Lost and Found

At the time, allowing Adella and Marshall an hour’s worth of playtime in Granma’s bedroom seemed the best way to allow the cable installer an unobstructed hour or two to run wires throughout the house. But as I surveyed the aftermath, I began to question the wisdom of that decision. An entire deck of cards was strewn about, two side chairs had been moved to a corner in order to create a display shelf for a pretend store dealing in paperweights and Happy Meal toys, the bench at the foot of my bed was overturned, the quilt on top of it spread over the floor, the rug was littered with toys, and the bed, a temporary trampoline, was disheveled. Needless to say Adella and Marshall had a blast, but chaos reigned in my bedroom.

After the installer left and their father had collected Adella and Marshall, I considered my good fortune that I had never been required to share a bunker with these two cherubs during a zombie apocalypse. Then I set about restoring order. As I was vacuuming, I stopped to rescue Buzz Lightyear’s Spaceship (circa 1995) from under the dust ruffle that had valiantly fulfilled its purpose collecting dust. While I was down on my hands and knees, I decided I might as well vacuum under the bed. After rescuing a few coins, collecting a few crumpled scraps of paper and  two cellophane wrappers for juice box straws at the border of the bed frame, I pushed the small vacuum attachment a little further under the bed. Then I saw something dark blue. I was not sure what it was. I reached in a little further and pulled it out.

“Aha, she cried as she waved her wooden leg into the air,” I said out loud. I have no idea what the phrase means. But my grandmother used to say the phrase whenever she was pleasantly surprised. So when serendipity surprises me, I too use the phrase. It gives me some sense of satisfaction to say it. That is, if no one else is around to question my sanity. Then I only exclaim it in my head.

There it was. A miniature blue plastic New York Yankee batting helmet, just about the size to easily fit Beverly Cleary’s beloved mouse protagonist Ralph in The Mouse and the Motorcycle series. (Did I have a mouse taking up residence under my bed?) It also fits neatly on a square of a checkerboard. It was the twelfth and final helmet to complete my checkers set. I had found it.

The helmet was part of a checkers game my two sons had given my husband several years ago for his birthday. Twelve Baltimore Orioles (my husband’s team) helmets and 12 Yankees (my sons’ team)  helmets. A few months earlier Adella, Marshall and Jim had found this checkers set. They loved playing with these helmets, sometimes placing them on Sheriff Woody or Buzz Lightyear, sometimes testing how high they could stack be stacked, but usually they danced on fingers or were dropped off the landing in the front hall. And I usually collected the helmets at the end of the day and put them in their box.

Some days, I collected complete sets of helmets for both teams. Other days one or two errant helmets would escape under a chair or a dresser, hidden until a cleaning spree. But it did not matter. Marshall cannot count. And although Adella and Jim can count to twenty-four, they have not yet developed a one-to-one correspondence with numbers that large. As far as they knew twenty helmets looked the same as twenty-four. And they did not yet know how to play checkers. They did not need to line the helmets in two rows on the checkerboard because the checkerboard was irrelevant to their play.

The missing helmets always seemed to return home. Like homing pigeons. I might not find all the helmets on any given day, but eventually they all come home to roost. It had been some time since I had possessed a complete set. But here it was. The last Yankee helmet. I felt as joyous as the woman in the parable of the lost coin. True I had not been searching for the helmet. True it was not as valuable as a piece of silver. But, nonetheless, I was overjoyed at my discovery of something that had been lost and now was found.

In fact, in my home, it seems that most toy parts eventually find their way back. I still have a complete set of twenty-four Christmas mini-books, even though my grandchildren scatter the books throughout my house all year. Last week I found the black knight, no more than an inch high, under the living room ottoman. It fit snugly into its spot in the magnetic folding chess set my children inherited from Aunt IV twenty years ago. After three children and three grandchildren, the set was still complete with all thirty-two miniature chess pieces.

I am not sure why these toys always seem to find their way home. My home is usually a sinkhole for household items. Spoons and forks disappear, requiring me to restock my utensil drawer every few years. Unmated flip flops proliferate like bunnies in my mudroom. My coat closet is home to a basket of mismatched mittens and gloves. And in my basement, for twenty-five years, a lonely argyle sock that belonged to my father has sat at the bottom of an entire basketful of socks waiting hopelessly for mates. And yet my toys always seem to be found.

