Month: September 2014

Holding my grandson for the first time. Mr. Henry Robinson Moore.

When my wife, Nancy, was due to give birth to Abigail, we’d packed our bags and were ready to go when the water broke and the contractions came. It was time and nature that told us it was time to head to the hospital. I remember that feeling, the quickening of my heart, the excitement of heading into the experience as if it were a class 4 white water rapid, thinking I was ready but fearing I might not be – who could ever know?

This time, it was a phone call from Abigail that told me it was time. I’d just had a relaxing glass of Scotch, watching TV. When I picked up the phone I expected a casual check-in call from Abigail, but it was a different story. Abigail and Ryan were at the hospital already. Contractions were steady. And because the baby was breach (which we all knew already), there would be a C-section. In two hours. The rush of emotion and excitement all came back to me as if it were Abigail being born and not my grandson. I told Abigail I’d be driving down as soon as possible.

Nancy, at this time, was on a business trip in Paris, and I knew she’d be in a bit of a panic. I didn’t want her to feel badly for not being there, and was resolved to keep my calm and reassure her as well as my daughter that things were under control. Nothing, of course, is ever “under control”. When birth is involved, I knew from experience it was a joyous cavalcade of bodily fluids and wailing baby cries and slimy poop and the uncertainty of wondering if there would be the right number of fingers and toes, and the billion other concerns that overwhelm even the best prepared mom, dad, or grandparent. You take a deep breath, keep moving, and hope to God things will work out.

I slept fitfully between texts from Ryan and Nancy. At 2:30 am I received the text I had been hoping and praying for: Mother and baby are happy and healthy. His name was Henry Robinson Moore, taking my middle name.

I sat on the edge of my bed and wept. Thank you, God, I said. Thank you.

I hit the road at 3:30 am for New York, guzzling hot coffee in the darkness and light rain on the Mass Pike and arrived at New York Presbyterian hospital on the upper East Side around 8:00.

Abigail’s hospital room was quiet when I entered, save for the tiny murmuring of a baby, my grandson. The floor to ceiling hospital curtain surrounding Abigail’s bed felt to me like the curtain in The Wizard of Oz, pulled back to reveal the old man feverishly tugging at levers, only now it was Abigail in the bed holding Henry, smiling up at me, Ryan grinning in a fatherly way beside them, and I was the old man.

Meeting your own child for the first time is a rush. Meeting your grandchild is similarly exhilarating, magical and joyous. And yet there’s something more to it, another layer. The hard work of raising Abigail right, nurturing her and loving her, making sure she grew up in a nice town with great schools. Sending her to the college of her choice (George Washington, not coincidentally in the same city where Ryan – her high school sweetheart – was attending Georgetown). Celebrating her wedding on a beautiful old farm in Vermont with friends and family there to support her. All of these things formed a kind of foundation for her life that she could then build upon. And even though I could not see all these things at that moment when I held Henry for the first time, I was aware of them and felt the love and effort of all that parenthood as if it had been somehow condensed in time, right at the moment I saw this wonderful and handsome baby, Henry, my grandson. I held him in the crook of my arm and made no effort to stop the tears from streaming down my face.

I said, “Hi Henry.” He was so light and small. Deeply asleep. Content.

After I’d visited them for a while, I went back to Abigail’s apartment on West 74th and slept for a few hours. When I called Abigail to say I was heading back to the hospital, she asked me to bring the diaper bag, and the Boppy – a large horseshoe shaped pillow. When I arrived at the hospital room with the Boppy, Ryan and Abigail giggled at the sight of six foot six tall me holding the Boppy, with its multicolored illustrations of giraffes and elephants. Ryan looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “Boppy. Maybe you’re Boppy”

For months all my friends had asked me what I wanted to be called. Grandpa? Pops? Gramps? I said I wasn’t sure, and didn’t know if it was actually up to me. When Ryan proclaimed that perhaps I was Boppy, it was as if I – in addition to the baby – had also been newly named. That this naming process was an extension somehow of the baby naming process. And this in turn meant that we had both been born, in a way. I was born into grandfatherhood. Henry into life.

