“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn’t Nice, What Is? (Advice to the Young)
When our kids are young, things blur, memories telescope, or as our daughter and mother of five recently put it perfectly, “Days seem endless sometime, but the years fly by.” Grandchildren, however, seem like different stories to us. Time is slower. Each one is indelible and unique. Proverbs 17:6 put it perfectly, “Children’s children are a crown to the aged.”
Little anecdotes are embedded in my mind like diamonds in a coal mine; they pop into my consciousness at odd moments and always bring at least a smile – sometimes welling up emotions that make the old guy fill up unexpectedly. There are seven grandchildren, all expertly homeschooled, but I’ll tell only a few tales. They all have their different interests, talents, and endearing idiosyncrasies. Four of them dance and just helped perform a professionally choreographed ‘Swan Lake,’ learning multiple roles each. They dance with grace and control, passion and beauty, lost in the music. That’ll make an old guy cry every time.
Two live in Southern California and are competitive multisport athletes who always try hard at seven and five. We’re out west for a First Communion and will catch the last tournament weekend of the spring softball season. The First Communion girl is my early morning cuddler. When she was younger, I’d be the first one up until she came down the stairs sleepy, warm, and smiling in her pj’s to cuddle on the coach and I’d read to her. Now she reads to me. Insists on it. Koufax, their 90 pound German Shepherd lap dog, usually joins us and puts his head on my lap.
Locally, there was the ‘scooter’ who never really crawled because she didn’t want to relinquish whatever she was holding in her hands and flew across the floor sitting and motoring with one leg scissoring. Now she is confidently conversant with Chesterton or Augustine, Flannery O’Connor or Homer, Tchaikovsky or K-pop. Next fall she will be heading off to Catholic University of America in Washington. She sings her last concert next month with the statewide honors choir. Alto. Oh, I’ll miss that voice down the street.
Then there was the button kid. Before she could talk or walk, I’d hold her while wearing one of my decades old well-worn three button Eddie Bauer
sweaters. She would immediately start on my buttons with ferocious concentration. Buttoning. Unbuttoning. Buttoning. A half dozen cycles faster with each iteration. Her concentration was only exceeded by her eye hand coordination for such a tiny person. Now she is fifteen and draws with equal concentration and coordination. Recently, she drew the cover for my book of the camp on Webb Lake in Maine. And portraits. Lots of portraits. One of our extended family in-laws is a professional artist. “That’s incredible,” he said. Papa thought so too.
Another budding scholar is in her third year of Latin at 12 years old. We call her scary for her prodigious memory, relentless logic, and omnivorous appetite for books. She is the resident expert on dragons (seven types) and devoured C.S. Lewis, E.B. White, and Laura Ingalls Wilder just about whole. She told us she wants to be an architect and build things while simultaneously a prima ballerina and mother. But she would make a formidable attorney. She always wants to know what the rules are. Exactly what the rules are. When she was three or so, she was happily clearing out a nostril. Her mother suggested that it was not a great idea in public. “Don’t pick your nose.” The little lawyer got quiet, thought a bit, and sought clarification. Precisely what would and would not cross the line? The girl just wanted to know. Looking up in complete seriousness, she asked, “Can I pick the other one?”
Finally for this post at least, there is the emerging wildlife ranger who is now eleven and loves all things fauna, wild, domestic, or imaginary. Her current favorite is the sugar glider. On the way to ballet lessons, we always pass what we would call in Maine a ‘beef critter’ farm – laconic Maine teleology. We observe which large ones of the herd get moved into the fattening pen, the next to last stop for these Black Angus steers. We count who’s left each week. Our ranger knows the ones in the pen are destined for the steak grille and leather coat factory and are all males. She knows the local Gurnsey and Holstein dairy herds are all females, and she understands that and why these things are so ordered.
I never explained to her how bulls got to be steers. Giving her the details that castrati put on weight faster and are better marbled with tasty fat than bulls has not come up, and I’ve not introduced the subject. I have some concern that an eleven year old in an intemperate moment might explain it to her five year old brother with some mischief in mind, and he’d need a couple of years of therapy to recover.
I clarified to her that when the time was right (for the farmer), they were trucked off site to a butchery and returned to the farm store for sale in labeled small plastic wrapped packages. She accepted this well and acknowledged she liked a good cheeseburger too. When she was about nine and learning about what befalls the beef critters, she decided to warn the ones she had gotten to know and count, although I never noticed any of them paying her any attention. Probably for the same reason, they never figured out the sign out front about fresh beef for sale. After a while, when we passed the feeding pen of the short timers, she would roll down her window and yell to them, “DON’T GET IN THE TRUCK!!’
“The lonesome friends of science say
“The world will end most any day”
Well, if it does, then that’s OK
‘Cause I don’t live here anyway
I live down deep inside my head
Where long ago I made my bed” John Prine, The Lonesome Friends of Science
Have you read about the possible polarity switch that may have been underway for the last few hundred years? [i] The outer core of our planet is molten liquid iron and nickel. The core is superheated and moves with the rotation of the Earth and creates a natural geo-dynamo that generates our magnetic field. The magnetic field screens us from cosmic rays that would destroy our DNA like scarab beetles in the mummy’s tomb. Without our magnetic field deflecting the solar wind, it would blow away our atmosphere and evaporate our oceans, turning our beautiful blue ball into a desolate red rock like Mars.[ii] Poor Mars has no chance and no magnetic field protecting it. A polarity change occurs when Earth swaps poles as the core moves around every four or five hundred thousand years. Here in Rhode Island, our compass would point no longer to Maine but to Florida.