Why? Are there alternate universes in my home? If my husband is to be believed, aliens are responsible for all those missed socks. And I have long suspected munchkins wreak havoc in my home during the wee hours of the morning. But when it comes to the toys, does Toy Story have it right? Do Sheriff Woody and Buzz Lightyear really come to life whenever I leave a room?  Is it their mission to return my toys? If so, I admire their true grit, for my Woody is a double arm amputee--one at the shoulder, the other at the elbow-- and my Buzz is missing a leg. Actually I suspect a transgenerational toy karma, a sort of cosmic cause and effect, is at play in my home, restoring order to my world of toys. The more beloved and used a toy by a child in one generation, the more assured its position is in the next generation. Hence, older, worn, treasured toys are more likely to survive the chaos of my home.

A few months ago, I thought my luck had run out. The vintage Holgate block set my mother-in-law Alberta had given me was missing its twelfth block, a blue cube necessary for the colorful rectangular and square blocks to fit snuggly into the green little pull cart in which they were stored. Week after week, when I brought out the cart with only eleven blocks for my grandchildren, I felt great guilt. Alberta had entrusted me with this heirloom, the blocks she had stacked and the cart she had pulled as a child. The same blocks both my husband and our children had stacked whenever they visited their grandparents on holidays and vacations. And now, each Sunday afternoon, my grandchildren were playing with an incomplete set.  

I was baffled. In the past, lost blocks usually had usually resurfaced every week or two. But not this time. So I cleaned my house in earnest. I searched under couch cushions, rugs, and the kitchen table, behind curtains, chairs and the piano, in toy bins and book baskets, even throughout the refrigerator and under my pillow. But I could not find that block. I was considering the closest match on ebay, but $125 seemed a bit steep for an iffy match. And then it happened. My daughter found the block, which had migrated upstairs to a spot behind her bedroom door. The link between four generations was restored. Clearly transgenerational toy karma.

Now, after all that sturm und drang over a lost blue block, logic would dictate that I store those antique blocks in a closet for just a few more years to preserve them for future generations. (As I have done with the dominoes Scott’s great-grandparents used each Sunday afternoon.) But I do not. I continue to bring out those blocks each Sunday afternoon. And Marshall and Adella and Jim continue to stack those blocks and knock them down and to chase whoever is pulling the cart up and down my halls and around the kitchen island. And each Sunday night, we continue to collect those blocks. Sometimes I do not find them for a day or two. But despite my temporary lapse, I now have confidence I will always find them.

I have now been the guardian of the blocks for two years. None has been lost on my watch. Yet. But Adella and Marshall and Jim did not care. They do not fret over lost and found blocks. They just want to play. They do not realize the mystical staying power of the blocks nor do they realize they are building far more than towers and towns. They are finding their place in a family beyond their self-centered preschool wants and wishes and their sibling and cousin rivalries, beyond their parents and grandparents who praise and scold and love them, a place with their great aunts and uncles, and grandparents many times great, whom they have never met. A place worth far more than the price of vintage blocks on ebay. A place where no matter how lonely and lost they feel, they will always be found.

Breakfast Particulars

When I hear my daughter’s ring tone so early on a Saturday morning, I am expecting an emergency.  Instead, when I answer the phone, I am rewarded with a question a grandmother delights to hear.

“I fixed oatmeal for Marshall this morning, and something wasn’t right. It was as though he had certain expectations,” she says. “Is there something special you do when you eat oatmeal with Marshall every morning?”

My daughter does not like oatmeal. Or any hot cereal for that matter. But she does keep a few packets of instant oatmeal on hand. And when she made some oatmeal for Marshall this morning, he seemed to launch into a foreign ritual.

I smile.

Usually it is I who query my daughter about Marshall’s habits and preferences in order to minimize the number of his toddler tantrums when I care for him. But this fine morning, this very fine morning, my daughter is asking me.  I feel like a village elder who has waited patiently years for the tribesmen to seek him out to learn the wisdom of the ages.

“No, not really,” I reply. There is nothing particularly special about our morning bowl of oatmeal. It is just a bowl of oatmeal.

