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Lucky Day
The chance of a lifetime
by Stephanie Piper
At first glance, the picture on my computer screen looks like a moonscape. It’s all craters and bumpy, sepia-toned plains.
But I know this is not a space photo my youngest son has sent me. The subject line of his e-mail makes that clear. “Baby Lucky,” it reads.
I look more closely, squinting through the ultrasound swirls for a familiar face. And then I see it, the neatly defined shape of my first grandchild. I put my hand on the screen, trace the miniature head, the small, straight nose.
Lucky was the joke name, the wouldn’t-it-be-funny name assigned to this child before we knew its gender. Lucky works for either one.
Lucky works for every last one of us, beaming parents and grandparents and great grandparents and delighted aunts and uncles and thrilled cousins on both sides of the Atlantic. A baby is coming. You could say that’s nature, not luck.
But you could also say that nature is neither predictable nor reliable. Anyone who has weathered a tornado or an April blizzard can attest to that. The notion that things should happen in a prescribed way at a prescribed time is no guarantee that they will. This is why the tiny, perfect fact of Lucky seems to me a stroke of spectacular good fortune.
Lucky is a boy, or so his ultrasound indicates. I happen to know three ultrasound boys who arrived as bouncing baby girls. No matter. I will knit a yellow blanket and a cream-colored sweater. I won’t buy trucks or dolls. I will hedge my bets and keep my eye on the sure thing.
And the sure thing is that I have fallen in love with a set of wavy lines on a computer screen. I am besotted with this new life, every inch of him. I have seen him through a glass darkly, but he is undeniably ours. Floating placidly there, one minute hand curled next to his mouth, he seems to define the art of waiting. Every day, he is a work in progress: fingernails, eyelashes, toes.
The best part of being a grandmother, someone told me once, is the conscious choice to miss nothing. My own children’s childhoods are alternately vivid and distant to me. I marked the milestones with care, the first smiles, the first words, the first steps. I guard my set of mental snapshots: the three of them on a Cape Cod beach, decades of Christmas mornings, a cluster of ordinary days when I just stopped short and thought, remember this.
Now I am offered the gift of another chance. I get to watch a life unfold again, and to be there, fully present.
It isn’t neglect or indifference that prevents parents from achieving this. It’s the leaking dishwasher and the squeaking brakes and the whopping credit card bill. It’s the endless parade of distractions and the terminal fatigue and the do-it-now urgency of small children. To arrive at the end of a day with everyone reasonably happy, whole and accounted for seems enough, and most of the time, it is. We fall into bed and tell ourselves that we’ll treasure each second of tomorrow.
For this grandmother, though, there is only now. There is only this moment, this sepia image on a screen. When I look at him, the world quiets down. I trace his profile again, and wish him safe passage. He is on his way.
Lucky for me.
November 24, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 48
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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