Be Mine Forever

Adella found it. The large pink Valentine heart—a Valentine person actually with eyes and smile, dangling arms and legs—in my mudroom. Even though I had tucked it away in a box, waiting for that perfect moment to sneak it into the trash. November is just beginning. And she found it.

Adella had proudly given me the heart on Valentine’s Day. And that Valentine took up residence on my refrigerator for the month of February and most of March.

“Do you think she’ll notice?” I asked my husband as I scratched and pulled in order to peel the tape holding the heart from my refrigerator door. (Clearly I had not anticipated grandchildren and the need for a refrigerator magnet art gallery when I had purchased the refrigerator with the sleek stainless steel, unmagnetized door a few years back.)

“Not sure,” Pop Pop said. “Nothing gets past her,” he added.

True, I thought. So I hedged my my bets. I did not want any grandchild of mine to think I had rejected her work. So I stashed Mr. Valentine (or is it a Ms?) in a box in my mudroom. If the Valentine’s eviction from prime refrigerator door space went unnoticed, then I had hoped to quietly slip him or her into the trash a week or two later.

And she had not noticed. Until today. If only I had stuck to the original plan. If only I had not forgotten to dispose of it. I should have known leaving the little red stool in my mud room so that I could reach the highest shelves would only encourage her snooping.

There was no blame nor shame. No “Hey, Granma, what’s this doing here?” Adella simply took matters into her own hands.

She rummaged through my junk drawer and found the tape. Using the little red stool, she restored that Valentine to its proper place. And for good measure, she drew four more pictures and enlisted her brother Marshall to draw one as well. Then she taped them up all up on my refrigerator. A stunning gallery of preschool art.

So now the time clock on my refrigerator gallery is reset and I must consider when I can once more polish my sleek stainless refrigerator door.

What is the statute of limitations on a Valentine, I wonder. Especially one that has already been recycled once. One that carries the taint of having been discovered hidden away. Perhaps I should view it as a boon: Art so easily hides tiny fingerprints. 

I ponder for a few days. Perhaps Thanksgiving, I think. And then I realize the relatives are coming. Practicality defenestrates my guilt. Grandma Kemp and Grandpa Kemp, Uncle Ethan, Uncle Jonathan and Aunt Sarah, ( my daughter’s in-laws) and cousins Katherine, Rebecca, Jonathan and Nathan, all will descend upon my house to celebrate the naming and blessing of baby Max, Adella’s infant brother. The refrigerator door must be polished sleek and clean.

This time I slide the art directly into the trash. Underneath a cereal box and three pieces of junk mail, lest the eagle-eyed Adella discover my subterfuge. Then, for good measure, I empty the trash, watching sadly as the wee heart-shaped hand of Mr. (or Ms.) Valentine reaches out above an envelope, frailly, almost desperately waving, as I cinch the trash bag closed.

At least I took a picture. Should Adella ask.

Baka

Try as they might, grandparents can never pick the name their grandchildren call them. As a new grandmother, I naively thought I had a choice in the matter. I mulled over what I wanted to be called in the months before Adella became verbal. For while I relished being a grandmother, I somehow considered myself far too young to fit the grandmother stereotype. (Alas, no longer. My grandchildren have worn me out.)

Finally, I settled upon obāsan, the Japanese word for grandmother. Somehow it paid homage to my time in Japan while also conveying the wisdom and reverence I felt my role deserved. Yet my son Daniel is the only one who ever called me obāsan. Despite my coaxing, when Adella learned to talk, she called me Granma, dropping the d sound. And I liked it.

Young Jim called me Anma. I liked that nickname, too. Two-year-old Jim used it in our own little call-and-response whenever we drove together in the car.

"Anma," he would yell out to make sure that I had not forgotten he was in the backseat.

"Yes, Jim," I would respond.

And we then we would go back and forth, over and over. If I ever tired of our predictable conversation and did not respond, he would only yell Anma more insistently and quickly until I did respond. I found that nickname quite endearing. I hoped it would stick. I was more than a little bit sad when he outgrew it, abandoning it for Grandma with a decided d.

