Last week for instance, my nine-year-old stepgrandson and his parents flew in for a visit. The kid is energetic and bright, but this is my eighth rodeo and I should be able to ride out.
While his parents still are unloading the rental car, the kid produces a deflated beachball, blows it up and says, “Grandpa, let’s play a game.” I’m not sure what the rules the game are but, whatever they are, he has to be tired after a long flight, so it shouldn’t be much of a strain for me. As its turns out, the game he teaches me involves batting the ball around in the living room until we’ve hit it 10 consecutive times or until the first knick-knack gets broken, whichever comes first.
While I’m busy sweeping up the remains of the Hummel angel he drafts his nana to accompany him to a pond in our neighborhood which, he informs us, probably contains crawdads they can dig up.
“Why don’t you dig up crawmoms, too?” I suggest. The eyeball roll says all I need to know about his opinion of grandpa humor.
An hour later they return. He has a bucket containing brownish water and little black specks, which he insists are tadpole eggs. Nana has pond scum under her fingernails.
“If they’d had a girl, I’d be at Sephora right now,” she declares.
While we wait for the tadpole eggs to hatch, he chats up our virtual assistant app. From which we learn there are songs titled, “It’s Raining Tacos,” “Monkey Baby Bon Bon” and “It’s Corn,” which repeats the phrase “a lump with knobs” with mind-melting frequency. More importantly, we learn that Alexa can be instructed to make fart noises. Good to know the next time Nana has her garden club meeting at our house.
In a Quixotic attempt to turn the conversation toward something a little less scatological, I ask him if he’s looking forward to going to back to school and being his with friends again. That inspires him to perform a song and dance he and his Montessori schoolmates created last semester. It’s called “The Diarrhea Song” and, as my gift to you, I won’t relate any of the lyrics.
The next four days are packed with all sorts of lessons like those. The most significant of which is that I may be getting too old to be a grandfather.
Contact this columnist at dlstew_2000@yahoo.com.
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