Our grandson came to visit this last weekend, the first visit here since before covid. He’s six and he’s very proud of that fact.

The daughter and her wife had two sons that they raised. One son was an officer in the Army and fought Isis in Iraq. The younger soon is married and his wife just had their first son. Once the boys were out of the house the daughter and her wife decided to adopt a third and he’s the six-year-old who visited.

I set up an iPhone on a tripod and passed the clicker for taking photos to the boy. My partner and I were at his sides, kneeling. He stood and we talked and laughed and he clicked the shutter. At one point I turned to my partner and said, “You didn’t see this, did you, when your mom took us to Fort Ancient?”

That visit was in 1970, weeks after the daughter’s birth and after a bad fall which left the woman who would become my partner in a coma for days. My best friend suggested we see them and we drove from the east coast in a roundabout trip to college.

We had a good visit which included being driven to the earthworks at Fort Ancient in southwest Ohio. Driving back at night the sky lit up with heat lightning, the first I’d seen. My best friend took a photo of the new mom and me there and we’re both grinning.

We have history that goes back years. We are old enough to know that one of these days we’ll leave the stage of history. We also know that the past holds the present in a firm grip. I grew up in the Jim Crow south and remember seeing Whites Only signs. This was also the era of duck and cover, school kids under their desks with their hands covering their vulnerable necks during a nuclear attack. After leaving the new mother and daughter, back on the highway to college, my best friend and I passed a large billboard proclaiming, Welcome to Klan Country.

The grandboy is African American. He’s bright, sweet, shy, and friendly. One of our fears is that the terrible history of the United States may have already doomed him.