Grandpa was not so quick to discover that he had no control over his nickname. One of Adella's first words was Pop Pop. And while I found the nickname sweet, Scott did not. Perhaps he felt it did not give enough weight to his position of patriarch.

So he corrected Adella frequently. "Grandpa. My name is Grandpa," he would say.

But Pop Pop stuck despite his best efforts. And eventually Scott gave up correcting Adella. Now six years after her birth, I think he seems reconciled to name. In fact, he seems to wear the name as a badge of honor.

Marshall has only recently given me a nickname: Baka. I am not sure how he hit upon this nickname. It bears no resemblance to word Grandma. But Baka it is.

I found this new nickname endearing, too, until today. I connected a few dots.

I asked Chrissy once more what Marshall calls me, just in case I was not hearing him correctly.

"Baka is what he calls you," she confirmed. "He always talks about wanting to go to Baka's house."

I smirked.

"Do you know what baka means in Japanese?"

"No," she replied, curious.

"Fool or idiot," I admitted.

No wise obāsan am I. Merely a fool.

Marshall has not yet mastered English. I doubt he has ever heard a word of Japanese. But there is no foolin' Marshall. He sees me for what I am. I suppose the only way I can spin my new nickname is that I am a fool for love, grandmotherly love that is.

Mother's Day

Just when I thought it was safe to have stamps in my house, Adella decides to make a Mother's Day card for her mother.

"Oh honey, " I say. "I needed those stamps."

"Sorry," she cavalierly says. She knows Granma values creativity and she considers this card her magnum opus.

She opens the card and proudly points out that there is just one stamp on the inside in the center of a heart. Not sure how to interpret that, but she considers that detail important. Regardless given that there are a total of 19 stamps on the card and provided that Chrissy can peel them off, the Kemps won't need to buy stamps for a while.

The Screwdriver in the Milk

My grandson Marshall is a wanpaku. Pop Pop agrees. This Japanese word, or at least our Americanized interpretation of it, captures Marshall precisely: a mischievous young boy. An imp.

Marshall does not set out to be mischievous. It just happens. He simply cannot ignore his impish impulses. And, to be fair, Marshall is only two and a half.

Our wanpaku is curious, perpetually experimenting. He throws objects, hard and soft, over the balcony in my foyer, observing their rates of acceleration. He crumbles an entire sleeve of saltine crackers in his uncle’s bedroom, testing the conservation of matter. He spits mouthfuls of milk onto the sliding glass door in my kitchen, studying their splatter patterns and then finger-painting in his results. And he smashes a blackberry into my antique Persian rug in my office, noting its squish properties.

As a granny, I am patient and tolerant. Oh, I admit I drew in a very, very deep breath and took a few moments to compose myself when I saw the blackberry stain on the my treasured rug, purchased by my grandparents when Persia was still called Persia. But as I blotted and treated the stain, I remembered the fruit punch stain his mother left on the rug thirty years ago when the rug lay on my mother’s floor. Just as that stain has blended into the background, so I know this stain too will fade in importance.

I am resigned to the fact that my house will never be pristinely clean until Marshall reaches the age of maturity or at least until he starts school. This is because Marshall has the stealth of a ninja and I am no longer spry. I usually arrive just after his mischief. And Marshall intuits that I am more often amused than gobsmacked by his antics. I cannot resist the tiny wanpaku twinkle in his sweet blue eyes and the impish curl of his guilty grin.

Today, however, when Adella brings me the evidence of his latest experiment, I see my wanpaku and his impish behavior in a new light. And I begin to wonder whether his antics are part of his genetic code.

“Look, Granma,” Adella says as she holds up a nearly empty gallon jug of distilled water. “Look what Marshall did.”

She has me at the word “look.” I look, then jump up, ready to grab some towels and mop up.

“Darn you, Pop Pop,” I think.

Long ago I had foreseen this very problem. I had warned Pop Pop, more than once, not to leave the gallon jug of distilled water he uses to fill his CPAP machine next to his side of the bed. I also had known that Pop Pop, my absent-minded scientist, usually loses the cap to the jug as often as he loses those to tubes of toothpaste or gallons of milk. And I had predicted the force attracting Marshall to that ill-placed jug would be irresistible. Essentially Pop Pop was issuing an invitation to experiment.

