It was a Tuesday – Sept. 15 – and we were rushing in a number of directions, as usual. I had just finished delivering a broadcast history lecture and was also about to drive to a photo session out of town. My wife had just received word from her magazine publisher that she would have to cover a story in the Arctic; she’d have to rush home, pack for a 12-day trip, and immediately catch an airplane bound for Greenland. All of our plans, however, moved down the priority list, when our son-in-law phoned with an urgent message.
“You’re grandparents again,” he said, “of a baby boy.”
Detours are generally not difficult to accommodate in our family. We’re used to them. We alter plans all the time. But this detour proved different. By early evening, Jayne and I had made our way to the Port Perry Hospital to meet the latest addition to our family – Sawyer Massey. And, you know, as much as we figured we would react very differently from every other grandparent before us, we didn’t. We smiled, sighed and cooed over the little guy the same as every other doting grandparent that ever entered a maternity ward.
We wanted to know how much he weighed. We wanted to know when his mother, Quenby, had gone to the hospital and how long the labour was. We had to know if the baby’s dad, J.D., had made it to the birth in time. And we needed to have photographs taken, as each of us held the newborn as if he were a piece of prized china.
“How does it feel to have a boy in the family?” a friend asked me.
“It’s quite a departure,” I admitted.
In both my wife’s and my family, the birth of a boy was not a regular phenomenon. Jayne had grown up with one sibling – a sister. So had I. And I was the exception in my family; my father’s brother had had six daughters. Then, Jayne and I had two children, both girls. Women had dominated my bloodline going back several generations. What’s more, growing up among my mostly female relatives, my life had been dominated by long line-ups for the bathroom, waiting for dancing or horseback riding lessons to end, and plenty of frills and finery emerging from wrapping under the Christmas tree each Dec. 25.
But this was different. For the first time in my life, I could think “boy” when I thought of offspring. I could think about such things as sandboxes with toy soldiers and trucks, walks and talks about RBIs and Treasure Island, maybe camping and canoeing weekends with the guys, and, one day, relating to the opposite sex from the male perspective. Sure it’s a little cliché (because I’m sure I’ll share many of these same experiences with Layne, Sawyer’s nearly two-year-old sister), but his arrival has kind of put a new spin on upbringing, albeit from a grandparent’s point-of-view.
I know I had a unique relationship with my Popou (the Greek equivalent of Grandpa). We talked about sports together (he insisted that wrestling was not fixed, but that baseball was.) We shared duties cultivating the vegetable garden (he supervised and I cultivated). We discussed the news and the way news was reported. Regrettably, he introduced me to Greek liquors, such as Retsina and Ouzo, but he also showed me bouzouki music and Greek line dancing. In return, I gave him time – as much as I could – sitting through long interviews about his Greek family roots and his extraordinary immigration from Europe to New York at the beginning of the last century. Of course, my Popou and I were closer than most. You see I was named after him.
But names are symbolic. When our two daughters were born in the late 1970s, friends and relatives asked me whether I worried that the Barris surname would end. Acknowledge, sure, but not worry. The fact is that our daughters do exhibit physical and personality traits of my side of the family and my wife’s too, whether or not they use our surnames. I’ve always felt it’s not a child’s job to live inside a parent’s name. Nor is it a boy’s job to carry a surname as if it were an obligation.
Besides, thanks to the parents of our new grandson, he has indeed carried the family name a further generation. They honoured the memory of my father by giving Sawyer a second name – Alex.
And that only begins to describe the joy we feel in our new lives as his grandparents.
