The Peanut Trap

Marshall is asleep in my bedroom. Adella is playing happily, singing Primary songs to herself and occasionally conversing with Blue Inga, her colorful, imaginary friend. I am taking advantage of this rare morning quiet time. I am busy on my computer preparing to advise an anxious parent about college admissions, a competitive sport in northern New Jersey. When I finally look up from my keyboard to assess what Adella is doing, I see a neat line of peanuts running the length of my family room rug.

Is Adella playing at Hansel and Gretel, I wonder. Surely she has not left the trail for fear she will get lost in my house.

She catches me staring. “I’m setting a trap for Marshall, Granma.” Then she carefully mounds a hill of peanuts at the end of the peanut trail.

“Who will clean all those peanuts up?” I ask.

She gives me a curious stare and laughs. “Silly Granma. Marshall will. He will eat them all up,” she says matter-of-factly.

“Of course,” I say, knowing full well Marshall could never eat that many peanuts.

And as I look at those peanuts, so deliberately laid, I think of Pearl Buck. Peanuts often remind me of Pearl Buck.  She mentions them in one of my favorite essays, “A Debt to Dickens.” In the essay, Buck describes her loneliness as a child of American missionary parents in China at the turn of the twentieth century who measures the enchantment of her first encounter with Dickens by her undisturbed pocketful of peanuts.

As I spy the open door to my pantry, the Adella's red stool pushed up against it, I think the essay particularly apt. Buck describes the hot August afternoon when the household is asleep and her parents preoccupied and she, a seven-year-old with no playmates, is left to her own devices. She pushes her “three cornered bamboo stool on top of a small table”  to get to “a long row of somber blue books on a very high shelf”--the Dickens, which have been put out of reach by her parents who looked askance at novels. On her way to the veranda to read Oliver Twist, she stops “in the pantry for a pocketful of peanuts.”  

This lazy morning, Adella too has a preoccupied caregiver and is without her playmate Marshall. She too has been left to her own devices, so she has stopped at my pantry and has used her red stool in pursuit of a snack, a 2 ½ lb tin of Kirkland Brand Virginia peanuts. Adella also is not without a literary sidekick. On the coffee table near her peanut trap, she has placed her cloth-bound, pocket-sized book, The Last of the the Mohicans. I know that she has pushed my grandmother’s chair up to my mother’s tall bookshelf in the bedroom upstairs in order to retrieve her favorite volume. I know this because this is part of our ritual. When she comes to my house, rather than choosing my childhood books Make Way for Ducklings or Madeline or some other classic picture book conveniently shelved on the lowest shelf, Adella pushes the chair to the bookshelf to retrieve this particular volume from the middle of a higher shelf. This book then accompanies her throughout her stay. And just as soon as she leaves to go home with her father, I reshelve the Mohicans next to the larger, red leather bound volumes of Kipling that Pop Pop inherited from Baba, his grandmother.

It is a peculiar yet endearing ritual, for Adella cannot read. This novel has no pictures. But it is compact, a pocket-sized book created in an era long before paperbacks. A book sized perfectly for a small child. I imagine she enjoys the feel of the cloth cover in her hands and running her fingers over the silver embossed title and turning its thick, yellowed pages. Maybe someday she will read it, I think. Maybe someday she will enjoy it as much as I did. Which is why I long ago stopped fretting about her destroying a treasured book with her great-grandfather’s name beautifully inscribed inside the front cover. Carrying that book, I hopes, will teach her to love books like her mother and father, and like me and Pop Pop, and generations of her grandmothers and grandfathers. I hope to instill a love of books in her, to lure her to worlds of treasure.

Oliver Twist so mesmerizes young Pearl that she quickly forgets her pocketful of peanuts, noticing they are untouched hours later when she is called to dinner. Adella, being four, quickly moves on from her book and her well-laid peanut trap to a game of Scrabble, which she induces me to play according to her rules. We find all the A for Adella tiles and place them on the board, then she draws pictures on the scoresheets, expecting me to guess what each scribble is. I am not particularly adept at guessing and she begins to suspect as much when I keep asking clarifying questions, such as “Is it a person?” or “Is it an animal?” or “Does it live inside a house or outside?” But soon, luckily, we are interrupted by the waking of Marshall, who happily joins us.