“See Granma,” Adella sings with a tattletale tone as I rush toward her. “Marshall stuck a pencil in this jug. Now we can’t get it out.”

I do, in fact, see that there is a yellow pencil obliquely resting in the nearly empty water jug. After checking my bedroom, I laugh. I laugh because I have avoided disaster: the open water jug had been nearly empty when Marshall found it and a harmless pencil had been the nearest object at hand. But I also laugh because Marshall has repeated an iconic Stornetta moment, an experiment of his Uncle Daniel’s. Stornetta blood did, in fact, course through Marshall’s veins.

Twenty years ago, Daniel too had been tempted by an open gallon container. He too was curious as he sat at the kitchen table eating his breakfast cereal. Somehow he spied a screwdriver and the open gallon of milk and was irresistibly drawn to the possibilities. And when my attention finally turned to the table, there was a screwdriver in the milk. I cannot fathom how my three-year-old came to have a screwdriver. But I like to assume we can blame it on his absent-minded father. And although Daniel’s siblings clamored for me to punish Daniel immediately, I simply laughed. There was no use crying over contaminated milk. Daniel had simply made a mistake, I told them. And from that moment, the phrase “screwdriver in the milk” entered the Stornetta lexicon as a synonym for a mistake.

So as I look at the pencil and the jug and try to calm a frustrated Adella, I conclude that I should revel in my little wanpaku. Perhaps he is not so much an imp, but a grand experimenter like his uncle and his grandfather. A scientist in embryo, his empirical bent embedded deep in his DNA. I cannot wait to tell the story to my children and Pop Pop, I think.

“You won’t believe what Marshall did today,” I say to my daughter, Marshall’s mother, as soon as she calls.

And I begin to repeat the story to her. I carefully build the scene. The jug of water next to Pop Pop’s side of the bed. A missing top. As soon as I say “pencil,” she says, “Oh, like the screwdriver in the milk.”

I call Nathan. I tell him the story. He immediately grasps the connection. “Like the screwdriver in the milk,” he says.

Then, I call Daniel, the original wanpaku. I tell him the story. He too quickly sees the connection to the screwdriver in the milk.

So when Pop Pop comes home from work, I tell him a well-practiced story. I lay the scene for him effortlessly. But I sense he is not quite connecting to my story. So I stretch out my tale, exaggerating the details. Yet he continues his wife-listening, nodding when appropriate and adding an “uh-huh” whenever I pause when in actuality he is lost in scientific thought. So I hand him the punchline.

“You know,” I say. “Like the screwdriver in the milk.”

The punchline resoundingly clunks.

“Ah yes,” Pop Pop responds, still distracted.

But the moment has passed. He has missed the connection. It is not worth explaining to him. It is time for me to move on and leave Pop Pop to his thoughts solving the mysteries of the universe, for if he had remembered the story about the screwdriver in the milk, he might never have left that jug of distilled water without a top within the reach of a wanpaku like Marshall. 

There is no doubt in my mind that it is Pop Pop’s genes, not mine, that are responsible for the screwdriver in the milk and the pencil in the water jug. My only hope is that Marshall becomes a theoretical scientist like his grandfather before he destroys my house with his experimenting.

Holding Out

“Oh Graaan-ma,” Adella calls out. 

I know trouble is a-brewin’. Whenever Adella lengthens out the vowels in my name, she usually wants to draw my attention to some failing on my part. Like an empty cookie jar or one of her toys that has somehow found its way into one of my toy baskets. I look up.

“Look what I found,” she sings out. She holds up an egg-dyeing kit.

We have just cleaned up our mess from sponge painting this year’s Easter eggs. Those eggs are not even dry. But somehow Adella has found an unused egg dyeing kit from a previous year in my pantry.

“Oh, Granma!” my daughter Chrissy adds, mockingly shocked. “You’re holding out on us!”

It is true. I am cheap. Too cheap. Too cheap to throw out a kit I bought years ago. Even though it probably cost no more than a dollar or two, I have kept it. Did I mention my mother, who came of age during the Depression, used to rinse out the Wonder bread wrappers and reuse them? 