And yet . . . .

“Maybe there is,” I begin. “I do follow a bit of a routine. Maybe that’s it.”

I am a creature of habit, you see. After many, many years of eating breakfast, I have become particular. Every morning, I prepare and eat a bowl of oatmeal in a particular way. I scatter a scant handful of raisins in the bottom a particular bowl, a rimmed stoneware soup bowl with a shallow broad bottom. Then with a particular scoop, one leftover from Daniel’s utilitarian days as a Soylent liquid meal adherent,  I measure a ½ cup of oatmeal, rolled not quick, that I scatter over the raisins. I add just enough water to cover the flakes, and microwave the bowl for exactly three minutes. 

I then carry the bowl carefully by the rim, as the stoneware bottom is very hot, to a particular spot at the end of my kitchen table and place it on a placemat next to a jug of milk and a soup spoon, not a teaspoon. As I stir my oatmeal, the sound of my spoon clinking against the stoneware bowl--a sound so distinctive my son can identify it over the phone--alerts Marshall that it is time for breakfast and he comes running. By the time he has run to the silverware drawer to retrieve a teaspoon and climbed into my lap, I have pushed the oatmeal to one side of the bowl and poured milk into the other.

Then together we eat.

I cut my spoon into the oatmeal I have mounded on one side, scoop it into the milk on the other side of the bowl and then take a bite. By pouring the milk using a just-in-time method, adding only what is needed for a few bites at a time, I preserve the warmth of the oatmeal until the last bite, ensuring the perfect balance of warm oatmeal and chewy plump raisins and the coldness of the milk in every bite. 

Marshall, on the other hand, just sticks his spoon into the bowl and gets whatever he can balance on it. Sometimes he gets a huge lump of oatmeal, other times just a spoonful of milk. Sometimes he uses his other hand to pick up a raisin or two or a lump of oatmeal and place it on his spoon. Marshall’s spoon-to-mouth skills are still evolving and often some milk is lost to the placemat or either his legs or mine. When his spoon has arrived to his mouth empty a few too many times, I feed him a few spoonfuls, which he happily accepts. Sometimes, when he is not very hungry, he directs a few of his spoonfuls towards me. And if I am quick enough, I slurp up his offerings before they land on my lap.

When Marshall finds the milk in the bowl too scant, he points to the milk jug and waits for me to pour some more. And if I do not pour enough to satisfy him, he points again and says, “More.” And so we spoon and pour and eat. More often than not, when the bowl is empty, when there is no more oatmeal nor raisins, he points again at the jug and demands more milk until I pour it. I am not sure if he is still hungry, wants some more milk to drink, or is using a ploy to extend the moment. I usually pour just a bit more milk, then, leave him on the chair while I put the milk away. More than once I have caught him putting his face into the bowl to slurp up the last of the milk like a kitten.

So, yes, I guess there is something special about how we eat oatmeal together. We do have a routine. It is unusual. Crazy, perhaps. Particular, to say the least. But it is the prerogative of a grandmother to be particular. And though I have come by the particulars of my breakfast rituals on my own, they remind me of both my mother and my grandmother, for both ate hot cereal for breakfast. 

I see my mother in her later years, padding around her kitchen, retrieving from her cupboard a misshapen tin cup to carefully measure first Cream of Wheat and then water into her bowl before microwaving it. And I see my grandmother bustling at her kitchen stove quickly stirring through the steam her pot of cornmeal mush and raisins. And I see them both sitting at their kitchen tables with large tablespoons eating their steaming bowls of hot cereal with milk. The flavors of our morning porridges vary, but I come by a breakfast routine naturally.

I have not always eaten oatmeal for breakfast. As a child I ate my fair share of Alpha-Bits and Cap’n Crunch. But Marshall does not know that. He does not know that my particular routine yields the perfect ratio of warm oatmeal and chewy raisins to icy cold milk. All he knows is that he likes to eat oatmeal with me in my particular way. He does not know that next to the oatmeal in my cupboard I keep my mother’s tin cup or that in a corner of my silverware drawer, next to the spoons we use, I keep my grandmother’s engraved silver tablespoon, sorely in need of polishing. All he knows is the warmth of my lap.