Adella delights that he does, in fact, fall for her trap. Well, sort of. He eats the peanuts, but he does not start at the beginning of the trail. Rather he begins with the mound at the end and then works his way toward the beginning. Until he stops midway. He gets distracted by the Scrabble tiles. Of course, none of this matters to Adella. Her only purpose in setting her trap is to get Marshall to eat some peanuts. Which he does.

I, unfortunately, have a family room with a line of peanuts. As I expected, Adella was a tad bit overconfident in predicting Marshall would eat them all. Once more, my house evidences my status as a granny nanny. As does my peanut tin. For when I later reach for a handful of peanuts to snack on as I read, I discover another Scrabble tile: A for Adella.

The Power of Suggestion

The call came early. I knew it must be urgent. No one ever calls before 8 o’clock in the morning unless it’s urgent.

It was Pop Pop. 

As soon as I heard his voice, I knew. “Let me guess,” I said, “You forgot your pump.”  

Yes, it was urgent, not life-threatening in the short term, but urgent nonetheless. Scott usually detaches his insulin pump for his morning shower. And Scott, being Scott, sometimes forgets to reattach it afterwards. The forgotten pump phone call, while not a frequent occurrence, was not exactly uncommon. It just had never happened on a morning when I had the grandchildren.

“Yes,” he replied, his tone sheepish with a generous oozing of I-will-really-owe-you-if-you-help-me-out-on-this-for-me.

“Soooo . . . ,” I said, pausing for dramatic effect. “I guess you want me to bring it to you,” hoping that by stating the obvious, it somehow would make it not true.

I looked at the kids. Adella was asleep on the couch. Marshall looked dazed and contented, on the brink of falling asleep.

“O.K., I’ll text you when I get there,“ I replied half-heartedly.  

My wedding vows had not included the phrase “in sickness and in health” nor the line about my “holding him” not just “for better,” but also for “for worse,” so I was technically in the clear if I wanted to grumble about this task. And grumble I did. I knew that in taking Scott's insulin pump to him, I was not just giving up an hour of my time, but an hour of potentially uninterrupted time--a treasure above all treasures when one is charged with watching young children. In fact, this morning was the first time all year the stars had aligned for both children to be asleep at the same time on my watch. Waking those children up to put them in the car was not a trivial sacrifice. But I reminded myself that thirty-four years ago I had vowed to love Scott forever, and perhaps this sacrifice was requisite.

I pulled on some sweatpants retrieved from the dirty clothes basket--urgent times require drastic measures--slipped on my shoes, grabbed the pump that was emphatically beeping for attention, pocketed my cell phone, strapped the dazed Marshall into his carseat, and finally carried a groggy Adella to my car. By the time I sat her in her booster seat, she was very much awake.

“You know, Granma,” Adella said as I was backing out of the driveway, “we could stop for donuts.”

I laughed. I was not in public-appropriate attire. I had no bra on. I was wearing my “mom sweatshirt,” a designation my son had given to my zip-up, hooded, baggy BYU sweatshirt. My sweatpants bore evidence of yesterday’s cooking, and although I had run a comb through it, my hair was definitely bed head, not hipster, runway bed head, but Granma bed head--one side smashed flat revealing the gray roots, the other side standing straight up.

“Why don’t we go through a drive thru somewhere?” I countered to no avail.

But Adella was only interested in donuts. So we set off for Pop Pop's work. Marshall promptly fell asleep in the car. Adella was quiet and content cuddling her blanket and sucking her thumb. And I kept hoping as I checked her status from the rear view mirror that she too would fall asleep.

A half an hour later, as soon as I had parked on the street near a door just outside his classroom, I texted Scott: I am here at the side of the building. Then we waited.

