ALCHEMY OF INNOCENCE

My mother used to say that after marriage, it was "all downhill." She and my father two wounded souls who found each other after different things scraped them similarly raw, had children anyway. She'd escaped her family by enlisting and found relief in cocktails. My father carried his own damage — from a Depression-era boyhood that taught him love could be rationed, to bomber flights over Japan.

When they married and had children because that's what people did in 1950, neither of them had a clue how to raise them.

My sister and I didn't melt their hearts. I knew this early and found myself drawn to other people's babies, to the young mothers in grocery stores who cooed and kissed their children's faces. I’d heard of love, saw it on TV and studied it like a subject, unable to decode its mystery.

After the complexity and turmoil of growing up without tenderness, I escaped and stayed away for decades, building a life that felt safer than the one I'd inherited. But when I finally returned—my father said proudly, “like the prodigal son”— it was not to gain his wisdom but to watch him slowly disappear and eventually die, leaving my mother alone with a mind that had lost it's grip.

Dementia is cruel, but it taught me something unexpected about communication. When the tangle of my mother’s thoughts couldn't find their way to her tongue, there was still music. Show tunes, mostly—songs that somehow survived the wreckage of everything else.

We'd sing "Getting to Know You" and "Some Enchanted Evening," and for those moments, she’d forget what was bothering her. No longer the bitter woman who raised me, she became childlike.

Hired to sing in nursing homes and assisted living facilities, for ten years, I crooned in rooms full of similar innocence, filters gone, pretenses stripped away. No one judged my singing voice or compared me to someone better. They only wanted me to emote and share my heart—the advice every voice teacher gives yet impossibly difficult to follow for someone like me.

But people with Alzheimer's wanted authenticity above all else. When I sang "Moon River" to a woman who'd forgotten her name, she cried—not because the song was perfect, but staring into her longing eyes made both of us feel real. Fumbling through "Danny Boy" for a smiling man who thought I was his son, made me sing without armor.

The irony wasn't lost on me. I'd spent my whole life feeling like a fraud, reserving part of myself to beat up, carrying a bag of bones, that weight of old wounds that people, like voice teachers always told me to release. Yet as I dealt with my mother through her final years, even as I brought comfort to strangers in memory care units, I felt like a charlatan with her. Who was I to offer solace when I couldn't stand either of us. But innocence, I've learned, doesn't care about war wounds, credentials or self-esteem. It only cares about willingness to show up.

Three years ago, I met my eight -year old step-granddaughter Penelope again after too many years apart. I was carrying the guilt of having left her mother when she was only fifteen, still anxious about decisions I'd made so long ago. But watching her at the piano, helping her small fingers find the keys the same way I'd once helped her mother's, something familiar happened. The same alchemy I'd experienced with the seniors—transformation that occurs when innocence meets someone ready to be moved happened.

Penelope brings out the best in me the way those dementia patients did, the way children and the elderly do when we let them. She doesn't see my history of mistakes or the complexity of how I came to be in her life. She sees Grand Jed, someone who teaches her about plants, tells stories and is present for her and myself in the moment. Like the seniors I sang for, she trusts and wonders, allowing me to mirror her delight in small things.

I can totally understand how people refuse to let themselves be moved by pets, by the aged and by children. How they armor themselves against the very experiences that could crack them open. Innocence demands something of us—it asks us to drop our sophisticated defenses and remember what it felt like before we learned to protect ourselves. Some of us with no memory of it must learn to love on the fly before it’s too late.

Now, as Penelope and her family prepare to move closer to my husband and me, I find myself ready for something I never thought possible: to let her continue bringing out my best self. Not the perfect grandfather I never had, but a real one at her high level.

My mother couldn't let anyone melt her heart because it had been broken too early and too often. My father loved as much as his wounds would allow. Though I could relate to both of them through my own damage, my inadequacies were a reminder of their shortcomings and vice versa. Yet nothing loosens knots or alters the ache of growing up hungry for tenderness, but tenderness. I only hope the miracle of finding it in memory care common rooms while my mother looked on helped her in some way, but I’ll never know. Before he died, my father saw my one-man show and told me, “I had balls.” I know all about the unwillingness to let innocence in while arming myself with rationality.

The irony runs deeper than I initially realized. My parents never took care of their aging parents—my father's mother died alone in an elevator hallway outside her apartment, and my mother disowned her family entirely. I grew up terrified of old people because I'd never been around them. Even when I lived closeted with Penelope's grandmother at nineteen, babysitting her children while hiding my truth, I felt like a fraud and a coward.

Leaving that family to come out felt like another abandonment, another wound I'd inflicted. Yet somehow, the very people I'd been taught to fear and avoid—the elderly losing their grip on the world—taught me what authenticity looked like. My stepdaughter now over fifty, despite my guilt over abandoning her, understood why, still treats me like a father and knows I'm dying to babysit. Not only are they moving close —

she likes to garden and sing, her husband’s a deep thinker and Penelope, the glue for all of it, wants to learn about medicinal plants.

This is what innocence does: it bypasses defenses and goes straight to the heart. It doesn't care about mistakes or complicated histories. It only cares that we're here, present and willing to share. And in sharing, we discover we’re not frauds we think we are. We’re just people learning to love, one song, one smile, one sprig of Moringa at a time.