I went to New York City yesterday to trade for a new camera and to see my daughter for perhaps the last time before she has her first child. I was shocked to see her belly, happy and sad. I knew I was saying goodbye to one of the most remarkable chapters in my life, being her father, being so central to her life. It gave meaning and comfort to mine.

I messaged her husband Jay and said how grateful I am that he is such a good husband to her, she loves and trusts him so much.

My own family was shattered with conflict and illness,  all of the mind. There was no normalcy there, little love and no safety My family was a maelstrom, it damaged everyone it touched, and I fled from it early on and stayed away my whole life, a terrible but necessary choice.

They would have destroyed me, they nearly did.

My mother was a remarkable human being, creative, intelligent, fiercely committed to living a meaningful life, but thwarted at every turn, she said, by the way women were forced to live, and by selfish and uncaring men, my father most of all.

She loved me very much, and told me every day of my life that I was special, I had great stories to tell.

She was perpetually at war with herself and the people around her, she could never find a safe or comfortable place to be. She never accepted her life, not in any way. She never stopped fighting, and never could win.

In the end, I kept away from her, and also kept my daughter away from her. I thought she was dangerous. I know she was.

I am sorry I did not get to say goodbye to her, she was found dead in a group home in Providence, she was 88 years old, I had not seen her or spoken with her for several years I didn’t know where she was. She had a sudden heart attack.

She died alone, before I could say a last goodbye or tell her that I did love her, for all of the trouble we had.

I asked Emma if I could take a photo of her belly on the street in New York, and she said yes, but just for me, I couldn’t share it, I couldn’t put in the blog. She would rather I never mention her on the blog, I think.

Emma and I are different in this way, I want to be open with my life, I have few secrets, she does not wish to be especially open about her life, and I try to honor her feelings, although I couldn’t always. I couldn’t quite believe it, looking at her daughter, my granddaughter, who was kicking, she said, as we spoke. This was my little girl, whose diapers I changed?

Emma seemed puzzled by my need to mark ritual, to take note of the passing of things. It is not something she does, and I had the feeling she thought I was being emotional in a harmless kind of way.  She tolerates me, even when I confound her. In a sense, I puzzle her, in another she knows me all too well.

In my family, the first and the second,  I was always making trouble by marking the passage of things, or complaining about the rituals of others, nobody wanted to hear it.

When I had lunch with Emma, I asked her what kind of grandfather she wanted me to be, what did she need and expect from me, and she was startled by the question. She said she wanted me to be closer to her daughter than she was with her grandparents, She said she remembered my mother very fondly, there was something about her that she connected with.

She remembered that when we visited my mother – Emma and the other grandkids all called her “Fa” for reasons that are lost now, they always had tea together.

My mother would invite Emma to tea with a great flourish – I recall it well also – and set up a small table and chairs, and she would bring out her very best antique tea service, linen napkins and silver, all a treasure, she said, she had gotten for pennies from a weak-minded antique dealer.

There were also cookies and pieces of freshly-baked pie. A British kind of tea.

I wondered at the sight of the two of them, sitting in their tiny chairs on the floor, sipping their tea (and nibbling on their cookies). My mother was in perpetual conflict and disappointment, raging about her lost dreams and railing about my father’s lack of support for her intensely creative desires. She could never quite manage to defy him, or say not to his often selfish decisions. It is true that he never supported or encouraged her to follow her dreams, he always seemed to find a way to sabotage her.

But none of this mattered at tea.

There the world seemed to recede, and she seemed so peaceful and happy. Here she was, sitting on the floor with my daughter, chatting and laughing like two life-long best friends.  I remember the sound of my mother’s best china clinking against the teapot and the plate beneath. There were red, or at least red dragons circled the cups and plates. They were normally kept in an antique dresser, I often looked at them.

My mother never permitted her own children to go near her china or even touch it.  And there was no holiday or dinner important enough for it to be used. It was only brought out for Emma.

She trusted Emma completely, the two loved one another, I could see it. Emma was right in the way she recalled it.  It all happened at tea.

Ten minutes later, life returned, and my mother and father would be screaming at one another, rattling the china with their loud voices, making me uncomfortable and Emma nervous.  My mother would be berating me for not coming to see her or call her often enough, for never inviting her to my home. What had she done to deserve this?

The truth is, I rarely think much about those days, I will never come to terms with my mother and our love for one another. But I loved the connection she and Emma had evoked, and which surfaced at lunch in New York City many years later, here we were, so far from those teas,  sitting on our tiny chairs at our tiny restaurant in this all super-hip Thai place Emma found on Yelp, nibbling at our tiny portions. The restaurant the first gentrifying sign in a seedy block.  New York is fascinating to me, I love being there, I no longer belong anywhere there.

Everyone around me could have been on the cover of GQ or Vogue.

Except me, of course.

In the story of Fa and her tea party, I saw what it was that Emma hoped for from me as a grandfather.

That simple trust, pure love and acceptance that comes from loving a small child so purely and openly. You leave the world behind, the one you struggle with, the one the child has yet to experience.

My mother, who had so much trouble learning how to live, had connected with Emma from the heart, she put aside her anger and hurts and created a special world for the two of them to share.

Every time we visited, which was not often, my mother would always at some point say “Emma, dearest, would you like a cup of tea?,” and Emma, even then not demonstrative, would nod enthusiastically. The two would rush off into the kitchen to turn on the tea pot and take out the china and place it so carefully on their little table in the corner of the living room. They told jokes and stories, laughed and gossiped, were ridiculous together.

It was their own space, no one else ever was invited in there.

And here, decades later in a gentrifying neighborhood off of once-seedy Times Square, was Emma, describing the scene to me as if it was yesterday. The world is filled with crisis and mystery.

That was what she wanted from me, and so for the first time I think I grasped how I might be a grandfather, how I could create that special space for me and my granddaughter, maybe at the farm with a dog or donkey or barn cat around. Maybe by a stream with fish, maybe in the deep woods looking for chipmunks.

I could offer her a memory like that, a feeling, a connection, a shared  experience that she might remember decades later, long after I was gone.

I thought about this on the train, and it wasn’t until I looked at my reflection in the window that I realized I was crying, tears were streaming down my cheeks and I cried almost all the way to Poughkeepsie, an hour up the line, hypnotized by the clacking of the train over the tracks.

I never had a moment like that with Fa, and I’m not sure I had one with Emma either, unless we count taking her to her first baseball game and showing her how to score. For parents and kids, it is not so simple.

But I can do that, I think, I am the king of moments to remember,  it will not come from the mind, where things usually come together for me, but from the heart, which is opening up all of the time.

I am beginning to understand what it might mean to be a grandfather. And what it means to be a son.