Grandkids are growing

Melinda's post re Dillon's talk reminded me that our grandkids are growing up so fast that it startles us. That's the case even for Claire whom we see multiple times each week. How much more is it the case for the ones we see only a couple of times a year.

In August, it was a novelty to carry on a conversation with Dillon. That's never been possible before. In this case it was about Melinda's instructions concerning his breakfast. I had questions: "Did she say..?" and he told me exactly what she must have said because that's the way she does it. And when I got it wrong anyway, he would correct me. "Grandpa, Mommy doesn't cut up my waffle." He ate it anyway.

And Claire comes up with surprises, too.

Grandma informed me in their presence, "When Claire allows you to put on her eye patch, give her and Dillon a see-oh-oh-kay-eye-ee." "No!" exclaimed Claire. "Only I should get the see-oh-kay-eye-ee."

Logical. But we're going to have to learn Spanish.

And at Wheeler Farm, Claire, Dillon, and I came out of the restroom and saw Melinda rapidly pushing Jeremy in his stroller up the sidewalk away from us. She probably didn't know where we were and she was hurrying to search for us. We cut across this huge lawn to intercept her.

Claire, at a dead run with Dillon in tow, headed for a foot bridge across a ditch made to look like a little brook that separated us from the sidewalk. I noticed that there was a tiny rope strung across the foot bridge with a triangular flag hanging from it to prevent someone from accidentally tripping over the rope. I looked around and noted that the entire huge lawn was roped off, apparently for a private reservation for a group I noted occupying a distant corner. We had entered it at the only place where it was not roped off -- near the restroom, of course.

Claire saw the rope just in time to avoid running into it and she stopped so fast that Dillon almost ran into her. Then she turned away. That surprised me because I expected the rope to be about as much hindrance to their progress as a sunbeam across their path.

Claire headed upstream to another little bridge which, by that time, was even closer to Melinda and found the rope strung across that one, too. At this point, she also looked around and saw that the entire lawn was roped off.

"Grandpa," she exclaimed in dismay, "we can't get out!"

I was startled and impressed with her respect for law, order, and barrier, and I considered turning around and exiting the area by the restroom where we had entered. I considered it for a good 2 milliseconds, then I lifted up the rope and invited her and Dillon to walk under it, which they did. Claire was wearing a little grin as she did so.

And I felt terrible. I hope I didn't permanently damage their respect for law and order.

Time for your swimming lesson, Claire.

I think I made a mistake when I pointed out to Claire that the only place she was allowed to run was on the diving board. I was shocked to suddenly see my 5-year old granddaughter sprinting the length of the diving board and gleefully leaping wide out over the rippling chasm. And here I am, sprinting through the water to grab her within 2 seconds after she hit the 9 foot bottom -- more for my peace of mind than hers, apparently.

She had found an exciting new activity we could do together and she repeated it over and over leaving grandpa exhausted and the lifeguard, observing all from atop her pedestal, giggling.

Claire is now registered for swimming lessons beginning November 1st.

If you're 50 and not a conservative....

I have a favorite quote which I often pull on my kids. They respond with eye rolls and other signs of irritation. The quote is attributed to Churchill:

"If you're 20 years old and not a liberal, you have no heart. If you're 50 years old and not a conservative, you have no brain."

This speaks truth to me, but the best expression of this truth was recently given by national columnist, Thomas Sowell, in his 9/11 column. From his picture, Sowell appears to be a good looking black man. This is his column:

Liberals' lofty vision often runs counter to real world threats, experience

Conservatives, as well as liberals, would undoubtedly be happier living in the kind of world envisioned by the left.

Very few people have either a vested interest or an ideological preference for a world in which there are many inequalities.

Even fewer would prefer a world in which vast sums of money have to be devoted to military defense, when so much benefit could be produced if those resources were directed into medical research instead.

It is hardly surprising that young people prefer the political left. The only reason for rejecting the left's vision is that the real world in which we live is very different from the world that the left perceives today or envisions for tomorrow.

Most of us learn that from experience — but experience is precisely what the young are lacking.

"Experience" is often just a fancy word for the mistakes that we belatedly realized we were making, only after the realities of the world made us pay a painful price for being wrong.

Those who are insulated from that pain — whether by being born into affluence or wealth, or shielded by the welfare state, or insulated by tenure in academia or in the federal judiciary — can remain in a state of perpetual immaturity.

Individuals can refuse to grow up, especially when surrounded in their work and in their social life by similarly situated and like-minded people.

Even people born into normal lives, but who have been able through talent or luck to escape into a world of celebrity and wealth, can likewise find themselves in the enviable position of being able to choose whether to grow up or not.

Those of us who can recall what it was like to be an adolescent must know that growing up can be a painful transition from the sheltered world of childhood.

No matter how much we may have wanted adult freedom, there was seldom the same enthusiasm for taking on the burdens of adult responsibilities and having to weigh painful trade-offs in a world that hemmed us in on all sides, long after we were liberated from parental restrictions.

Should we be surprised that the strongest supporters of the political left are found among the young, academics, limousine liberals with trust funds, media celebrities and federal judges?

These are hardly Karl Marx's proletarians, who were supposed to bring on the revolution. The working class are in fact today among those most skeptical about the visions of the left.

Ordinary working class people did not lead the stampede to Barack Obama, even before his disdain for them slipped out in unguarded moments.

The agenda of the left is fine for the world that they envision as existing today and the world they want to create tomorrow.

That is a world not hemmed in on all sides by inherent constraints and the painful trade-offs that these constraints imply. Theirs is a world where there are attractive, win-win "solutions" in place of those ugly trade-offs in the world that the rest of us live in.

Theirs is a world where we can just talk to opposing nations and work things out, instead of having to pour tons of money into military equipment to keep them at bay. The left calls this "change" but in fact it is a set of notions that were tried out by the Western democracies in the 1930s — and which led to the most catastrophic war in history.

For those who bother to study history, it was precisely the opposite policies in the 1980s — pouring tons of money into military equipment — which brought the Cold War and its threat of nuclear annihilation to an end.

The left fought bitterly against that "arms race" which in fact lifted the burden of the Soviet threat, instead of leading to war as the elites claimed.

Personally, I wish Ronald Reagan could have talked the Soviets into being nicer, instead of having to spend all that money. Only experience makes me skeptical about that "kinder and gentler" approach and the vision behind it.