A Letter to My Grandson

My dear grandson,

You entered this world seven weeks earlier than expected and from the moment I saw you — this tiny thing in an incubator, in a neo-natal intensive care unit — you gripped my heart.

When your father called, with news of your pending arrival, your grandmother and I packed and drove the three-and-a-half hours from Atlanta.

I was flabbergasted, dumfounded, and gobsmacked when your parents told us your given name, that of my paternal great-grandfather, a Jewish scholar.

Here you were, weighing two pounds and four ounces, connected to devices that monitored your vital signs, with an intravenous drip in one arm, a feeding tube run through your mouth, and your eyes shielded as protection from phototherapy lights atop the incubator.

I was mesmerized and humbled.

Every other consideration in my life instantly moved to the periphery.
We marveled at your dark hair, the length of your fingers, and your itty-bitty toes.

Your cry was insistent.

I declared that watching you — your chest rising and falling, raising your arms, and stretching your legs — was better than any other form of entertainment.

We stayed for four days, visiting you daily and helping your mother and father by running errands, doing laundry, cleaning dishes, anything that freed them to concentrate on you. Fortunately, the neo-natal ICU is just a couple of blocks walk from your future home.

We left to attend a family wedding — where you were a major topic of conversation — subsisting since then on a diet of texts and pictures sent by your parents.

Those images are precious — your first skin-to-skin contact with each of them, grasping one of your mother’s fingers as you look at her, and your father reading to you from an English spy novel.

I have been thinking about how the world has changed between my birth and yours.

I was born a decade after the end of World War II, during the “Cold War,” decades of antagonism and tension between the United States and the now former Soviet Union, each vying for influence around the world, often in countries that most people could not find on a map. Today’s conflicts are not so neatly packaged.

You were born as America prepared to mark its 250th anniversary. The nation is polarized and engaged in heated discourse over the relationship between the government and the governed, as many people fear for the future of what its first president called “the last great experiment for promoting human happiness.”

You are a Southerner, born into an often misunderstood and intensely proud region. The South played an essential role in the founding of this country, yet not a century later fought a bitter civil war. A region with a history of inequality and inequity based on skin color, but which also birthed a historic movement that led to laws banning discrimination in the right to vote, as well as in access to public spaces, schools, employment, and housing.

I would like to tell you that six decades later, such issues have been resolved — but I can’t.

Like the generations that came before, yours — Generation Beta, as named by demographers — will pick up the baton from your elders and tackle these and other issues, among them the effects of climate change.

Let me offer this thought, from a well-known Jewish text: “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”

You will dress in ways that confound your parents, listen to music and speak in slang they cannot understand, and adopt attitudes that will frustrate them. Take heart, they did the same to us, as we did to our parents.

The greatest change between my birth and yours has been in technology. My generation grew up watching rockets roar into the heavens and our world grow smaller with the ability to watch events around the planet as they happened. What was the stuff of science fiction in my childhood is becoming real and will affect nearly every aspect of your life.

They say that when you’re young, the days go fast and the years slowly. From where I sit now, the days pass slowly but the years hurry by.

You are, of course, too young — not even a month old when this column is published — to understand any of this.

Your parents will share their experience and wisdom with you, and, as aspects of their lives become part of yours, you will benefit from the blending of two families’ histories and traditions.

You have been born into the Jewish community on your mother’s side of the family. It is a long and rich heritage, one that has seen more than its share of tsuris, and generated much nachus, to use the Yiddish. You will develop your own relationship with Judaism and find your own place within the Jewish people.

You already have changed the trajectory of lives, most notably those of your parents, but also your grandparents.

Whatever you call us, your grandmother and I look forward to reading and playing with you, telling you about our lives and families, and listening to the stories you tell us.

I look forward to our conversations.

With all the love I can muster,

Your grandfather Dave