Do You Know Where Your Son Is?

There was an insistent, authoritative knock on my hotel room door at 7 o'clock this morning. The kind of knock that is accompanied by a police officer shouting, "Open up. This is the police."

Startled at the clatter on this fine Saturday morning, I suspected it was not the police. For I am no criminal. And my three children, two in-laws, and four grandchildren were all sleeping in adjacent rooms. All part of an after Christmas visit to Great-grandmother Stornetta in Annapolis, Maryland.

I sprang from my bed and flew to the door in hopes the knocking would not wake the other guests. Alas, too slow. A second pounding resounded through the hall.

I threw open the door.

There was Jim, my robust, four-year-old grandson, his rocket ship and astronaut in hand.

"Good morning, Granma," he said sweetly. Then he ambled in. It was as though we were repeating a daily ritual.

"Hmmm," I said, with just a more pronounced hint of suspicion in my voice.

He put his rocket ship on the coffee table, knelt down next to it, and set about the business of playing. His astronaut danced in the air around his spaceship.

"Hmmm," I said, this time with a bit of disapproval. My "granma sense" was tingling.

But Jim was tone-deaf.

"Granma," he said, "Can you put this piece away for me. I don't want to lose it."

"Jim," I replied, addressing the matter head on. "Do your parents know where you are?"

"They told me I could come to your room," he replied, quietly, his head down.

My "granma sense" was more than tingling. It was shouting. I suspected that his parents had granted their permission yesterday afternoon, not this morning. Justine and Nathan reside in a different time zone, and they like to slumber late when they are on vacation. I knew they must be nestled in their beds dreaming of empty nests. Or a least the advent on Kindergarten.

I texted them, letting them know I was in possession of their son.

"Hmmm," I said again when there was no response. I decided to let sleeping parents lie.

So they slept and Jim played on. Until he got hungry. Only then did I notice he was shoeless.

I called Nathan. My phone rang several times until it went to voice mail. I called a second time.

"Mmrphrmp," Nathan finally said. Clearly he did not appreciate being so rudely torn from his dreams.

"Do you know where your son is?" I asked. I sounded a bit like the judgmental television announcer on those old public service announcements that used to run at 10 pm, asking parents if they knew where their children were.

"No?" he said, wary of my question and unsure of his answer. He knew Jim.

"Well, he's with me," I said. "And if you give me his shoes I will take him to breakfast."

So after the shoes were passed through the door crack, and after they were donned, Jim and I went to breakfast. Merrily Jim ate his way through eggs, three sausage, two cups of cranberry juice, and a waffle. (He does love his breakfast.)

And as I nursed a cup of orange juice, intermittently cutting a sausage or pouring some syrup, I had an epiphany about those ubiquitous hotel door latches, high above a child's reach. Indeed, when a Stornetta is in residence, those latches are not intended to keep burglars and criminals at bay, nor to allow one to prop open the door in order to quickly grab a bucket of ice from the machine down the hall without having to use a key. Rather the purpose of such latches is to keep Jim in.