Such a mind bending shift happened 780,000 years ago when our compass switched to its current setting. Briefly in geological time, our magnetic north pole moved south about 40,000 years ago, but migrated back after a couple of centuries, and there are many hotly debated signs like a slightly weakening magnetic field that might signal it’s in the process of doing it again. Geologically, a flip is overdue. Might play havoc with navigation for us and the birds which have their own inner compass. Not to worry, it takes centuries for the magnetic North Pole to migrate that far. It won’t mean that we lose our magnetic field, but there would be disturbance in the Force.
We live in a time of disruption. And the disruption is not limited to geology.
“You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, the times they are a changing.” Bob Dylan
In the previous post, Remnant, I quoted Jorge Bergoglio (Pope Francis) talking about a change of eras rather than an era of change. Having magnetic north move around is unsettling enough, but if we lose sight of true North, that’s a far more serious problem for us human beings.
Circling back to our grandchildren, what world are we leaving for them? Our culture has changed so radically that our parents in 1940 would be dumbstruck as if we had fallen into a sci fi dystopian novel. We are muddling along in a change of eras; no surprise we are befuddled.
There are countless examples.
When discussing beef critters with our granddaughter, I avoided the bull and steer part. In doing so, I avoided the bull and cow part too. Because she helped care for a baby brother, and she understands the basics anyway. She knows that a Holstien dairy cow spends her life in fields and barn giving to the farmer and us from six to nine gallons of superb milk every day. What I didn’t have to explain to her, because it is common sense, is that steers missing a few parts will not start producing milk or calving; they are just bulls without portfolio.
Ideology and philosophy uprooted our postmodern societal imagination and enforced how gender is now a matter of identity and choice. But ideology and identity do not change biology. British cultural commentator Mary Harrington coined an ideal term for the oddness of our redefined self-created image. The human body remade into whatever we want it to be, she described as “meat Legos.” But biologists like neo atheist hero Richard Dawkins clarified that actual biology is clear: there are large gametes and small gametes, and efforts to change that are futile. The pain of those suffering from gender dysphoria is incapacitating, and they deserve all our love, sympathy, and respect as human beings. Whether rearranging their body parts may help their identity issues is intensely debated, but it will never result in a biological transition.
Ideology cannot redefine what a human being is. Not for lack of trying.
Our modern turn to radical expressive individualism, profound skepticism, deconstructing the limitations and controls of formerly commonly understood civilization, and radical self-creation has percolated down into our confused common societal perceptions for the last few hundred years from Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Satre, Foucault, Derrida, and others. Seeding in and metastasizing like many hazardous ideas in faculty lounges, these notions have diffused into popular understanding, not just gender labeling, but in almost every aspect of our culture. The pace of change has accelerated at a breathtaking pace. Imagine even twenty five years ago, a candidate for the supreme court before a Senate confirmation hearing being asked to define a woman and having no answer. No breaking news that we are confused.
Another sign of the times that would have been rejected without hesitation by my parents is genetic manipulation, especially its use combined with IVF and surrogacy for eugenic goals to create our perfect kid. I’m sure you can come up with your own without much brain work. Transhumanism. AI controlled autonomous weapons. On and on. In Jurassic Park, the most memorable line for me was from Dr. Ian Malcolm who told Dr. John Hammond who revivified the dinosaurs, “Just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we should do it.” That may be the most ignored warning of our times.
“And I know just what I’d change if went back in time somehow
But there’s nothing I can do about it now.” Willie Nelson
The shifting ground of our era is one of moral instability when the unquestioned principles of millennia that were the foundation of our civil order are now seen as inhibiting human freedom. Subjective freedom, not what is right, has become our lodestar. True North is on the move but has not entirely disappeared. At least not yet, he said hopefully.
Well recognized figures like Dawkins, Elon Musk, and Jordan Peterson have been expounding that while, of course, they don’t believe that Christianity is literally true, they favor a ‘Christian culture,’ because a shared common belief system of morality and reality with widespread acceptance keeps our society from decomposing. They are right. What they fail to acknowledge is that while a Christian culture does have indispensable value for societal cohesion, without a Center, it cannot hold.
So, dear grandchild, when common popular beliefs some rolling up to your gate in a faded and dented stake body truck, but no longer seem wise or coherent, well, “DON’T GET IN THE TRUCK!”
“Those who kill God discover in the long run that they have to step up and be gods and provide all that God once offered: a stable meaning and significance to life. Or given their rejection of the traditional Christian answer, they need to provide a response to the psalmist’s question, “What is man?” Carl Trueman, “The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity” 2026
[i] I’ve been told by a professional editor whom I greatly respect and admire that I wander too far afield in these posts. He’s right, but bear with me, and maybe these strands in this one will weave together for you in the end. Or not. On the About page of this blog, from the beginning, “I write this to help me clarify my own thoughts and to encourage (I hope) contributions to the “Great Discussion” in which we all need to engage. I especially enjoy the juxtaposition and relationships of seemingly disparate topics.” I’m too old to change now. As the bumper sticker says, “Not all who wander are lost.”
[ii] https://theconversation.com/earths-magnetic-field-protects-life-on-earth-from-radiation-but-it-can-move-and-the-magnetic-poles-can-even-flip-216231
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