29.07.26
Hey kid. This is an inauspicious start to all this, but I’m sitting at the Kaiser in Vallejo with your great-grandmother with little else to do. I guess I should have brought along a book. I don’t remember my own great-grandmother, Mary Lewis, but there is a black and white photo of me with her. I’m in what looks like a ridiculous baby dress. I don’t know what that was all about.
Mary came to America from the Azores island of Pico in the late 1800s, just to give you a sense of how weird the passage of time feels once you have some years behind you. I turned 60 this last Sunday and I realized that 60 years back from that was the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Growing up, that always seemed like ancient history, now, not so much.
At the time of the big quake, cars were pretty much a novelty and shared the roads with horse-drawn wagons and cable cars. There were phones, but the first transcontinental phone line to New York was eight years away. Planes were invented, but the first passenger routes were 20 years in the future. The changes that generation lived through must have been head-spinning.
When I was born, we were just beginning to get embroiled in the Vietnam War. The first Kennedy assassination was merely three years in the rearview and the next was two years off, as was Martin Luther King Jr.’s. Your grandmother and I were born in a crazy era, and it sort of has been one thing after another ever since.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that the world is always going to be a bit of a mess, so you shouldn’t take it personally. Be kind to yourself, other people, and dogs. Cats could give a shit what you do, but I wouldn’t go out of your way to cross them. I’ve personally found it advantageous to avoid megafauna larger than myself, but you do you.
We are all waiting on tenterhooks for you to be born. I saw your mom at the Holy Ghost Festa last weekend and she was huge! I guess the only advice I have for your upcoming experience comes straight from Bugs Bunny, as close to a mythological trickster god as our society has yet produced. “Watch out for that first step, Mac. It’s a Lulu!”
See you in the funny papers,
Tio-avô
Román Leão 
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