Couple of hours being shuttled to JFK by Mohamed ... 34 year old man from Tunisia ... Here since he was 19 ... Two toddlers and a wife at home. Lots of traffic ... everybody in the car just a tad manic. I'm traveling with women ... the grandmother I sleep with -- M, herself .... our youngest child -- therapist, Mother of three, Wife ... her oldest, sitting in the airport lounge reading Dawkins' Selfish Gene. On our way somewhere ... Curiously, it matters to me little where that destination is ... Right this moment, sitting here trying to comprehend the mystery of it all ...
Do I really have a 16 year old grandchild? Yes. I do, indeed, have a grand-daughter munching on Dawkins' treatise ...
Three generations of women and Me, the oddMAN-out ... Husband, Father, Grandfather. No longer a Son ... people don't seem to like when, in the Last Quarter, one identifies themself as an orphan ... but I do sometimes think of myself in those terms. Complicated: this living in the Fourth Quarter. So many identities have collected about what once was so simple.
"Mom, Dad ... C'est moi ... It's me."
I don't imagine to know what these women are thinking ...
I suppose I never knew what the clergyman's daughter and the WWII soldier boy were thinking, either. As children, we expend preciously little energy trying to ferret out Mom and Dad's thinking ... their dreams of the future.
"God put Mom and Dad on Earth to birth and provide for me."
Maybe, on this trip I'll find the visceral fortitude to ask ...
"What do traveling ladies think about?"
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