. There was life in his eyes. It was like he hadn’t been in there before, and that had been what seemed so strange about him. His body had been alive, but you hadn’t been able to see it in his eyes.

And now here he was, spirit and all. I introduced myself. He smiled. I ran out of the room to get Susan. “He’s here! He’s a baby now!” She already knew. I wasn’t imagining it. In fact, you can see it clearly in the photographs. Before and After. Body then Soul.

But that’s not where I got my answer. I needed something even more concrete. And I got it.

Cisco’s name had been misspelled on his birth certificate. I had proofread the whole thing for mistakes, and it was perfect, except for his name being spelled “Sisco.” So I sent in a copy with that one item changed and nothing else. When they sent us a corrected copy, the name was now spelled correctly. But the date of birth had been changed. It had been moved forward exactly one month, to the date of his rebirth. The birth certificate now reads March 15, 1994.

Thank you, God. For my son Cisco. For everything.