"Things and Joy"

Sydney M. Williams

Essay from Essex

“Things and Joy”

May 16, 2019

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“I looked around the rooms I did not see as rooms,

but more as landscapes for my emotions, a biography of memory.”

                                                                                                Anne Spollen

                                                                                                The Shape of Water

My wife and I have always been collectors, not for investment, but because something struck our fancy:a painting, an old English tea caddy, an antique desk, for example. I have bought old books and Caroline old china. We have politically incorrect knick-knacks, wooden snuff boxes and cast-iron doorstops. Amidst the books and papers that clutter my built-in desk are two dozen photographs, an old Wall Street cartoon and the paper ticker, embedded in Lucite, of a trade I helped facilitate many years ago. On the walls of our small library, where seven hundred books have found a home, hang forty-five framed paintings, photographs, drawings and letters, most having to do with family. Collections, as someone once said or wrote – or should have if they did not – are little more than reflections of the collector. Look at our walls and bookshelves, I tell our grandchildren, and you will learn something of us.These are walls that talk.

The collecting of “things” has become passé,in an age of helicoptering parents who prefer the bustle of in-town living to the placidity of rural life. Collecting can be a selfish and solitary avocation, for it is only the self that wants pleasing. Experiences, in contrast, are usually shared. Experiences, of course, are often memorialized in things: photos, mementos or souvenirs of places and sights visited. But, do we take time to savor last years’ trip, or are we too busy planning next years’ expedition? This is not to argue against experiences, especially with children and grandchildren. God knows I love them, but perspective is wanted, and balance is needed.

Has the pendulum swung too far from “things”? Who, we are asked, would want ‘brown’ furniture in their living room, pieces of junk in the family room, crockery in the pantry, dusty books on shelves and old paintings on walls? Well, we would. But the furniture are antiques and the junk, curios. The crockery is, in fact, Meissen, the “dusty old books” include first editions of Through the Looking Glassand Huckleberry Finn, and the “old pictures” include a few Connecticut impressionists. While recognizing that changing habits are to be expected, there is a compulsivity toward the “doing of it now” that possesses our ego-obsessed culture, which is troubling, making those like me feel like dinosaurs in an age of Twitter. 

Life is more than collecting “things” and even more than experiences. InThe Second Mountain, David Brooks writes of his climb toward faith: “Happiness comes from accomplishments. Joy comes from offering gifts. Happiness fades; we get used to the things that make us happy. Joy doesn’t fade. To live with joy is to live with wonder, gratitude and hope.” There is wisdom in those words. There is so much about the world we do not know and cannot understand. While there are some who claim that all climate change is due to man, I feel humbled when a thunderstorm passes through, a winter storm brings devastation, or the sea churns in enormous, potentially destructive waves. The Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory tells us that the average hurricane generates and releases energy equivalent to almost two hundred times the electrical generating capacity of the planet. There is no question that man has affected our climate, but he is not the only – and probably not the principal – cause. It makes one realize there are forces greater than man. I am filled with wonder of the natural world, gratitude for being alive, and hope for a future that is free and peaceful for my grandchildren.

But is a joyful life simply a belief in God, helping others, or witnessing nature’s mysteries? Perhaps? However, in my opinion joy comes from striking the right balance between work, home, play, faith and community service. Joy stems from being happy with one’s self. Certainly, the absence of bad luck plays a role, but it is mostly about walking the line between compulsion and dedication; a willingness to work hard, but not at the expense of ignoring one’s family. The Serenity Prayer of Reinhold Niebuhr comes to mind: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.”  When I skied, there was joy in fresh powder on the Bolshoi Ballroom at Vail. Having given up skiing, I find joy in walking alone through the woods and in putting words on paper. Joy comes from the pleasure of giving back to one’s community some of what one has gained. I get joy in our infrequent visits to church. And I get joy in looking at things we have collected over many years – a photograph of me and my sister, each holding our dolls, taken around 1943; a painting my wife did while a student in Boston in 1959; a wooden Christmas Tree ornament bought in Germany on our honeymoon in 1965; a Henry King Taylor painting “Carrying Out the Anchor” bought in Haddam, Connecticut in the late 1960s; a family history discovered at Boston’s Goodspeed’s in the 1970s; a signed copy of Midstreamby Helen Keller, and numerous pieces of sculpture and drawings by parents, children and grandchildren.

