Some basic skills do not fade away

These breasts have not suckled an infant in decades, but they still know how to comfort a frightened child. These hands are no longer a young mother's, but they still know the way to hold a baby. These arms still wrap a child in a protective cloak that no earthly fear can penetrate. These shoulders still can cushion the head of a sleeping child.

Some knowledge never fades. Knowing how to comfort a crying child is one. Some are born with the knowledge. They are nurturers from an early age. Some learn the skills later, out of necessity. The soft voice, the gentle touch, the rhythmic motion stay with you deep in the subconscious. Life's most frightful sounds, of an infant in distress, can be comforted away with the right voice, the right touch, the right motion. It comes back to you, like throwing a ball or riding a bike, and there is no finer silence than the quiet breaths of a baby returning to blessed sleep. Grandchildren are a time machine that takes you back to a time and a feeling almost forgotten in the distant past. You find the skills you had put away and stretch your patience beyond its bounds.

It is good that child-bearing years come early, when energy and vigor are more plentiful. Nothing can prepare young parents for the ordeal of sleepless nights, the terror of nocturnal crying and the irrationality of an inconsolable infant. But at a young age, they are better able to physically adapt. A generation later, muscle memory will return to them those skills honed long ago, but their bodies will not recover as they had the first time around. Grandparents still can comfort and quiet a crying child and find in these immutable skills renewed awe at the miracles of life.