GRANDSONS

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writers’ musings:

“You better make them care about what you think. It had better be quirky or perverse or thoughtful enough so that you hit some chord in them. Otherwise it doesn’t work. I mean, we’ve all read pieces where we thought: Oh, who gives a damn?”

Nora Ephron

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GRANDSONS

Now I derive sensual pleasures with senses other than the tactile as my eyes behold the beauty of my grandchildren even as they are children no longer.

My grandsons are beautiful beautiful beautiful – beautiful boys… to quote John Lennon. As children they were both reed-slender and finely proportioned, the older with the skin of a pearl, the other as perfect as a hazelnut. They resided in angelic perfection, dwelling in the simplicity of childhood and the sweetness of innocence even as they gathered the complexities of life around them: the general messiness of urban Los Angeles, the confusing atmosphere of the industrial-entertainment complex that continually barraged them.

As children they read – a lot, absorptively, consumingly, adding more and more rooms to their developing minds. A way, perhaps, to disengage from the adults around them, to burrow into where they needed to be as they retreated from the explorations of childhood, even from the hurrahs of connection with their peers, a way to give themselves solitude in the presence of their parents, in their family, in a crowd, in the jangling world.

They liked to pet and cuddle my puppies and their kittens. As brothers, they’d scorn one another at one moment, and then swim together like porpoises in a pod the next. They weren’t especially athletic. Nobody close to them was particularly sports-minded; these boys really hailed from Athens, not Sparta.

Julian the elder was ever-so-curious about stuff like rocks and elements and astrophysics. Olivier the younger liked board games. Julian was always drawing. He also tinkered and puttered, he’d make things with bits of wire and liked to fashioned home-made weapons - and sure enough he’s grown into his manhood as an artist and a Maker. He went through his phase of pyromania. Their Papa would sit with them at the computer screen to troll YouTube for interesting experiments that might include explosions and such. They were always quite socialized, talking easily with adults.

They were both a little eccentric. Olivier seemed more vain than Julian; he went through a phase of gobbing his hair up into a mad Mohawk with viscous gel so that it stood straight up from his beautiful head. Julian’s always worn a ponytail. For awhile, he proudly wore a kilt to school. Olivier wore one, too, but got teased too much, so he abandoned his. Julian could decidedly have been taken for a girl then, what with the skirt and the ponytail, but he scoffed at the unimaginative who reacted to his kilt; he only rued the fact that he couldn’t wear a sword or a knife in a scabbard at his waist to school, because he was very serious about being in the tradition of a Celtic warrior. He also took up blacksmithing. Children under 12 weren’t really allowed in the blacksmithing workshop, but at 11, Julian charmed the teacher with his desire and charisma, so off he went to clang away for awhile on wrought-iron bottle openers and letter-openers.

They were certainly differentiated, to themselves, to each other, to the adults in their lives, in their individual worlds. One was the tinker and the tailor, the other was the soldier and the spy. The older loved science, the younger loved tech. And games. And electronic screens. Those were especially irresistible to that one.

In the face of this, the old ways are seen in starker and starker relief. The mere and simple act of writing, for instance. There’s an elemental simplicity to it, the mental transposed to the physical, practiced neural pathways on which that skill of writing is mastered. It is quite arduous for children to learn to write when those little hands are not yet finely human and able to exercise fully developed motor skills. Their hands remain primitive when they are very young. That infantile whole-hand grasp hasn’t yet fanned into fully using the fingers.

Are we now at some inconceivable juncture when we as a species evolve away from and past this very ability? When the brain will no longer direct the hand to write, and paper and writing implements become archaic, with even words and language perhaps morphing into symbols and emojis? Will it just be the brain, the bits, the bytes? Oh God oh God why hast thou forsaken me?

But back to the boys. The second boy.

He was drawn inexorably into the rabbit hole of the magical handheld, so down and down he went. There was a white rabbit there that kept luring him, that spooled out more and more possibilities and as a child he saw no reason not to follow, to proceed, to suspend his reason or to curb his impulses. He merely touched the screen with his finger and the paths kept opening. He loved to play all the seductive games through the constant beckonings to him to go deeper, to get more advanced, to go to the next version.

Still a child, he didn’t know of the Corporation with a capital C behind the curtains that pulled his strings and directed him. There was no such thing as cost or money or having to pay for it. There was only pleasure and delight in the moment, the gratification of the immediate, of pleasure with no pain. It was Edenic.

But. Numbers presented themselves. The piper must be paid. And so. The credit card bill appeared. His parents were shocked by an onslaught of charges, a sudden burden, the sheer crush of having to pay the price of paradise for their child, who didn’t realize…

Child, they asked. Did you do that? Did you get new games to play with on the screen?

That child’s heart quickened. That child knew in his tenderness that a serpent had entered his existence. That child’s limbic system, so suffused with the simple seductive pleasures of bright temptations in his hand via the enticing screen, now felt a frisson of threat to his pleasure.

His inclination was of course to protect himself. If he had somehow done wrong, would it not be better, not so much to lie, but to remain and to claim innocence? He was nine.

Somehow through this shiny object he was cast out of the paradise of the garden of his childhood. The action of swipe yielded consequences of the intangible. It is true that surely he would experience action and consequence in life one way or another. He may still try to apply magic thinking. Anyone, child or adult, would prefer the stasis of one’s world, but at nine he was suddenly unsure of how to control it……

I had my share of worry about serpents in my grandsons’ Garden of Eden. Bullies. Drugs. Confusions. Worry that the very world they’re coming into is irrevocably degrading and degraded on a planetary scale. I still worry worry worry my head off.