Seeing Life in Front of You

The Boston Herald

The room was different. I remember it as bigger, though it probably wasn't. How big can a hospital room be? I remember the day was cold, but that's easy because it was February. I remember Caryn sitting up in bed, smiling, putting on her robe and the two of us walking down to the nursery to look through the glass at her new baby, Kerry Lynn McLean.

That was 27 years ago. Now that baby has her own baby, Mikaela Elizabeth Renzi, born Saturday night in the same wing of the same hospital.

There was nothing extraordinary in this. Babies are born every day.

And yet extraordinary is exactly what this moment was. A lifetime goes by in a flash. A million moments pass and you find yourself back in a place where you were years ago and the place is the same, only you're not. And it isn't until you're sitting in a hospital room, holding your friend's daughter's new baby, that you realize how long it's been since you held your own babies, and how much life has changed while you watched but didn't see and could never imagine what would be.

If someone had told me that I would someday be holding this child's child, I wouldn't have believed it. If someone had said that this baby and my baby, who hadn't even been conceived yet, would be steadfast friends, would play together as children and party together as teens and grow up and be in each other's weddings, I would have said, "Oh, really?" but I would have been thinking, "Oh, sure."

That's the thing about life. You turn the calendar, you mark off the days, you tally all the birthdays and Easters and Christmases. You do the math.

But you don't see the numbers even when they are right there in front of you.

How it is possible that Kerry is a mother, Kerry, not Caryn's oldest child, but her middle one?

Caryn tried to teach me to play tennis behind Canton High School while Kerry cried in her carriage and Lauren sobbed in hers. Wasn't that just last year? Caryn and I made frog bean bags for somebody's birthday party. Wasn't it Kerry's and wasn't it just a few weeks ago? Kerry used to fall asleep in the middle of the fireworks every Fourth of July.

So many birthdays and Halloweens and pool parties and waiting in line to see Santa and waiting in line at the clam shack at Nauset Beach. And playing gin rummy while the kids slept. And telling the kids to go to sleep, to stop fooling around, thinking there would always be kids fooling around.

Now Kerry is a mother and though I was at her birthday parties and proms and at her wedding and her baby shower, I am stunned that this day is here and that she is, overnight, who her mother and I just yesterday used to be.

I watch Kerry change the baby and wrap her in a blanket and I think, who taught her this? I watch Kerry hand Mikaela to her grandmother and I see Barbara cradle her great grandchild, and I know that she aches because Papa isn't with her, because she can't turn to him and say, "See. Look what we did,"  because it was just a few years ago that she was young and her children were babies, too.

Babies are miracles, not just because they come from nothing and become everything, but because they connect and sustain us.

In the middle of a gray February, in the middle of war talk and tornadoes and scandal, in a world filled with sadness and loss, a child is born, a bridge connecting the past and the future.