Of course, things seldom turn out to be what we anticipate or want them to be. I think that’s why I write. That’s why I paint. And I’ve accepted that I really don’t know much about anything, but I am always curious about how things will turn out. My mother used to tell me that as a child I loved playing in the mud, forming shapes that never really resembled anything, and then laughing with delight at my creations. How little has changed in seven and a half decades.

My wife doesn’t realize it, of course, but she is a most wonderful woman. Even when she criticizes me, which she does infrequently, she does it with a compliment. For example, in recent months I’ve spent so many hours painting each day that she sometimes feels neglected. She told me that she feels at moments like Monet’s widow. Monet! She could have said she felt like a painter’s widow, but she had to compare me to one of the greats. I suggested that perhaps she was just comparing herself to the most unhappy painter’s wife she could think of, but she said no, she actually loves the fact that I’m so involved.

This led to a discussion of how fortunate she is that I have stuff to occupy me instead of being underfoot all day. Of course, I’m fortunate, too, to have stuff I want to do. And she asked me to describe what makes writing and painting so absorbing.
I explained that when I’m writing, I go to bed at night thinking about what my characters will do the next day. How Bahari will deal with the discovery that his grandmother is dying. Whether Elsbeth will confront her husband, who has dementia, with new evidence that he had an affair fifty years earlier.

For the last few months, I’ve been taking a painting course online, relearning some of the basics I never mastered or have forgotten. Things like light and shadow, value and edge, volume and depth. Instead of dousing my pigment with linseed oil or other mediums, I am reduced to using a dropper to add just five drops of oil to an inch or so of paint squeezed from a tube.

Instead of having access to every pigment in the universe, I’m limited—for the first block of painting consisting of twenty exercises—to four gradations: extreme shadow, moderate shadow, moderate light and extreme light. The discipline is both rigorous and exhilarating. Now I go to bed fantasizing about how the palate knife creams pigment and oil together into a shiny paste with a butter-like texture. How I marry the tip of my brush to the darkest shade of extreme shadow, as I encourage pigment to infiltrate the bristles in order to shape the brush into a flat, elongated edge. And, finally, the application of paint to canvas, a process at once visceral, intimate and breathtakingly delicate.

It’s something like sex, except that instead of rapid, ragged breathing, my breath slows as it does when I meditate. I join the edges of pigment with exquisite, feathered strokes in order to shape a clean edge between objects, where light and shadow are clearly defined. I use admixtures to achieve gradients, gradual darkening or lightening, where shadows bend around curved surfaces.

I go to bed thinking of how generously my brush feeds pigment to the canvas, how thirstily the canvas drinks as I offer just the right quantity of pigment, how the paint seems to know just where it needs to go from the tip of my bristles to fill the tooth, the raised texture of the canvas.

Rather than painting a jug or an apple, I am relearning to create only the variations of light and shadow. As with writing, where my characters develop themselves and the story ends up telling itself, I’m discovering in my painting that the apple and the jug and the cylinder and the blossoms and the thorned stems of the persimmon tree emerge fully formed from light and shadow. It’s like the miracle of a love affair. How fortunate I am to have more than one in my life.

Happy Valentine’s Day, my love.

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Yes. There are many small miracles to celebrate, some taking place in the most unlikely places. Rwanda, for example, where they know all about the horrors of genocide, has become a haven for the girls of Sola.

I didn’t expect to be as touched as I was by this jewel of a report by Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes. It’s not only the bravery of the young woman who decided to take it upon heself to educate the next generation of female leaders in Afghanistan. Nor is it only the courage it took to extricate every one of her students from Afghanistan when the Taliban took over after the disastrous withdrawal of the US. Stories of getting the girls to the airport under Taliban surveillance, and onto the last planes out, are hair-raising. Nor is it her prescience in being sure that it was only time before the Taliban would do what they’ve now done.

Girls are not to be educated beyond the 6th grade. Women in responsible jobs are now to stay at home and send husbands and brothers in to do the jobs they were never trained for. Nor is it only the courage, in the face of fear and grief and loss, of the parents determined to give their daughters a chance at freedom and happiness, who sent their female children away, to a place they’d perhaps never heard of, for what might be forever. As a father and grandfather of beloved girls, I wonder whether I would have had the courage to make such a decision.

