Not spud

What has eyes but sees not?  Sound like a riddle. No, actually it's the 5 week son of my daughter's best friend, a baby with a bird's name, peering dazedly around with blue eyes. Oh, kissable, oh, warm head against my bearded cheek, oh, squeaks and bleats and tiny head-flops, and  fitting so perfectly into my arms...
   
We'd come for our ritual Thanksgiving evening of games, and to catch up on the lives of those who'd been the best friends of our children going up, and their younger siblings and their friends. There have been years and years of comings and goings between our families. The mystery of the passage of time filled the crowded cozy living room, fire crackling in the hearth. That our contemporaries are growing older is no surprise--so are we--but that the young should cease being little girls and become young women and mothers (and mothers to be) is wonder-ful. The evening was a reaffirmation of what doesn't grow old: our common love of word games, our affection for each other.

So I'd say to you, Mr Huggable: Welcome to the Planet, but you're as much a child of this blue-green globe as any who've gone before, and those foreseeable, carbon-based, DNA-directed. How  about this: Welcome to the World of Human Affairs, but you've been participant in the lives of all around you for months already, indeed even as as potentiality you were making an impact.

So Welcome to the Light and Air, and to the arms to those who didn't conceive you but do want to hold you. Today it's only me, friend of the family, later it will be lover, later on it may be son or daughter, and you'll do your share of carrying in turn.

On this holiday in honor of the virtue of gratitude, I appreciate with joy  the continued vigor of the old and vitality itself incarnate in the new--and so fetchingly, with just the right heft, just the right heat, just the right level of alertness. I look forward to getting to know you as your life unfolds, a prospect I'm grateful for.