It remains to be seen if the Boppy designation will stick. These things take time to figure out, and I’m in no rush. I have my whole life ahead of me.

June 8, 2014

When my kids were born, their sex was a question mark until the doctor uttered the words, “It’s a girl” (Abigail), and “It’s a boy” (Nicholas). I liked the old fashioned surprise aspect of it, the not knowing. Now that Abigail is having a child of her own, she has chosen to know. I can understand why. She can prepare in advance to buy – and receive as gifts – the things most relevant to the baby’s gender. And I think there is also some satisfaction in the certainty at this stage, when so many other aspects of her life are not certain. This one thing she and my son in law, Ryan, can know.

So, last week I learned, it’s a boy. Simultaneous with this announcement came the newest ultrasound, showing my grandson in profile. He looks just like Abigail. And she looks a lot like me. A nose with a bit of a ski jump. High forehead. A prominent mouth made for eating and laughing boisterously.

Grandson.

Just as Abigail can now prepare by buying boy clothes, I can prepare for having a boy as well. My mental preparation has already begun. When I first heard Abigail was pregnant, I got these images in my head of walking with the child in our field up in Vermont, and sitting together by the bonfire down at the beach. Now my imagination is more specific. All my dreams are of boyhood. I know about that well, because I was one, and all my four older siblings were boys, too.

Boys are different. We didn’t just build big dams of dirt in the backyard, and fill up a reservoir of water with the hose. We also stuck firecrackers into the wall of the damn and blew the fucker up. It was not a little dirt dam behind 25 Oakland street. It was a massive concrete Nazi dam, and we were commandos sent in to destroy it.

In grade school, me and my friend, Chopper (named that because his mom liked lamb chops), didn’t huddle in the basement when the hurricane hit New England. We found the biggest pine tree in the yard, and we climbed it during the height of the storm, the limbs and trunk swaying like panicked arms before the force of wind. We went as high as we could go, laughing, until the trunk was so narrow we could join arms.

When my son, Nicholas, was a toddler, I saw boyhood again from the angle of fatherhood, and I remembered what it was like to be that boy, and have a father. I tumbled and roughhoused with him, as my father had with me. One time when Nicholas was in grade school, his two front teeth were loose and on their way out. I was on my back on the couch, tossing him in the air with my feet (being airborne is always good), and his knees knocked back and deftly removed the teeth. This was simply helping nature along, in our view, as the teeth were going to come out soon anyway. But it didn’t stop him from informing his grade school teacher that “Daddy knocked my teeth out.”

Boys live in Neverland. Peter Pan is always there, and Tink. The flying and knocked out teeth and cuts and bruises of our adventures are badges of honor. The lid of the family trash can is our shield. The nearest stick is our sword. And we battle Captain Hook at every turn. At night you can just make out our shapes crossing the sky, the stars temporarily gone where our shape blocks them out. Wendy can come and visit, but ultimately this is our place. We will never grow up.

I am looking forward to meeting my grandson and having these adventures. They will all be new again.

April 13, 2014

My impending grandfathership has sunk in finally. It’s much less of a shock than it was when Abigail first shared the news. And now I seem to be in a new phase, pondering what being a grandfather is all about and how I can fully experience the joy of it – for myself but more importantly for my grandchild.

What occurs to me is that when we think of “grandfather”, most of the time it is a memory. We typically experience grandfathers for a brief span of time, when we are very young and up to our teenage years. Grandfathers don’t live as long as grandmothers based on average life expectancy, so this span is all the briefer and more precious.

My grandfather on my father’s side, Roland Page, died young, when my dad was only 7. He died of tuberculosis. My dad would tell the story of sitting by his father’s deathbed, his dad coughing violently, and dad would rub his dad’s chest to help make it all go away. Dad always blamed himself for not making it all better, even when his adult rational mind told him this was unreasonable. This may have been my dad’s most vivid memory of my grandfather.

