Grandchildren

 

                                   John Henry                 /              Hazel

 

            We have six grandchildren—real ones, I mean—in addition to an indeterminate number of imaginary ones on whom this essay may briefly touch if I have time.  The grandchildren range in age commodiously from twenty-eight to seven, one full twenty-one- year span of childhood by the old legal reckoning.  Five of them are of the female sex, including both the eldest (Sophia) and the youngest (Hazel).  The plethora of granddaughters has been for me a special blessing.  In my family of birth there had been only sons, three of them.  The faint mysterious hint of a daughter, stillborn when I was two, a shadow and another sorrow is a mother's hard life, was barely even a spectral presence.  I regard the tutelage provided by so many highly accomplished girls and their mothers a special gift of my mature years.

 

            I have somewhere a little pewter plaque with the following assertion: “Happiness is Being a Grandfather”.  Not too long ago at the bottom of the yard in one of several now long-established weed beds, I stumbled upon a similar ensign claiming that particular little plot to be “Granpa’s Garden.”  You are surely familiar with the genre, which is widely to be found in its various forms on bumper stickers, belt buckles, sweatshirts, and coffee mugs throughout the land.  Call me a snob.  I ordinarily recoil from outsourcing proclamations of my sentimental life to the indentured rhymers at Hallmark cards or the proprietors of Interstate rest-stop tchotchke-sellers.  But the relationships between grandparent and grandchild actually does provide an opportunity for felicity sufficiently potent to overcome even the saccharine annoyances of American commercialism.

 

            Just at the moment we are enjoying a Covid-delayed visit from the Montrealers—that is, Luke and Melanie and their two kids, John Henry (8) and Hazel (7)—our only grandson and our youngest granddaughter.  I suppress political commentary in this blog, and so will not comment upon the combination of personal self-righteousness and practical incompetence with which the smarmy Canadian Prime Minister has supervised the pandemic in his land, leaving much of his unvaccinated population in lockdown behind a closed border.  Personal opinion.  In any event, it has been a long time since we have been able to visit with this family, and we are reveling in the opportunity.  The first thing that strikes one is that kids do grow.  Furthermore, their mental and ethical growth is as notable as their dramatic physical expansion.  They get more and more interesting and delightful.  They move from cute to acute.  They become great companions.

 

         On Monday, Luke and I set out with the two kids on what I think of as my “regular” walk.  Later on their mother Melanie, taking a slightly shorter route, caught up with us about half way along; we then proceeded together.  This is a hike of approximately three miles, most of it through lovely sylvan glades above the lake and along a short section of the Delaware and Raritan Canal.  Though they spend a lot of time in the great outdoors of Québec, John Henry and Hazel are of course city-dwellers for whom the zoological opulence of suburban New Jersey might as well be the Serengeti.  We set out with the conscious intention of cataloguing the animal and bird life we saw on the walk, and in the first five hundred yards we were able to record chipmunk, deer, groundhog, rabbit, and squirrel.  The birds were too numerous to count.  One special treat came when, looking down from the height of a cliffside path, we could clearly see four or five turtles, some of them quite large, sunning themselves on the trunk of a dead tree fallen into the water.  I was disappointed only by the absence of the cormorant that often joins them.  For the kids, the permanent interest of the natural beauty is at the moment complemented by the diminishing remnants of the cicada phenomenon of which I wrote in a recent post.  Everywhere along the beaten forest track are hundreds of the little holes from which the critters have emerged in their prehistoric exoticism.  The little corpses of the thousands which have briefly fulfilled their last full measure of procreative devotion lie scattered promiscuously everywhere, sometimes in such numbers as to create unpleasant whiffs of decomposition.

 

            Walking along the canal paths, we pursued a somewhat eccentric mission.  Our house has a small atrium, with its own tiny pond and turtles, through which a short path leads from the glass door to my study to a wooden exterior door on the other side.  I am trying, very slowly, to cover this path with a layer of the white sea pebbles to be found throughout this part of Jersey in much of the topsoil and practically all gravel.  I try to pick up a small bag full of these pebbles on every walk.  If I had enough grandkids, we could do it on an industrial scale!

