What the Sphinx Saw

The marble sphinx had watched over my garden for forty-seven years, its stone face unmoved as baseballs thudded against the oak tree, as grandchildren learned to swing, as the seasons painted the lawn green and gold again and again. My wife Eleanor bought it at an estate sale, said its enigmatic smile reminded her of life's great joke: we think we have forever, then suddenly we're the ones wondering where the time went.

Last Sunday, I sat on my porch watching twelve-year-old Mia and ten-year-old Leo hit a small blue ball back and forth across a net I'd barely noticed being set up. Padel, they called it. Some newfangled game with walls and racquets, nothing like the baseball my brothers and I played in this same yard when Eisenhower was president. Yet there they were, laughing, calling out scores, moving with that same joyous urgency I remembered from dusty summer evenings when a glove felt like magic on your hand.

'Grandpa!' Mia waved. 'Want to try?'

I laughed, shaking my head. 'Your old grandfather's knees quit cooperating about the same time baseball started asking too many questions.'

The sphinx seemed to smile deeper. It had seen my clumsy grounders in 1958, my son's home runs in the eighties, and now this strange new game with its plastic balls and enclosed courts. But children laughing remained children laughing. The games changed, but the game—the joy of play, the sweetness of being young and strong and believing summer would last forever—that stayed the same.

Eleanor always said the sphinx knew the answer to its own riddle. Watching Mia and Leo, I finally understood: the answer wasn't in what we played, but in that we played at all. Some things, like love and laughter, don't age. They just find new games to play.