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| ESSAY: JESSICA | |
 May 2, 2001 
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ROGER ROSENBLATT: The news is about Jessica, our first grandchild-- have a cigar; no, don't-- who was born on March 1, weighing in at just under seven pounds, and 19 inches big. I hold her on the couch as she sleeps swaddled, part baby, part blanket, in the crook of my arm. Her harpist's fingers twitch in independent dreams. The threads of blue veins above her barely visible eyebrows run like rivers on a map. It comes back to you, holding babies, the surprisingly substantial weight. The news is also about Jessica literally, in that, as she sleeps, the news is on TV. As I hold Jessica, 15-year-old Charles Andrew Williams sits in the back of a police car that is about to take him to a county juvenile facility for killing two fellow students in Santee, California. His skin looks smoother than a baby's. I casually realize that part of my grandfatherly duties will be to hold Jessica safe from the news, but the thought is too easy. She will also need to be alert to the news. When she is old enough, I will inform her that I am in the news business, or on the soft edges of it, and she may ask what the news business is. Then, I'll be forced to confess that I have never understood most of the news: Not the child killings, the tribal slaughters, the religious wars, the categorical hatreds, the fate of the poor, the diseased, the driven-from-their-homes; I have never understood the weather. Not that these deficiencies have ever stood in the way of my sonorous brayings about the nature of the universe. But I should also let her know that there are other kinds of news I do understand. The news of the heart's surprises, for example: The news that makes Mohammed Ali decide, after long decades, to apologize to Joe Frazer for brutally taunting him when they were contending for the heavyweight championship; the news of the white school teacher in North Carolina, who donated a kidney to her African-American student. I should tell Jessica about the news of the familiar, which is always strange -- and the news of the routine and continuous, which is always shocking -- the news of tides and tulips -- the news of the full moon. I should tell her about the news of the just and the good. I should relate the story of Billings, Montana, which in the Christmas season, in the mid- 1990s, was invaded by members of the Ku Klux Klan. They knocked over headstones in a Jewish cemetery, tormented an old black minister in his church, painted swastikas on the homes of American Indians. Then they tossed a cinderblock through a Jewish child's window, which was signified by a menorah. So the local paper printed up a full-page picture of a menorah, which the predominantly Christian people of Billings placed in their windows, and soon the Klan was driven out. I should tell Jessica that there is the news of the honest broker, of the fair-minded, of the modest, the quiet, the traditional, the harmless, the unglamorous, the unchatty, the constant and the tender. All of these made news while the O.J. trial came and went; while Monica came and went. The news business, I should tell her finally, involves knowing and understanding all that goes on in the world: The gentle and the intelligent, as well as the stupid and the murderous. As I hold her, a girl in Santee, California, is attempting to lift the spirits of a broken-hearted friend. In Northeast America, we are attempting to dig out of a snow- packed winter and to catch flashes of sunlight. This, I should tell her, is the news of gratitude and hope, or the news about Jessica. I'm Roger Rosenblatt. |
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