Intermission. Happy Birthday, Ellen, Granddaughter of my Dreams

I will defend to my death your right to consider your granddaughter, or all of them, perfect beyond all the meanings of the word. But this is for Ellen Kathleen Bryant, today at one of those mid-range ages when it is every woman’s right to keep us guessing about how old she is. She has brought unbridled joy to not merely me, her GrandDad, but to everyone who has been blessed by her presence every day from her first one to this one. She has, to the point of what I do every day with my work, made me poetic on two unforgettable days that I wish this day to share with you. On her 21st birthday I wrote this for her.

Ignorable Advice to Ellen at 21

Ellen, this day I fret lest you forget your hard-learned lessons of etiquette.

Your momma, you bet, would be so upset if you were seen in the local gazette sipping on a double anisette, and sucking on a violet cigarette, while dancing a half-naked pirouette, and carrying on like some scarlet coquette.

For then you would be met by her with an epithet, a one-way ticket on a drafty jet to someplace colder than cold Tibet, and twin lifelong curses of debt and sweat.

No, my pet, this day avoid that net, wear a demure silhouette, dance the dainty minuet, and backwards recite the alphabet,

For tomorrow’s the time, at about sunset, when you can snap up a cute cadet and drive away in a red Corvette.

*

When she was about ten, I took Ellen along when I was commissioned by the United Way of Louisville to write something about the work they do. My assigned destination was a house where children of incurably damaged sight are taught to make the most of their remaining lives with the manifold mysterious talents they have left to use. Apart from all the happiness Ellen brings to me at all times in her company, she made sense as my sidekick that day because she was in the early days of her first pair of spectacles that my own poor vision had brought to her mother Leslie, and to her, by unfair genetic inheritance. Two hours of simple observance rendered us stunned into silence while there, and even continuing through the lunch we shared after we left. That was odd for the two us because we are a particularly chummy pair of a particularly talkative family. Later that day after I returned her to her home I sat alone and thought of one of the children who filled me, and her too, with solemn and yet hope-filled memories. I found these words that the encounter had produced, retrieved here by Adobe Acrobat Pro.