MARKING TIME


Mark came to visit me a few days ago. Mark is the second oldest of my seven grandchildren, and the one person these days who really has time for me.

He’s someone I can comfortably be myself with. No walking on eggs. No fear that he might feel embarrassed by me -- just a sense of mutual okayness and a willingness to tell each other the truth.

Mark is twenty-three and kind. He never mentions it when I doze off for a minute or two in the middle of a Scrabble game; he accommodates himself to my slow pace as we walk; he answers my stupid computer questions without making me feel stupid.

Mark had a hard time of it growing up, but when Mark is unhappy he doesn’t whine about it. What I desperately want for Mark, of course, is the same thing any halfway decent parent or grandparent wants for their children or grandchildren. I want Mark to be happy.

And I can no more tell him how to do that than my mother could do so for me. I was near forty when I learned how to make myself happy. And, accepted that it was my job to do so.

I remember Mark as a reasonably happy toddler some twenty years ago. At that time I was living in what Mark’s mother called “the mother-in-law driveway” outside their home. Mark would come out to visit me and I’d sit him on my lap where I introduced him to the brightly colored DOS computer games that I enjoyed – Cosmo, Duke Nukem, Word Rescue.

Mark’s parents, my oldest son and daughter-in-law, were less than happy with me about turning him on to the seductive world of computer games. My own mother never did get over the idea that the comic books I feasted on every Saturday morning in Dickie Pitman’s garage would corrupt me in some sinister way. Perhaps they did.

Anyway, as it turned out, Mark makes his living these days working in computer gaming systems. And he has become my go-to guy for computer problems. I probably take advantage of him for that.

But when we’re together we talk about books and politics and the difficulty of finding the right sort of friends. Not just someone to play Scrabble or Warcraft with, but someone worthy of sharing our honest feelings with.

After Mark left I was wondering if he knew how much I appreciated him in my life.

So I wrote this piece to tell him.