DEAR GOOD GG: You are fifteen days old today and I am writing because, while I myself am not all that much older, I don't expect to be around when you are of an age to absorb the kind of small wisdom which I have to convey to you.
    When I was born there was a war going on. They called it the war to end all wars, I learned in time, but it wasn't. When my own daughter was born the legions of the worst monster in the history of mankind were on the march in Europe and when my son came along the world was aflame in another war to put that man down. (His name, by the way, was Adolf Hitler.) No more than five years after that our country became involved in a "police action" in a far-off land called Korea which would last into 1953 and cost us more than fifty thousand lives. When my own granddaughter was born, our nation was taking its first baby steps into an adventure in Indochina, and in the eleven blood-drenched years which lay ahead that war would claim the lives of more than fifty-seven thousand of our children (the phrase for that is always "the flower of our youth") and send another 155,000 home classified as soldiers who had suffered "wounds, not mortal." This is a deception flowing from all of our wars, for a great number of those "wounds, not mortal" were indeed mortal except that the wounded mortals passed for living persons because they were still breathing. They may not have been able to walk, or talk, or feed themselves, or tend to their own bodily needs, or bear children, but they were alive. Oh, many of them were able to do all the things I have mentioned here but for practical purposes they weren't alive at all, because their wounds had proved too much for them to bear.
   That war, in a place called Vietnam, all but tore our country asunder, ultimately forcing a Democratic President to in essence abdicate his office and make it available to a Republican who in time would plunge us into the worst Constitutional crisis in our history before resigning rather than face impeachment or possibly even a prison sentence.
    But, GG, this little letter is not about wars or mischief in high places.
    It is about love -- love and the mission which lays ahead of you, for you are a most fortunate child of a turbulent and dreadful century.
    You did not come yowling into this world the way I did, and my children and grandchild after me, and get held upside down and whacked on your backside and then imprisoned in a hospital nursery. You had the indescribable benefit of a natural childbirth -- the Lamaze method. The doctor did nothing more than help a bit with your debut. Then he cut the cord attaching you to your mother and handed you to your father to dip you into some lukewarm water in a stainless steel container to wash off all the muck which attends a birth. After that the doctor dropped some mercury into your blue eyes to make certain that they were all right and put a suction tube in your mouth to draw out the mucous formed there in the time while you were awaiting your parole date. And then --
    A nurse wrapped you in swaddling clothes and, with your mother you were borne to, took you from the birthing room to another room and left you to nurse at your mother's breasts, where there really wasn't any milk quite that fast, just something more like water. You stayed there two hours and were carried then to the nursery for several four-hour stretches and brought back to your mother. So except for a few very short periods you were always in the hands of the two people who wanted you and loved you most. That's what natural childbirth is all about.
    You don't even know about the hospital, GG.
    You were born on the evening of February 28th, a Friday, and you were in your own home before noon that Sunday. Your father carried you in so that your mother could spend a few minutes with the big Great Dane who also lives in that house to show him that she loved him no less. The six cats -- each of them almost as high-born as you -- did not need that kind of pampering. Anyway after a while your mother went up to your room and the Dane came along, hard on her heels, and the cats began to drop in and the family was all together.
    Now we're getting down to it, little girl.
    There is a biblical injunction, one of the Ten Commandments, which makes it incumbent upon you to "honor" your father and your mother. In my own time, I have known very few people to whom I thought I owed any "honor" -- including my parents. To me, there is something subservient, even degrading, about that word. I don't think it belongs or deserves any place in a free society such as ours. In my book, you "honor" kings, queens, Arab potentates and totalitarian rulers.
    Love is the word.
    You are loved and you owe love in turn, and that is by no means an easy burden. Moreover, beyond that love you have an equally awesome responsibility.
    You were born into a world in ineffable turmoil. Happily, our country is not in a shooting war at the moment, but are we really at peace?: a revolutionary regime in an oil-rich land called Iran has been holding fifty of our people hostage in our own Embassy there for almost five months because we gave asylum to a money-hungry, cruel and murderous Shah they should have taken care of themselves before he got away; our friends in the Soviet Union, the other great world power, have invaded a country called Afghanistan on Iran's border, raising a question as to whether they're trying to clamp their hands upon a part of the world upon which we must depend to keep our own home fires burning; in still another country, in South America, a band of terrorists is holding our Ambassador hostage. So much for that.
    Here at home we are all but choking in an ever-growing wave of violence because there are more criminals than our multi-billion dollar law enforcement system is equipped to deal with. Indeed, there are more criminals than there are prison cells to lodge them in if we happened to be able to arrest them all and then get judges to sentence them to prison terms. There is only one area, GG, in which the rest of us have a strength superior to the literal armies in the streets which have no regard for the law because it isn't working as it should and they know that. As victims, all but helpless more often than not, we do outnumber them.
    Now we come back to you.
    Grow up good.
    Point yourself to some area in which you may be able to help to make this a better society for the children you yourself may bear in time. Teaching, Social Work, Medicine, Law, Journalism, Politics -- although you will find that that can be a very dirty word because there are so many dirty people in it.
    And love some people. Don't honor anybody, or anything except your family name. Love some people and help some people who are not loved. If you find them in the dark, show them where the sun is so that they can share it with you. This, GG, is your mission in life.