 

            Yesterday was the hottest day of the year to date, both broiling and muggy.  I wasn’t feeling all that great, and I probably should not even have undertaken such an ambitious walk under the conditions.  I was soon huffing and puffing badly, and finding it difficult to carry on.  My son Luke was sensitive enough to intervene.  When we were a couple thousand yards from home, he suggested that he run home and fetch a car, while the rest of us await his return, sitting in the shade on the abutment of a bridge over a little creek.  I agreed with relief; I am gradually having to accept such necessary humiliations.  Young John Henry, not yet nine years old, was a little distressed on my behalf and tried to pretend that he, too, needed the relief.  Partly because my only grandson and I are both named John, and partly because a fragment of a recent sermon came to mind, and partly because I seem to specialize in bizarre patterns of thought, a certain Bible text text (John 3:30) leapt to my mind.  It is one that identifies John the Baptist in some well-known medieval and Renaissance paintings, including the unforgettable Isenheim altar-piece: Illum oportet crescere, me autem minui (“As he grows greater, I must grow less”).  Volumes of puzzling medieval exegesis were devoted to this puzzling verse, but I finally understood what it means, or at least what it means to me.  It is a simple truism of biological and historical life.  And a very comforting one at that.  Our vital continuity is that of our posterity.

 

            All grandparents probably think that their grandchildren are superior beings.  I certainly do.  I refer, of course, to my real as opposed to my imaginary grandchildren.  Many of my readers will be puzzled by the very concept of imaginary grandchildren, though I suspect that several of my fellow seniors will know immediately what I refer to—a grift vaguely related to the “Spanish prisoner,” the “Nigerian entrepreneur,” and various telemarketing schemes involving aluminum siding, ornamental plaques, or John Wayne memorabilia.  Not too long ago the AARP featured it in their popular “Geriatric Scam of the Week” feature.*   I got my first call about five years ago, then two or three more each year since.  I picked up the landline and said “Hello”.  The immediate response, in a youngish adult male voice that I might place as originating somewhere along a line from Beaumont TX to Morgantown WV, was interrogative: “Grampa”?  I didn’t think so, as my only grandson at the time was about three.  “I think you have the wrong number,” I said, utterly without effect.  “No, Grampa,” he said.  “It’s me.  I ran into some trouble, and I need a little help.”  After a few more confusing remarks, I simply hung up.  But at length--by the fourth or fifth such call-- I had grasped the concept and developed my own little line of dialogue.  “I’d love to, but thing is, George, Butch double-crossed me on that last delivery, and the cartel is after me.  Watching every move I make.”  That was pretty good, I thought; but I could do better.  I finally settled on “I’d love to help you out, Sonny, but I spent my last damn dime bailing out Granny.  Possession with intention, initial hearing in about a month.  I was actually hoping to  borrow a little something from you.   And, honest, this time I’ll pay you back.”  If you are simply trying to round out your scumbag credentials, breaking into the alms boxes in impoverished country churches is all well and good; but prostituting the impulses of grandparental love really is beyond the pale.

 

 

*https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2018/grandparent-scam-scenarios.html

 

 

Singin' and the Rain

I have never quite understood boredom, by which I suppose I must mean extended periods of boredom, as opposed to the fleeting experience of a bad lecture or a committee meeting.  For the most part life has been a Heracletian fire, full of crackling rapid movement that has left me wondering what comes next.  Even retirement itself, which I expected to devolve in some pastel monochrome, has already been punctuated by a series of vivid, not to say garish episodes—some of them, admittedly, of the sort I could do without—that have been anything but boring.  No doubt this in part arises from the fact that aging makes many intrinsically simple and ordinary things rather complex and extraordinary, and consequently their achievement more notable.  In the twenty-third canto of the Inferno Dante conjures up a procession of the Hypocrites.  These damned souls can move only at snail’s pace, burdened down as they are with cloaks, flashy on the exterior, but actually lined with lead.  Perhaps I can find a more positive analogy in the sight of some of our young college athletes in training, burdened with heavy backpacks as they run up and down the long ranks of seats in the football stadium.  In any event, I feel leaden a good deal of the time.  When locomotion itself becomes a kind of ordeal, simply showing up can be an adventure.

