“How vainly men themselves amaze to win the palm, the oak, or bays” Andrew Marvell
Over the years, in our household, various bits and pieces of poems, songs, Shakespeare plays, and bad movies have become a part of the family idiolect. One of these is “life’s true treasure.” Early in our marriage we watched an unremarkable Western in which a young man obsessed with the desire to strike a rich rift of gold allowed the obsession to destroy his own life and that of his lovely young wife. One of her phrases became part of the household vocabulary: life’s true treasure. That, claimed the wife, they had already at hand in the daily challenges and rewards of a shared life.
I thought of the idea of life’s true treasure again on Sunday, when in the political world that had been obsessing so many of us, the thread snapped. I was taking an afternoon nap at the time, but when I woke up, I just sort of had a sense, and I was right. I refer, of course, to the situation of President Biden, and to the thread suspending the sword of Damocles. Everyone used to know about “the sword of Damocles” because everybody used to have read Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations or, more probably, heard about it from somebody who had, as was certainly my own experience in, I think, fourth grade. But late in my teaching career I used the phrase before a small seminar of undergraduates, eliciting blank stares. You can always tell the difference between student reactions, at least the reactions of ordinary boredom and those of honestly not knowing what the hell you are talking about. Mainly my readers are, shall we say, of mature years, but for reasons soon to be made apparent my mind is at the moment on some rather young ones, and on the off chance there are a few others like them in the audience, I’ll say a few words about Damocles.
He was a real person, a courtier in the entourage of the Sicilian tyrant, Dionysius of Syracuse, in the fourth century before Christ. The following legend concerning him is, well, legendary. Damocles had spoken enthusiastically of the great happiness that must characterize his boss’s life. In order to teach him the lesson probably better know to us from Shakespeare’s “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” Dionysius invited Damocles to a sumptuous banquet, but placed him in a seat over which hung a heavy sword suspended from the ceiling held only by a single thread of uncertain but dubious tensile strength. Well, President Biden spent a few most uncomfortable days recuperating from Covid as he awaited the breaking of the thread or the falling of the ax or the spring of the trap or whatever other metaphor you can come up with to emblematize a dreaded fate seemingly inevitable yet teasingly uncertain in its exact nature or timing. He announced the decision in a brief, dignified, straightforward letter while I was having a Sunday afternoon nap. His resignation threw the political world into chaos, which is another way of saying that we have shifted from one flavor of uncertainty to another. Well, we are creatures who thrive on variety; but I prefer the uniquely quiet character of quiet familial love to the ragged uncertainty of national passion.
For what are for many others the stimulating new paroxysms of the rapidly changed political scene are leaving me free to enjoy our summer visit from the Montrealers (son Luke, Melanie and their two absolutely delightful kids, John Henry and Hazel) to the full. We have been able to sublease a sizeable house in the neighborhood for them—a three-minute stroll through sylvan glades from our own. Those arrangements are nearly ideal, offering an adjustable quotient of privacy and togetherness that recognizes the variety of tempos needed in a multi-generational household.
Like all kids their age—Hazel is ten and John Henry headed for his twelfth birthday this week—these two are growing fast. (The illustrative photos in this post were take by Melanie on their very recent vacation in Costa Rica.) All grandparents have the right, and many of us believe the duty, to cluck over their grandkids. This process usually begins with their astonishing rate of growth, all those incremented inches since last sighting. On a white wainscotting panel in the kitchen we keep on display in penciled markings the dated increments in the heights from one visit to another. The measurements are always taken with an elaborate show of exactitude, and the results are always dramatic and cluckable. Since there are four other grandchildren whose measurements have over the years been recorded in that same place, the panel has become a little crowded—you might even say messy—but a just emblem of the dynamism of young life itself.
The households of the elderly benefit from infusions of dynamism, so long as we are talking about a disciplined dynamism. Luke was able to rehabilitate three bicycles hanging unused for far too long in the garage. Thus there is now available both a home base and a convenient escape from it, an excellent feature of successful inter-generational venues.
Later today we shall hope to pack the whole kit and kaboodle into the Montrealers’ big Dodge van and drive up to Richard and Katie Dixon’s farm in Kingwood. That’s only about thirty miles as the crow flies, but in terms of the sensation experienced, it could be three hundred or three thousand. I haven’t been there myself in more than three months. I wrote about the ambitious tree-planting party we participated in on that occasion. That trip was in the still lightly-leaved spring. We shall find it now, no doubt, in its preferred state, that of incipient jungle, full of mystery and challenge. The kids will love it, and so will I.
