What will you witness in your lifetime, little girl? What will you celebrate, what will you mourn?

I entertained these thoughts when I held my newest granddaughter for the first time in a hospital delivery room. Freshly born, wet, brown wisps still plastered to her delicate little skull, Kyla Renee blinked at the unforgiving light of this world, mewled her response and settled into my arms.

She didn't cry, and I, ever the optimist, have taken that as a good sign.

Though exhausted by the long hours of labor, my daughter and her husband did not sleep that first night. They feared the baby would choke on her own mucus, a nurse's warning taken too much to heart.

And so begins that burrowing worry that forever haunts.

A mother five times over and a grandmother thrice, I can claim a modicum of perspective on parental anxiety. It usually is well founded. After all, when you survive a few decades of loss and love, grief and joy, you earn one true sliver of knowledge: no one lives life unscathed.

It is only natural then for the celebration of new life to carry the undercurrent of concern. The older one gets, I dare say, the stronger and swifter the undertow. We've seen, we've hurt.

Yet I can only think of the wonders my littlest darling will see, and seven hours in the waiting room offered a pretty good preview. The world, or at least the immediate family and circle of friends, was alerted to her impending arrival by dawn. From the hospital bed, in between contractions, the mother-to-be texted her four brothers, her cousins and friends.

I got an old-fashioned phone call at 4:23 a.m. The only people I had the pleasure of telling were those who belong to the pre-digital age: my father, my husband and my in-laws.

The ongoing saga of Kyla's birth was reported as thoroughly as a presidential campaign on CNN.

Photographs were sent via cell phone to offices around town for those who couldn't make the trek to the hospital. Updates -- seven centimeters dilated at noon! -- were posted on Facebook. Video of the grandparents was taken by a father who narrated the first episode of his newly burgeoning family tree.

This is the brave, new world my granddaughter has been born into, one with instantaneous communications and global reach, where everything can be recorded for posterity and experiences are shared with the ease of a click.

Will this make her shy or gregarious? Will she yearn for the lights or seek refuge in privacy controls? Will the immediacy and speed of relentless information rob her of that delicious sense of mulling over experiences or of the inevitably slow process of growing wise? Who knows? But again I wonder, what else will you see, little girl?

Maybe in her lifetime, she will know flying cars and virtual vacations, business travel in space, the end of global warming, the cure for cancer and the solution to the problem of poverty.

I can only imagine. There is, though, one verity I will make sure she learns. When our disparate journeys are distilled to the essential, we discover, as she will, that the greatest source of pleasure -- and concern -- is family. In digital or analog, in cyberspace or in the physical world, ultimately all paths lead to this bedrock of generations.

Welcome, little girl.

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