Dedicated to All the Children I Thought of When Writing This About My Grandson – Those Separated From Their Parents at the Border

Second Grandson – 12/31/20

…and when he was young, and really not so long ago it seemed, his parents would leave him at times for just some hours few – an endless unknowable infinity of time to a small child – and though left with his grandparents and also with his older sister and brother, when he realized his mother and father were going out the door and he was not leaving with them, his little arms stretched out, and his mouth silently opened wide and another eternity intervened between the soft closing of the door and the first sounding of his loud piteous wail that would last another eternity, for him, yes, and for his grandfather, suffering along with him, for he himself remembered being left with his grandparents by his mother when he was two and running after her car as she drove off to her Spanish class and being abandoned and utterly all alone and by himself where the dirt driveway met an equally dusty rutted dirt road. 

And this grandson so young, after traveling silently through that endless time – an eternity to his time – the closing of the door, his mama vanishing, disappearing from his life – he poured forth his wail – a sound, a cry, that would surely melt the concrete under her shoes, impeding her progress, if she knew.  And wail for a moment, yes, he did, sitting there transfixed by grief and a tragedy truly of universal proportions and extent.  But, then…after another moment, after a time, he opened his eyes and the wailing quieted then ebbed into an endlessly deepening despair and…  He saw his older sister and brother, and then, again after a time, the day acquired time and life anew and they all happily played in the little blue wading pool with images of fish on the bottom that his grandparents had bought for them, just the same it seemed as the pool they had bought for their three daughters so long ago – not an eternity past, no, just time counted, as they grew up and then left, in quick and even quicker years. 

And the grandchildren played and splashed and dumped little buckets of water on themselves and each other and outside the pool upon the California grass, such as it was, always in need of water.  And after a time of jumping and laughing all around in the little pool – though not so little to him – he got out, all wet and dripping, and walked around the paths of the backyard, as was his wont from his very first steps, which in a time not long before, his steps were a waddle with his bottom wide with his diapers, when he still was wrapped within them.  But now, he pauses, he squats down, and perhaps now because his bottom is closer to the earth, the gravity of the situation, however his mind so young images and pictures it, comes back to him, and as he squats alone and by himself, he remembers his mama.

The memory, in a simple multiply of one times many times many again, floods over him as from a bucket poured upon his head, and overwhelms and washes away the moment of happy splashing in the pool with brother and sister, and the sadness of wailing, now so long ago to him but brought alive and closer by again feeling the door closing quietly upon his mother who he could not reach, once more sounds within him.  And within all these memories – his mama leaving, disappearing – resides the entirety of his universe and an eternity of duration. For does a young child possess hope? Or is the wailing without knowledge, assurance, that she will appear again? And all this…now playing sadly upon his little space, the sadness of that moment, the closing, closing, of the front door… For to his mind, nothing is real or will live again, until she returns…and the returning may just be a thought his young mind is not capable of, being so rooted, by gravity, in the now…