From the mouths of babes...

Daniel's away. He's in Limoges.

I was feeding the kids tonight and the kids were asking a bunch of questions. They talked about Gaza at school and I was trying to "fill in the gaps" a little. It was kind of tough to explain things.

I told them I stayed with a Palestinian family for a few days on my first trip to Israel. Talia asked how old I was. I said 21. "That's when Mémé married Grandpa!" she said. Oh no, honey, she was much older (49). "No! You Mommy. You were 21 when they got married..."

I was suprised that she knows that. How old I was when they got married. Yes, that's right. I left a couple of months after the wedding.

Ronnie then added "I love Grandpa. I'm glad he's my grandpa and everything...but I wish your dad were still around. I would have liked to have met him".

I went to say something, and I couldn't. I just burst into tears.

It's been almost 35 years and it's still hard. The truth is, when my mother told me the news that sunny day so long ago, the first thought that came to my 10 year old brain (since my own grandfather had recently passed away) was "he'll never know his grandkids". That was a quarter of a century before those grandchildren would evan be born.

Now I'm older than Daddy ever was, my son is almost as old as I was then and now he tells me the same thing I thought of back then, that my son who has a version of his never-met grandfather's name, wished he had known him too.