Up and Down

I was washing dishes at the kitchen sink. Adella and Marshall were eating a roving breakfast. Each had started breakfast with a cup-size bowl of Rice Chex (No milk, please—Adella does not like soggy cereal) at the kitchen table, but soon Adella, bowl in hand, had migrated to the family room and Marshall was ambling around the kitchen with his bowl. Then suddenly my Spidey-sense kicked in. Marshall was quiet. Too quiet.

Now Marshall is an unusually contented toddler. As his grandmother, however, I recognize that his happy-to-be-alive worldview is nonetheless tempered with an ounce of stealth. I immediately looked up from my dishes to see him huddled over the decorative heat register in the floor near the kitchen table. I rushed over to find him intently pushing his Rice Chex, one by one, through the varying rectangles and squares of the Art Deco register.

Quickly I assessed the situation. Thankfully, for some unknown reason, the register was closed (as it shall stay until Marshall outgrows this stage) and the crumbs were accumulating on the plane created by the closed vents underneath the cover. So I let him continue, and I watched. He was not playing an analytical game seeking to match the square pieces of the cereal to the square grate openings as I would have expected. Rather he was engaged in a trial-and-error effort, pushing, shoving and crumbling the different cereal pillows through all of the holes, an effort requiring more toddler brawn than brain. He delighted in watching the crumbs drop through the holes, and he continued dispatching the Chex until there was none left, stood up and moved on to the toy corner in the family room

And as I looked at the cereal dust, I was left to contemplate. I obviously had not given much thought to that heat register since purchasing it a few years back, or I would have opened it to allow the heat to take the edge off the morning chill of the late fall crispness that morning. I was more focused on the items in my adult field of vision—the cluttered counter, the dirty dishes, the unopened mail. I certainly never could have imagined how attractive a heat register in my kitchen floor would be to Marshall.

There must be something about being almost two and a half feet tall, nearly half my size, I conclude. Living life closer to the ground offers him a perspective of the world far different from mine. He sees things I do not see, finds things I cannot find. A few mini tootsie pops a few days earlier further proved this. Marshall brought me a cherry one for me to open for him. I was puzzled. I had no idea where he had found the sucker. I considered it a random anomaly until he brought me a grape one a little while later after he had finished the cherry one. I was perplexed. Was he privy to some secret Halloween cache of Adella’s hidden under the family room couch or behind the dining room curtains? Or had Pop Pop carelessly spilled a few in the mudroom when preparing a reward for a student? Certainly if I had not been so busy (or tired or lazy or old), I would have gotten down on all fours and discovered the source of his treasure. But I did not. I never saw what Marshall (and his cousin Jim, who found an orange tootsie pop the next day) saw.

As I considered Marshall's fascination with the grate, I remembered a similar incident with Nathan on a bright, September morn twenty-five years ago in upstate New York. I was trying to hurry Nathan, a toddler, along the pathway as we returned from the top of a hill to the parking lot. But Nathan was oblivious to my pleas. I looked back at him, squatting down, looking intently at the pathway. I would have appreciated the juxtaposition of my squatting son against the backdrop of the golden statue of the Angel Moroni pointing heavenward had I not been in such a hurry.

Naturally, I assumed Nathan’s squatting stance signaled a poopy diaper in progress, so I rushed back to pick him up. But when I reached down to pick him up, I saw what he saw: a frog so small only one so close to the ground would have seen it. So I stopped. And together we studied that frog and its tiny toes and bulging, shiny eyes. We looked at its glossy skin and noted its camouflaging colors and marveled at the intricacy of the patterns on its back. And then we delighted at the trajectory of its hops as it escaped to the grass. All this we saw when we looked down together.

And as I think of Marshall and Nathan, I contemplate the chaos and busyness of my life. Modern life is often lived looking up. Look forward and stand up straight, our schoolteachers direct us as we march single-file down our school halls. Things will look up, our mothers console us after our first failed romances. And our religious leaders entreat us to look up toward the heavens for the strength to face life’s challenges. And all this is very good. But sometimes there is value in looking down. While it is true that we see the broad sweep of God’s grandeur when we look up, we also see the delicate strokes of God’s finger in the intricate complexities of the minute when we look down. This I learned from my son and a frog in a place where my religious tradition tells me both the heavens and the earth revealed the wonders and mysteries of God.

It happened again. I caught Marshall fascinated with yet another heat register. But this time it was not a decorative grate, but a boring one with simple, straight, narrow openings. It was not Rice Chex, but a gingerbread man, and this time I had to stop him because I knew the register was open, not closed. My rescue was a bit too late for the gingerbread man—he will not live another day to taunt “Catch me if you can.” Just in time, I pulled out pieces of the gingerbread man’s arms and legs before they slid down the heating vent. And I sighed. I appreciate Marshall’s fascination with dropping things down. I just hope he outgrows this fascination soon enough to save my heating system.