Pondering the eternal with my grandson

Leave it to an adorable, tousle-haired minion to punch a hole in his grandfather’s pretentiousness.

I don’t know all things, and I shouldn’t try to convince my 3-year-old grandson, Judah, that I do. My wife, Hedy, and I spend considerable time fielding his “why” questions.

Honestly, many of his queries are far above my pay grade to answer.

The other day, Judah posed a question that caught me flatfooted. I simply wasn’t expecting it. In this instance, I had to swallow hard and croak a reply. What a sweet and poignant moment it was … for me.

For him? He was simply expressing for a brief instant a thought that — like cloud-to-cloud lightning — was streaking through his brilliant little mind. After a moment, that thought was superseded by another bolt of lightning. Then another.

“Out of the mouth of babes …,” Jesus observed in red-highlighted text in Matthew’s Gospel.

How true. And this loquacious babe is my grandson.

Remember Art Linkletter, the genial host of several popular 1950s and ‘60s-era radio and television programs? Linkletter mined gold from the mouths of youngsters. No, he wasn’t a quack orthodontist.

One of his shows was titled, “Kids Say the Darndest Things!” It was a runaway hit — and a royal crackup — because, frankly, kids do say some darned funny and provocative things.

My grandson presented me with one of those “eternal” questions recently that might surface in a personal conversation but not normally in discussion with a 3-year-old. I don’t remember exhibiting such depth in a graduate school seminar.

Judah: Opa, is dead real?

Me: Yes, buddy, dead is real.

Judah: I don’t want to be dead. I like myself.

Whoa!

Where’d that come from? I was gobsmacked!

When I was about 5, I remember having a discordant thought that left me mystified. That’s the only way to describe it. It was a months-long rumination about my existential self. I realized at that time, though just 5, that in the scheme of things one life is a vapor.

But, try as I might, I couldn’t comprehend “what condition my condition was in” six years earlier. I had no answers.

The thought had me bound in a Gordian knot that strangled my sangfroid. I intuited that somehow I’d always been, yet, clearly, there was time — a considerable time — when I was not. So, where was I?

I didn’t have an opa to ask.

Though I still ponder answers to this 5-year-old’s conundrum, I’ve enjoyed 71 revolutions on Planet Earth and have come to an understanding with TBJ (Time Before Jim). I won’t overly concern myself with the whys and wherefores of time immemorial if the Eternal One will get me through the next five minutes.

Humans, generally, are disquieted by their evanescence.

“Mortals, born of woman, are of few days and full of trouble,” muses Job of Old Testament times. If you haven’t read Job I suggest you do. I bet, like me, you’ll relate to what he has to say.

Job continues: “They spring up like flowers and wither away; like fleeting shadows, they do not endure.”

Thirty centuries later, the “Bard of Avon,” through his flawed character, Macbeth, picks up Job’s theme: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Job and Shakespeare trod similar paths.

“Do I count for anything?” That’s what 3-year-old Judah was asking me the other day. “Am I going to die?” “Is there anything I can do about that?”

Eternal questions, all.

My answers to him at some future date will be: yes, yes and yes.

Yes, the God who created you has a purpose for you; yes, we all go through pain and, ultimately, death; and, yes, bow your knee to the one who died for your sins and allow him to turn your pain into unbridled joy.

I’m glad Judah asks questions. We all need to.

JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.