On Being An Older Grandfather - 2020

ON BEING AN OLDER GRANDFATHER (2020)

     Thirty-one years ago, we, Jamie Donnelly and I, brought our infant son home. Sevi Donnelly Foreman was three months old when we first met him. We'd flown to Medellin, Colombia to complete the process of adoption so we could bring him home. Thirty-one years later our son returned home with his son, Dorian Alexander, now eighteen months, our grandson. We are on yet another journey, Jamie and I. At forty-two years, we are a unit, sometimes imperfect, but still. We are. There is history here. The past few years have not always been easy, in fact, have rarely been easy. Each time the phone rang we'd wonder if the police were calling to tell us our son was dead. We knew he was out there, without protection, in danger, partnering with someone violent and unstable. Yet, our beloved son found his way back home, his way, not ours, but, still. Home.  "Home," said Robert Frost, "is where when you have to go there they have to take you in." Well, he did come home, and we did take him in. How could we not? His son brought my son home. 

     When Jamie and I decided to adopt we availed ourselves of an adoption counselor to help guide us towards the right decision. I can’t remember her name, but I could never forget this woman: six plus feet tall, very plain, baggy clothes, humorless, wise, to the point, and legally blind. An ancient seer from out of the forest. She was the court appointed social worker assigned to visit the homes of prospective parents. We drove to her plain, cluttered office in a nondescript house in a nondescript development in a nondescript plot of Long Island. Somewhere. Could never find it again. Hundreds perhaps a thousand photos of children covered her walls. When she left the room for a minute, Jamie said, “Look at those pictures, Stephen. They’re all so beautiful.” The counselor returned to the room and said, “Look again. They are all not so beautiful. But you must be prepared to say, “I will love this child forever”. I will love this child forever. I cannot write these words without tears. We made that decision, and, once made, there were no more decisions – tactics, yes, of course, but not decisions.

      Carl Sandburg said, “Children are God’s opinion that life should go on.” While I can’t attest to this with  theological certainty, my children certainly made life full and deep and wonderful, but they did not make life easy. An old cowboy I knew back in Montana, Aaron Pursely, said about his kids, “Wouldn’t give ya a nickel for ‘em; wouldn’t take a million”.  I get it. Two years after her brother, Madden Rose, my daughter, four months, brought her roaring zest, astonishing red hair, and raucous good humor from Colombia, and then, for forever, it was our little band against the world. Until it wasn't. One day, Sevi and Jamie were talking about his difficulty adjusting to a baby sister. "I thought you wanted a sister," Jamie said. "I did," he replied, "But I didn't want you to be her mother." Like most roads, ours was pocked for stretches at a time with potholes, at least two of which qualified as rim busters, but there have also been long, sweet, peaceful miles of private roads ripe with pure pleasure, tooling along, singing a song, the dog ate my ice cream cone, however, like summer in the mountains, they never quite lasted long enough. Tiny creatures. Yours to keep safe until they are no longer yours, as if that will ever happen.  They fly along like seed pods carried elsewhere by the wind, yet, there are times when, given the prevailing currents, without warning, the wind brings a seed pod back.

          So, Dorian Alexander. An actress I met at a party in Hollywood forty-two years ago is his grandmother. She and Gerry Ragni ("mad, bad, and dangerous to know" as Lady Caroline once said about Lord Byron) who, with Jim Rado, created and starred in the original “Hair” on Broadway - Jamie and Gerry dragged me (no pun intended) to dance clubs in LA - "I Will Survive." Donna Summer. "It's Raining Men." -  an experience as foreign to me as sliced ham on a seder plate. However, when the volcanic level thump-da-thump-da-thump-thump-thump finally pounded me damn near senseless,, Jamie and I would dance for hours. Non stop. I had no idea what I was doing, but that didn’t stop me from doing it. We were in great shape. Had to be. Now, she's sitting on the floor doing, "Patty cake, patty cake, baker's man..." with a creature not yet two, her face as delightful as ever, perhaps a bit more peaceful.  

