Kids

We went to the kids’ for dinner. At their invitation. At their home, their first one.

New construction, still has that new house smell: the slight tingle of fresh paint, the faint air of freshly laid padding and carpet. Not a single stain on the off-white driveway, the cement seemingly poured that morning. A new subdivision, carved from farmland that itself was carved from forest, likely once the domain of the Caddos, centuries ago, or the Quapaws. Maybe the Osage. (Are there descendants of the indigenous still about?) Ethnic anxieties that helped spawn this and other exurbs, though a slow cruise through its streets suggests its inhabitants have in common not color but class, the latter of greater significance among neighbors than the former. So, progress. Of a sort.

The distance from our old house to their new house: Just a few miles, they say. Correct, although the dynamics of modern urban-suburban-exurban existence demand the measure be computed not in miles but time of day. A mid-afternoon drive would be, yes, just a few miles. For cocktails and an early meal, as in drinks at 5:30 p.m. and dinner at 6, well, a few miles equals one hour, longer if there’s a fender-bender. Communities created from pastureland, commuter traffic, highway construction to accommodate: There’s a cocktail for you, a shaken and stirred synergy that poses ever greater challenges to the policymakers of the cities from which the sedans and SUVs excuse themselves at dusk.

Kids: What we once called their parents. No longer. Now it’s the succeeding generation, the kids’ kids. In their first home, in their first jobs after college graduation, jobs that aren’t in journalism. Grandparents survey the house, glance at one another, each thinking the same thing: First jobs in journalism did not, not permit the purchase of a home. A rental strained the budget. A dog was unaffordable, even if served table scraps, and come to think of it, there were so few scraps remaining on the entry-level journalists’ tables that a dog, or a cat or a goldfish or a turtle, would have starved.

Pride, not envy. Well, a little envy, some.

Newlyweds, two months; and already there’s a third mouth to feed. His name’s Hardy. Hardy never makes a mistake. “Hardly ever,” that is. Hardy is about five weeks old. Five inches tall. Three inches of tail. Tawny as tobacco. Teeth like needles; enjoys using them, especially on visitors, such as grandparents. Trouser cuffs are especially inviting. Shoelaces are an appetizer, a purse is an entrée, a windbreaker is dessert. Cute little fellow, Hardy.

Grandparents yearn to be great-grandparents, even as they remind themselves that they have had their turn, that the kids they can no longer call kids are entitled to their turn as grandparents, that great-grandparents have no claim, no right nor standing to wrest the newest generation from the one that produced their parents. They will do their best to muscle in, regardless. So, Hardy the delightful dachshund is nice, but, ahem… The thought, on the tip of the male grandparent’s tongue, goes unexpressed, suppressed by the stern that’s-none-of-your-business glance of the female grandparent — who then airily mentions something about biological clocks and how infant garments come in such interesting colors these days.

A few yards from the granite-and-stainless steel kitchen, the muted big- screen TV on the wall. Disturbing images. Dazed survivors surrounded by the rubble of their homes in Turkey, sometimes a U.S. ally, and from Syria, an adversary the U.S. periodically bombs, sometimes to prevent it from bombing other countries, or slaughtering its own citizens. A massive earthquake, aftershocks that rivaled it. Chunks of cement and twisted rebar. Furnishings, much of it barely recognizable as such. Bodies, many of them unidentifiable.

Then pictures of that balloon, from China. And pictures of men and women intently scanning the skies through binoculars, rifles at the ready, presumably prepared to shoot down that particular invader, or maybe what they fear would be its successor. At 60,000 feet. Switch to Washington: pictures of some members of Congress, the captions declaring their insistence that the previous president would never have allowed such an intrusion on his watch. Followed by captions that explained that it had happened several times on the previous president’s watch.

Local news now. The Arkansas legislature.

The new husband returned from the patio carrying a new platter of chicken. From the new oven of the new house the new wife slid a new pan of roasted new potatoes, slathered in butter and garnished with spices, her mom’s old recipe. Together they asked if we wanted to finish watching the news before eating.

No. Because we came for dinner. And hope.