I am going to San Francisco to see my 6-month-old twin grandsons. I’m not sure whether we’ll walk in the fog and rain, stay inside with their fluey sniffles and coughs, or whether we’ll sleep much.

But I do know this: We will rock. When times are tough, when kids need hugs, when adults are tired, I know to rock because rocking can be healing.

When I was a child, people sat around and rocked. I rocked with Memere Albert, in her overstuffed red leather rocker. We sat in the corner of her den at the cottage and looked out picture windows at open ocean.

Always, this small gesture felt good. Sometimes we sang in the French she taught me there. Usually, we repeated this verse in English:

“Oh, the pretty baaaaa-beeee,

“Oh, the pretty baaaaa-beeee.”

Her toes pushed against the floor to make the rockers sway in time with the syllables. “OH, the PRETty BAAAAA-beee.”

While I cuddled, lots happened at Memere’s, as I am the oldest of 21 first cousins. Diane is next, one year younger. Having made her first Holy Communion in the morning, Diane arrived at Memere’s late one Sunday. Diane wore lace ankle socks, black patent leather Mary Janes, and the delicate white dress I had worn the year before.

Grass-stained from a post-Communion stumble, sporting four or five Band-Aids on her legs, Diane had red eyes after crying from the fall. I felt for her. I did what I knew. I rocked. Do people do this anymore?

Once Pepere Albert returned from the hospital. He had undergone surgery, which I did not understand; something to do with his prostate. He didn’t look like my Pepere, way thinner than his wiry self, cheeks ghost-like.

I thought my fun and funny grandfather was dying, the one who — I’m told — used to walk home from work at lunch to see me in my infant crib, to rock me when I cried. Where was my usual belly-poking, Spanish peanut-eating Pepere? I rocked.

Rocking was not so much a way of passing time in my family. It was a way to be held, a way to learn that ups and downs eventually smooth out, that life will be full of pain and joy and that we can feel supported through it all. Through sickness and emotional storms, we grew into a trust in something larger, like big arms soothing our souls.

We rocked for a touchstone. Memere Lebel had a bentwood rocker, her knitting bag on the floor to its right. Memere had crocheted the seat of this chair, green leaves around pastel flowers. Her rocker was small enough for just me and big enough for my petite grandmother and me together. My childhood attempts at knitting started there.

To the right of the rocker was a gray stone fireplace. In that rocker, I learned left from right. For years, I’d contort my body into the configuration of that chair, that fireplace, that knitting bag, to know which was my right hand.

When confused, I begged my grandfather, “Pepere, which is right? Which is left?” He’d say, “Let’s see, how can you find out? Where’s that rocker?”

In rockers we learned what it is to be small and human and yet embraced by what is greater, by an intelligence that is smarter. So next week in California, I will swing baby troubles back and forth. I will rock my grandsons, cradling them and the moment, making room for life to be as it is, flu and all.

“Put your troubles in the lap of the Buddha,” those who understand quieting say, or maybe “release the small to the infinite.”

What if we cultivated the arms of compassion as a go-to habit? Perhaps rocking is bigger than me, bigger than the twins, and bigger than me and them together. Rocking is Mary holding Jesus.

What if, in the face of wanting to check our email first thing in the morning, in the face of the beckoning newspaper waiting at the breakfast table to report huge hatred in the world, in the face of some of us being refused marriage rights and artists’ work not being recognized or even ripped down, what if we started our day gently?

Perhaps if we sat a bit, we might understand the truth that, through unwanted spring blizzards, through viruses that “go around” and then hang on, through taxes that must be paid, through babies being born and grandfathers dying, we are all being held.

Susan Lebel Young, author of “Lessons from a Golfer: A Daughter’s Story of Opening the Heart,” teaches mindfulness and can be reached at:

sly313@aol.com

 

Copy the Story Link