          Has anyone anywhere ever had an ugly grandchild? Odds? He is a perfect little creature, as perfect as any since my own two perfect little creatures, but the feelings are not the same. The love is no less intense, but it feels, somehow, more buoyant, less fraught, unencumbered by small print, knowing what hurts and what doesn’t. Free to wander, feelings surge way past barriers you'd never have known were there. They erupt. From the deep. How come? This is not flight or fight but something else that overcomes the strongest of us, a tap root into the deep-down-dark when beginning was all there was. Do they give us life when life is almost over? A bit more time to pass it on? A fellow named Gaston Bachelard wrote, "Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world, and thus is a world event." And thus it is a world event for me, too. 

Maybe, when we raised our own children, we were too concerned with getting it right. Now's our chance to start over. Nail it this time. No mistakes. News flash: Fugedaboudit! That's no longer our province. My grandson explores the world and takes me with him. Everything is a first. Alpha and Omega. We have the benefit of each other's knowledge. The peace and innocence of his face becomes the peace of my own. Perhaps this is the reason - peace -  peace to “help me make it through the night”, as Tammy Wynette once sang.

He's been walking for awhile and on the verge of actual words. I make a goofy sound; he makes a goofy sound. I've got this kid listening!  Time to raid the old trunk. I'm grooming a whole new audience for all my malarkey! I’m dusting off routines from years ago! That renowned family classic, The Ice Monkey, is anxious to lunge out of retirement. And Jamie's face, peaceful and endearing, as she gently coaches her grandson in his effort to make his first word.

Here's a sight: a little human turning the pages of a book held upside down while sitting on the outstretched legs of some weathered, grey-haired guy of indeterminate but unmistakable age, wearing a faded flannel shirt and and ancient jeans sitting in the tattered armchair that was his father's, one he's been hauling around for years. Been a whole lot of dogs sat in that chair. Kep' it warm. One birthday he was given a new one. The next day Habitat for Humanity came and took it away. It wasn't that the chair was bad or anything like that. It was actually quite handsome. Brand new. That was the problem. It just didn't have any stories in it. 

         

                                                      END

On Being An Older Father (1989)

On Being an Older Father was published in Newsweek when our son was not yet two, and our daughter was on the way. I’m re-printing it here as prequel to a new one which will follow: On Being an older Grandfather.  Stay tuned.                         

    On Being an Older Father  (1989)                                

      Recently, at the wedding of the daughter of a close friend, a thought struck me: "My God," I said to my wife, "When our kid gets married, we're going to be so old we'll have to have it catered by Meals‑On‑Wheels!" My son, you see, is only two.  When he is thirteen, I will be sixty, and the twenty‑first century will be here. You can do the rest of the arithmetic yourself. I'll tell you this, however: it's a strange thing to suddenly find yourself reading the obituary section and Parents Magazine at the same time.

      Sevi, my son, was a long time coming. I first began trying to have him one marriage and many lifetimes ago, and discovered myself infertile. It felt as if someone had died. That marriage died, too, but not before a harrowing assault by a battalion of fertility specialists. A man spends his entire life trying to protect his gonads then offers them up to a breed of medical practisioner equaled in cold‑hearted arrogance only by Porsche mechanics. At least, a Porsche runs after a tune‑up. No matter what those doctors did, my sperm count remained among the lowest on earth. So, I counter‑ attacked with vengeance. I set about fashioning a life that took me anywhere I wanted to go. A child had no place in it.  And I married a woman hell‑bent as myself. She was also infertile. Children were out of the question. It was, we thought, the basis of our relationship ‑‑ until that night, years later, when the issue was suddenly, once again, as alive and insistent as an infant crying in the next room. I don't remember how it came up. We were driving home along rural roads in a rainstorm when my wife said, "You really do want a child, don't you?", and the thought came to me that not once in my entire life had I really felt that I would never be a father. The underlying assumption was simple: someday, somehow, I would be.

           "Yes," I answered, "Yes, yes, yes."

 And, at that moment, I knew I would have one. It was overwhelming. My wife couldn't see or hear me in the utter darkness and driving rain, but I was crying.

