In and Out

Madelyn Rose rolled in with the lilacs and the mayflies. Straightaway, she exercised a powerful influence over the family from North Dakota to California, from Massachusetts to Minnesota. She is new life, a freshly minted human, expanding our understanding of what love can be, even in this time of hardship. Just to kiss her feet is an act of devotion, an exquisite surrender. Madelyn is not a sack of flour. You can’t throw her over your shoulder. She wants to face out into the world, taking in its texture. She loves to be bounced up and down, recalling the rhythms of the prenatal dance. But now, seventysomething days out, all her senses are activated. She knows the taste of her mother’s milk and the sound of her father’s voice.

When I met my great-granddaughter for the first time at her grandfather’s 50th birthday party in the foothills of the Sierras east of Sacramento, it was hours after leaving my elderly sister in her basement cave in Berkeley. I put my head on Roberta’s shoulder and I wailed. I keened like a mourner at an Irish funeral. I’m told that she later said that I was sad because I didn’t think I’d see her again. She is in and out like the fast food chain, but sometimes she really nails it. How do you say goodbye to your sister and hello to your great-granddaughter on the same day? You let it wash over you. You don’t try to contain it or explain it.

I came upstairs after I left my sister and fell into the arms of my niece’s husband, Anthony. Anthony is a large man with a cavernous heart. There’s room for everything in there. He gathered me in and let me cry all over him. It was messy. It was everything that life is, or so I thought. But five days later, Frank and I found ourselves stranded overnight in the Dallas airport on our way home. It was climate-change-in-Texas thunderstorms. It was covid-related understaffing. We were part of a massive dysfunctional family of crazed travelers and airline employees breathing on one another through the night, exhausted, filthy, subsisting on peanuts. At the ironically entitled customer service counter, one young woman confronted by a police officer with a gun on each hip, refused to go to the end of the line. I was aware of the distinct possibility of someone going postal.

We are far too old for that kind of party, bent into pretzels in a seating area overlooking concourse D on what, I must add, was my 76th birthday. When we parked our bags up there, we noticed a sizable contingent of young people. It was a church group from Boise, just back from missionary work in Mexico. The youth pastor asked if we needed anything. Food! we begged. Is there any food at DFW at 11:30 at night? They went foraging and came back with protein bars and trail mix, about eight of them lining up like the Magi bearing gifts. You could see that they were deeply grateful for the opportunity. They were glowing in and out, shining their light over the airport lounge. I cried again. Partly from fatigue but also from the magic of it. The earnest young people running up to us with their offerings, manifesting generosity in real time, the real deal. And I cried yet again nineteen hours later when we finally got on a plane to Boston and fell into the arms of some saintly flight attendants. I asked one of them how she managed the constant stress. I breathe, she said, what else can you do?

At the beating heart of things, when my defenses went off on their own vacation, all I could do was breathe and weep. The tears released me from everything I’d been holding these last fifteen months. I poured out my love for my sister sliding down out of her recliner and into what comes next. I bathed in holy water with the kids from Idaho and the flight attendants doing their work with such grace. I showered kisses on Madelyn Rose. All any of us wanted to do was feed and be fed. Out and in. In and out.