Passover

Our only son called yesterday. I, having just returned from my morning walk, did not catch that first call. My wife missed it, too.

Some hours later, he called again, a video call from London, where my wife and I could see our grandson bouncing on the hotel bed in the background. London. Of course. They'd told us last week, just after the American inauguration, they'd be traveling from their Amsterdam home to London, but to our When had only replied, Soon.

Our grandson had something to share with Grandma and Grandpa: Were you scared on the flight? (Nod.) Were you sick? (Nod.) But are you all better now? (Nod.)

Our son then told us that his son had vomited four times; that the simple one-hour flight from Amsterdam to London had been a turbulent nightmare. They had flown from a breezy morning directly into Storm Herminia. The pilots attempted one landing, the plane arcing and bouncing madly against eighty-mile gusts. They aborted; then, with no other option, wheeled and whirled and finally thumped the tarmac.

Our grandson had been wailing, his dad said, reaching for his mother. She, pregnant with twins and pinned one row ahead, could not provide the safety he craved. This two-year-old, this veteran who'd previously flown to India, Bhutan, Vietnam, Italy, France, the United States -- this toddler was as frightened as any on that plane.

We concluded our brief call. All was well.

Today, I wonder. Yesterday had been such an ordinary Michigan morning. Neither my wife nor I even knew they'd been in the air. We might have passed serene hours before hearing something on the news. Or answering a different kind of phone call. The kind that notifies you.

And then, all is disbelief. And all that has gone before is simply that. There is the past. The event. And all that follows.

Five lives. Two, still only a promise; and one of those, the smaller twin, the fighter, already high risk.

But it didn't happen. They were all safe, of course.

A day later, reflecting, I feel the brush of black wings. A whisper of the threat of what might have been. It would all have ended: the announcement of twins last fall, the higher-risk pregnancy, the need for a dual stroller found only in the U.S., the Amsterdam house suddenly too small for three boys, C-Section a probability, stairs an issue for several weeks, preparing the older brother, one twin barely two-thirds the weight of the other, constant monitoring, preemie births, grandparent travel preparations, clothes, finances, school, job leave, medications, more -- all erased.

How do people do it?

Last week one of my best friends lost his job after twenty-five years. An email. Pack your things; you're through.

How is that possible? How random, how jarring these events landing like bomb shards around us?

I thought of my daughter-in-law, strapped in, willing that plane to land. We males have no idea what it means to wrap ourselves around those living beings inside. We don't know the protective instinct that arises and builds. Mothers-to-be, having made the choice to carry -- in our country, a choice increasingly imperiled by indifferent men -- as the days pass and time ticks to delivery, how do these bonds grow?

I think of Ukrainian women, whose men are off to battle and who nonetheless carry and give birth in extreme uncertainty, in some cases bringing to daylight sons and daughters who will know their fathers only through photographs. I think of women of Gaza, having survived the broken glass and blasted buildings, the snipers and the screams, carrying despite starvation and little water, to give birth, as quietly as they can so as not to arouse the soldier passing by; or, perhaps suddenly, triggered by God knows what, lying in an alleyway under the rockets' red glare. To bring life into a dying world, as the now-despised Jews did in the concentration camps, under the boots of the then-despised Germans, eighty years before.

As, some would say, was once done in a manger.

I think of all this, returning in my car from my daily walk today. The sun shines brightly into the strong wind. I step onto the driveway, my gait arrested. Feathers lay blasted, strewn on the cement by the bird feeder. A cat, a bird. One of them trusted too much.

Our indifferent D.C. power brokers don't get the true stakes of this game, I think, my foot teasing the wing feathers to the edge of the grass. They've only been in for a week, after all. Individual life is fragile; but life itself, the push and pulse of events and accidents, of climate and pollution, of fires and floods and births and tortures and inventions and killings and all the rest -- life itself is far more potent and powerful than is dreamt of in their schemes.

I enter the house, shed my winter layers, head to my office, start my PC. Coffee awaits. Outside, the wind may bring power failures today; then again, it may not.

All is well, I think. The dark wings have passed.

I conjure Amsterdam, a city I’ve learned to love.

They return home on Thursday, when I turn sixty-nine. If I do. I await their call.