I hope so.

Thankfully, I’ll never have to find out.

One would like to believe that these girls, in their lovely uniforms and face coverings decorated in the way of Rwandan fabrics, presumably as a way to honor their hosts, can freely roam the streets of Kigali. But the generosity of the Rwandan people who have welcomed this school for girls with open hearts doesn’t guarantee the school safety from the reach of the Taliban.

One can only hope.

What touched me most deeply—and what would make me most willing to send my own children away under similar circumstances—is the determination of each girl to make a difference in the world. They understand the privilege of freedom better than most. According to this report, they speak with their families in Afghanistan weekly. They understand and appreciate the sacrifices their parents have made.

The joy in their eyes as they describe what it’s like to live in a community of free women is inspiring. What’s not stated but is self-evident is the contrast between their good fortune and the fates of their mothers and sisters left behind, trapped by a primitive worldview that deems women less in every way.

We live in a world where medical advances have made gender truly fluid, and in a country where we have the luxury to debate the nature of sexuality, gender and gender roles. Too often, in our privileged world, we allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.

On International Women’s Day, the girls of Sola—and those who are left behind—are at two extremes of the spectrum. We should never lose sight of how fortunate we are to be where we are on that spectrum, regardless of how far we still have to go.

You can watch the report here: https://cbsn.ws/48rlImC

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I thought that was the entire circle of life and learning. At every stage, I was sure I had arrived at an understanding of how it all works. It was as simple as accepting that each generation is born, takes its place in the world, and then passes from view. But, there is much we cannot begin to imagine. Our vision is small, and the distance to our horizons is short. Speaking about the lifelong search we engage in, T.S. Eliot famously said in his poem, Four Quartets:

…the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Here I am, watching again, learning from my grown children how they parent their offspring, just as I learned about raising young children from watching how my parents raised me.

And here I am again, discovering how to parent grown children, just as I learned from observing my parents navigate the shoals of being parents to me and my siblings.

But there is more. I saw my parents become the best grandparents possible to our children. They seemed to do it effortlessly.

Now, my wife and I are exploring how to be the best grandparents possible to our own grandchildren. The circle rotates unendingly, reaching orbits unimaginable, until those orbits become real.

Our children have now become mature adults, close to being in their middle years. Our grandchildren will live in a world we couldn’t have fathomed a decade ago. And us? There are more years behind us than there are before us. But still, we explore. It is the state of being human, of being alive. When we cease exploring and being curious, we will have given up motion. And, as one of our children said recently, motion is life. Without motion, life ends.

What, you might ask, remains to be discovered?

Magic and joy. The fortunate among us are led to a promised land in which we have increasingly more in common with our mature children. It is a world sweeter than could have been envisioned, a world in which we are not raising grown children as much as befriending them, and they us. It is a world in which we offer the benefit of our lived experience. In turn, they offer us the equally important gift of their vision and vitality, a view of current reality that would otherwise be inaccessible to us.

We laugh together at the absurdity of the world. We share the experiences we’ve had. If it’s true that children can never really know their parents, this is the time of life when closing that gap becomes possible. They are old enough to be curious about our early experiences and capable of understanding how those experiences formed us.

This, too, is part of life’s circularity. Knowing how parents became the kind of people they are affords children a perspective on the impact their histories might have on their lives. It further opens the possibility that we all have the power to choose who we want to become: we need not be captive to the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. What parent would not delight in presenting a child with such an unexpected freedom?

It’s not always easy or simple. There is teaching going on as well as learning. Only now, it’s intergenerational, and it goes both ways. It is punctuated not only by love and laughter, but also by friendship and common experience. And, above all, by our common devotion to the third generation.

I wonder, is this where I started? Have I come full circle? Is this how it feels to know the place for the first time?

If so, how wonderful. And if not, I look forward to arriving there. It will feel like reaching home after a long journey. Either way, what a surprising and unexpected gift. For us all.

