The Grandchildren

Here it is, another Christmas season, and our mailbox is stuffed with Christmas cards, well, stuffed is a relative term, let's say we get quite a few, actually more Christmas cards than circular and other junk mail.  There used to be quite a few persons who composed Christmas letters which I glanced at in a desultory fashion, just to note the emphases and omissions.  Now, when they are far fewer, I would welcome them, just because I don't get around much anymore, as the song goes, and see a smaller and smaller number of those whom I think of as friends, not to mention, their ranks having been much diminished by death and dementia.  The Christmas letters are far fewer, the cards with photos are fewer; it's the influence of Facebook where family news is broadcast far and wide, leaving the non-subscriber outside the pale of family or friends.  There have always been those who send on photos, but there is a new and disturbing trend of sending on as surrogates photos of the grandchildren.  In many instances persons of whom I have the most affectionate memory from forty or so years ago include only representations of their grandchildren.  Forget that I have not even met their children often since they were teeny tots, but the grandchildren are no more to me than the family pet.  I want photos of my friends, now beyond the hope of serious facial surgery, just as they are, just for the fun of trying to decipher their faces of yesteryear in today's lineaments. My own grandchildren are indifferent to the sending of cards, as indifferent to life beyond Facebook as their parents, my children.  I recognize that there is something more involved than Facebook, however. My children from an early age were encouraged to develop themselves independently of each other and their parents, and they have done so.  My wife came from a family she did not much care to spend time with with whom she however spent almost all major holidays, and summer visits, bringing us all along in tow.  I came from a large family that dissolved more or less in the years of moving about in the Second World War, the impetus to reunite having been lost in the death of our mother.  We had a wonderful Sunday dinner in 1940 when the oldest two went east to college; we six siblings met again in 1954 at our mother's funeral (father had died in an accident in the thirties), and in 1973 worried that we would never meet again I invited all five to my home in Brookline MA for a weekend.  And that has been it.  Three of them are now dead so the next family reunion will have to be in Heaven.  My wife and I divorced when the children were in their teens, so  they no longer sensed any place as "home" except for their grandparents' (their mother's parents) ancestral farm in New Hampshire.  Unfortunately the grandparents were not grandparently so it was not an emotional and spiritual refuge.  They all married into secure strong families which gave them the attachment they needed, but deprived me more or less of any position of meaningful focus in their lives.  Funny to have four children and six grandchildren, delightful people; whenever I get together with one or all of them we truly have nonestop fun,  but none of whom would consider initiating a meeting, and I have more or less accepted disappearing from their lives.  I guess Christmas brings out these thoughts.