Having a Baby at Mid-Life Is a Wonder to Behold--Just Don’t Look Too Far Ahead

I worry. When my youngest son is 16, I’ll be 61, one of those infamous “older� parents--grayed and toothless, unable to run the 40 in credible time, unwilling to share with him the thrill of an 80-m.p.h. upside-down roller-coaster ride, uneasy with the 21st Century.

My son’s friends will think that I’m his grandfather and will ask which ear they should yell into. If I want to go for a walk with him for one of those man-to-man talks, he’ll have to give me a head start. If I squat to catch his fastball, I won’t be able to get back up. I’ll be mildly jealous of his muscular body and deeply envious of his female admirers.

I worry. When my son is 16, television will be much closer to the definition of ubiquitous. It will be a three-dimensional nightmare, a holographic horror with wraparound sound, a phantasmagoric kaleidoscope of steamy kisses and Technicolor car crashes in the living room. There will be three newspapers in the country that will make USA Today look like “War and Peace.� Most of the book market will be on cassette, and reading will be what the quaint old man still does.

I worry. My son will need a master’s degree just to get the opportunity to say, “Welcome to Jack in the Box, may I take your order?� My wife and I will be the only married couple in this end of the state. Kitchen appliances will talk, but people won’t--they won’t have to: They’ll be surrounded by entertainment machines at home and communication will die, stabbed by digital music and interactive programming. Public broadcasting will come to mean TV sets on street corners and on everyone’s wristwatch. When my son is 16, America will be older but not wiser.

I worry. When my son is halfway through his teens, women in dresses will be just a historical memory, one-night stands will be long-term relationships, and debasing oneself for money will be de rigueur. He will be at the open end of the cornucopia, but will be taking from those at the closed end. Computers will make life easier in a harder world, and he’ll be forced to adjust to a richer material existence with fewer reasons to believe that he has earned it. I’m concerned that I won’t have enough life left to give him guidance and help him form the ethical, emotional and moral bases that he’ll need to survive in the world that is to come.

Sure, I worry. But there are times, when I’m walking with him in the cool of the afternoon and he stops to exclaim, in his loud 18-month-old voice, over the petal of a flower or the sight of a big truck rumbling past, that I remember: He is not that far removed from the womb, and this is not the 21st Century. He is not yet 16, and I still have time.