Jude

Dear Tony and Ruth, It was a head aching and heart-stopping thirty minutes with your grandson in the Westfield Shopping Mall in Bondi yesterday, as I was trying to have a coffee and a chat with his parents, Bill and Mindy.

One second the boy is reaching for the glass of coffee that I can see about to spill, and the next he’s testing the automatic sliding doors about to get his fingers caught, totally unaware of people coming and going, side-stepping to get around him.

While grand Uncle Michael has palpitations and indigestion; there sits mother Mindy, such a saint, cool, and speaking firmly in Korean (which the child mostly responds to!), and frazzled father Bill, in line for a medal if he doesn’t blow a phooffoo valve and expires in the meantime.

I wonder why children can’t progress from that dear age of sweetness safely strapped. smiling in a stroller, and skip those trying, draining, screaming, wilful months where they are on the verge of talking, and finally reach the point where they can understand boundaries more clearly? Of course ‘trying’, ‘draining’, ‘screaming’, ‘wilful’ are the aspects that describe an old grand-uncle.

It could be said that the child is simply learning and loving and celebrating the gift of life. But . . . ask me whether I saw it that way when we parted company after yesterday’s thirty-minute ‘quiet social catch-up over a cup of coffee’, that was just a teeth-biting marathon for me.

My sainthood will never come from a virtue of Patience!

But Jude is a sweet child, isn’t he?