Friday October 28, 2004 – Journeys

Friday October 28, 2004 – Journeys

At the beginning of this month, October 1st to be exact, My wife “I” and I embarked on a journey from San Jose to the southland. We left home around 10:00 AM Saturday morning heading south on California Highway 101 toward Gilroy. Thirty years ago, we would have taken 101 all the way to LA. But sometime in the early 1980s, when first our oldest daughter M and then our youngest R started at the University of California Irvine, we discovered Interstate 5, the high-speed, straight-as-an-arrow freeway that runs from the Canadian Border all the way to Mexican border. In the process it slices California in half vertically. I’ve always viewed both 101 and 5 as highways of discovery and new experiences. Every trip south when the girls were at UCI, we witness yet another change in each that represented their continuing journey into adulthood.

Now, a decade and a half later, both are grown with families of their own. M and her clan living in the East Bay 30 of so miles north and east of San Jose, R living the Mediterranean life of Orange County. M and her family and my wife and I are both driving south to celebrate the christening of R’s second baby, a baby boy barely four months old and weighing nearly 20 pounds all amassed on a steady diet of mother’s milk. We call him CB. “I” and I had both M and R baptized catholic but the girls only attended church when we visited my mother and father in Texas, both devote Catholics in their 80s. The church and its wonderful ritual provides them peace at a time in life when you start thinking about the next journey we will all have to embark upon in time.

CB was being baptized Catholic in a lovely church on a hill with a commanding view of the Pacific Ocean. CB’s sister “A” was baptized at this church barely a year earlier. M’s children, our granddaughter E and grandson M, were also baptized in a Catholic church that sat on a hill facing west toward the Pacific Ocean—about 70 or so miles beyond—with a beautiful view of the rolling hills of the East Bay. The Catholic church understands the need for a natural setting that embodies peace and serenity and comes a beauty that inspires a belief in something greater than humanity. CB is about to enter the world as defined by the church: baptism followed by communion, confirmation, marriage, and last rites. I’ve probably not listed them all as I’ve not kept up with the religion.

This is one of many roadmaps of life that each of us can follow. M and R were shown the road—as the three other grand babies have. M and R traveled the road anytime we visited their grandparents who would invite them to attend church. Both daughters took to these visits much as they did our visits to museums, great cities, natural wonders, etc.—experiences that affected them and helped form a view of the world they inhabited. Now the fourth grandchild was being shown the road, though he is far to young to form an impression of it. His reaction to the ritual—as for most of the babies accompanying him—was to cry at being subjected to something he did not find pleasant. Once the water part had past he returned to contentedly sucking his pacifier.

We celebrated the event for the milestone it was: CB becoming a Catholic. Since his dad is Italian it was only natural that we have a big Italian meal, a bottle of wine, and a white christening cake that M and R had a local bakeshop decorate appropriately. It was a white cake. Though M, R, and I are devout chocoholics, it would send the wrong message to have had a chocolate cake, with all its associated sinfulness. (We don’t realize how much religious propriety affects our lives until you notice something so trivial as the color of a cake.) CB was as nonplussed by the party we had for him as he was for his christening, though he did smile more at the party.

“I” and I had gone through this same ritual some 30 years earlier with both M and R. For M the celebration was among the three of us. For R, the event was a far bigger production. Instead of absentee godparents, she had them in the flesh. Instead of a small celebration at home, R had a feast of friends in family with more food than anyone could manage to eat courtesy of devoted grandparents. Now, this many years later, the ritual repeats with the next generation of doting grandparents, parents, and children who are looking down the same road but seeing it for the first time.