It is said that “enough is enough,” and that probably applies to this essay. But what does it really mean? Are your demands the same as mine? Life is not (or should not be) a competition. We are here for a moment, and then, like all living things, we die. Are we remembered? Looking at what we have collected, I see history and the memories they evoke. A drawing of my father as a child and a silhouette of my mother in her riding habit at age twelve make me think of their childhoods and of how the world has changed. I recall once an Aunt coming to our home in Greenwich, seeing a chest that had belonged to her mother, my grandmother. She said how pleased she was to see that piece, well-loved as before, but in its new home. My wife and I feel the same way, seeing things we once owned now gracing rooms or walls in the homes of our children. Each carries a memory; each tells a story, one we relate, and which may (we hope) be passed down to future generations. History is more interesting when personal. “Things” help pave that way.

In defending “things,”I am not belittling the experience of a bungee jump in Costa Rica, serving a meal at a soup kitchen, or renewing one’s faith. I am suggesting that, in this trip through life, which we are all fortunate to be on, never be embarrassed because you chose a silver cow creamer over a trip to Disney World. It is finding the right balance.Self-help books are of little use, as we each find balance in different ways. In life it is the trip, not the destination, that is important. David Brooks finds joy in different ways than do I, and what is optimum for me will be different from what is right for you. There is no right or wrong way in the search for joy, only what is most comfortable and what brings peace and comfort, whether it is renewed faith, a sunset on an island beach, or a P.G. Wodehouse first edition.

"The Joy of Grandchildren"

Sydney M. Williams

swtotd.blogspot.com

Essay from Essex

“The Joy of Grandchildren”

January 14, 2018

“I love music of all kinds, but there is no greater music

than the sound of my grandchildren laughing.”

                                                                                                Sylvia Earle (1935-)

                                                                                                American marine biologist and author

On a recent visit to the home of my youngest granddaughter, I noticed a hand-written sign posted on the door leading from the mudroom to the kitchen: “Manicure, one cent.” Feeling the least a grandfather could do was encourage entrepreneurship, I consented to having my nails painted. Despite pleas that my nails not be varnished in some garish color, and the offer of a dollar bribe, I soon found myself with ten fingernails decorated as though they were Joseph’s multi-colored coat. A few hours later, and a penny and a dollar short (the dollar was accepted, but not honored!), I walked into our home with my hands in my pockets, thinking of Ogden Nash: “when grandparents enter the door, discipline flies out the window.”

Not everyone is fortunate to have grandchildren, so we count ourselves among God’s chosen. As grandparents, we see in our grandchildren the promise and risks of the future – we dream of the places they will go, the people they will meet. We think of the loves and losses, joys and sadness, laughter and tears they will experience. We know they will learn from failure and that they will derive satisfaction from success. We know they will come to understand that work brings dignity and pride, and that they will have the chance to do those things we tried, or didn’t do at all.

While our lives lie in the past, theirs are the future. We have memories; they have the promise and mystery of the unknown. We look backward, sometimes cynically, through scrapbooks in the mind; and then we look forward, with hope, through the eyes of our grandchildren. In their genes they carry our DNA, which ensures that a part of us will live forever, or at least as long as they and their progeny procreate.

Caroline and I have ten grandchildren. They are the issue of three sets of parents – all of whom were married within a twelve-month period – June 14, 1997 to June 20, 1998. Grandchildren (six girls and four boys) began arriving in 2000 and the wave did not stop until 2008. There was only one year – 2007 – when the stork didn’t deliver a new package. Today, two of them are high school juniors and three high school sophomores. The rest scale down to the fourth grade.

