SIMPLE LIFE

My daughter, Maggie, was born in 1989.

That year became known as the “Year of Revolutions,” a turning point in world affairs that witnessed the opening of the Berlin Wall, a Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, and the end of communism in Europe’s eastern bloc. It also saw the end of Apartheid in South Africa, the birth of the World Wide Web and the first commercial internet providers — social revolutions of a different kind. 

Mugs, as I called my beautiful baby girl from day one, was born in the aftermath of a huge snowstorm in Maine. We took her home to our cottage on Bailey Island on day two, after her paternal grandparents arrived from North Carolina. 

One of my fondest memories is of sliding on my rump down the deep, snowy hill behind our cottage,  my bundled-up baby clutched to my chest. When I looked at my daughter’s tiny face, I swear she was almost smiling. 

Upon returning home to Carolina, my dad, a veteran newspaperman with a poet’s heart, jotted me a note of gratitude with a bit of whimsical verse attached. He fancied himself, I think, a homegrown Ogden Nash. 

Sadly, I can only remember the opening lines of the ditty because I kept it in my office desk forever until it apparently migrated into attic boxes stuffed with half a century of manuscripts, letters and correspondence. Someday, I hope to unearth it. In the meantime, here’s the only bit that I can recall, advice from a happy grandpa: 

There’s nothing in this whole wide world / As precious as a baby girl / who someday soon will surely be / A child as happy as can be / Your job, my son, is take her hand . . . at which point my memory fails.

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When Maggie and husband Nate visited us in the autumn of ’24, she graciously offered to plow through my mountains of archives and work papers, giving me hope that she might find my dad’s wise, little verse. 

Instead, she found a pile of letters from my early career that included an unopened one from legendary New Yorker magazine editor William Shawn. He complimented me for an investigative piece on a forgotten African American community I’d written for the Sunday magazine of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where I was a staff writer. He’d read it while waiting for a plane home to New York from Major League Baseball’s spring training in Florida. He also wondered if I had interest in writing for his magazine.

I laughed at this discovery because my career ambition in those early days was to someday write my way to The New Yorker.

My daughter was incredulous. “Dad,” she playfully chided, “how could you have not opened this letter?”  

Sheepishly, I explained that I had a habit in those days (and even today) of setting aside important letters to read and properly answer later. “I probably just put it in my cluttered desk and forgot about it,” I theorized. “Crazy, I know.” 

But if a dream job at The New Yorker was never to be, I added, perhaps my mistake was a perfect, unanswered prayer. 

For, if I’d achieved my ambition to work for The New Yorker, I probably never would have burned out covering crime, politics and racial justice in the so-called New South and fled to a winding trout stream in Vermont, where I soon became the first senior writer of Yankee Magazine, married her mom, built a gorgeous house on a forested hill in Maine, and became the father of two beautiful babies. Moreover, I never would have also found my way home to North Carolina, where I wrote a dozen books and helped start several popular arts-and-culture magazines across my home state that are thriving today. 

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Last May, we were thrilled to learn that Maggie was pregnant with our first grandchild, a baby girl due on Christmas Eve.  

June Sinclair Prescott arrived early, born seven days before Christmas Eve, weighing in at a healthy 9.9 pounds. I immediately nicknamed her “June Bug,” because they are said to bring good luck and my spring garden is always full of them.

Maggie’s mom and my first wife, Alison, flew to Los Angeles first to be with mother and baby as they got better acquainted.

The plan called for “Nana and PopPop,” aka Wendy and Jim, to follow in early January. Unfortunately, a powerful ice storm struck the day before our flight was to depart. A flow of adorable photos and videos of “June Bug” had to suffice. In half of them, she appeared to be smiling and even belly laughing. Like her mama at the same age.

Two weeks later, we tried again. This time on the eve of departure, it snowed 13 inches and thousands of flights up and down the East Coast got cancelled. Including ours. 

The day after the big snowstorm — shades of Maggie’s own birthday in 1989 — the sun popped out and I stepped outside to fill the bird feeders and think about my spring garden. An old idea suddenly came to me.  

Pushing the snow off my favorite wooden chair, I sat down and jotted a letter in light verse to my new grandchild like the homegrown Ogden Nash who preceded me. I also asked my good friend, artist Harry Blair, to illustrate it.  

Dear June Bug,

Someday while you are still a tyke, 

I’ll take you on a wondrous hike

To see the world from on a hill

And all the places that will fill

Your life ahead with joyful things —

Like winter snows and golden springs.

For nature is the ideal guide

To leafy paths that cannot hide

The glory of a world that’s wide —

With loving souls so full of grace

Who’ll help you find your perfect place

To live the life your heart desires —

With faith — and strength — that never tires.

                   With my love forever, 

                    PopPop 

Our third effort to reach Los Angles proved a charm. 

We took the illustrated verse, lots of cute, new baby clothes and a lovely Swedish bear to finally meet our beautiful new grandchild. All we did for five days was rock, hike, hold, cuddle, feed and play with the June Bug and her mama.

Like her mother, baby June was born at a moment of revolutionary change and turmoil across the planet. But I have a feeling that our laughing June Bug will bring good luck and happiness to anyone she meets on her life’s journey, just as her mother has.