In this Land of I Don’t Know, I know all that I am missing
/The Boston Globe
Beverly Beckham
I say out loud, every day, that I am so grateful for e-mail and FaceTime and WhatsApp, for all the technology that lets me see and talk to my grandchildren, though they are in Scotland and I am an ocean away. I try to remind myself how lucky I am.
My son sends me photos of the kids in their school uniforms. They started school last week. He takes pictures on his phone and I see these pictures within seconds. And because I am old enough to remember when a roll of film had to be developed and then snail-mailed to people far away, I don’t take this magic for granted. I am immersed in gratitude.
And yet.
I haven’t seen my grandchildren since last December, a week before they moved, when we all said goodbye in my driveway. My husband, our daughters, and their families, all of us hugging with masks on, all of us pretending that Scotland is just a short plane ride away, no farther than a trip to the West Coast with a stop in Chicago. All of us ignoring the possibility that it would be a virus and not distance that would keep us apart.
My husband comes from a long line of stiff upper-lippers. Look for the silver lining. He does. And my kids do, too.
I try.
My son and his family, which includes a dog that ended up detained in Germany for a few days, made it safely to their new home in the middle of a pandemic. They didn’t get sick on the plane. They didn’t get sick in the long, isolated months after. Not even heartsick.
Spring came and with it, so did hope. Euan, who is 8 and the youngest of the grandchildren, FaceTimed to show off the raised garden he was planting in a little patio off the small house he now calls home. Home, before January, had been a New York City apartment. He didn’t have a garden there, just a bean plant he grew from seed in a Dixie cup he kept on a windowsill. In Scotland, he was growing zucchini and strawberries and tomatoes and eggplant, he told me.
Last week he FaceTimed to show me his full-grown produce. “These are the strawberries,” he said, turning the phone so that I could see. “And these are the tomahtoes,” he added, broadening his “a” like an Englishman. “And this is aubergine,” the British word for eggplant. “And this is courgette,” another British word. It means zucchini. I had to look it up.
Euan has changed so much since December. He has more words, different words. And fewer teeth. “I’ve lost 10 in total. Six in New York and four in Scotland. And look. I have another loose one,” he said. And he wiggled it. And I saw.
My son got vaccinated in the spring. So did his wife. Here in the states we, his parents, his sisters, and their families were fully vaccinated by early summer. When the United Kingdom lifted restrictions, we would fly over. That’s what we said.
In the meantime, in June, my son flew home for business and we saw him for two days, hugged him — all of us — for the first time in 17 months. We felt freedom in the air. We felt ourselves relaxing. We laughed. We talked. We planned.
On Aug. 2, when Scotland relaxed its restrictions for fully vaccinated travelers from the United States, I went online — eager to book a flight. My husband, who reads to the end of everything, who reads even the fine print, had misgivings.
The Delta variant was surging in the South by then, the numbers of people with COVID-19 increasing in the United States every day. The requirements for flying, for entering a country, for exiting a country, the protocols were in flux.
What happens if we test positive when we arrive in Edinburgh? What happens if we infect the kids? What happens if the rules change and we can’t leave Scotland? What happens if the United States closes its borders and we can’t get back to the States?
My husband says we are living in the Land of I Don’t Know. He has said this since the beginning of the pandemic, when we were wiping down groceries and disinfecting mail.
I don’t know what’s next.
I don’t know about school or travel, about next week or next year.
I don’t know when this will end.
“I don’t know when we’ll be over,” I say to my son.
“It’s OK, ma,” he says to me.
And I look at him and I see him and I hear him because of technology that didn’t exist for all the centuries before this one.
And I am grateful.
But I am sad, too. Because in this Land of I Don’t Know, I know all that I am missing.