*With thanks to Joni Mitchell for “The Circle Game”

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Why, I wonder, is he wearing my ring on his hand? Oh, it’s mine. My ring, my hand. When did that happen, I find myself asking?
Or, shaving, I glance in the bathroom mirror to make sure my hand doesn’t slip and sever my carotid artery. I promised my wife when we married that I would never do anything to put myself at risk. That included activities like hang-gliding and bungee jumping over alligator-infested rivers. Low on the list was being careful while shaving. It seemed like a quaint promise at the time. Who knew how fast it would rise on the probability scale?

Then there’s hair. Since we inherit our balding patterns from our maternal grandfathers, I was never going to see my father’s full shock of hair on my head. What I didn’t expect was to peer into the mirror as I smoothed the “eyelashes” growing on my scalp—I would hardly call them hair—and see my grandfather’s balding pate atop my father’s aged face. My grandfather’s been gone since I was eleven, some 63 years ago, so it was a shock to see his oiled, silver strands combed back across my skull, framing my father’s face.

The last time I remember seeing that grandfather was when he took me to the cavernous warehouse of the import-export company where he worked. It was filled with candy and toys, and he invited me to choose anything I wanted for my upcoming eleventh birthday. I could have picked any of a dozen boxed toys that took my fancy—a huge Meccano set, an electric train, a telescope on a tripod as big as I was—but I could never have imagined asking for anything so elaborate. My grandfather made clear his preference that I select something athletic. I didn’t really want the soccer ball I eventually pointed at. I felt like a fraud, and as we walked out between the towering shelves stuffed with shining toys I would never own and tried to conceal it beneath one arm.

The soccer ball lived for years in my bedroom closet, a reminder, whenever I looked at it, that I hadn’t been determined enough to ask for what I really wanted. Of course, whether I really knew what I wanted is another matter. Perhaps, it’s just one example of how the stories we manufacture about our past seem to define us.

But this is off topic. My intention was not to write about the past, or even about how the past gets reflected in the present. What I want to discuss is how the past we never anticipated discovering in ourselves appears when we least expect it.

I thought I had a grasp on what it means to get old. After all, I have watched it happen to my parents, in particular, to my father. At first, he aged almost imperceptibly, and then very fast. In his last few years, he aged at such an excruciatingly slow pace that when debility finally ended his journey, it came as both a relief and a surprise. Watching him, I imagined my own trajectory to include physical changes like wrinkles and baldness and age spots.

Perhaps my balance would go. There might be glasses and loss of hearing and chronic itching. Maybe I would even find it increasingly difficult to locate exactly the right word to express a particular idea. But one thing I didn’t anticipate has happened, too. Suddenly, surprisingly, amazingly.

All our lives we train to become better. We measure our height against the wall from the moment we can stand. I remember distinctly weighing 90 pounds, and being impatient to get to 100. I was the prototypical ninety-pound weakling. My parents sent me to a gym where the owner, a retired policeman, routinely measured biceps and chests.

Measurements were noted on a wall chart so that we could track our progress. And progress we did. What a sense of achievement I had as my weight increased and my chest measurement inched upward! The number 27 inches comes to mind, but that was a long time ago.

We learn how to count and then to count in 10s and then in 100s. We move from simple arithmetic to algebra to trigonometry. We crawl, then walk, then run and, if we’re lucky, we learn to jump rope and perhaps do gymnastics. The point is that we are constantly striving to become bigger, brighter, stronger, more competent, and more self-sufficient as we increase our mastery over one discipline after another.

We’ve heard about the theoretical plateau, that hypothetical place where we stop advancing and instead hold steady for a while before whatever follows next. We pay it lip service, saying that we expect it to happen, but that can hardly be true. We can’t understand the reality of decline, any more than an infant can understand adulthood. And how many teenagers would choose to have children, if they understood the challenges involved in raising a child?

Some things can’t be denied. It turns out that strength, speed and endurance are no match for gravity and time. If we’re lucky enough, we reach a point where we have to admit that maintaining the status quo has become an adequate goal, and that, soon thereafter, the plateau will start to decline. I know that now. I learned it last week.