“So now we can color some more eggs,” Adella asks.

“No,” both her mother, my daughter, and I quickly shout. The unplanned unison of our responses sounds well-practiced. 

“Not today, ” I add, a little more calmly.

I don’t want the mess. And my daughter does not want to blow out any more eggs. We Stornettas do not hard boil our Easter eggs, we put small holes in the ends of each of the eggs and blow the innards out. As a result, we have cleared sinuses and lingering stuffy pressure headaches from all that blowing. And we eat lots of omelets and scrambled eggs for a few days.

Chrissy and I settle back into our lazy Sunday afternoon conversation. Soon Adella returns. She is holding up not one, but two more egg dyeing kits that she has found in my pantry. I am not sure where she is finding those kits. But I am certain that if she is able to delve into the deep abyss of my pantry to find these kits, some of which probably date to years before she was born, I should be teaching her how to deep clean my pantry. 

“You’re holding out on us, Granma,” Adella says, perfectly mimicking her mother’s tone.

What can I say? I am not only cheap, but also forgetful. And clearly aspirational. Every year when I see all those egg dyeing kits on the shelves at Walmart, I immediately envision a Norman Rockwell scene, me at my kitchen table surrounded by my cherubic grandkids sweetly dyeing eggs even Martha Stewart would envy. But usually when I return home and tiptoe through the Legos, Littlest Pet Shop pets, and action figures littering my floor, I remember my grandchildren are not cherubs but preschoolers and that life, much less egg dyeing, is just plain messy. So usually I shove my newly purchased egg dyeing kit to the back of my pantry and my aspirations to the next year when my life will be less messy. Of course, the next year, when I am at Walmart aspirationally daydreaming in the floor-to-ceiling aisle of egg-dyeing kits, I have truly forgotten whether I have a kit in my pantry. So I buy yet another. 

“Can’t we color some more eggs?” Adella begs.

“No,” Chrissy and I answer resoundingly, again in unison. 

“Not today,” I add encouragingly, offering hope.

Thankfully, Adella finds no more kits in my pantry. But she keeps returning to us, pestering us. Being five, she simply cannot resist the allure of the glitter kit.

“Maybe Grandma will dye some eggs with you on Tuesday,” my daughter devilishly offers.

I give her the evil eye. “Maybe,” I say, hoping my ambiguity will somehow extinguish Adella’s fervor.

It does not. On Tuesday, Adella bounds through my kitchen door at 6:30 a.m. ready to glitter those eggs. 

I put her off yet again. “Maybe Thursday, when I am not so busy,” I suggest. 

Tuesday is not a good day to dye eggs. In fact, for the next fifteen Tuesdays, Granma’s house will never be a rockin’ fun zone. I have agreed to teach a class on Tuesday afternoons. A scheduling blunder on my part, agreeing to teach a class in the afternoons after I’ve spent the mornings watching my grandkids. It took only one week to convince myself that I am not really the Super Granny Nanny that I imagine myself to be. Did I mention this class is new to me, that the parents frequently sit in on the classes, and that I am creating the curriculum on the fly?

But this Tuesday morning Miss Adella is nothing if not persistent. At one point, when I look up from my computer, I see six little cardboard circles on the floor. She has punched them from the back of the box of one egg dyeing kit in order to create a stand with holes for drying eggs. She does not realize she has created a utilitarian stand. She has simply caved into an unremitting urge to punch out the perforations. Then, a little later, I see several colorful strips scattered about the floor. From another kit, she has retrieved and separated the perforated strips intended to be bent into a circle and connected at the notches to create a different kind of egg stand. Next, she hands me a mangled wire, once an egg dipper from one of the kits, asking me to fix it. It is not worth rescuing. 

In a matter of minutes, Adella has pulled apart three different egg dyeing kits. I marvel less at her tenacity, however, than at the fact that Marshall has not been drawn into Adella’s antics. I am just happy he is absorbed first with the toys in the toy box and then the banana I have given him. I keep working. That is, until Adella calls out to me.

