When your own baby — never mind that he has two master’s degrees, is happily married, and moving all the way across the country — has a baby, it’s weird.

Wonderful, but weird. Just sayin’. There’s a kind of disconnect: baby/ son/ son-as-father/ son-once-was baby… It’s kind of a strange loop. And yes, I did say it’s also wonderful.

My grandson looks very little like the downy-headed baby my first-born once was, so that’s not it. My grandson’s eyes are dark pools, like the night sky. Not brown so much as darkness. My son’s were the dark gentian blue of dreams.

No, the weird comes from this thing called ‘time passing.’ It’s not that my grandson evokes my son. What happens is that I have come unstuck from the gravity of time. Its field no longer contains me, and I float between the baby that was then, and the father who is now. You know how our grandparents used to say time flies? Well, apparently it has. Flown. Because no way is that little boy w/ the wide blue eyes the father of this little baby with the wide dark ones.

As for beginner’s heart’s place in all this confusion? Remembering — once again — how ephemeral it all is: life, love, childhoods. I reach out for the clouds sometimes, before I remember: the clouds come & the clouds go. Only the sky remains. And sometimes, if you are very lucky, the blue sky also holds a grandson. Nothing like his father, really. Except for being perfect. And ever-changing. Like beginner’s heart…?