MISSING THEM...

I woke this morning feeling lonely for my grandkids. Not so much Luka, the youngest, who lives not far from us in Los Angeles. Even at the very start of the pandemic, he could come over with his mom and take a walk around the hill with us. Not long into it we started having him over, masked and socially distant, for longer, indoor visits. And in the past few months he has been a regular overnight visitor, coming over for an online school day and staying a night, sometimes two, in the room that has come to be "Luka's room" in our house. Quite recently, especially since our vaccinations, we have abandoned all pretense at masks and social distance, and have felt free to give him the hugs a small boy needs from his grandparents. Which is all good.

So, no, it's the other three I feel lonely for. The circumstances of their parents' lives have always kept us geographically far removed: Alice, our oldest, now in her early twenties, was born in Tokyo, where my son Matthew and his wife Diane worked for quite a number of years. The twins, Joseph and Georgia, were born in London when the family returned to Europe, in part to be closer to their other grandparents as they grew up. They have lived in and near London ever since. and thanks to the great distance, the cost of airfare, the obvious need for longer visits if we were to make the journey and the consequent inevitable disruption in our lives, our visits there--or theirs here--have been pretty much biannual, or annual at best.

Which is clearly no way to be a grandparent. Of my own two grandfathers, I knew my father's father only through a single photograph of myself and my sister sitting on his knee when I was about one year old; and a family portrait of a distinguished gentleman with a genial smile, a smart tweed suit and an ascot tie. He died quite suddenly on a business trip to New Zealand before I reached the age of two, so I never got to know him. I did know my maternal grandfather, though. "Grimp", as he was affectionately known to all his grandchildren, was, by the time I knew him, the Chancellor emeritus of Brecon Cathedral in Wales. For the better part of his life he had served as a parish priest in Swansea, and had retired with my grandmother to the village of Aberporth on the Cardiganshire coast. They lived in Penparc Cottage, a low, single-story, white-washed home with a gray slate roof. I remember Grimp as a gentle man with thinning silver hair and a wry sense of humor. He was hardy, too, a strong swimmer, and even into his eighties he would don his bathing suit each day for a morning swim in the frigid waters of the bay. In my mind's eye I best recall him sitting at the breakfast table in the front room of that little cottage, patiently chopping the top off his boiled egg and dipping into the yolk with toast "fingers".

To me, as a child, even this grandfather seemed remote. The west coast of Wales, in those days, was a very long trek from the midlands, Bedfordshire, where my father had his parish. But we did manage the trip almost every year, in the summer, even during the war when petrol was strictly rationed and hard to come by. And Grimp lived on until I was in my late teen years, so at least I knew him as a grandfather. And he remains the model for me until today: kindly and patient, quietly attentive to childhood hurts and fantasies, tolerant of moods and childish outbursts, and at the same time totally secure in his own aging adult world. I certainly remember having felt the power of his blessing, even though it went unspoken.

Perhaps--I would like to think this--I am a similar presence to Luka. For the others, I remain known more by my absence than my presence. From everything I know about my distant grandchildren, they are thriving. After several months of Covid-related socially-removed work, Alice has now returned full-time to her job at a school not far from where she still lives with her parents. Having started out after university as a teacher's assistant (as I understand it), she is now herself a teacher and will be studying for her full qualifications as she works. Of the three, she is the one we know best because she came out a couple of years ago and spent some time with us in California. That was a special joy.

The twins, two years Alice's junior, both started out at university this year, Joseph at Nottingham, where Alice graduated, and Georgia, to my huge pride and joy, at my old Cambridge college where my father also studied in the 1920s. I feel so sorry that their university experience--and their first time away from home--had to start out with all the strictures imposed by our current pandemic; with isolation and social distancing, at a time when the university experience should be one not only of educational opportunity and shared learning in lecture halls and seminars, but also of the first social experience of adult life. (My own first year, in the 1950s, after twelve years of lockdown in boys' boarding schools and adolescent emotional interaction almost exclusively with other boys, was a splurge of beer and ill-fated, fumbling attempts to adjust to the wondrous world of girls!)

In short, I have a grandfather's pride in the achievements of my grandkids, but lack the opportunity to spend time with them as a grandfather would want to. As it is, I send anonymous blessings from afar, and wish them well in everything they do, and hope for wonderful relationships in lust and love, and send the fondest of thoughts their way. And miss them. There was a time--before even I was born, and that's a long, long time ago!--when families of custom and necessity stayed close, fathers and mothers and their children, uncles and aunts, even; and, of course, the grandparents. Our world today is very different, with different social mores, different opportunities for dislocation, different modes of travel. There is something deeply human lost in this, something perhaps to do with the ancient tribal gene, the sense of belonging, of solidarity, of communal life, of family.  

I wonder: are we witness to a new, perhaps more rapid stage in the evolution of our human species? Must we now, as we set our sights on previously unimaginable distances--the moon, the planet Mars?--adapt to the effects of dislocation, disconnection, separation?