Sleeping with the Fishes

My daughter greets me at the door when I return home.

"Do you know where Woody is?" she asks. "We can't find him anywhere."

No pleasantries. I have just finished a four-hour trip from my father-in-law's funeral in Annapolis. No "How was your trip?" nor "So happy you're home safely." Just a direct question.

"No," I quickly reply, stepping into the house.

"Woood-ddy, Woood-ddy," Marshall calls plaintively, as he walks from room to room holding Woody's hat.

I, too, join the search. Even before I bring in my bags.

Marshall loves Woody and Buzz. When he comes to my house, he makes a beeline for the red toy basket under my family room desk where my circa 1996, 15-inch Toy Story 1 Sheriff Woody and Astronaut Buzz Lightyear usually reside. But today Woody is not there.

Only two-and-a-half, Marshall, a second child, is a child of few demands and even fewer words. And his mournful calls to a silent Woody (whose pullstring has long since been broken) tug at my heartstrings, particularly given my promise three nights ago. Marshall had tried to sneak out of my house with both my Woody and my Buzz in tow. His father, however, immediately noticed the dolls, each one-third Marshall's size, and told him to return them to the toy bin. It was then that I promised an inconsolable Marshall that Woody and Buzz would be patiently waiting for him the next time he came to Granma's house. And now Woody is gone.

So my broken promise impels us. We three, his father, his mother, and I, search. His father looks for Woody upstairs, downstairs, and in the basement. He lifts up living room chairs and checks behind the sofa. His mother looks upstairs, downstairs, and in the basement. She lifts up couch cushions and braves the clutter at the bottom of my closets. I, too, look upstairs, downstairs, and in the basement, under bed pillows and in dresser drawers. All to no avail. Finally, we switch tacks. We placate Marshall with my vintage Burger King Toy Story 1 Kids Meal toys. Despite their missing limbs, he plays contentedly with these mini wounded warriors.

I am perplexed. Every so often, I interrupt what I am doing to check yet another spot for the third or fourth time. In bed, I rehearse my searches once more. Woody haunts me. I am nearly as inconsolable as Marshall. Not just because Woody is missing, but also because Woody serves as a reminder of one of my great failures as a parent.

You see, Woody is the only toy that eluded my inner Santa all those years of Christmas mornings when my children were small. I was an expert at fulfilling my children's Christmas wishes, big and small, simple or complex. I scored a hard-to-find Game Gear, three Game Boys, a Samantha doll, multiple Tamagotchis, and even two Mighty Morphin Power Ranger action figures in 1994 when no one could find them. (A tip from a stranger in a Toys 'R Us aisle gave me the phone number of yet another stranger who lived four towns over who sold me Blue and Black Rangers for slightly over the price she had paid for them in Florida where they were more abundant.)

But Christmas 1996 I failed. Years before Amazon and Cyber Monday, despite my best efforts searching every toy store within a 50-mile radius and even begging a friend who worked at Disney headquarters, I could secure neither a Woody nor a Buzz to place under the Christmas tree for my son Daniel. Instead he found a ragtag collection of Burger King Toy Story 1 Kids Meal toys. (I ate a lot of hamburgers and chicken nuggets.) It was not until his fourth birthday, six months later, that I overcompensated by giving Daniel both Woody and Buzz.

Today I convince myself that if I just look hard enough I will find Woody. I might have failed my son Daniel those many years ago. But I am not about to fail my grandson. So I check every possible spot once again--behind the curtains and under the table in the dining room, under the beds upstairs, in all the nooks and crannies of my closets. I pull out every toy in every toy basket.

I spy the little suitcase Adella carries around and think, "Aha, there he is." But he is not. I begin checking less logical places, under the sheets in the basement waiting to be laundered, in the ball bin in a corner of the garage, behind the milk in the refrigerator. But I cannot find Woody. Maybe, I think, Toy Store 1 did not end so happily ever after all and Buzz has exacted his revenge on my Woody.

Finally, I stop. I resign myself to the fact that somehow Woody must have mistakenly been placed in a trash can or among my Goodwill donations. Or stolen by some evil elves. And I wonder, will my Woody, who has the letters A-D-E-L-L-A  written crudely on the sole of his boot, make his way back to my home.

I am resigned, but not defeated. So I do what any self-respecting, compulsive grandmother would do: I place a bid on eBay and sit back on my couch and wait. And when I look up from my computer screen, I see my kitchen table, a maple-drop-leaf farmhouse table. With a drawer.