On Monday night we went to a remarkable musical event in the University chapel—a performance of Georgian folk music by the Ensemble Basiani, the Georgian State Vocal Ensemble.  This was a male choir, thirteen strong, all dressed in traditional ethnic finery, sort of decorated black soutanes, over very elegant high black boots in supple leather.  The singing, which included both religious and secular songs, was amazing.  Only a few pieces included some kind of minimal instrumental accompaniment; the main instruments were deep, powerful male voices.  Georgian folk music is characterized by a lot of orchestrated noise—shouting, clapping, and a very distinctive kind of yodeling, sometimes supplemented by dance.  

But the seemingly mundane tasks of getting to and from the venue were slightly more than routine.  It was, in the immortal words of Bulwer-Lytton, a dark and stormy night, fraught with possible geriatric anxieties.  Driving visibility was poor; finding a parking spot demanded competition and an adrenaline flow.   Triumph in that arena left us still with a bit of a walk through a cold rain.  I was armed, but insufficiently; I couldn’t get my five-dollar umbrella open.  Every few steps of the way we would be overtaken by lither juniors.  This process was repeated in the return trip to the parking lot.  Now if age is daily presenting you with an anthology of petty quotidian reminders of your incremental geezerdom, it is only fair that it offer also some contrasting compensations.  It does that marvelously by giving you grandchildren.  A grandchild is not simply a child at one remove, or a smaller version of their own parents.  A grandchild is a unique blessing, a living symbol of vital continuity, a tolerant and ever-surprising companion, a rewarding student and so bounteous a fount of frank and uncomplicated affection, however undeserved, as to repair a souring view of human nature.

We have six grandchildren, five lovely girls and the most delightful little chap you will ever meet--all geniuses of course, all faster than a speeding bullet, each more powerful than a locomotive, and every single one able to leap tall buildings at a single bound.  Furthermore, you have to bear in mind that buildings are now considerably taller than in the heyday of Superman! Admittedly, the oldest “girl” is in her mid-twenties, beautiful and brainy,  and a high-powered executive in New York.  But  do not press me as to what, exactly, it is that she executes.  It’s one of these techie “platform” things that, so far as I understand, empowers other platforms.  In my mind it must be similar to Garrison Keillor’s National Organization of Organizations.  What really keeps me on my toes, I just realized, is not kefir or yoga; it is grandparenthood.  In a healthy familial setting grandchildren are like works of art as written about in Eliot’s great essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”  They recapitulate a respected cultural inheritance while applying, modifying, and expanding it through individual personality and experience.  They are teachers as well as learners.

The youngest of the grandkids, also female, has only arrived at the beginning of her schooling, though she  already radiates an executive aura.  Four of them live in New York, and the other two not so very much further away, in Montreal.  We see the New Yorkers very frequently and the Montrealers perhaps too seldom but still not infrequently.  We are rapidly coming up to Thanksgiving, which will involve the usual stuff-and-groan contest, and for a New York kid a leafy New Jersey back garden opening on a sylvan path to Lake Carnegie is as good as Camp Gitche Gumee any day.   All the grandkids will be there save Lulu who on her own initiative is spending a (high school) junior semester is Marseille in order to keep up with her French.  But I could feel her sitting next to me at the Basiani concert.  For right in the middle of it the golden youth of the Princeton University Glee Club briefly claimed the stage (i.e., the cathedral-like chancel steps) for a couple of beautiful numbers.  The talented director of this group, Gabriel Crouch, wrote thus in the Program Notes: “…[W]e’ve never come so close to a tradition which makes our own feel so…adolescent.”  According to Chaucer’s Miller, an exponent of the generational war, “Youthe and elde is often at debaat.” But on Monday night youth and elde were in harmony, or at least sweet and fulfilling complement. 

