Ordinary Miracles

A letter of introduction for an unborn child

As some of you know, I am slated to become a grandfather in 2025. To mark the occasion, I have begun writing letters to my prospective granddaughter, which I hope will ultimately become part of a larger project that tries to capture what it’s like to be alive in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. I hope it will be of some value to you now and her later. —Jim

December 22, 2024

Dear Baby,

Miraculous.

Consider, for a moment, the string of contingencies that it took to bring you—unique, ineffable, you—into the world. The unforeseeable set of circumstances (not exactly random, but certainly not predictable, either) by which your parents met, bonded, procreated. The particular egg and sperm—one in a million, to use a common phrase, is significantly low-balling it—that fertilized, split, adhered, grew. On track to emerge into the light of the world, ten fingers and toes and all the rest. The template so sturdy and yet with countless variations and outcomes (nobody’s perfect). We dream, we plan, and we act, but so many of the most fundamental things beyond our power to know or control. Which may be why the dreaming, planning, and acting can seem so precious—a cherished source of humanity in an impersonal world.

Here's something else I consider miraculous: that we have overlapped. I suppose I’m something of a miracle too (though I don’t often feel that way), and a lot of things had to happen, or not happen, for you to catch me at the moment you did. You’re brand new; I’m on my way out. We don’t know each other—you haven’t actually been born yet, and so are a perfect cipher to me, and of course at this moment in the year of our Lord 2024, I am incomprehensible to you (and may well be long after that). But we have one tenuous but unmistakable tie: you are carrying around one-fourth of my DNA. It remains to be seen if or how that will matter. I reckon you’ll win some and lose some in the gene pool. I don’t particularly wish my temperament on you, but am here to offer sympathetic comfort if you inherit it. In any case, in the eyes of the world and your parents I have some small claim on you as a matter of genealogy and custom. For reasons that are not finally rational, that matters to me. Something has to; this is as good as anything I can imagine.

Actually, when it comes to you, imagination is all I’ve got right now. I have categorically no idea what you’ll be like. In some important sense, I’ll never fully know you—not in the way other members of your family, your friends, your partners will. But I’ll be attentive as any of them, and do my best within my finite powers to understand and engage you in ways I hope will be useful to the best of my limited ability. Right now, what that means is trying to capture the state of the world into which you have come to life for your future use. To give you, in a way that might otherwise be impossible, a version of who you are at the outset of your life. Inheritances are not destinies. But it can be difficult to map a future without a sense of your past.

It so happens that this was the particular stock in trade of your grandfather. Who, having built a life with it that supported the family that helped bring you about, will now use the tools of that trade to fashion a compact history that you can carry with you, ready for any variety of circumstances—and miracles—that will come your way. Not much, I know. But it’s a start.