“Granma, I think I need some help,” she says. There is an atypical urgency in her voice.

I immediately look up from my computer. There is fearful helplessness in her eyes. Her lips are blue. Not a pastel, I’ve-just-eaten-cotton-candy blue, but a deep, dark ink blue. And there is a little trickle slowly dribbling from one corner of her mouth down to her chin.

I jump up. Gently but quickly I push her towards the kitchen sink before the blue drips from her chin while my mind races, trying to figure out what she has eaten and whether I need to call Poison Control. Then it occurs to me. 

I stop for a minute and look at her. “Did you eat one of those little Easter egg dye tablets?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says sheepishly, her head bowed as she nods. 

Then I wipe her mouth, inside and out. I get her a drink of water. I check one of the egg dye box abandoned on the floor. Yes, those egg dyes are in fact food grade coloring. 

Whew, I think. And then I go in search of the melting dye tablet that Adella admits she has spit out. I capture it in a paper towel before Marshall finds it and wipe the floor, relieved my wood floor has not been stained. 

Crisis solved. The only remnants of the mishap are Adella’s deep blue lips and her unusually obsequious demeanor.

Then I sit down. I laugh. Yes, I think, I guess I have been holding out. But sometimes Granma has her reasons.

Granma Hall of Fame

"I'm just no good," Adella says.

"Oh, honey, don't say that," I reply. It saddens me that she is speaking of herself in negative terms. She is only five. I am a firm believer that young children can never have too much positive reinforcement.

"Why do you think that?" I ask.

She is at the kitchen sink. "I can't make my own bubble mix." 

She had poured out the bottle of commercial bubble mix she had been playing with and was trying to create some of her own bubble mix. 

"How do you make bubble mix?" she asks.

"I'm not sure," I say. "But it must have a little bit of dish soap in it."

I hear the water from the kitchen sink running and a minute later she exclaims, "I did it." 

She brings me the bubble bottle and blows a bubble to prove to me she has succeeded. 

Then she screws the top back on. "This belongs in a museum." Her childlike exuberant self-confidence restored.

Don't think the bottle quite qualifies as modern or even performance art. Maybe I will have to create a Granma Hall of Fame for ingenious inventions.

So Nice to be Included

Our extended family is less extended and more immediate the past few days. Chrissy and Christian have been without power since Wednesday. (They also were without power during the storm a week ago.)

Anyway, Marshall and Adella slept on the sofa bed in the loveseat in my office last night. This morning Marshall discovered a cache of paper clips, which he dropped over the second floor balcony into the front hall in clumps. The front entry way was carpeted in paper clips.

Granma pulled a Tom Sawyer. I have a magnetized disk that doubles as a paper clip holder. When I showed Adella how it worked, she ran downstairs to start picking them up without my even asking. She took great delight in watching the paper clips dance and jump to the disk.

"Do you know why the paper clips are attracted to the disk?" I asked. Thought I would throw in a little science lesson along with the clean up.

She did not.

"It's because it's a magnet," I explained.

She immediately stopped collecting the paper clips and ran out of the room. When she returned she had a magnet she had pulled from the refrigerator.

"Here, Granma," she said, handing it to me. "You can help, too."

So nice to be included.

Turn Around Is Fair Play

Adella begged me to get out my Easter bunnies. A little early, but it did not take much for Adella to persuade me, especially when she is here to help. Half the fun is seeing her and Marshall's excitement.

So Adella and Marshall played with the bunnies, arranged them throughout the house, and had an Easter egg hunt. (Somehow Adella, who hid them the eggs, found most of them.) After Adella neatly arranged all the Beanie Babies bunnies on the stairs, Marshall came along and pushed them all down. She was not very happy. 

"Marshall," she scolded. "It took me a long time to put these bunnies up."

I laughed. Turn around is fair play. For the past three years, it has been she who has pushed those bunnies down. In fact, she is the one who has taught him to push the bunnies (and the Halloween cats, spiders and ghosts, and the Christmas bears) off the stairs. Usually it is the first thing they do when they come to Granma's house.

Maybe this year, someone will help me put the bunnies back.