The ancient music of these Caucasian singers had another special balm for my geezerdom.  We were sitting in the second row of the nave, which, as the first row had been left empty, was in effect the very front.  I don’t know how large a Georgian expat community there is in central Jersey, but judging from the friendly personal exchanges between singers and audience members I’d say quite a few.  There is a subsidiary entrance to the chapel at the chancel level on its east side.  During an applause pause midway through, a group of three sodden late comers came in: a middle-aged woman, a very ancient woman in a wheelchair, and what I must describe as an ecclesiastical Gerontius.  They came to the front row immediately in front of us.  The man, though not in full ecclesiastical regalia, was obviously of some high order of Orthodox Christian episcopacy, in the autocephalous Church of Georgia.  His beard, though not quite so long as his full-length cassock, was perfectly proportioned to it.  He wore an elaborately embroidered tall, flat cap that puts to shame the one I bought in the Istanbul market.  He carried a beautiful stick, half cane and half crosier, topped with a large metal ornament in a material I took to be gold.  He was probably not much if at all older than I am, but he radiated the aura of Blake’s Ancient of Days.  He also radiated an unfeigned “child-like” joy for the music both of his foot-stamping, hand-clapping compatriots and the sober reticence of the American teen-agers in the Glee Club.  In that moment neither walking sticks nor wheel chairs seemed a very big deal.

William Blake, "The Ancient of Days"

You can hear a short piece by the Basiani Ensemble HERE: or their whole 2017 concert in Saint Petersburg HERE.

Summer Visitors

two visiting grandchildren

The best part of the summer is rapidly approaching, the part during which the five youngest of our grandchildren are likely to be about the grandparental homestead, sometimes en masse and sometimes in discrete family groups.  The brevity of their infancy is underscored by the fact that our eldest grandchild, the college graduate, is now pursuing an exciting professional career on the West Coast.  This makes me especially conscious of the wonder of young childhood, and especially eager to attend it, to pay close attention to it, as it unrolls before my wondering eyes.  Of the many palpable blessings of retirement none is more prominent than its attendant emancipation from the awareness of having to make a living, the goad to “getting ahead,” whatever that absurd phrase might actually mean.

Just at this moment the two Montréalers, as we call them, are briefly with us.  They are actually on their way to South Carolina and their maternal grandparents.  They will travel with their mother, while their Dad, our son Luke, hangs out with us for a week and luxuriates in the anthropology holdings of the Firestone Library of Princeton University.  Then we’ll see the kids again for a day or two on their way back home.  By then our two “Washington Squarers” will also be here.  We hope, too, that a fifth, Ruby the Brooklynite, also somewhat daringly known as the Red Hooker, will be able to make an appearance during that time.

Though it has been a relatively brief time since we saw the Montréalers, the signs of their mental and physical growth are dramatic.  Hazel turned two fairly recently, just about the time I was turning eighty.  However I have not been able to observe the terribleness of her twoness, so much spoken of by her parents.  (The awfulness of eightyness is another matter, and on prominent display daily).  Her verbal skills have improved dramatically in the brief period of a couple of months, and to her increasing mastery of the spoken word she is adding a certain prowess in bel canto.  At her play-group she has been strangely indoctrinated by her Filipina minders, so that she arrived here burbling out a quite recognizable version of  “O, Canada!”.  Those are the only two words of the anthem she has so far mastered, and this means that she and her grandfather are at exactly the same level.  However, I am apparently wrong in believing that its tune is identical with that of “O Tannenbaum…”  She reacts adversely to my attempts without, however, being able to supply me with more positive guidance.  Her elder brother, John Henry, only days away from his fourth birthday, is now quite the lad.  He has a delightful temperament (most of the time) and a distinctive sense of style that manifests itself in a sailcloth fedora hat and a penchant for really bad Knock-Knock jokes—not that I wish to imply the possibility of a good Knock-Knock joke.  He now talks a blue streak, and in his conversation one finds many intimations of his two professorial parents.  Just the other day he correctly used the subjunctive in an introductory contrary-to-fact clause: “If I were…”

