AT YEAR'S END, 2014

Ah!  There you are!  And so are we!

After more than thirty years, sometimes Mari and I look at each other and say how surprising it is that we have found each other.  It often happens when we have decided that neither one of us wants to go adventuring: you know, to the grocery, or to a movie; or least of all, to a party designed to disguise gravity, deny arthritis, and display bottomless good humor.

At the same time, sometimes Mari and I look at each other and say how surprising is everything that has happened to us.  The world we grew up in has gone, and now there is another, and that we are still here, as we were, and altogether new.

It is Jao we are thinking of.

This year, more than any other in our lives, has been the year when a grandchild has occupied a significant portion of our ordinary lives.  We have, in our various ways, come to have several grandchildren, but this time one of them has lived so nearby that we could walk to where he is.  We have not done that, of course, because our car still starts, and lurches forward when we ask it to.  So Jao, Michael's son, has come to signify what all of our family means, partly because he is near, and partly because he is dear.

Mari and I have achieved “a certain age”.  One of us legitimately bears that honor.  The other, if she continues as she is going, will eventually earn that privilege.  And Jao, in delightful proximity, reminds us.  He is a stand-in for nearly a dozen such grandchildren.

Mari and I have walked through churchyards in Norway, and read our names:  not us, but people like us; bearers of our culture and genes.  People in Norway did not ask how we pronounced our names.  They jotted them down, unsurprised, and pronounced them without wondering.  None of those names were Jao.  None of them had brown skin or black skin.  None of them traced their recent history to Africa, South America, or Asia, or even to the British Isles, except by longboat.  It is only recently that most of us genuinely recognize that all of us are related, not just long, long ago, but right now.  Right now.  Hello, Marcia!  Hello, Michael and Jao!  Hello Makaila and Dominick!  Hello, Ian and Colin and Nicole and Dylan and Kaia and Elliza Chen!  Hello, Luciana and Alfonso, and Allie and Tyler! 

There is a little Thai and Black kid who comes to our house a couple of times a week who says, "Papa and Mama"!  (Multi-syllables are still a challenge, except for “chee’bu’geh”.)  He represents what is new in our old lives.  He helps put out the recycle bin, and pick up the newspaper from the driveway, and carries the mail to Mari.  I am the caboose in his folding-chair train, and Mari is his snuggler and storyteller.

It is as if human stuff walked off in every direction, on a globe, and discovered itself again, coming over the horizon from everywhere and from the same place.  Sometimes I say the names--Nichols, and Los Huertos, and MacIntyre and Weis and Chen and Hubbard and Heltne and Røyksund and Simonson.  That is who we are: everybody.  

We used to pretend that some of us were a Chosen People from a Promised Land or Garden East of Eden.  Now we know that we are a family!  Once family was a tight little fiction.  Now it is everyone we are, however we got here; then by where we walked to; now by whom we choose to love.

A Mari Heltne Collection and Collaboration