“I’m not sure why Pop Pop is taking so long,” I said to Adella after a few minutes. We really were just outside his classroom. Perhaps it was an inopportune moment to leave his students, I thought. I texted him a second time: Are you able to come?

“I have an idea, Grannma,” Adella cheerfully offered. “We could go get donuts and then come back. Then he would be here when we got back.”

Adella certainly was persistent. Her proposal for passing time while waiting sense made perfect sense to her four-year-old mind. Her parents must have used a similar tactic some other time. Yet it was clear she missed the nuances of that tactic as she assumed a casual link between getting donuts and ending a waiting time.

“Honey, I don’t think that will work,” I replied. “Pop Pop knows we are waiting for him right here. We need to stay here while we wait for him.”

So we waited some more. And some more. Finally I texted: What’s the situation?? I am not a person prone to textual dramatics, but I added the second question mark, nonetheless.

After a few more minutes of waiting, Adella offered, “Dunkin' Donuts is my favorite. They have sprinkles on their donuts.”

“Maybe your Daddy can take you for donuts. He knows just what you want,” I said.

“That’s o.k., Granma,” she replied, “I can show you.”

My patience was wearing thin. I briefly considered walking into the school and leaving the pump with security. But that required getting two children in and out of carseats. It also meant I would be seen, looking like a hobo, at my husband's workplace. So I called Scott. I had not wanted to disturb Scott in his classroom with a phone call. I know what it is like to be interrupted in a classroom. I also know that a ringing cell phone is perhaps the most disruptive and annoying sound a teacher faces, particularly when he has banned them. But I had waited long enough. I was beginning to really crave a donut. A chocolate one. Perhaps one with cream in the middle. He deserved to be interrupted.

“Oh, are you here?” he asked sweetly. I heard some giggles from his students in the background. “I'll be right there," he said, adding, "I thought you were going to text me." 

After hearing the tone of his voice, I tempered my impertinence, concluding he clearly had not received any of my texts. Either he or I needs a better data plan, I thought, one that delivers and receives texts promptly.

And soon Pop Pop was there, smiling at the kids, overjoyed to see them. I passed off the pump to him, and we began the return trip home.

“Granma, do you know where Dunkin' Donuts is?” Adella asked as we were pulling away from the school. She was not about to be denied.

“I don’t think we have time to go there, honey,” I replied. And we joined the throng of morning rush hour traffic on Route 24.

Later, as I neared the Morristown exits, I noticed Adella was on the verge of falling asleep again. I could drive straight home without incidence, I thought. But then I glanced at her, sweetly sucking her thumb. She had been aroused from sleep to get into my cold car without grumbling. She had cheerfully waited for Pop Pop to come for several minutes without complaint. And she had persistently made her wish for a donut known without whining. She was only four, but she had been far more patient than I.

So I took the first, not my usual second, Morristown exit. Adella deserved that donut. She had earned it. I am the Granma, after all, I thought. And what are grandmas for, but to reward their grandchildren for good behavior and spoil them a bit in the process. I pulled into the Dunkin' Donuts parking lot, stopping right in front of its storefront. Adella, sensing the car had stopped, suddenly snapped to attention.

“There it is, Granma!" she exclaimed with great wonder. "There is Dunkin' Donut!" It was as if she had found the promised land. 

"You're so right," I said. We had made it.

And I walked into that Dunkin' Donuts in full Granma disheveled mode. I got in and out in under two minutes. No one gave me an odd look, perhaps because I had chosen the location near the train station, the one most frequented by the homeless. And Adella got her reward--a pink donut with sprinkles.

Then I drove home in a self-congratulatory mood, etching yet another notch in my belt of successful Granma moments. That is, until I saw Marshall, freshly awakened and energized after an-hour-and-a-half-long nap. He was merrily smearing chocolate icing and sprinkles all over his car seat and my car. (Adella had not told me he does not like sprinkles on his donuts.) As I looked at the new styling of my backseat, which conveniently coordinated with my Granma hobo look, I felt my Super-Granma smugness rapidly dissipating. 

At least I have that donut I craved, I thought. The one I had not even known I wanted when the day began.