photo by Collyn Ware

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. —W. B. Yeats, “The Stolen Child”

The world, as Yeats declares, is “more full of weeping” than a child can understand—than a child should understand. And even at the cusp of adolescence, my grandson, Griffin, has yet to fully cross that inevitable threshold to understanding. There are so many moments when he is still that bare-chested little boy in a straw hat stirring the water with a stick, that sweet child who flings my front door open and exclaims, “I’m here! What are we doing today?” Too soon, he will leave this child behind. But not this summer, not today. Today, we have the “waters and the wild,” the magic of each new day, which breaks golden and true.

A few weeks before Griff’s 12th birthday, we stood at the edge of the pond in a small cove where bluegill spawn and school. As he looked into the water, he turned to me and said, “This is so beautiful.” Tears sprang to my eyes. We stood in silence for several moments watching the fish. We’ve shared so many moments like this during his 12 years. Griff sees the uncommon beauty in the most common things. He will stop to marvel at uniquely shaped rocks on the road. He will find the one red, ripe strawberry in a patch and eat it before he leaves the garden. He will uncap and smell any scented candle or bottle of cologne, his sense of smell always active and finely tuned. He will wax nostalgic about holiday memories and family traditions. From the moment I first held him, he captured my heart and recaptures it daily.

“Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies,” writes American lyrical poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Or when people die, their deaths are so removed they don’t wholly register. In Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “Indian Camp,” a boy about Griff’s age makes a trip with his physician father across the lake to the Indian camp where a woman is in labor and needs assistance. The woman’s husband has been injured and lies in the bunk above her. Unable to help, he has listened to her screams for hours and, in a final act of desperation, takes his own life. The boy, Nick, witnesses this death and the cesarean section his father performs without an anesthetic. In the final lines of the story, Hemingway tells us that Nick rests against his father as they row back across the lake toward home, quite certain that he will never die. When one is very old or when the circumstances of one’s death are so foreign and so unnatural (a suicide at an Indian camp), it’s understandable that children may believe they will never die. Death is a distant galaxy. It might be glimpsed through a high-powered telescope, but its presence is a suggestion, not a cruel reality.

The child in Griff believes I can easily sprint across the lawn to retrieve the baseballs he’s hit. In the kingdom of his childhood, I will be forever young—or young enough to stave off infirmity and death. At 12, however, he’s begun to see the slower, less able me. When I didn’t move quickly enough and took a wiffle ball to the chest last week, he gasped. “Are you o.k., Grandma? I’m so sorry—are you o.k.?” Of course, I was o.k. I can still take a wiffle ball to the chest and stay in the game. But it was his quick concern that struck me. In that moment, I could see the shadow that crossed his face, the understanding that I was older now, that I would die. And even as I wished I could wipe away the shadow, he squared up at the plate and hit a ball deep into our neighbor’s yard. Smiling, I said, “That was a great hit.” Grinning, he replied, “I just love the sound the ball makes when it connects with the bat like that, don’t you?” And I knew that for tonight at least, we could both live happily in the kingdom of his childhood.

In her novel, The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy writes, “Childhood tiptoed out. Silence slid in like a bolt.” This is the painful thing about the loss of childhood: it often comes with silence that slides in “like a bolt.” I want to hold on to the noisy Griff, the boy who talks your ear off and shouts as he leaps off the edge into the pool. When he was young and wanted to be a bull rider, he used to flail around the room, throwing his right arm in the air, whooping and hollering as I counted off 8 seconds. Then he’d collapse in a sweaty heap on the rug, panting and looking up expectantly as I announced, “Griffin Ware riding Red Rock, a new world record!” If anything, I don’t want Griff’s childhood to tiptoe out. I want it to go with whooping and hollering, to make a noisy last stand.

For every child, I suspect there is a parent or grandparent who wishes they could delay the onset of adulthood. It’s an unrealistic but universal wish. We consider the adult world our children must navigate, and we hold fast to those last days of innocence. In his novel, All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy writes:

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.

I’m afraid it’s just this: we suspect if our children knew the truths of adult life, they’d “have no heart to start at all.” We chuckle when kids declare they will grow up to be professional athletes, rock stars, and billionaires. Let them dream, we say. We want them to imagine the lives they want to live. Yet, we also want them to have the heart to grow up and take on the real responsibilities and challenges of adulthood. If we send mixed messages, we confess it’s with the best intentions.

Griff just returned from a minor league baseball game. For a day, he had a VIP experience as he lived his dream. He spent time in the dugout, took photos with players, and came home with a signed jersey and too many memories to count. Like many boys his age, he can see himself taking the field and hitting the winning run in a championship game. The dream of becoming a professional baseball player is still alive and flourishing, even as the painful reality of its unlikelihood lurks in the dugout. I want Griff to have the heart to dream these dreams for as long as he can. And then I want him to have the heart to embrace new dreams as he moves into adulthood.

In truth, I could say so much more about this boy who’s blessed my life. I know that the day is coming when he won’t ask his grandma to pitch wiffle balls or ride around with him in our UTV. I know that he will soon experience a world that’s “full of weeping,” a world in which death abounds. This day will come soon enough. Until then, I will live happily with him in the kingdom of childhood. Neither of us can imagine a better place to be.