Dear Ones, I miss you and wish I could come see you in Oakland and push you on the swings in your backyard and hang out around the table with you, witnessing the mild chaos of family life in your formative third and seventh years. I wish you could come down here and we could find our usual big booth at the Palomar and enjoy a leisurely lunch and I could listen to all your news and catch up with your mom, my daughter, and be amazed by your dad, whose sweetness and patience with you is awe-inspiring. A two-hour lunch and a walk around downtown, maybe stopping for an ice cream, makes for a perfect and exhausting afternoon for me, and I am astonished that your parents can keep up with you round the clock.
Your mom the teacher is working from home, and working with you full time. She tells me the yard is a lifesaver these days. Our lunches at the Palomar will not resume for a while. And there’s no telling when it will be safe to see each other again. I’m so technologically backward that I don’t even have a mobile device with which to visit you screen-to-screen, much less a desire to Zoom with you in the anti-space of the internet. And so I send these words instead of digital images.
As I was starting to say, your mom can work from home, but your dad is a hospital doctor and often works long hours, and when he comes home from work the first thing he does is take off his clothes in the garage and jump in the shower. So far, his hospital has not been overwhelmed, thanks in part to California’s quick response to the pandemic, with many Bay Area cities sheltering in place even before the governor gave the order. So that is great and I hope your dad continues to help sick people while staying well himself.
Of course, by now you know there’s a sneaky virus going around that is making a lot of people feel really bad, and the medicine makers haven’t come up with a vaccine or a cure, and that’s why we all have to stay close to home and entertain ourselves and each other as well as we can. I wonder whether you’ve been reading the poems in “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” that I gave you last year. Since you only have a dog, I thought you might be amused to know such feline personalities as Growltiger and McCavity the Mystery Cat and the Rum Tum Tugger. Read those poems out loud to each other when you have a chance. They’re more fun than a barrel of cats!
On a more serious note, I want to apologize for the messed-up world you are inheriting. The pesky coronavirus isn’t the half of it. You probably know already about climate change and what it promises, and soon enough you’ll learn about politics—maybe by then there will be kinder, more competent, more sensible people running our country and the world, and we will have begun to recover from the criminal mismanagement of the mobsters that have somehow come to power and made everything, which was bad enough already, even worse. So for now the world is a crazy, scary place thanks to a lot of bad things people have done over the centuries, and even though it wasn’t my fault I want to tell you how sorry I am for all the sadness and suffering you will witness.
You’re both so smart and so happy that I have high hopes you will rise to the occasion and have interestingly exciting and creative lives, and that you and kids of all kinds with your character will, with your own skills and ethics and ingenuity, improve society and the planet we’re leaving you, and turn it into something better.
Much love from your grandpa.
Stephen Kessler is the author of “Need I Say More?” and other books.
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May 30, 2020 at 07:03PM
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Stephen Kessler | A letter to my smart and happy grandchildren - Santa Cruz Sentinel
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