This week, my wife, Wendy, our daughter Katy, and I have had delightful company. On July 25, our daughter Mary and our grandson Thomas (youngest of Mary and John’s seven children) arrived from Connecticut for a visit; they’ll fly home tomorrow. The last time we saw Thomas was two summers ago, when Mary and John and all the kids came to the Midwest for the Junior Olympics, which were in Des Moines that year. John and Mary rented a house for eight days in a small town called Perry, about forty minutes from Des Moines, and we’d drive from there to the stadium at Drake University where the track and field events were held. (This week, John and most of the other kids have been in Houston, where this year’s Junior Olympics were held.) The only time we’d seen Thomas before that was roughly a year earlier, when we visited the family in Uncasville, Connecticut, where they had moved from Texas not long after Thomas was born. So this was indeed a special occasion; a four-year-old has a definite personality, with hints of the man to come. And it has been wonderful, as always, to have time with Mary.
There is something at once commonplace and mysterious about families, whether large or small. I think of my own family, which consisted (after my parents were divorced, when I was around five) of my mother, her mother, myself, and my brother, Rick, two and a half years younger than I. In some respects, our mother and our grandmother were very different from each other, while in other respects they were like two peas in a pod. So it was with Rick and me, too. Rick was driving even before it was legal for him to do so; he has owned well over a hundred cars and trucks in his lifetime (and tinkered with countless more). Meanwhile, my mechanical aptitude is probably at the very bottom of the chart. And yet Rick and I share a lot as well (not least, a love for reading), and we have always been exceptionally close.
By the same token, when I think about our seven grandchildren, I am struck both by how various they are and by shared affinities. I wonder about the future course of their lives, and I am overwhelmed by a mix of feelings—sadness included, of course, since my own time here will end long before their stories do, but also (and, thankfully, more strongly) an overwhelming sense of mystery.
Thomas, it’s clear, has inherited some of the aptitude that led his father to gravitate toward engineering as a career, though it’s well to remember that John has a philosophical bent as well; he and Mary (a philosophy major) met at Wheaton College in a seminar devoted to Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Thomas loves building things (such activity has occupied much of his week here), but he also loves stories. And he also delights in making both fine discriminations and judicious generalizations, a quality I find most endearing. Seeing Wendy occasionally breaking into a glorious smile at this or that Thomasian mark of identity has been a great joy. And speaking of smiles, Thomas himself is a charmer in that respect, with a whole range of smiles to suit different occasions.
It will be very early on Saturday morning when Katy drives Mary and Thomas to the airport for their flight home. I have to admit to feeling a pang as I type those words. But above all, I feel thankful.
