Our Own Reality
This Christmas my daughter Carolyn gave me a great grandparent gift in the form of a 2024 calendar that is a four-inch block of daily photos of my granddaughters. That means that I have a pad of 366 (2024 is a Leap Year) daily reminders of the charm and beauty of my two granddaughters, Charlotte and Evelyn. When you stop and think about that, to gather and even have 366 current photos of the girls is an accomplishment on its own, but then to gather them and organize them in some manner that makes sense with the calendar is altogether amazing. These are two lovely little blonde girls who in 2024 will turn eleven and eight respectively and each and every snapshot of them is a momentary treasure to a doting grandfather like me. It so happens that I am flying to New York today for expert witness business to give a deposition, and I will be seeing the girls tomorrow night for a family dinner. Nevertheless, I get to remind myself about my wonderful granddaughters for a few moments this morning as I tear off several days worth of photos to catch up from my absence in Sedona for a few days.
We all live in the world that most immediately surrounds us. For my last stage of life, I have chosen to live on this hilltop in San Diego County and it is by now the place where I feel most at home. I think about my mother, who grew up in rural Upstate New York on a small farm, got herself a world-class education and went out for forty years and attacked the broader world before settling into her final reality, which was in a condo in Las Vegas, near her middle child and where she could engage regularly with two of her grandchildren. Las Vegas was not my mother’s life, but it was her final reality. It was there that she married for the second time to good old Irving Jenkins, one of her close college friends from way back. It was there that we, her other children and our children, came to visit her as she worked her way through her seventies, eighties and nineties to round out her century of life. Like my mother, I have moved to my final reality on this hilltop in my late sixties and will shortly be entering my seventies. This hilltop is not my life, but it is very much my reality of my own choosing and making. I have no children who live nearby, but I do have my siblings (as does Kim) and as the youngest respectively of our broods, we specifically wanted to spend some time nearby all of them to remind us of our family heritages and original nuclear bonds.
I just got a significant dose of that in Sedona since both of my sisters were there and three of my four nieces and nephews were in attendance. It was not an earthshaking moment since it was the simple but earnest wedding of a niece who had co-habituated with her spouse for a decade. We did not discuss great or momentous things, in fact, we pretty much avoided discussing all the ills and traumas of the world for a few days. We just chit chatted our way through several meals together and generally caught up with what we all planned for our coming year. My sisters and I are fortunate to all be in good health, so there was little by way of the “organ recital” that starts to plague the gathering of older sorts like ourselves. All of our organs and joints for that matter seem to still be in reasonable working order. Instead, we talked of travels and gatherings to be. My sisters and I spent most of our lives on our own separate courses, living our own separate realities, but now we are all much closer physically, so our realities are more connected than ever. For three kids that grew up in the tropics, it is noteworthy that we all seem to prefer the desert environment for our final reality.
My kids all grew up in the metropolitan New York City area and gradually that seems to be changing. My oldest son has already taken his reality down to the Delaware shore and seems to have set up more or less permanent shop in that Mid-Atlantic environment that has all the beach that he so much enjoyed in his youth but none of the city life that he longed for and then discarded a few years ago. My youngest son, who was just wed and now lives in Brooklyn, the belly of the metro NYC beast, and has spent his entire life in the urban center of Manhattan, has decided to move to Colorado. He is a city boy who has longed to live in the country for quite some time and will soon be realizing that dream. We will see if that new reality suits him the way he hopes it will. My daughter and those two blondies of hers have staked their claim to an area of Brooklyn near the waterfront and seem content to make that their ongoing reality. That tethers the rest of us to New York and will do so for some time to come. It is interesting that this suburban-raised daughter is so comfortable being a city girl and raising her girls in that challenging environment. It will be equally interesting to see what the girls decide as they grow up and make their own reality decisions about where to settle down.
The world is a very connected place these days. We all very much live in a global society where we know first thing in the morning what is happening all around the world. We know when a volcano erupts in Iceland or a Tsunami hits Sumatra. We know when bombs drops in Gaza and when tensions arise in the South China Sea or the Straights of Hormuz. With climate change, we are especially cognizant of the weather that our significant family members are enduring in their realities. I am flying from sunny Southern California to frigid New York City today and I am totally plugged into the upcoming weather reports so that I can prepare myself for my temporary new reality in the center of Midtown Manhattan. No matter how much we digitize ourselves and connect ourselves through social media, we all spend most of our consciousness in the physical reality that we choose.
More and more, I find myself feeling most comfortable in this hilltop reality. That is a good thing because being comfortable at home is pretty fundamental to one’s happiness. When I travel away, even for just a few days, I have noticed that I am very happy to get back home to the reality that I have chosen for myself. I suppose we travel for many reasons and when it is to see family or for work, we do it despite the issue of leaving our comfort zones. But when we travel just to travel, as we will be doing in another month when we head off to Southeast Asia, we do it perhaps to see the world and experience as much as we can in our allotted time on earth, but I also think we do it subconsciously to remind ourselves that despite all the alternate realities that exist and please others, our own realities that we are always happy to return to, are simply the best for our purposes.