                  The video taken when our adopted son was first handed to us shows a man with silver hair taking a baby into his arms. I don't think I look like a grandfather, yet most of my peers look like this, and their children are in college. But I'm fit and fairly certain of my powers. In some sense, I feel as if I've been in training for this all my life. What I've done is to reverse the time frame. My child rearing years will be the last third of my life instead of the middle third. I've been fortunate. While others my age were struggling with their careers and raising families, I was living a life of textbook adventure. My heroes had always been men like Gordon, explorer of the Nile, and Lawrence of Arabia. I don't mean to imply that I operated on their scale or with their skill; but, like these men, I was driven to pit myself against myself in exotic places. There is a photograph of me from this period that shows a man with a week's growth of beard leaning against a tree in a jungle. A cigarette dangles from his mouth. He wears a headband. His eyes look out at you with some amusement and more appraisal, the kind of guy, the sergeants say, you'd want beside you in a firefight. But I'm not sure I like him. The picture hides a lot. There is too much swagger. What I remember most vividly from those times, really, is the loneliness. I was attached to no one. I was building nothing to pass on. Nowadays everything I do has taken on a whole new dimension. Let me explain. Last Fall I put my son in a pack on my back and climbed the mountain behind our house to look for blackberries. Hank, our springer spaniel, who loves wild berries almost as much as he loves flushing pheasant, went with us. We saw deer and porcupine, the tracks of coon and coyote. Lightning had hit a tree I liked, and its roots had erupted from the ground, brown and tangled like a mass of wire. We found the blackberries ‑‑ thousands of them ‑‑ and I could not have been happier and more satisfied if the juicy berries had been the Holy Grail.

                  True, the adjustment to parenthood is not always easy, and, yes, being a father takes up an enormous amount of time. But who would I rather spend it with? I'm not a man who's interested in accumulating companies or commanding an army. I've served my time in the trenches of masculinity, and I don't have many illusions about these things. I fail to see where beating someone up is more satisfying than showing my son where to find the echo or suddenly hearing him speak a sentence where before he only dabbled in isolated words. He has enabled me to touch reserves of strength and love I never knew existed. Nothing is more basic. I will give my child a safe place to sleep. I will give him the food he needs. I will teach him to survive as best I can. And I will protect him with my life. There is a certain serenity in the simplicity of this formula. Sure, sometimes, it's a drag to get up so early in the morning; but, then again, I get to see his face at an hour when it is most innocent, when it is most open. To me he is a work of art, a creation as intense as the Sistine Chapel. The purity of his rage and joy astonishes me.  If I can teach him to love, if I can put him into this world with the ability to handle it yet without the feeling that he must subjugate it, then, I believe, I will have done my job.

                  Am I a better father now than I would have been when I was younger? Yes. Would I recommend that every man wait to have children? Not necessarily. I believe it happened to me at the right time. I cannot speak for anyone else. I do worry about staying healthy and agile enough to be the parent I want to be, and I worry about what will happen when Sevi reaches his teens and begins pulling away at a time when, perhaps more than younger parents, I will want to hold him close. More than anything else, I am afraid that I might die when he needs me the most. However, I have this feeling that I'm going to be around for a long time, that I might even get to be a grandfather, for God's sake. I wouldn't be surprised, but like the pitcher going into the fifth inning with a no hitter, I don't think I should talk about it.

                  Does there have to be more to life than this, I wonder? I guess so, because my wife and I just received word that our infant daughter is waiting for us to come to Colombia and pick her up.  We're told she has red hair, and I cannot wait to have her in my arms.

                                                               END              

Spring Grove - Further Adventures of a Social Worker

This case, as did every one of the others, had a terrible, built in sadness, only it was funny, too, very very funny, fall down laughing funny, sad, yes, a terrible sad,  but, still, as funny anything I've heard since. Did I want to laugh? No. Could I help it? Could you? Only by  biting down hard enough to draw blood. Did I exploit my client? Did I tell this story without her permission? Show me a writer, and I'll show you a thief. Will I share the proceeds with her? What proceeds? People may throw things, call me names,. cross to the far side of the street. Gimme your best shot. I'll risk it. It's true. It happened. Call me anything, but don't call me late for dinner.

