Oh baby......

My cousin D out in Arizona is a new grandpa..... one of his three daughters gave birth to a baby boy yesterday. D's other two daughters also have children, so this isn't the first time D is a grandpa. I called him up this afternoon, to congratulate him on this latest grandson, and D said exactly what I had been thinking before I called him: How in the world did we get from playing Monopoly on Grandma's porch to here?!

Both D and I said that playing Monopoly on the porch in Queens happened just yesterday, didn't it? We both remember all the holidays at Grandma's house, with all the aunts in the kitchen fussing over the stove and the oven (except for Aunt Jaye, who never cooked, and still doesn't), and all the uncles playing cards with Grandpa in the dining room. The only thing that got the cards and the poker chips off of the dining room table was my grandmother poking her head through the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room. A woman of few words, she said "Time to eat! Now!" (In Italian, of course, which made it sound even more important and forceful.) While the uncles were putting their cards and poker chips away, my generation of cousins would be tucking our Monopoly money underneath the board, making sure everything was safe in our spots so we could resume the game after dinner.

So here we all are, fifty years later. As D said--- Where did the fifty years go? 50 isn't a small number! How come we didn't see the years disappearing?!

But we didn't. The days go, the weeks go, the months pass along, and the years disappear. And then one day (as my dear friend Frankie used to say)-- "You look into the mirror and you see this middle-aged person looking back at you.... and then if you're really lucky, you get to see an older person looking back at you and then you say to the mirror "Well, who the hell are you and what have you done with me!?"

D sent me a photo of the new baby today-- a tiny little postage-stamp sized photo on my cell phone. I have no idea how to re-send this phone-picture to my other cousins, so D is going to have to send the same photo to the rest of the family. When I was talking to D on the phone, he told me to look at the picture and let him know if the new baby boy looks like Mussolini or Churchill.

I eMailed D a little while ago. I told him I got the photo....... told him I looked at it very carefully..... and said that the baby doesn't look a bit like Mussolini or Churchill. What I told D was that his new grandson looks like part of the family.