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A letter to my children
By Eileen McNamara
March 14, 1999
Dear Tim, Patrick, and Kate
Your mother writes as an old century is about to end and a new millennium is about to dawn, with a request that you wait until the 100th anniversary of my birth to read this letter. By then, save accident or ill-health, you will be reaching retirement age, beginning to assess the meaning of your lives. I cannot know all the lessons that adulthood will have taught you. But, if nostalgia and psychotherapy loom as large in 2052 as they do in 1999, you will be looking back to the children you were to make some sense of the men and woman you became. What do I hope you see in the rearview mirror?
Not my parenting skills, which Dorothy Parker might have said ran the full gamut from panic to terror. ''Worrying must work for you,'' your grandmother once told me, ''because 99 percent of the things you worry about never happen.'' A clever one, your grandma, with her generation's passive philosophy that children will grow up if their parents just get out of the way.
Not my cooking. Your olfactory nerves are not impaired. They simply stored no childhood aromas of fresh-baked bread. Your hot chocolate came straight from a Swiss Miss box; your chicken noodle soup right out of a Campbell's can. Yours was the only house on the block that had Domino's Pizza on speed-dial, that considered grilled cheese haute cuisine.
Not your experience in organized sports. You all played on ''A'' teams and ''B'' teams and when you were assigned to one, chances are you belonged on the other. Youth sports taught you less about athletics than about arbitrary judgments, adult competitiveness, and smalltime political influence, lessons better left for later in life.
Not the experience of late 20th-century education ''reform.'' Too many terrific teachers were held captive to policymakers who conned the electorate into believing that what children know, that who they are, can be reduced to a series of multiple-choice questions on a standardized test. The best teachers taught you otherwise, but it was hard for you to hear them when the drumbeat of conventional wisdom was banging so loudly.
If not the hearth, or the playing field, or the schoolhouse, what is it that your mother hopes you'll remember from your childhood with unalloyed joy?
I hope you will remember Your Tree.
The perfectly symmetrical sugar maple stood at the edge of our property and the center of your childhoods. It meant different things at different times to each one of you, but it held in its branches the very essence of childhood - spontaneity, imagination, improvisation - the very things devalued by the adult-sized world at the end of century.
There was no ladder, no swing, no clubhouse in Your Tree. It was all gangly branches - all arms and legs, just like you. But even without plywood floors or old lumber siding, Your Tree was a playhouse, a room of your own where adults held no sway, where what rules existed were rules made and enforced, or not, by children. Your father and I would hand up juice boxes and peanut butter sandwiches and you would shoo us away, silence prevailing on high until we were out of earshot, beyond the whispers of grade-school gossip.
Your Tree taught you, Patrick, that not all athletes are found on the soccer field or the basketball court. It was you who fashioned the rope that hoisted you and your pals to the bottom branch, you who climbed straight up in your Birkenstocks and guided the less sure-footed safely to the higher branches.
Your Tree taught you, Tim, that not all learning takes place in libraries. You read your first paperback books in Your Tree, following the exploits of Matt Christopher with the sun on your face and the bark against your back.
Your Tree made friends with you, Katie, giving you a place to be alone or to welcome others when you were ready to offer Lily a flowerpot or Chris a kitchen chair to boost themselves into your orbit.
For all my warnings against climbing too high or too fast, none of you ever fell out of Your Tree. Several stitches followed a fall from a bicycle. A broken leg resulted from the collision of a sled with another tree. But Your Tree held you all safe and secure.
We first saw Your Tree when we answered a real estate ad for a fixer-upper ''with the most beautiful tree'' in town in the front yard. It was 100 years old by then. It would be too much to say that Your Tree sold the house, but it was certainly true that Your Tree was the only thing on the lot that could not be improved upon by human hands.
We did not realize the lack of hyperbole in the real estate agent's description until our first autumn living alongside Your Tree. Its even shape had been obvious during the spring and summer, but when the leaves turned from green to red and gold and orange, Your Tree looked impossibly, perfectly symmetrical. Cars pulled alongside the road to photograph it. Neighbors put Your Tree on their jogging route. Traffic picked up as commuters timed their drives to experience the variations in color at sunrise and sunset.
It was during that first fall that you claimed Your Tree for the children of this neighborhood. Foliage might be pretty, but millions of fallen leaves could be raked - by adults, of course - into enormous piles for jumping and throwing.
We gave up trying to grow anything under Your Tree. Nothing could compete with its deep roots; nothing but children could grow in its shadow. Your Tree became the four-season backdrop to suburban childhood: the annual neighborhood cookout on the last day of school, snowball fights in winter, and sprinkler runs in summer. Your Tree was home base for hide and seek and home plate for pickup baseball games, the most memorable of which took place in 10 inches of snow.
As this century ends, there are few among us who can recall its birth, but Your Tree was a silent witness at the dawn of the 20th century. It is hard to imagine the skinny sapling it must have been then, undistinguished among the pines and other hardwoods in the forest.
It sits now at the edge of a quarter-acre lot, its branches extending across a road that did not exist before the Great Depression. At the end of the 19th century, Your Tree grew in a rural village that was home to no more than 6,000 people, many of them farmers. Three new railway stations built at the end of the 20th century were about to turn that town into the prosperous Boston suburb of 28,000 that it became.
We always knew it was not really Your Tree, that such a specimen could not be owned. It belonged as much to the families of squirrels that lived in its branches and the cardinals who nested in the Whelan family's front hedge and used it as a regular perch. It belonged to the fledgling house finches who hatched every year in the hanging flowerpots on our front porch.
We were just the custodians of Your Tree, spreading mulch over its roots, watering it through droughts, binding its two main branches with cable in hopes that some boy or girl 50 years in the future might be able to experience what you all enjoyed 50 years in the past - a summer afternoon in the arms of an old, familiar friend. Your Tree.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist
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