It was the mirror again. This time it wasn’t anything as mundane as my father’s ears or his fingers or his twinkly eyes. It was something far more elemental. As I raised my arm to smooth the back of my head, I saw not the full, ripe, swell of my bicep, which I could have sworn was there the previous week. Instead, I saw my father’s bicep. It reminded me of that old soccer ball when I last saw it a half-century ago, the leather loosening and stretching as the substance that gave it form and shape began to deflate.

I’m one of the fortunate ones, for whom this recognition remained hidden from me until my seventy-fourth year. Perhaps that says more about my denial of the obvious than anything else. If I insist, I can retain the delusion that I will continue to increase the weight I press and lower the time it takes to do so. But that deflated soccer ball is proof that despite the spirit’s willingness, the flesh may no longer be up to the task of constant improvement.

The advantage of doors closing is that they leave us space to focus on other things. I remind myself daily that we are constantly setting an example for someone else. Becoming a kinder, gentler husband is a goal with moving goalposts. Being the type of father I would wish my adult children become to theirs. The grandfather intentionally focused on creating memories for grandchildren.
I want to be a subtler chef. A writer whose words inspire. A painter with a looser, more instinctive brush. A greener-thumbed gardener. I may not get to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, which was once on my bucket list. But the Grand Canyon still beckons. And hiking the John Muir Trail—or parts of it—is still a possibility.

There’s another lesson, one my grandfather didn’t live long enough to learn. We don’t have a choice. The only way to keep going is to keep improving, for as long as we have breath. It’s who we are and what we do. What being human is all about.

At least, that’s what I will continue to do—and to believe—until such time as the reality of what I can’t yet imagine shows me otherwise.

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We begin with orange, of course, as close as we can come to pumpkin. The idea of washing brushes between colors is a concept not yet understood. Each idea gives rise to the next. We decide that painting our hands is just as important as decorating our pumpkin. This goes along with being colorful white ghosts. Pretty soon, the colors merge. That mixing red and blue results in purple is a subject of unending fascination, but only one color emerges when all the paints are combined. We brush it on our fingers and smoosh it all over our hands and wrists. Then we laugh with delight as we daub the mud on our noses and chins.

Finally, we’ve had enough. We make our way to the stair-stool in the bathroom to wash hands. She rips off her painting apron. In the process, she gets paint on her shirt and in her hair. I stand behind her, little fingers in mine. Gently, I wash away the thick paint, thankful that it’s water-based and not the oils I use on my canvases. We laugh as water splashes everywhere. Mommy and Daddy will have to clean up after us.

“Time for soap, Papa,” she says. There are a variety of soaps, perhaps reflecting Mommy’s lifelong wish to be all things to all people. But that’s a subject for another blog that will be postponed until permission is granted.

She points to a small, lavender-scented oval on the dish. It’s green—her favorite color. “I’m going to use this one,” she says. She points to the white rectangle with a red heart embedded at its center. “You use this one, Papa.”

“Why do you want me to use that one?” I ask.

She looks up at me in the mirror, hands upraised in a gesture that conveys astonishment at my lack of understanding.

“Because I know you love me,” she says with certainty.

“I do love you,” I whisper, barely able to get the words out. I focus on the suds, rinse pigment from her hands, reveal the purity of what lies beneath. I follow it up with a list of all the other people who love her, too.

What a fortunate child, I think. And what a fortunate grandfather. Do her words come from the heart, or is she repeating what she hears her parents say? Does it matter?

I am struck by a sudden realization, both new and as old as the hills. We learn and relearn it as the passage of time gnarls our bark, wizens our trunk, softens our center, and shapes our grain into hardwood patterns as intricate as life itself.

Love and connection are not the same. We love our children, young and old, with love unconditional. But our connection to them changes. The fabric from which we are woven rips as they differentiate themselves from us. The tearing is a natural process. It continues as they harden into their own wondrous and intricate patterns.

But, for now, there is a brief moment when everything can be spoken—when self-involvement is indistinguishable from innocence.

What wonders we are.

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