A message to all of my granddaughters

By Carl Heintze

The other day for the first time in a long a while, I saw all four of you together. It was something of a shock. For seeing you all four together, my only grandchildren, I suddenly realized that you were all grown up. Well, I suppose that's stretching it a little.

You're all still teenagers, but that state is not going to last much longer. The oldest of you is 19, the youngest 15. You aren't all yet old enough to vote or drive a car or do a few other adult things. But what's more important, you're no longer children. You've become Persons, individuals, not just kids, not someone your grandparents could conveniently lump together into a single class. You can't be sent out to play, nor told you don't understand, you're too young or treated as children in half a dozen other ways.

You've acquired individual personalities, although I thought of you that way a long time ago. But then you were children, and now you are almost grown. You have become women, the mysterious other sex about which even I at my advanced male age, don't know a great deal.

There's something wonderful about the transformation from a girl to a woman. It's a much more amazing change than from being a boy and then becoming a man. It's not only physical, there's a psychic change, too. You've acquired curves and hollows that didn't exist before. You're able to bear children. You understand that males are fascinated by what you have become.

You appreciate how you arrange your hair and what your face looks like and how you talk and walk. Once I could hold each of you in two hands. Now you are almost as tall as I am. Once you used to come to me to ask how to do things. Now you tell me what I ought to be doing.

Now you have opinions, advice and knowledge I don't possess. And you are busy. You are far busier than I am, or, it seems to me, than I ever was. You seem to be so busy with studies, sports, clubs, travel, boys, cars, movies, television and a half a hundred other things that I don't see how you have time in a day to accomplish it all.

And you already have done so much.

Two of you have been around the world. The other two have been to Hawaii at least twice, to London once and to Washington, D.C., a couple of times. When I was your age I had hardly been out of my home town and then only to San Francisco.

Your world is far smaller than was my world. I am not sure if that is good or bad, but it is certainly a fact. And it's a far different world. Unlike like the world in which I grew, beset by the Depression and the approaching shadow of World War II, your world has hanging over it the specter of AIDS and overpopulation, and the threat of global warming and global pollution.

The Cold War has disappeared, the Bomb as receded as a threat to your lives. You've all come to the computer, and you think of it as we once used to think of the radio, as something that's always existed. In many ways your world has more hope and challenge than mine had. In other ways it has more perils.

My one regret is that I probably won't be around to see how you contend with it, what you'll do after you finish your education, who you'll marry and when and if you'll have children.

I have to take it mostly on faith that you will all four turn out as I hope you will, that sometime a generation from now when you yourselves are grandmothers, you will one day pick up this letter and remembering my concern for you, have the same thoughts about your grandchildren. By then you will have become a part of the long march of generations, the succession of parents and grandparents which is what life is all about.

I won't be here then except in spirit and in the spirit with which you pass on to your grandchildren the best of the past and the hope for a better future.

With love,
Grandpa

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Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to Silicon Valley Community Newspapers. A collection of his earlier essays, Waiting for the Garbageman, may be found at http://www.doitright.com/Carl/essays. His email address is feodorh@juno.com.

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