My two daughters visited me this afternoon for our portion of Christmas, the elder with her husband of three years. When we sat down for the ritual gift exchange, she handed me a small lumpy package, with a smile. I was, not surprisingly, slightly confused and a bit more taken aback, but I dutifully opened it anyway. It contained a pair of baby socks.
So now I'm going to be a grandfather.
Oh. My. God.
Let me admit up front: this is a selfish diary. it lacks any trenchant political observations, it's not filled with interesting facts you'll store away in your memory banks to wow party guests or shut up some Tea Party yahoo. As much as anything, it's my own effort (the first of many, I'm sure) to sort through the myriad emotions, memories, fears, exultations, and reveries I've been filled with since I stopped crying and hugging my daughter as hard as I could and for an embarrassingly long time. I fully expect to cry in the course of writing this (here it comes now, in fact).
The baby socks sit on the table next to my laptop. They're white, with faint yellow ducks stencilled across the tops. They are impossibly small. I can't remember either of my girls really being that small, ever, even though the memories of their birth is as fresh as today's sunset in my mind. They are also, for the next eight months anyway, anonymous - I won't meet their proper owner until late summer. This, I suppose, gives me some time to get my own act together, which is undoubtedly a good thing. Because I have a lot to get together between now and then.
One of the things that middle age (I just turned 58) gives you is a deeper sense of the passage of time. When you're young (and I never thought I'd write in this long-in-the-tooth voice) things are immediate, the past quickly retrieveable. Even before the news today, however, I found myself increasingly contemplating the fact that my sentient life now stretches back well over a half century. I can remember Roger Maris' 61st home run, the blizzard that struck the day before John Kennedy's inauguration (I earned a lot of money that day shovelling walks, until I became overcome with the cold while working on some nice old lady's house. She brought me in, gave me hot chocolate, and let me watch the speech while she slipped out and finished the job herself). I remember military planes droning in and out of nearby MacGuire Air Force Base during the Cuban Missile Crisis - we'd watch them from my back yard, with a child's incomprehension of the abyss over which we teetered. I've nearly lost a brother to Viet Nam, and a nephew to Iraq. My grandmother was 15 before the Wright Brothers flew, and watched with me while men landed on the Moon. My grandchild now may well live to see the twenty-second century. My own life span to date takes up almost a quarter of American history since the Declaration of Independence, and well over that since the Constitutional Convention. The sweep of the years has become fascinating to me - how things flow into each other across time, how immediately connected we are (or can be, if we reach out for it) to our history, and how any one given life is at once meaningless compared to that immense flow and at the same time precious for its own small glistening eddies.
What do I say to this child, when it arrives and can listen to me? How do I give it some feeling for the immensities and intimacies into which it arrives? What do you say to your posterity when it literally stares you in the face? I need to work this out, and to find a means of communicating that will avoid that curse of pedagogy, dullness, and that nearly inevitable aspect of reminisce, self-centeredness. The more I think about it, the more impossible it seems.
I always prided myself on not talking to my kids as if they were kids, or idiots. The advantage of being a parent as opposed to a grandparent, however, is immediacty and intimacy of access: I had eighteen more or less uninterrupted years to show my own girls what I felt was important in living and how to live, in history, culture, personal integrity, and intellectual rigor. At the risk of going on a complete ego trip, I think it went reasonably well. Now the task begins anew, but at a critical remove, from my point of view anyway. My values must be outshone by my grandchild's parents' values, and my understanding of history etc by theirs. This is, I suppose, the final test of how well I managed at parenting: how my kids do the job themselves.
An oddity of my legal education was a class required in our first year. This class wasn't about torts or contracts or property or procedure, but about linguistic philosophy. What makes a "chair" a chair? When is it one? And, how, by extension, can we hope to honestly define anything, when even the simplest of terms and concepts are subject to so many vagaries? The answers, as with most philosophy classes, were themseves maddeningly vague, but I think it boiled down to one idea: context is everything. Meaning, isolated from the flow of life in which the need for definition arises, is an impossibility, if not an absurdity. This is a profoundly relativistic observation, and one worthy of the relativistically defined century through we've just passed. I wonder if it will be as acute an insight to my grandchild, or if it'll seem quaint - phlogiston of the ancient brain - to its future world. I tend to think the former (with the egotism that accompanies any age as it passes).
So, at the risk of being fuddy, I suppose I'll make that the basic idea, when I talk to my grandkid(s). Just as I showed my own kids not just what the best pop and rock music was at the time, but what roots it arose from; just as showed them not just the day's good movies but those stretching back to the silents; just as I embraced not just modren literature but classical as well; so I think the world will continue to be best understood not in snapshot but in motion, a movement that begins long before our individual arrival on the scene and whose momentum continues long after we cease to participate. And then, of course, the trick is to see what glistening little eddies of your own you can add to that stream. Their world does not arise or exist in a vacuum, nor is it self contained. It is rather fileld with and influenced by the echoes of all that has gone before, and it contains unnoticed tny swirls that will profoundly affect its future. Context - in history, family, culture - is indeed everything. We have an ancestry to lean upon and to build from, and a posterity to be responsible for and to foster. It's a subtle lesson, and one of constant tiny discoveries, but I hope, between my kids and me, that some feeling for it can seep through and sweep down through the coming ages. In whatever time I have left.
I hope I have a few more swirls left in my bag of tricks.