As somebody who spent many formative years out in the deep woods of the Ozarks I think of my current suburban circumstances as pretty unexciting and conventional.  But for the young children who visit us here the back of our house, which features a dense bamboo patch and opens onto several acres of dense woodland with a pleached path leading down to a lake, the place has all the remoteness of the little house on the prairie and the exoticism of Camp Olgagaloka.  And we have the wildlife to back it up.  Deer are abundant and likely to show up anywhere—especially at the fence line of my tomato patch.  Groundhogs—identified by John Henry as beavers (more Canadian brainwashing, I presume)--prefer to be inside the fence.  But there are also innumerable squirrels, rabbits, and chipmunks.  Occasionally a fox appears, holding out its tail as stiff and unmoving as a hunting dog.  There are birds galore including some interesting and brilliantly colored ones.  If you step outside you couldn’t escape birdsong even if you wanted to.  Nocturnal raccoons make a mess of the garbage bins once or twice a month, and there is the odd opossum now and again. All of these creatures are for these children potential sources of a Wordsworthian infantile delight that confirms all my deepest religious instincts.  Amazingly, perhaps, their favorites are the two box turtles—Chloë and Hector—resident among the lush woodruff and impatiens pots of our home’s internal atrium.  John Henry and Hazel look for them the first thing in the morning and say goodnight in their direction as they head off for bed.

two resident turtles having a morning swim

 

Vacation

one impulse from a vernal wood...

There is a difference between a nuclear family and a nuclear-powered one.  We have a brood of globe-trotters, and quite honestly we frequently have a better idea of the current whereabouts of Carmen Santiago than of our three offspring.  But this year we were able to corral sixty-six-point-six percent of them for a contemporary version of the family vacation of yesteryear—one that involved packing antsy infants and far too much of their gear into station wagons to drive long distances into the rain forest.  That is how six adults and three infants have come to find themselves is a contemporary rustic mansion deep in the backwoods of suburban Warren, Vermont.  So far we have mainly been watching it rain, but that is bound to change soon.

            We know this part of Vermont quite well.  For many summers in the Eighties and Nineties I taught in the summer session of the Bread Loaf School of English—a very fine master’s program offered by Middlebury College.   Middlebury, Vermont is itself hardly a metropolis, but the college’s Bread Loaf campus, which a hundred years ago was an upscale camp for New England “rusticators” in the heart of the Green Mountain Forest, is really out in the sticks.  I reckon that here in Warren we are about twelve miles, as the crow flies, from our old Bread Loaf haunts; should the crow be travelling by Subaru, however, he’d better recalculate to about twenty-five.  The ancestral engineers who laid out the roads in this part of the world were not great believers in the hypotenuse.

            All members of the family have happy memories from those old Bread Loaf summers, and we had them in mind when we were investigating possibilities on AirBnB.  The gorgeous house we found is on an appealing man-made pond, called Blueberry Lake, probably within a hundred feet of its shoreline.  It’s a little hard to tell because of the heavy woods.  But from the main kitchen-dining area one gets a fine sliver of a glimpse of water in the gap along the short, steep path used to transport the canoe. Our first two days were for the most part spent indoors trying to convince three squirmy kids that standing at a window watching it rain is actually a highly entertaining activity.  But on day three the sun burst forth early, and so did we.  This turned out to have been a wise move on our parts, as the rain returned early in the afternoon.

