The Day of Redirection 


Jim steps through the looking glass. 

Stephen has a Christian phrase that he is fond of: "This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us be glad and rejoice in it." I haven't ever really taken the advice before. But my transformation was waiting for me, so I took its hand, said "Thank You," and moved on.

So I'm going to say it. Not "Stephen's grandson" but "our grandson." Stephen and I are "the granddads." Dawn and Stephanie are the parents. And Alexander, whom Stephanie calls "Mister" and I call "Zander," is the grandkid.

After Dawn went off to work, we packed up and went to the Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. You know, it is a great place. We saw a partial showing of a Picasso show they are preparing, including the renowned "Rape of the Sabine Women." They have recently restored a second floor rotunda with the original John Singer Seargent murals and bas reliefs. There is a wonderful collection of Chinese porcelain pieces. Stephanie had to take Zander to the lactation therapist, so Stephen and I just wandered at will through room after room of priceless art treasures.

We were to meet for lunch in the first floor café. I got a table for four and Stephanie and Dawn simultaneously showed up. The waiter was snappy and witty. I ended up getting the Asian Shrimp Salad after he claimed that a guest from Germany had said yesterday that it was the best salad in the world. "Did he really say that?" I flirted. "But of course. Do you think I could make something like that up? . . . Well, maybe the part about Germany!!" It was a nice, leisurely lunch with wine. Then Dawn went back to work, Stephanie to another appointment with Zander. Steve and I ended up looking at Greek and Roman statuary, pottery and jewelry, some of it similar to what we saw on our recent tour of Greece. Usually I get tired of a museum in an hour or two, but somehow today, mixed in with the family stuff, it seemed to be ok spending a whole day there.

Tonight we had pizza and then Donny and Donna and their 3 year old son Donnie, Jr. came over to pick up and deliver long overdue Christmas presents. Dawn hired Donny at a previous job and they have stayed close friends. In fact, the last time we met them was at Dawn and Stephanie's wedding several years ago. Stephen said to me after they left, "Are you alright? You were kinda quiet." But I was alright. I was just mesmerized with this new world of young parents. They talked on and on about Donnie's new school, about the way babies transform your lives, about the other young parents they knew and what they were going through, pediatricians, the high cost of babyhood, the priceless things kids say. Little Donnie was a jewel of a kid, with precise speech and a confident but relatively humble presence.

A digression with a point . . . . I took piano lessons from age 7 to age 10. The last summer of these lessons, being a boy, the piano lessons became a major source of contention between my mother and me. You can hear it now. "Aw, mom, do I have to?!" "Jimmie, you will thank me when you grow up." But one day, I became adamant. None of the other boys had to take piano lessons, and I wouldn't take them any more either. So my mother became very sober. "Alright, Jimmy. You don't have to take piano lessons any more. But don't you EVER come to me when you are grown up and sorry that you quit and tell me I should have made you keep taking them!"

And fairly late in life, I came to the understanding that my failure to continue to receive proper training put a severe restriction on my adult ability to play the piano, because I ended up continuing to play, and learning my own self-taught but faulty technique. And, to boot, I had only myself to blame.

Yes, and when I broke off my engagement with Luellen Watson in 1961 and buried myself in 10 years of almost aimless graduate study, came out at 31 and lived a fast gay life for a while, completely bypassing the joys of starting my own family with kids, that was my own self-taught technique. I'm not sure that I want to say that it was faulty, but it did not contain a focus on kids. Oh, sure, there were my sister and brother's kids, and there were the Hildebrand's and the Hoffmann's kids, and I did enjoy and love them, but there were no kids of my own.

Little did I know when I agreed to let Stephen's daughter Stephanie come to live with us in 1987 while she finished her last two years of high school that I would be able to experience a little bit of the joys of grandparenting.

Little did I know that I would set for the second night in a row and watch the absolute joy and gratitude beam from Stephen's face as he held Alexander in the light of the Christmas tree while the moms were taking a break. "Look at his hands," Stephen directed. They were folded comfortably beneath his smile.

How little did I know.

I handed over copies of my papers to them tonight. Now they are my and Stephen's heirs. Some fortune. They're probably worth as much as we are, or soon will be.

I can hardly believe it, and I know it will take years to figure it all out, if I ever do. I stepped through the looking glass after all. What can I say? It's really warm and nice over here. 

Posted: Thu - January 5, 2006 at 09:22 PM          

©