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.