Time Enough to Marvel

The Boston Globe

Thirteen weeks without writing a column. Without cutting and pasting pieces of life, a thing I did three times a week for much of my life. My grandson, Adam, is asleep upstairs in my house. His mother, my daughter, is in Foxborough waiting to try out for "American Idol." He dreams and so does she.

My dream was always to write and I did and I loved it, and then I stopped and for this summer, at least, I hadn't missed it. But I do now.

I miss what I will lose if I don't record what I see. Adam eating blueberries, one by one, his dimpled fingers pincers, the act exact, the motion perfect. "More" he signs when his dish is empty, his palms facing each other, the tips of his fingers tap, tap, tapping until I say, "Do you want more blueberries?" And he says, "Da" and I refill his dish and he smiles. 

His fingers are as blue as his eyes and his lips are blue, too, and his hair is white, bleached from days at the beach, and he sits in his high chair in a Onesie with his tanned feet crossed.

He plays peek-a-boo now, squeezing into a corner, "hiding" in his favorite spot. He stacks blocks, throws balls, bangs a drum, dances, sings, shakes his head "no" and twirls until he's dizzy.

All summer I've been watching him, amazed that all people begin this way small and vulnerable, happy and pure. Adam has made me seek out the baby in the adults that I see. I try to imagine the baby each person was.

My father is 82 and has stage 4 prostate cancer. He was a soldier and a police officer. He is a husband and a father. But in the beginning he was simply his mother's baby boy. Did he stuff blueberries in his mouth, too? Did he sit with his small feet crossed? Did he play peek-a-boo and bang a drum and shake his head "no." Is it possible that he taught himself to walk one summer, wobbly in June, the way Adam was, clinging to tables and chairs, holding on to walls falling again and again, pulling himself up, crying, but not often, his tears always erased by kisses? Did his parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends watch him and smile at him and clap and laugh and cheer him on? And at the end of August was he, too, racing through a kitchen and a backyard and the sand along a beach?

In 12 weeks, Adam went from stumbling to stampeding. And I saw it all. Someday he will be a man. He may live to be 82. I want to write what I see so that the laughing and the cheering and the peek-a-boo and the way he twirls and crosses his chubby feet remain even when they're gone.

"What have you been doing with all your free time?" people keep asking. And I say that I have been doing the best things. I have been blowing bubbles and reading children's books and singing songs and coloring and counting Cheerios, Binkies, blueberries, french fries, and cut up pieces of ham. And I have felt not despair, but hope. Not that the world is a terrible place where you can lose everything you have in a minute on a summer afternoon. But that the world gives, too. It gives us beauty and it gives us each other.

My grandson is new. My father is old. Little people. Big people. Human life is amazing. 

"Did you have grandparents, Dad?" I asked the other day.

"Of course I had grandparents," he said. "My mother's parents, Jeremiah and Mary Quinn.”

"What did you call your grandmother?”

 "Mary," he said. "Mary," he said again.

And he smiled.