No, I think. Woody could not possibly fit in that small drawer. My placemats barely fit in it. But I hurry over to the drawer and jerk it open, nonetheless. And there Woody is. Sleeping with the fishes. Or rather sleeping with one fish--Goldie, a Beanie Baby goldfish.

"Yee-haw," I yell loudly, as my hands jubilantly reach for the sky. "I found it! I found it!"

There is no one to share in my triumph. But I do not care. I have found Woody. I have redeemed myself. I have not failed my grandson. At least for today.

Then my computer bings. I panic. Obsessive Granma had placed my bid. I am now once more Rational, Pragmatic Granma. In my efforts to secure a Woody, I cannot remember how high I bid. I rush to my computer.

Outbid, the emails says.

"Whew," I think.

Dodged some Rootin' Tootin' bullets today.

Like Father, Like Son

Thanks to Pop Pop’s work on the blockchain back in 1991, we are in Chicago. He has come to address two fintech classes and a student forum at the University of Chicago Booth Business School. I have come to Chicago to see my grandson Jim. Oh, yes, and to listen to Pop Pop’s lecture.

Few people know about Pop Pop’s patents. He often laughs at the irony of his AP Calculus students discussing bitcoin and cryptocurrency. They do not know that their mild-mannered Math teacher is a superhero in the blockchain world, cited in Satoshi Nakamoto’s seminal 2008 white paper proposing bitcoin. But our son does. Last year he listened to his father speak to the fintech class at NYU Stern School of Business. So when Nathan landed on campus as a first-year MBA student, he created this opportunity for his father.

Pop Pop is a gifted speaker. Explaining blockchains and hash functions to an audience with mixed technical abilities is child’s play for him. He could deftly explain nuclear fusion to my five-year-old granddaughter Adella. He is also captivating: in his lecture, he references modern marriage, indentures, philosopher Immanuel Kant, British essayist Samuel Johnson, nuclear physicist Hans Bethe, writer Mark Twain, mortar firing strategies, the stock exchange in Australia, existentialism and his experiences as a Mormon missionary in Japan. I am in awe. I sit in an inconspicuous corner in the back of the room and wonder, “Is this the man who quietly reads next to me each night?”

When Scott finishes, the students politely applaud. Enthusiastically, I think. But I am not sure until the student sitting next to me leans over and says, “Your husband is a genius.”

And so he is.

This morning, the day after his lecture, I struggle to remind myself of that student’s assessment. This is because Pop Pop appears in Nathan and Justine’s living room with a nickel-sized blob of opaque ointment on his left cheek, which is next to a dangling Band-aid and just below a strip of medical tape. A foam toe pad resides on his shoulder. His clothes are rumpled, his hair disheveled. He looks a tad deranged. He does not look like a genius.

“I think you might need some more Neosporin,” he says to Justine, my daughter-in-law. “Jim and I have used it all.”

“What?” she replies, puzzled.

“WHAT?” I say, exasperated.

The Neosporin is mine. As are the Band-aids, medical tape, and foam pads. All had been neatly packed with a pair of particularly sharp scissors in a small plastic bag, which I thought was in my suitcase. All were necessary to dress my foot recovering from an unfortunate mishap with a Verizon Backup Battery unit that landed on my foot four weeks ago. Obviously Jim had found the bag while playing with Pop Pop.

“Look, Granma, I fixed Pop Pop,” Jim merrily interjects.

“Well,” Scott says, “Jim had the Neosporin and Band-Aids, so I just assumed it was o.k. to use them.”

Today Scott does not sound like a genius.

“Forget about the Band-Aids,” I think. “When is it ever appropriate to hand a three-year-old a tube of antibiotic ointment and scissors?”

But I do not say what I think. Even though I know 9 ½  out of 10 parents across America would agree with me, I know such a conversation would not go well with my husband. He can easily outdebate me. Heck, in a matter of seconds, he could convince me that bandaging wounds is an age-appropriate, critical skill for three-year-olds in the Australian Outback that Jim should also master.

It does not take much effort to imagine how Jim came to find the tools to practice his rudimentary first-aid skills. When I left the basement, Pop Pop had been encouraging Jim as he jumped from our air mattress bed to the couch, over a rather swift river teeming with crocodiles. I should have foreseen that sometime between the fifteenth and twentieth jump Pop Pop would stop thinking like a grandpa and start thinking. Just thinking. Like a genius.