            Several hours of glorious sunshine allowed us all some opportunities for delightful athleticism.  Richard and Katie took their daughter Ruby, along with her cousin, bosom buddy, and unindicted co-conspirator John Henry, out in the red canoe.  Joan and I were not on hand to critique the regatta, but lots of photographic evidence confirms that it was exciting.  I was not on hand because Joan and I elected to go on a semi-serious trail hike in the adjoining National Forest.  We had noticed signs marking a trail-head less than a mile up the road.

            Vermont is all about the outdoors, and especially its intensely green woods.   There is a distinctive quality to the Vermont woods, a kind of wild freshness, that I have encountered nowhere else.  It’s one of those comforting places where Nature seems very much to be holding her own.  The nineteenth-century farmers cleared large acreages on the hillsides, pulled stumps, hauled tons of field stone to make fences and field boundaries.  The labor is almost unimaginable, and I can only suspect that the agricultural rewards were pretty exiguous.  The forest has now returned to many of these acres in a by now substantial second growth.  Not infrequently you now encounter old stone walls in dense woods.

            The trails in the National Forest are both wild and tame.  In addition to hikers, they entertain cross-country skiers in the winter and mountain bikes in the summer.  The steepness of the trail was as much as I could deal with on foot.  I have no idea how the bikers—of whom we encountered a few—manage.  After a good rain the whole mountain seemed as fresh as on the day after the world was made, full of the play of flashing sun and shadow, the gurgling of rivulets, and everywhere wonderful birdsong.

            We hope for more glorious days, but I have to say that if one must perforce be cabined, cribbed, confined, there is no better company than one’s three youngest grandchildren, each of them emerging from the chrysalis of infancy into distinct, determined, and delightful individual personality.  The pageant of the generations is a fascinating one, and moving from the center of the maelstrom to a slightly removed observation point is an opportunity for fruitful contemplation.  The comparative advantage enjoyed by grandparenting over parenting is its substantially optional character.  You can rock the kid in your arms as much as you like; then when it poops, pass it back to Mom.

            

Our promising future: Hazel, Ruby, and John Henry

Generational Change

 buzzing about the boroughs

In the introductory chapter of The Dark Side of the Enlightenment I had the occasion to ponder the large degree to which written history is concerned with change.  “All history must necessarily be concerned either with change or with stasis...” I wrote.  “It is safe to say that on the whole historians, particularly modern historians, prefer change.”  Our history textbooks are replete with dramatic phrases about “social transformation,” “revolutions” in mores, and the perpetual “rise of the middle classes” who have been rising so long that they by now must be well beyond Saturn, with Uranus heaving into view.

            Many of us born around the middle of the twentieth century need look no further than our own families to verify the drama of such change.  The most superficial comparison of the life experience of my parents and that of our children demonstrates numerous important developments of American life, beginning with the rapid decline of the agrarian system that defined the first century and a half of the republic. Widen the focus in both directions—that is, compare the lives of my nineteenth-century grandparents and my twenty-first century grandchildren—and the drama becomes nearly disorienting.

            I had the occasion to muse upon such matters this past weekend. Probably only a British academic in London could organize a conference of historians to be held in New York on Yom Kippur; but last Saturday that was the situation that cried out for a little extra grand-parenting and took us up to the city on a Friday afternoon in time to pick up two young granddaughters at the end of their day at the bilingual school at which they are maintaining their fluency in French.  That’s just around Gramercy Park, fifteen or so blocks from the kids’ home on Washington Square.

            New York has to be one of the world’s greatest walking cities, and when the place is on, meteorologically speaking, it is really on.  A crisp, bright autumn day is a wonder to be reveled in.  Our adventure began with a walk down Park Avenue to Union Square, then a short westward jog to University Place, then down University Place to Patsy’s Pizza—one of 171 establishments claiming to serve “the best pizza in the world” and of 46 more modestly claiming “the best pizza in New York”.

