Dearest Auden,
Welcome to our family!
We waited for your arrival with growing excitement and diminishing patience as the big day neared. You weren’t due until the third day of the New Year, but to be honest you’re just what topsy-turvy 2022 needed to finish on a high note.
You came as a belated birthday gift for your big sister, Maya, who turned four early in December, and a three-days-early Christmas gift for the rest of us. In a wink of serendipity, you share your birthday with your Uncle Greg.
Normally, Funcle – as Maya calls him, and I’m certain you too will find the moniker of endearment to be perfectly fitting – feels slighted by birthday/Christmas combination gifts. In this case, however, he could not have felt more blessed.
Holding you for the first time, Auden, was a time machine for me. I looked down at your blue eyes and saw your big sister; saw your mommy when she was a baby; and saw your grandma, NeNe, long before I knew her.
But most of all, I saw your great-grandma – who was my mommy – for she ha the bluest eyes I have ever seen. Her peepers were the color of the Caribbean Sea and a cloudless summer sky, the prettiest blue in Monet’s palette and Wedgewood blue, which she dearly loved, all blended together. Yes, Auden, you have her movie-star eyes.
More importantly, however – for your eyes, and you, would be just as beautiful if they were green or brown, hazel or grey – you also have your great-grandmother’s name. While her birth certificate, and death certificate 30 years ago, read Audrey, your mommy and the other eight grandchildren all called her Auden.
The great poet W.H. Auden wrote a poem titled “O Tell Me The Truth About Love” and the truth is, Little Auden, your namesake epitomized love. Of a thousand stories I will one day share with you, let me begin here with this one that remains, sadly and maddeningly, relevant in this troubled world that oftentimes seems to be moving backwards.
It happened a long, long time ago, in the previous century, in the late 1940s, in the Midwest, when Auden was in high school. There was a must-go-to prom party and she was thrilled to be invited.
Shortly before the eagerly anticipated merrymaking, however, Auden’s excitement evaporated faster than a wet footprint on a scorching pool deck in August because she found out her friend Trish had not received an invitation.
Auden’s disappointed sizzled into anger when she learned why Trish was excluded: because she was Jewish. America’s G.I. Joes had just defeated the Nazis overseas, but anti-Semitism – then as now – had not been vanquished across our amber waves of grain and fruited plains, from sea to shining sea.
Understand, this was not just The Party of the Year, it was The Party of The Senior Class’s High School Lives. No matter. If Trish was not welcomed, then Auden would not go either. Instead, she invited Trish over to her house for their own two-person party…
…that turned out to be The Best Partyof Allas a growing cascade of classmates followed her example.
“Injustice,” she often told me, “is everyone’s battle.”
Little Auden, more than your lovely blue eyes, it is her traits of inner-mettle and rightness, alloyed with a great sense of humor too, that I hope you are most proud to have inherited from your namesake.
With love to the moon,
Bruno
P.S. Next, I need to tell you why Maya and you call me Bruno instead of Grandpa.
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.
Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com