The
simple and pleasant purpose of this brief post is to introduce my readers to the
future in the most attractive form of Hazel Elizabeth Fleming, my newest
granddaughter. Yesterday we flew
to Montreal, where Hazel lives with her mother and father and brother. The journey seemed to have an
allegorical dimension, moving from an almost fetid over-ripeness to a
revivifying freshness. Technically,
we are still in spring, but it was one of those hot and saturated mornings that
suggest the New Jersey state motto (The Garden State) ought, to accord with
federal “Truth in Advertising” laws, be known as the Jungle State. Here in Canada we found a perfect
early summer day, its air soft but also fresh and dry, with every green
leaf bright and articulate. In
school I was made to memorize some lines of Lowell—a poet from whom I probably could quote no others—and they now came to mind. “And
what is so rare as a day in June?
Then if ever come perfect days…”
That was the feeling as, by mid-afternoon, we were all sitting on the
stoop of our son’s house chatting and watching the neighborhood children play,
as Hazel snoozed in her little carry-crib.
Snoozing
is young Hazel’s principal occupation at the moment. Eating is a fairly distant second. Of fussing and crying there is very
little. Augustine took the view
that the doctrine of Original Sin was empirically demonstrable in the naked
self-centeredness of infants. If
only he had had the chance to meet Hazel Fleming, the whole history of the Pelagian
controversy might have been different.
Surely she merits the adoring attention, stopping only short of
babyolatry, of all those surrounding her?
Or nearly all. Her brother John Henry (æt 2) reserves the right to evidence
occasional ambiguity toward the new and minute person whose arrival has
inevitably caused such a major revision of his Weltanschaung. But on the whole his chivalric
instincts prevail, and he often joins his elders in the prevailing reverential
fascination.
Here
she is, flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone, yet distanced from me by a vast,
intriguing alterity. Hazel is 195
pounds lighter that I, and four and a half feet shorter. She is seventy-eight years and three
days younger. I lay my hand next
to hers to find hers the size of two joints of my little finger. Was my crinkled old skin, tanned and
spotted with purple blotches, ever so smooth, rosy, creamy as hers? I myself can barely credit the world
into which I was born. How
astonishing would it be to her?
How more astonishing yet will be the world in which she will find
herself when she is my age? All
newborns are, or should be, children of promise. Hazel’s promise practically glows from her crib. She sets out in life endowed with the priceless capital of a splendid mother and a spendid father. May this beautiful child, who brings
joy to all who look upon her, who has already improved our needy world simply
by coming into it, thrive, growing in grace day by day.