This is one of the great conundrums of memory. That we often remember the traumatic things more than the pleasant things. The reason for this, according to research studies, is that adrenaline released during stressful events acts like a kind of memory glue. Fortunately, this glue also works (probably to a lesser extent) for emotionally satisfying events. It’s the average, every day satisfaction we experience that is forgettable.

What I’d like to do as a grandfather is work to engineer just the right good memories of me with my grandchildren. So for their entire lives the good times we had together, and the lessons I’ve taught, are the things that come to mind when they see a picture of me, or they’re in a situation at work or life when they need to make a decision and choose a course. I’d like to think that the joy and wisdom I instill can live on and do good things when my physical body is no longer around.

As I start to think about this process, of course my own grandfather memories spring up. Meet Fred Fish, my “gramp” on my mother’s side who lived until I was 19.A pilot in the First World War, a full Colonel in World War II, he was a towering and unique character. As a young teenager, I visited him and my gram in their retirement in Tucson, Arizona. One late afternoon we were at the summit of “Mount A” the tallest point of land in Tucson. Gramp saw these guys wearing WWI-style leather pilot helmets and jumping off a parapet of rock in their hang gliders. Gramp introduced himself (as a salesman he was good with people) and regaled them with stories of his flying days over France and Germany.

At our family farm in Vermont, Gramp and Gram rented cottages on the shores of Lake Willoughby. I see him now pushing a red wooden wheelbarrow piled with brush down to the fourth of July bonfire at the beach, sprinkling kerosene on the damp branches, and the flames leaping up and reflecting on the water. We’d all sing by the bonfire, my mom and dad, gram, my four older brothers, my cousins, the sparks flying up and mixing with the stars. Gramp would sing “The Foggy Foggy Dew” in his rich, wavering baritone, dressed in khaki head to foot, in his 80s and bent over, one hand outstretched as if to conduct his own voice. His nose aquiline in his long face, big ears jutting out at either side of his cap – “I once was a bachelor and lived all aloooooooooone!” Then he’d sing it again half an hour later because he’d forget, or wanted to torture my grandmother.

Another memory: Gramp would take me and my brothers to Howard Johnsons for the all you can eat fish or clam dinners, and we did in fact eat all we possibly could. His light blue eyes would glitter, and he’d smile and say “I love to see a boy eat.”

There is also the memory (one that surely results from a little too much adrenaline), of gramp tasking me with cleaning out the cottage septic tanks – by hand. We had to lower a bucket into the foul smelling goo, and heft it out, attempting all the while not to puke.

I’m grateful for all the memories of gramp, from the sublime to the stinky. Gramp could easily have been shot down by the Germans over France, bombed by them in London, or fall to natural causes before I ever got a chance to know him. He’ll always be a part of me. And I sing the Foggy Foggy Dew with my brother down at the bonfire, remembering him, laughing, drinking wine together as the stars come out.

I acknowledge that my quest to architect memory with my grandchildren is oh so baby boomer. Can’t we just age like everybody else without trying to do it better? Does being a grandfather in this decade really have to be engineered like a new smart phone? 55 isn’t the new 40. 55 is 55. I get it. But the reality is that my life expectancy is greater than that of my father or his father – not simply that I may live longer, but the quality of life I experience in later years will hopefully be on a different level than what was possible in previous generations. With luck, and good science, me and my grandfather peers can and should take full advantage of this time bonus to be good grandpas in new ways, with more opportunities to instill the warm and enduring memories. Less decrepitude. More hiking mountains with our grandkids on our backs. More stories by the bonfire. More love.

This will be fun.

February 2014

Today my daughter Abigail shared the news that I am the grandfather of a heartbeat.

The ultrasound image was pasted into a Valentine’s card

A black and white Rorschach, with one tiny hand reaching up as if to say, “Hello.”

The boulder of energy that struck my chest was both kind and playful

It whispered of future walks in a Vermont meadow

Me holding my grandchild’s hands up as she takes toddling steps through the tall grass

His gleeful laughter at how new and thrilling it is to be alive

Smeared peas and Cheerios soggy with milk on a highchair tray

And sitting together by the brook, staring in wonder and silence

At water spiders darting here and there.