I was at my desk making small talk with the dog prior to making it with the world when a photo pinged into our family WhatsApp group. It was sent by my eldest daughter. A welcome distraction. I opened it and stared at it for long seconds, simultaneously knowing what it was and hazy with the kind of disbelief that attends big new realities. A black and white image of a large-headed, large-bellied alien reclining in a zero-gravity chair awaiting blast-off to some new world. Ears, nose, limbs … all that stuff we humans have. They are coming for us, I thought, these aliens who will replace us, they are en route to a planet they can’t fail to take from us. How wonderful.
In an office on the other side of the Westgate Bridge, my wife, Sarah, broke down crying when the photo arrived, and had to mug at her workmates apologetically and wave her hands telling them she was OK, no one had died, nothing was wrong … just everything was different.
This nut-sized femalien, this denizen of tomorrow, will make us grandparents early next year. And what a farcical idea that is, me as a grandfather. I struggle to think of myself as adult, let alone as doubly adult. Or is a grandfather only half as adult as a father, licensed to recede into childishness and frivolity? Anyway, I lack the gravitas to be a grandfather like the ones I’ve known.
I will either have to feign wisdom, like some shiny-headed monk in a kung-fu whack-a-movie hiding his cluelessness behind an enigmatic smile and plagiarised Confucian maxims, or take my natural place as a usurper, a crinkle-cut clown whose contact with the kid will be rationed by her parents lest she become convinced, too early, that life is an infamous jest. One of those grandfathers who constantly act the goat, and whose interactions are eavesdropped by Mum and Dad so that reparative conversations can be had in the car going home to reconstruct her sense of reality.
“Gramps Ansy didn’t really mean what he said about us all standing on the shoulders of cancelled giants. And, no, gravity isn’t ending tomorrow, and your dolls won’t be having tea parties on the ceiling.” It’s not up to me to be a role model for the kid. I tried that with her mother and look where it led.
Soberingly, your own death is implicit in the announcement that a grandchild is to be born. A child who will never gently lower the needle on an LP record, or race after a Greensleevesing Mister Whippy with a stolen coin. Your looming obsolescence is ratified by that child’s first wail. Here is the person chosen, from the generation fated, to take your place on the carousel pony you’ve been riding.
What fresh world will she inhabit? And what barbarities ascribe to me, half-remembered hoary-headed buffoon of her childhood, when thinking back and realising she once knew a man who grew up in a town with no traffic lights or algorithms?
What makes it hard for me to believe in myself as a grandparent is that my own were so alien, so Brahmin, so Klingon, so Zulu, so historical – distant forebears stepped from sepia photos and trespassing in a present that was mine. They epitomised all the past to me – a vast labyrinth of spent time where my grandfather regularly botted a ciggie from Henry VIII, and my grandmother smilingly laid down a hand of aces and kings that made Cleopatra curse Isis.
How could I ever become one of these bizarre aliens? These rough and rusting prototypes of humanity? I once saw my grandfather take his teeth out to brush them – thereby transforming into a different, hollow, man. What other parts of this patrician were casually detachable?
If you’d told me back then that I would eventually become one of them I’d have giggled politely to mask the distressing realisation you were a lunatic. And then lain awake at night in fear, because… wasn’t Aethalides changed into a dolphin by Dionysus? Didn’t Bottom become an ass? Wild metamorphoses are on record.
And are real, it seems. This will be a baby, and then a little girl, and as her hand reaches out for an eclair, her eyes asking if it’s OK … or she laughs at a dog involuntarily performing a somersault, I’ll see her mother in her, I guess, and the echo of that love will … make me a grandfather.
Anson Cameron is a columnist for Spectrum in The Age and the author of several books, including Boyhoodlum and Neil Balme: A Tale of Two Men.
