New Friends

Noah is a hit.  

He has many, many new friends: caregivers and mentors among the parents, students, staff members, and older kids, and buddies among the younger crowd.  He has been enfolded in many loving arms.  Today the chief hotelier, an older Englishman named John, presented Noah with a Semester at Sea T-shirt.  Yesterday Noah watched The Lego Movie sitting in the lap of May, a new best buddy who’s nine.  Many students have approached spontaneously and asked to babysit—today he’ll hang with a new friend named Jessie.  The bussers at meals and our cabin steward, Rene, all rush over to say hi when they see him.  Residential Directors proudly exclaim that they got “my Noah time today.”  No blessing of this adventure has been greater than seeing the love blossom between Noah and his 800 or 900 co-voyagers.

Watching The Lego Movie

None of this is surprising to Susan and me, of course.  Noah has always been charismatic, and a lot of that must have to do with his beauty.  Even as a newborn, he was well formed (despite the usual bullet head) and had the distinctive cupid’s-bow mouth that he still sports.  His wide dark eyes and beaming smile—straight white teeth flashing amid his cocoa face—endear him to everybody.  When we walk in malls or down the street, people will whip around in double takes.   I always say that one of the privileges of being an adoptive daddy is that, anytime anybody says “Noah is so cute!,” I get to just reply, “isn’t he though?”

Noah and a favorite new friend, Suki

I wonder if any readers are put off by my talking about Noah’s beauty so blatantly.  Beauty in humans is such a fraught thing.  We seldom get to appreciate it as an uncomplicated blessing.  We intone solemnly that everyone is beautiful and we reject lookism; but we’re so self-conscious about our own appearances and so cautious, justifiably so, no doubt, about sharing our own preferences or delight in others’ faces and forms.  I am a painter who focuses much time and energy on people: portraits and figures.  On my own or in life drawing classes, I have painted or drawn the gamut of the human animal, from old guys who look like Gandalf to pudgy middle-aged women to gorgeous girls and children.  I have painted Noah and Susan several times each.  I understand, at a deep level, what people mean when they say that everyone is beautiful.  I can tell you, objectively, that it’s true: every human being has, as a birthright, the same claim on hue, light, shadow, form, all the rich vocabulary that makes up the poetry of visual delight.  And everyone knows the experience of seeing someone as beautiful who, at first glance, seemed nondescript, or contrarily, of seeing ugliness in someone who initially turned one’s head.  Beauty is very much not the simple, one-note thing that media enterprises make it out to be.

But it would be foolish too to insist that there is no such thing as a special blessing of beauty—akin to the special blessing, I suppose, of a good singing voice.  Whatever it is, Noah has it.  “It” puts his parents into endless tricky situations, wanting him not to get big-headed, wanting him to feel and know this gift for the gift that it is—an entrusted gift, “his” only in the sense that he possesses it, not in the sense that he made it out of effort and will.  This blessing is no unmitigated, simple gift.  I watch the consequences of it unfold on board the Explorer, especially around the pool: the lovely young women and handsome young men, bearing the marks of a great privilege: the slender grace, the clear skin, the perfect smile, big eyes, tousled hair, and also the whiteness and the wardrobe.  Beauty is a kind of capital, both as a generator and as a reflector.  I used to think that the most important game going on around the pool was a sexual game: the females of the species displaying their reproductive assets, etc.  Now I think the most important game is a class game, which of course enfolds race.  The most beautiful girls and the most beautiful boys find one another and hang out, bearing themselves with the insouciance and possessing-the-world mien of princesses and princes.  When they find one another—their own people—I wonder what they are thinking and feeling.  Is it, “whew!  Here’s someone on my level with whom I may rise above this rabble.”  Or is it, “thank God: here’s another person who understands the labor of upholding this burden of beauty and who shares with me the terrible knowledge that, someday, it will be gone.”  I’ve long thought that, in the same way that the luckiest person in high school was not an athletic star or cheerleader but rather a band geek, the luckiest face and figure in the world is probably, oh, a six or a seven.  With little to uphold and little to fear, such a one can relax and enjoy life.  

Noah needing a little help

As the nerdy, skinny someone who has always only watched the beauty game from the sidelines, I think I can see the gift of beauty for the mixed blessing and challenge that it is, and I feel both admiration and compassion for Noah as he navigates the waters into which his beauty brings him and will bring him (who knows where genetics will take him as he grows?).  For now, it’s enough to feel grateful as he so easily endears himself to everyone and so easily makes friends.  No doubt his warm, people-loving, extrovert personality has a great deal to do with his popularity, a popularity we’ve come to accept as a matter of course and to take delight in with him.  It’s still a joy that, wherever he goes, he’s followed by an endless repeated chorus: “He is SO adorable!”