Time goes by faster as we age, so the speed with which they left behind cribs, diapers and Santa Claus has been startling. One moment they looked up to me, as the fount of all wisdom. Now, they look down at me, and kindly ask if they might help me with my iPhone. It seems only yesterday I was pushing them in a stroller. Now, I hurry to keep up. Was it only a decade ago, I was reading bed-time stories? Now, they want to discuss quantitative physics, the New York Giants offensive line and the situation in Ukraine.

Like all grandchildren, mine like to hear stories – what it was like in the “olden” days. Former Poet Laurette (and New Hampshire resident) Donald Hall wrote about haying with his grandfather in the 1930s: “Even more I loved the slower plod back to the barn. My grandfather told story after story with affection and humor.”[1] Mine like to hear what it was like to grow up in the 1950s – music we listened to, books we read, games we played, clothes we wore, food we ate, schools we attended. They want to understand what it was like to live without computers, fast-food restaurants, iPhones, or Amazon. They ask questions, as I did of my grandparents, trying to understand what it was like to live in a different time. While attention spans can be short – perhaps because of boring and interminable responses! – I know they hear me, just as I heard my grandparents sixty and seventy years ago. What is difficult to comprehend is trying to foresee the stories they will tell their grandchildren, seventy years hence. Will their childhoods seem as primitive to their grandchildren as mine is to them, and my grandparents were to me?

Their activities reflect the eternality of sports, the enduring appeal of extra-curricular programs and the timelessness of youth: playing on the beach, swing-sets and Little League when young. And now a multiplicity of sports and activities: squash, tennis, lacrosse, horseback riding, soccer, cross-country, track, skiing and swimming. One grandson tutors students whose first language is not English. A granddaughter is an Irish dancer. A grandson plays the cello and a granddaughter the violin. Two are in school choirs. Two are accomplished artists, and one has written a yet-unpublished novel. Another volunteers at a riding academy for children with physical disabilities, and one participates in Amnesty International. Two have had summer jobs as camp counselors. We have watched our oldest granddaughter play in a New England squash tournament in Deerfield, Massachusetts, and her cousin play Lacrosse for Darien, Connecticut’s high school. I have taken two granddaughters to riding lessons, and witnessed their improving horsemanship. We have watched two grandsons wallop tennis balls, and others swim, play soccer, lacrosse, squash and run cross-country. They all enjoy being young and are beginning to experience the emotional traumas of the teen years. All ten are fortunate to be living with loving parents in stable families. All ten live relatively close to their needy grandparents.

I live vicariously through them, feeling the ball hit my racquet, the muscles of the horse beneath the saddle, the splash of water in my face, and the sliding of my skis across the snow. I think, this is why we are here.

Having grandchildren recalls time I spent with my grandparents. Mine were born between 1873 and 1888. They grew up before cars or telephones – something improbable to my grandchildren who will ride around in driver-less cars and speak into wrist-watch phones. I remember thinking my grandparents were from another age – gas street lamps, electricity-free homes, horse-drawn street cars – real-life figures that leapt from dusty text books. I knew I would learn from them, and I instinctively knew I was special to them. I loved to hear stories of cows driven down Boston’s Beacon Street, carriages on Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven, and life on a tobacco farm in Tennessee. Grandparenthood is to be treasured. It is a joy.

My youngest grandson made a disparaging comment about Communism. He was asked, condescendingly, by his well-read older brother: “You don’t even know what Communism is?” “Yes, I do. It’s when two people work, one for two hours and the other for ten hours, and they both get paid the same.” There was enough truth in his answer that I don’t worry about their generation. They know how the world works. As I think about my grandchildren, the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s song come to mind:

“May your heart always be joyful;

May your song always be sung;

And, may you stay forever young.”

My message to my grandchildren: You will encounter storms; you will be becalmed, but, with eyes on the horizon, you will reach shore. And, take comfort in the fact that your grandparents – your perfectly correct grandmother and your politically incorrect grandfather – love you unconditionally.

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[1] “Physical Malfitness,” Essays After Eighty, 2014