Alexa Rovira

Ann and I had our first granddaughter Saturday morning. Jessie the mother is fine, and Alexa is beautiful. The birth wasn't due until November 27. Friday night, however, Katie arrived from Los Angeles to help with the baby shower on Sunday, then that same night Ann returned home from a business trip. I suspect Alexa realized that everyone had gathered for her and so she needn't wait an extra two weeks to join our world.

Next summer during my trek to Tor House I'm certain I'll feel I left a lot behind in the shadow of the Arch. Ann, of course. Yard work in the Drexel house. Morning coffee with friends at Starbucks in the Loop. Now there's Alexa. She'll be nearly half a year old when I leave; nearly nine months when I return. How much is three months in the first year of a baby's life? What firsts occur from six to nine months? When my three nephews were born, I was attending graduate school in Commerce, Texas. Luckily, on trips home back east, I saw each of them as babies. A year or more would pass; I'd see them again. They were always bigger and different, slowly becoming boys, then teenagers, and later young men. It's like I saw them in stages of spurt, without transitions, now a baby, now a boy, now a teenager, now a young man.

I'm trusting Alexa will be a baby when I leave and still be a baby when I come home. And years from how, I can tell her stories of how her granddaddy trekked from the Arch next to the Mississippi River to Tor House on the shore of the Pacific Ocean. Maybe those stories will be the beginning of her own development as a story teller.