Through the wall, my son and his grandfather are playing a game whose only rule, as far as I can reconstruct it, is that the grandfather's hands are spiders and the spiders are coming. Again.

He is one year old, and he is laughing the way a one-year-old laughs, up from the very floor of himself. He’s a big guy, so it must start low, somewhere under the ribs, climbing upward into a helpless hiccupping, which is when his laugh runs out of air entirely, just before an involuntary inhale as he draws breath for the next round. I have heard a great deal of laughter in my life. I went to college. I have never heard anything like this.

This is unbridled joy. He has no mortgage. He has never sat through a meeting that could have been an email. He has never heard of income taxes, and I have decided, after some thought, to let the government break that news to him. He believes the dog is a kind of weather. He has no opinion about the Pittsburgh Penguins, which puts him ahead of me emotionally by about thirty years. The laugh comes out of him effortlessly, because in this moment it is just who he is.

I am aware that a grandfather playing spiders with a baby is not an event. It is not even news in this house. If a stranger walked past the door he would hear a baby laughing and think, correctly, there is a baby laughing, and isn’t that wonderful, and he would keep walking, and he would be right to. There is nothing in the acoustics that explains why a grown man is sitting in the next room with his eyes stinging, unable to finish a sentence. The laugh is ordinary. What is not ordinary is that this one is his.

There is an old Hebrew love poem, the one that embarrassed the rabbis enough that they argued about whether to keep it, in which a woman is asked what is so special about her beloved, and she answers with an inventory. His head is this, his eyes are that, his hands, his legs, and so on down, like someone describing a suspect in a film noir. And then, near the end, the inventory gives out. She has run through the parts and she still has not said it, and so she stops listing and simply gestures at the whole of him: he is altogether lovely. The translation I grew up with put it that way, and I have always heard in it a kind of shrug. Not the shrug of indifference but the other one, the one you give when language has been tried and found insufficient, and you are left holding the whole person up in both hands and saying, well, just look at him.

He is everything delightful. It is not a compliment. It is not even a description. It is the sound a person makes when the description fails.

And it is, I notice, a verdict that cannot be reached from outside the room. The stranger in the hall cannot arrive at it. He has the same ears I have and the same laugh is passing through them, and he gets nothing, and I get everything, and the difference is not in the laugh. The difference is that this one is ours. I do not mean ours as a matter of possession, the way the couch is ours. I mean that we belong to him in the way that lets him be, for us, the entire category of the delightful, filled to the edges with one small person with some new teeth who is currently trying to eat his grandfather's glasses.

To me, this type of moment with a child of your own is the extreme on the spectrum of the world’s marvelous things. Not everyone is wired or blessed like that, and I am aware of it. Fortunately the feeling is not confined to nurseries.

I can tell you that somewhere this week there is a man in a hospital bed. He has just come up from the unit with all the machines to a floor where the beeps and noises go quiet at night. His grown children have probably arranged themselves in the chairs the way grown children do, as if the chairs were assigned. He says something dry about the hospital food, because it isn’t good. They laugh much harder than the remark deserves, and he knows they are doing it, and he does it again. Nobody on that floor has any idea. The night nurse thinks he is a nice old man with a good attitude, which he is. His children, in the chairs, are hearing the voice come back, and the wit come back behind it, and in that moment they are not thinking about his prognosis or his lab values. They are thinking, without the words, he is everything delightful, and he is here. The remark about the food will not be written down anywhere, but is perhaps the most important thing said in that building today.

And somewhere else this week a man is coming home in the evening with an ear that was not always as soft as it is today. A year ago he set something down that he had carried for a long time, and the hands that had been busy carrying it have slowly been coming back to him, and so have other things, and one of them is the ability to know and be known. He can now ask how her day was and then stay for the answer, and then for the next one, and the one after that. To her, tonight, with his soft ear, he is everything delightful, and the rest of the house is just rooms.

I tend to think of the sublime as a kind of event, that it had to be large or rare or at least photogenic. A view from a ridge. A birth. A diagnosis reversed. And some of it is. But the evidence of this week is that the sublime is sometimes not a kind of event at all. Spiders, Jell-O, and how did it go really, and any one of them, transplanted into a stranger's house, would be a Tuesday. What makes them unbearable in the good sense is that the person at the center of them is the one who has already been held up in both hands and declared altogether lovely, and once that verdict is in, there is nothing they can do that is not evidence for it. Delightful. And yes, the word delightful has been badly worn down by brunch, I know. People say it about scones. But a scone is not everything delightful. A scone is a scone.

The laugh through the wall has trailed off. But I know what’s going on in there. He has moved on to pulling the grandfather's glasses off, scrutinizing them at arm's length like a jeweler, and the grandfather, who paid real money for those glasses, is making a noise I can only describe as delighted. It occurs to me that the verdict runs the other way too, and that the boy, who does not know what a verdict is, is yet handing one down as he buries his face into the old man’s chest.

He will learn about taxes. He will not, I think, ever learn what he was to the people in this house on an ordinary Wednesday, because that is the one thing the people in the room can never quite get across to the person at the center of it. We tried. The description failed. We stood there holding him up, and said, well, just look at him.

John

The Mayfly Letter has no algorithms, no investors—just my wife and me folding newspapers at a kitchen table.

We're a small-batch operation built on the support of readers who have signed up to receive our handsome print edition— four essays, inked on premium English newsprint and sent to your doorstep every month.

If you're the kind of person who loves the feeling of picking up a real newspaper with your morning coffee, something you can underline and leave out for others to find, we'd love to have you as a print subscriber.

It’s the best way to support our independent writing.

Either way, thanks for being here.

John Conrad