hopeful vists

it has been a baby-heavy weekend. Driving north through the rain with my niece's kisses still wet on my cheek, I had a moment to do a lot of pondering. We spent time with two babies in the last thirty-six or forty hours, and it really was a blast. They are so hopeful, so honest, so trusting. I wish we all could be.

I had a drawing teacher in undergrad named Clyde Fowler who said to us that it was important for artists to be "child-like without being childish." To be aware of wonder and beauty and to exist as much as possible in the present, to look at the world wide-eyed and to learn learn learn. Clyde has retired now, but his words still ring in my ears almost every day, and spending a little time with children underscored for me their truth.

Two of the babies in our lives right now have grown to the point that they are keenly aware of their surroundings, and have an intelligence in their eyes that makes it very clear that they are checking out the world around them and that they have opinions about it.

Speeding north through the rain, the humming of the wheels and the morse-code blinking of taillights swept me off into thoughts about our own child, sleeping now in my wife's belly. Who will it be, and what will it think about that? Nine months seems so long, at times, but then it suddenly seemed impossibly short. So does eighteen years. I can't help but wonder what kind of world this person will inhabit, what will be it's reality? Will we (as I think we will) be able to undo in that time some of the great mistakes of the last eight years? What about the mistakes of the last fifty? Or hundred? The landscape of the life that my niece has begun is radically different even from the beginnings of my own life, and that was not too long ago. How different will our child's life be? What will be her (or his) battles, causes, talents, hurdles?

I think children are so hope-full. I love to be with them, to feel their tiny fingers around mine, to recieve their slobbery kisses when they say goodbye. I know that there will be many times that I am not in so loving and philosophical a mood once ours arrives, and that there will be many times that they make me lament all of Western and Eastern civilisation and shake my fist at the sky and quote old Baptista crying "Was ever a gentleman thus grieved as I?"

But for now, I am wrapped in a rainy-day reverie, thinking of children and babies. Thinking of lives to come that will carry on the work and the stories of the lives that have gone. Feeling very, very lucky, and putting off washing my cheek for a little longer.