            The first thing I noted was that although Lulu and Cora Louise love to go to Patsy’s Pizza, it’s not exactly for the pizza.  Cora won’t eat it at all.  Her invariable order is buttered penne generously garnished with freshly grated cheese.  Lulu orders the smallest possible margherita—what might be described as a minimalist pizza.  But both of them soak up the vibe at Patsy’s.  I think my parents died too young ever to have tasted pizza, though my dear English mother-in-law had at least heard of it.  She pronounced it “PITS-uh.

             Saturday, the actual day of our grandparental command performance, dawned even more brilliant than the Friday.  When the kids arose after a “sleep in” authorized by a seriously hard school week, we got organized for the day’s activities, exiting the house about eleven and heading westward toward the Hudson River at a leisurely pace.  Shortly before you get to the West Side Highway on Christopher Street there is a magnificent old brick commercial building which now houses, among Lord knows whatever other important cultural institutions, the American Tap-Dance Foundation.  Eight-year-old Cora has no lesson today—her specialties being violin, tutored Italian, and the sushi-making seminar offered as an extracurricular at her school--so we leave Lulu to spend an hour working on her stamps and stomps while the three of us cross over to a particularly exciting stretch of the Hudson River Park.  It features (among other things) heavily used soccer fields, tennis courts, boat-building ateliers, and stretches of the river dedicated to sailing, kayaking, and sculling.

            Merely watching the exertions of so many fit young bodies soon becomes tiring, and we started circuitously back toward the Tap Dance Foundation, stopping off briefly in the thrift shop of St. Luke’s church on Hudson Street, the church where Cora (we remind her) was baptized.  At this charity shop you can buy an excellent used white dress shirt for $18.  I was unmoved, however, as my wardrobe mainly comes from St. Peter’s Thrift Shop in Freehold, N. J., where the going price for the identical item is $1.50.  It’s called the “Manhattan Mark-Up”, I believe.

            The best part of the day still lay ahead, of course.  We picked up Lulu (from her Terpsichorean tutorial) and some cream cheese bagels (from a deli) and set out, via subway, for the Wall Street Station.  This is but a short walk from Pier Eleven at the South Street Seaport, from which the free shuttle ferry leaves on a regular schedule for Red Hook in Brooklyn.  This remarkable amenity was dreamed up for commercial reasons by the Ikea megastore in Red Hook, and the ferry now makes a preliminary stop at the even newer huge Fairway grocery there.  Fairway just happens to be at the end of Van Brunt Street, a few hundred yards away from the house of our son Richard, his wife Katie Dixon, and their beautiful babe Ruby.

            So my nieces had the great pleasure of sitting on the open benches of a jazzy new ferryboat as they zipped through New York harbor, skirting Governor’s Island, nodding “hello” to the Statue of Liberty, and arriving soon at the Fairway gangplanks to see their aunt, uncle, and baby cousin coming on foot or stroller from the landward direction down Van Brunt Street.  We consumed our bagels while our hosts downed roasted corn and spare ribs at an outdoor table of the Fairway café.  The scene was lively, colorful, picturesque; a cheeky breeze fluttered the numerous flags and pennants.  Here was something of the flavor of Seurat’s famous painting of “Sunday Afternoon at the Grande Jatte”--but none at all of the cotton fields down home.

            It was by now midafternoon, but the feasting was still not quite through.  We spent another delightful hour strolling over the sun-baked cobblestones of Red Hook in search of some supplementary “dessert” calories.  These were easily to be found in bakery or bodega, but our granddaughters set the bar pretty high.  Most strollers held out for Steve’s Key Lime Pies, just beyond Rich’s house.  This internationally famous emporium, housed in a minimally renovated brick warehouse that looks like an abandoned set for “On the Waterfront”, is another that plausibly proclaims its products “the best in the world”.  There was apparently not room on the signboard for a word about prices: highest in the world.  But of course that kind of penny-pinching thinking is my hang-up.  It is much attenuated in my children’s generation, and seems to have disappeared entirely from the mental landscape of my grandchildren: the rise of the middle classes.

 key lime pies to the left; Jimmy Hoffa's tumulus--straight ahead