But with our son returned for a week’s visit after a year’s absence and sitting on the swing at the other end of the porch, a daytime downpour had to suffice.
As the monsoon-size drops ricocheted off the streets like automatic gunfire and spray blew in beneath the eaves, I looked Benjamin’s way and remembered a photo taken 30 years ago on a porch swing at the apartment we rented at Northern and Elm streets.
In the picture, he is a little boy in tan corduroy OshKosh overalls.
A tangle of hair rises from his head like a laughing tumbleweed, and above below his laughing eyes, cheeks bulge like mounds of mirth. Next to him, my mother-in-law leans in, protecting him from a fall and catching his contentment in her arms.
During Benjamin’s recent visit, his nephew and our grandson, younger than his Uncle Ben was in that old photo, seemed to stage a historic re-enactment.
He sat on that same swing with a thickening mass of fine brownish hair rising in the humidity like steam off blacktop after a cloudburst while my wife struck the pose her mother had 30 years earlier, both protective and captivated.
It was in the face of all this that I reconsidered what it means to be a dependent.
For tax purposes, it’s pretty straightforward. Just as our children were ours, our grandson is our daughter and son-in-law’s.
But in late middle age, my own sense of security seems more and more dependent on them.
Years ago my wife and I lead our children into the future, shopping for school clothes and supplies, running them to the doctor and dentist, filling out forms and attending to necessities.
We now seem to be following along.
Sometimes it’s in little ways, as when my daughter emailed me instructions on making a smiley face.
I know how to make the idiot version, :).
But the emoticon version was beyond me.
I’d wanted to put one in an email to her so she’d know that, just as she was once excited to be going somewhere with her daddy years ago, he is looking forward to going to a tennis tournament with her now.
A few days earlier, Benjamin had taken the lead for us in another way, breaking a logjam on updating our computer.
We’d decided to do so and had made a selection on our own some months ago. But we never pulled the trigger.
It all seemed simpler to do after he sat on our couch, asked us three or four questions, ticked off what we needed and agreed to take me shopping.
He also saved his parents money on pain killers by transferring the data from our old computer, which now suddenly looks like the equipment the Sand People scavenged in the first Star Wars movie.
Back then, I carried around with me a sense that our children’s dependence on me was a burden. One or the other of us had to be around to watch them, and there was a kind of competition for free time.
Now we are are in a more friendly competition to hold our grandson and have trouble imagining what else we might want to do.
And the same baby squalling that once drove me to distraction now tends to put a smile on my face.
There also is a this strange sense of dependency on and vulnerability before fate.
Being this age means knowing the world can give you a punch every now and then. It means having seen your children absorb the same kind of punch.
By logical extension, it means knowing that similar punches await even the grandchild you hold in your arms.
And that makes you want them to know that, whatever storm comes their way, they still can depend on you.
About the Author