When Pop Pop starts thinking he does not talk, he does not listen, and he cannot hear. I imagine that Pop Pop would not have noticed that after twenty jumps Jim, no longer receiving positive acclamations from Pop Pop,  probably decided to ignore those crocodiles and set out in search of pirate treasure. I also imagine that when Jim saw my unattended suitcase, he probably concluded it was the most likely place to find that treasure. And I imagine that when Jim unzipped my suitcase without the slightest glance or harumph from the thinking Pop Pop, who sat only a few feet away, he interpreted that lack of notice as tacit approval and started searching for that treasure buried in my clothes, and when he found no jewels or coins, Jim undoubtedly decided my bag of Band-aids was his treasure. I also imagine that Scott, in his Zombie-like thinking state, absentmindedly abetted Jim’s adventure as a doctor, cutting the strips of medical tape for Jim, pulling off the backing for the sticky padding, or squeezing that last bit of ointment. And while I can only imagine what Jim was thinking, I have no doubt that Pop Pop was truly and absolutely so preoccupied with his thoughts that he did not see or hear a thing. This I know after thirty-five years of marriage.

So I am not entirely surprised by Jim or Scott. What does surprise me is my son Nathan.  He too was present in that Sub-Saharan tropical rainforest in the basement, albeit studying in the corner at his desk. Yet he too was oblivious. Nathan looks like Scott. He talks like Scott. I always knew he sometimes thinks like Scott. But it had never really occurred to me how precisely his process of his thinking mimicked his father’s.

What then is Jim’s future? I am pretty certain he will learn to think like a genius. The more pressing question is whether Jim, with a father and grandfather who frequently parent by benign neglect, will survive until adulthood?

Years ago, when my son Daniel was becoming aware of how the world works, we received a visit from a friend. In the process of leading a short discussion with my three children, he asked them a question. Anxious to be the one to answer, Daniel ran up to Tony and hoping to be called upon wildly waved his arm in front of Tony’s face. Then he yelled out, “Ooh! ooh! Ask me. Don’t ask Mom. She doesn’t think so good.”

The truth is I think just fine. But I do not think like a genius. Rather my thought process is more hardscrabble. And when it comes to my family, I think like a granny. In the Stornetta family that kind of protective and practical thinking is a very valuable asset, prized far above the most valuable rubies. For while the natural-born geniuses in our family are thinking about the futures of blockchains and bitcoins, we grannies simply keep our babies safe, assuring that at least some of our clan will survive.

A Numbers Game

Adella saw the remnants of a small, sinfully delicious chocolate cake on my kitchen island.

"That was a cake Pop Pop and I ate yesterday to celebrate the day we got married," I say.

"You weren't married?" she asks incredulously. If she were older I would suspect she was questioning my morality.

I laugh. "Oh, we were married a long time ago. But just like the way you celebrate the day you were born on your birthday, so we celebrate the day we were married on our anniversary every year."

That satisfies her.

Then I take a gamble. I ask, "Do you know how long ago it was that Pop Pop and Granma got married?"

She clearly understands that she is five and that Marshall is two. I really should not have asked a question, when I do not know how she will answer. But I am curious to see how far her concept of time goes. I am certain she will underestimate.

"A hundred years."

I laugh again. "No quite that long ago," I say.

"Fourteen years," she offers as an alternative.

And now it is time for Granma to give Adella a little math lesson at the same time that her mother is giving more advanced math lessons to her AB Calculus class.

"No, fourteen is not enough," I reply. "We have been married longer than fourteen years and less than one hundred. You need a number that is in-between fourteen and one hundred."

"Eighteen," she says.

She has, in fact, picked a larger number. But I decide to give her a little more help to get to the right number.

"No, your mother is thirty-one years old. She was born after we were married. You need a number that is more than thirty-one."

"Then it must be a hundred," she replies confidently.

At this point, Pop Pop, who has a snow day off from work unlike Adella's mother and is missing the fact that he is not giving math lessons to his AP Calculus class, says, "Let's count together."

So Adella starts, "14, 15, 16 . . ."

As she approaches 20, Pop Pop joins in to get her from the numbers that have a one-to-one correspondence in her mind to those numbers that seem to belong to an imaginary realm.

"30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35," Pop Pop says with Adella echoing him. "35 is the number of years we have been married," he pronounces exuberantly.

Is he so exultant because he considers it an achievement to have lived with me for so many years, I wonder.

Adella is unimpressed. Perhaps I should have agreed with her when she thought the number was one hundred, goosing the numbers just a bit to celebrate our achievement. After all, in her mind, and sometimes mine, thirty-five years is just as long as one hundred.