Pater Familias

Last Saturday we journeyed forty or so miles south of Sarasota to a vacation home of the parents of my grandson's wife.  It was the occasion of the first birthday of the baby girl which this delightful woman had borne to my grandson, and we were invited to join in celebrating the occasion.  I am not a big baby fancier but still I had met this child three or four times previously and found her even tempered and was prepared to enjoy myself.  Reader, we had a marvelous time!  As the afternoon progressed and I could sit quietly by analyzing the people, I came to recognize that my grandson and his wife are themselves persons of extraordinary good will and charm, and that they have given this happy disposition to the baby.  She was all smiles and gurgles, walking on her own already, independent and yet knowing that there was love all around her.  Her mother's family are partly of an Italian background and I so love Italy that I am always disposed to surrender to the charms of people of that culture.  The baby's maternal grandfather is the most delightful man, and it was a great pleasure to talk with him.  Somehow I projected the distinction "grandfather" onto some wrinkled old gent with white side whiskers, when of course he was more or less the same age as my son, the father of the young man whose wife had produced the baby.  I was the wrinkled old timer.  I was the relict of another era.  I was the great grandfather.  Here in this Italianate beach villa in Florida I suddenly felt myself as the patriarch, head of "la familia,' leaning back in the serenity of a life lived well and now awaiting heaven's confirmation of my earthly role.  There is just no way that someone raised in America can live up to something like that, however, and so I stopped trying, ate my food, drank my wine, smiled on one and all, so far removed from the preoccupations, joys, delights, and sorrows of persons of the present day.  In the haze of goodwill I looked at them all, and found them good, kind, and caring, everyone centered on the youngsters going in and out of the pool, and most of all giving space to the darling tot who was--believe it or not--my great granddaughter.  I think back to the nervous, over-sexed (and not very good at hiding it), brainy youngster of sixteen and hey, kid! would you, could you ever imagine that you would be sitting in this scene seventy years later?