It was probably paperwork that kept me in my cubicle 'til late morning, Normally, I was on the street by nine, often earlier. It was near eleven when I spotted the woman walking back and forth past my door muttering to no one I could see. Her dress was shapeless, worn thin, unwashed. Her hair was knotted, raggedy. She had no shoes. It would have taken a forensics expert to determine the last time she used soap.
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Finally, I stood up and asked, "Ma'am, did you want something?"

She rocked side to side, one foot, then the other like a metronome.

      "Ain't no danger."
      "What danger?"
      "To my kids. No, sir. Ain't no danger. Uh, uh."
      "Who said you were?"
      "Some damn liar."
      "Why'd you come here?"
      "You got my kids."

She was one of hundreds of cases inherited or assigned to me.

     "What's your name?"

I don't remember what she said, but I did have her kids. Foster care, probably, although I carry an image of a toddler in diapers with legs already bowed from rickets. I'm seeing him in my mind's eye, not yet two, friendly with a happy smile, unaware of the pain I knew was waiting for him -  misshapen body, enlarged head, late teeth, bone fractures, muscle cramps. Not enough calcium. Poor diet. For sweets he chewed on paint chips made with lead. Two years old. Only two. Already consigned to the city dump. The tot had done nothing to bring this on himself. Cute now. Fetching, while each day takes him closer to that day when he will not be fetching at all, a time when, if he wanted, he'd be snapped up by a carny for a side show. Food. Lodging. Tips. That or dance on bar tables or burrow away from everybody and everything.  What else? This was 1964.

This bedraggled woman at my office door had been remanded to Spring Grove, the state mental hospital - irrational outbursts, hallucinations, voices - the whole megillah. Remanded by the court to Spring Grove! Only right this minute Spring Grove was a hefty drive in the wrong direction, and this woman who heard voices was standing right smack in front of me. Wasn't it Richard Burton who sang, "How To Handle A Woman" in Camelot? So, I'm standing there wondering how to handle this one.

     "How'd you get out?"
     "Walked."
     "Here?"
     "Uh, huh."
     "All the way?"
     "Uh, huh."
     "You could get in trouble."

"Yeah. Right." was the expression on her face.

     "The 'lectric chair," she chortled.
     "How 'bout I take you back?"
     "I know who you are."
     "Want some water before we go? Toilet?"
     "Maybe some Tasty Cake." A Baltimore staple. "Tasty Cake cakes and pies," went the jingle.             "Cherry," she said. "They ain't got none".

Spring Grove was in a part of Maryland I'd never been, quite some distance, pretty much the boonies. My supervisor had written out directions for me in clear, block letters, easy to read and follow. A soft summer day, fine for a drive, even this one. No seat belts. She sat beside me in the shotgun seat, hummed and looked out the window. Nothing but cornfields until I suddenly realized, shit, I was lost, no idea where we were.  I drove around for awhile and finally pulled over to read my supervisor's directions.

     "You lost," she piped.
     "Hold on a minute," I said, eyes peeled on the page.
     "Aintcha?"
     "Lemme look at this."
     "Ain't nothin' to it."
     "To what?"
      "Just do what I  do."
      "What?"
      "Take off all my clothes 'n'  jump up 'n' down on the hood of the car."

Was she serious? She wasn't laughing. She was serious. This was no joke. She really said that. "Took off all my clothes 'n' jump up 'n' down on the hood of the car." Who could make this up? Maybe Larry David, but not me, certainly not then.

This was decades before the era of cell phones and GPS devices. I knew Spring Grove was generally somewhere west of my office. The sun helped. I kept west until I found it. My way, not hers.

I parked in front of the executive building - colonial brick with pillars and a cascade of white steps leading up to the entrance. I walked around to her side of the car while she got out...while she almost got out. An Indian woman with a briefcase, elegant in a traditional sari, was walking down the steps. As soon as my client spotted her, she damn near dove back in the car and refused to budge. Could not talk her out. Uh, uh. No way. That's when she told me, "I don't mind bein' in this place but I ain't gonna be waited on by no gypsy."

She really said that, too.

"...ain't gonna be waited on by no gypsy."

She stared hard at the "gypsy" and slumped down behind the seat until the "gypsy" passed on by. When she was sure it was clear,  she crawled out of the car, and we walked up the steps.
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