Lily

I am writing you a love letter. Well I am writing you a first letter and a letter which speaks only a fraction of what I feel for you. In other words it is filled with incidental stuff I would like you to know. Your grandma tells me that I wrote something like this in a letter to Tai when she was born, and this one only makes up for me not doing it sooner. (I don’t really remember what I wrote to your Mom). Maybe if you compare this to a copy your grandma say she has, it’d end up saying more or less the same things. Of course you won’t read either till I’m gone, so I don’t have to worry what you think of it.

First the word I’d use is pure wonder at your arrival. I am 80 years old at the time of this writing, and you are just around 8 months, and it really is a sudden wonder that you exist at all to cheer me on. I didn’t really expect you, I mean in the time that’s gone by, and here you are now exhibiting in this picture what I would call your ‘family blonde” look. Who’d have expected someone who looks exactly like you do? Family joke, I always claimed to being a blonde long after my hair had turned grey. So now I will claim you look just like me. (Obviously meant to be another family joke).

Next I would tell you about the place you hold in the world. You might not think it huge, but in my world and life it is huge. There are people who have a similar place to yours: your mom, your grandma, and people who aren’t even alive at the time of that I write this: my mom, my grandpa are but two of the examples. See these hold huge positions of importance to me. Like anchors, a symbolic place of rest and security and solace. In short an undeserved haven of hope and love. Rather like what you have on the very shirt you’re wearing in this picture. A heart stands for similar things in itself. And like an anchor, a moment of heaven in the real world, a person who will always be loved, now and forever. Like heaven, unearned, and timeless. Only people can really hold such a place no matter where they are. Even if they’re in Salt Lake City.

I repeated probably too often when I first held you that you were and are a “miracle.” Precious, as in a miraculous gift. I especially thought of as a miracle when I would look at and hold your feet or hands. Tiny but perfect, in every regard. Your dad also thought, it seems to me you were a miracle because of how he and your mom came from such different places and yet found each other. What are the chances that a kid from Salt Lake would find a kid from Wisconsin/Virginia/Alabama? A stroke of luck like warm lightning, and certainly qualifies as miraculous when you think of it. A chance encounter, thought of in another way, something that was “meant to happen”. That would be is tracing back where you came from, which is every bit as astonishing as you are. So you are a reminder to me that I believe in miracles.

I was given a church and religious background, which still does serve me well as I march along into my advancing years. My faith in my life’s purpose is still strong. Maybe I have doubted what that purpose is from time to time, but importantly I never doubted that I have a purpose to find. I had strong rules to rebel against, and I know your grandma, mom, or dad didn’t have them quite as strict. So that means I suppose that you don’t have to be as rebellious as I needed to be. Strive for the good, and resist the bad is maybe what my religious background left me to have as a guide. You can do that without having to rebel.

I’ve been pretty connected to the theatre and to teaching about theatre for my professional life, so it is only logical that I include something from the theatre as part of this note. I think of my theatre as a Globe, not original with me, for Shakespeare thought of his theatre that way too. A microcosm of his world. His theatre and mine is timeless, and symbolic of life itself, filled with all the tears, laughter, ideas, people, and stories that have played me on my way over the years. He also talked of the “ages of man” and that’s where we find ourselves right now, and both the beginning and the end. I often mark the years by productions I directed, as for bursts of time they were the most important thing in my life. Even your grandma was in a production of mine, and though we for reasons to do with our ages we weren’t an “item” then, I in spite of that I remember and love my memory of her in that particular show. Certainly now, though I am smart enough to realize that your mom, grandma, and you are my real leading ladies. Over the years one of my failings is that I paid more attention to shows than to life, but I aim to remedy that between you and me. I figure you’re one of my three leading ladies from now on.

So this is a note about your importance to me, my finding myself lucky because of the miracle of you, the place you have in my heart, my life’s purpose and work with symbols and words, and that the time is exactly right when you have been born into mine. I hope my luck holds and I get to spill an ample measure of my love on you for many a day. I have faith that this will be so.

Grow, read, search, and believe that over everything if we have love we have everything. See words do ultimately fail My fondest of blessings and wishes and prayers for you as you go kicking and reaching towards the heaven we find on this earth.

Love N’Stuff,
Your grandpa
June 7, 2024