When Felix Made His Entrance
A hummingbird dipped into a voluptuous red cactus flower, then darted away. A fragment of snake skin tumbled across the deck with a tiny plastic tapping sound. A lean coyote scampered up the hillside, and sat on his haunches watching us. The wind was relentless.
In England, a little boy in utero decided to make a very early appearance. Maybe he was tired of being cooped up and wanted to get outside and not miss anything. He emerged, perfect, a month before expected, not quite six pounds. He still has some extra growing to do, but he’ll catch up. He is already a miracle.
His birth transformed me. I am now a grandmother. I haven’t quite assimilated this fact, and there’s still something unreal about it, but it feels momentous.
On the day of his birth, the headline of the New York Times read: U.S. Deaths Near 100, 000, An Incalculable Loss. He is a time traveler, and his journey has begun in the midst of a global pandemic. The altered world is life as he will know it.
His ancestors will bestow courage upon him. From different continents and epochs, their stories converge and distill into love and resilience. I knew three of his great-grandfathers, and two of his great-grandmothers. One of his great-great-grandfathers boarded a steamer in Naples in 1905 and made a life in America. His California mother flew across the ocean, fell in love with the man who would be his father, and they began a life together in Oxford. His English grandmother went into the garden after she got word of his birth and sat in the quiet of approaching dawn, sipping tea from a china cup once kept in her own mother’s kitchen– the stars were still shining, and she was enveloped in wonder and fragrant spring air, trying to fathom her own transformation.
He is some kind of continuation, and some kind of beginning.
He is a much-yearned-for child with parents who are diligent and brilliant. He could not possibly be welcomed with more joy and love.
His name is Felix, not a family name but a new name, a name of Latin origin that means happy and fortunate. Felix defied the odds––he already has an aura of luck about him, and his birth has brought much happiness. So yes, the name does fit. Felix. I’m getting used to it. He will forge his own story with his new name.
Now I’m contemplating what it means to be a grandmother. It will be a little harder to get a handle on it during this Covid time. For one thing, it’s impossible to predict when we will be able to travel abroad to see and hold our grandson. Until then, we will depend on visits via computer screens. Monte says we’ll be the flat grandparents with the funny accents. (And I can imagine him turning to his mother upon meeting us in person someday, asking: “Mummy, are those holograms?”)
But now I am a grandmother. Nothing can change that fact. And although it isn’t as I imagined it would be, it still feels that I have in some way come full circle.