Missing

'Onto the mouse, the field hawk drops./ But here where the lesson begins,/ The lesson stops.'

This from Mark Van Doren's We Come Too Late, puts me in mind of the many times in my teaching career, I've encountered inattentive students. Van Doren in this poem reverses the situation: we, mankind, are alert and ready to learn from the universe, but find the teacher indifferent and undirected.

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What a hectic week for grandson Meja: Sturbridge Village and his great grandmother and great aunts;Great Island, Portsmouth (cold but refreshing water), and another great aunt; City Hall Plaza to see his grandfather's workmates; the cemetery next door in the rain just to get out for walks; and today, the zoo with its phalanxes of kids and parents wheeling around aloof and undemonstrative animals. And evenings, my son and my sister-in-law. He's been a trouper; given rest and food, he's in good spirits and interactive as person after person has sought from him the benison of a smile, a kiss, a hug, some endearing spontaneity. He's delivered joy over and over, without duty, without compulsion, simply out of the upwelling of longing-to-learn life that lifts two year olds aloft each of their waking minutes. Ah, that ever-open face of yours, my boy.

My urgency is to grab each moment before he takes his livingness to a new venue. As each situation brings out in him some new response, he brings out in me, and his MerMer, and in each of the rest of his admirers new aspects of ourselves. For instance, he got an Oscar quality Maori war dance performance out of my son as he generated distractions while teeth were being brushed.

Not a perfect child, of course, nor I a perfect grandfather (I get tired, and tired of playing in the same key), but without resort to comparison, there he is, here I am, and our encounter as it turns out to be. The interactions are simple but intense as a palate of dayglo paints. My retinas are throbbing, but I'm ready to risk blindness, because soon enough you'll leave us behind, not without our lives, but without yours.

Reflection is what mostly I miss when I'm with you, Meja: the mental space that allows the bubbling up of unexpected personal associations and opinions and ideas that make me interesting to myself. It's how I know who I am; indeed who that guy is who hams it up for you. This is not something you know about now, or need to, but it's surely part of your life's activity. All that I've discovered I'll make available to you, but you'll want your own (and rightfully).Indeed, I may need what you learn, as I already have begun to do.