I heard my first granddaughter’s voice the day before she was born.
That’s not really true, but when the little girl I called The Amazing Baby entered the world in Beijing on Sept. 19, 2008, it was still Sept. 18 in Los Angeles. She had been in the world for about five minutes when I heard her crying out on the other end of a phone call.
Her name was Madison Nicole Kastner until she chose to change it in her early teens, and yesterday she graduated from high school.
She is Arti — short for Artemis — now, and when she starts college in the Netherlands this fall, she will be living in her eighth different country on four different continents before her 18th birthday. She will have no memory of several of them, but in an era of digital photography there will be hundreds if not thousands of pictures to show her where she has been.
She has lived in China, Indonesia, Jamaica, Guatemala, Tunisia, Germany and the United States, although her only time stateside other than visits and vacations has been the years her mother spent in Virginia learning new languages for future postings.
She was just 10 days old when I actually met her, and she fell asleep on my chest as I sang tuneless lullabies to her.
One true regret of my later years is how little opportunity I have had to get to know Arti and my other grandchildren. Part of that is distance, but a big part of it is my wife’s health and how much it has limited our ability to travel. The last time we saw them was Christmas 2023 when we took them on a week-long Caribbean cruise.
She and her younger siblings have been all sorts of places I’ve never seen and never will, including a short vacation in the Sahara Desert. When Arti was still Maddie, she did something else no one else in my family ever has done. She met and shook hands with a sitting president of the United States when Barack Obama visited the U.S. Embassy in Kingson, Jamaica.
She’s the beauty in the red and white blouse.
She has a brother three years younger and a sister six years younger, and she acquired three more brothers when her mother landed a second husband. That makes her the second oldest of six children in her family.
With both parents in the Foreign Service, if things go according to plan all six kids will graduate from high school outside the United States. Arti and the other two Kastner kids have the opportunity through their mother’s dual citizenship to attend college in the European Union, and she will definitely take advantage of that.
I know so little about her interests, although our daughter has been doing an amazing thing for more than a decade now. Every Sunday she sends out a newsletter going into great detail about what the family did in the previous week. We also get dozens of digital photos that update us on the ones we love as they grow to maturity.
Just tonight we got the photos from graduation, and it was wonderful to see Arti crossing the stage in Frankfurt as a high school graduate.
From Amazing Baby to Incredible Young Woman in less than 18 years.
We love you, Artemis Nicole Kastner.