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.

A Perfect Storm

It was a perfect storm. It was late Sunday afternoon after dinner. Four sated adults talking to each other, not quite attentive to the conditions brewing upstairs. 

It was a pair of adult scissors, too easily accessible in a corner of Granma’s kitchen. A five-year-old itching to practice her recent mastery. 

It was a second floor landing above an open staircase in the front hall at Granma’s house. A two-and-a-half-year-old fascinated by testing the limits of gravity. 

It was a recently filled basket of snack-size bags of Goldfish crackers and Nilla Wafers. The five-year-old so irresistibly drawn to the slippery, thin texture of the shiny, puffy snack bags that after practicing her cutting skills to open a bag for her brother, she furtively carried all the rest of the bags upstairs where she neatly cut the tops off each of them. (Hey, at least she didn’t cut her brother’s hair, like her mother once did.) 

All these factors combined for a perfect storm of goldfish and cookies raining down up Granma’s stairs yesterday. 

Given the reactions of the parents, the chances of such a storm occurring more than once are rare. Although cleaning up the the storm's aftermath with the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner seemed more like a game than a consequence to the children. 

Granma thinks she is going to wait a few weeks for the weather to clear before she restocks her snack basket. 

A Matter of Life and Death

Grandparents are supposed to be warm and fuzzy. Usually I am. I let Marshall, who relishes skin-to-skin contact, rub my skin whenever he is tired. I allow Jim just a few jumps on my family room furniture whenever he is excited. (Perhaps I can justify replacing my twenty-year-old, now-that-the-kids-are-grown couch with a new now-the-grandchildren-are-grown model. ) And I hand Adella the Roku remote a bit too often. But when it comes to discipline. Well, . . . let’s just say, I frequently deflect to my children, their parents. They can play bad cop to my good cop.

But sometimes, sainted as we grandparents are, we get frustrated. And when we are frustrated, we say words we regret. Today was such a day. The minute I said them, I knew I should not have. And despite wishing all day that I had not said them, I could not take my words back.

The morning began with a text from Pop Pop. He had forgotten his insulin pump again. Now it might seem unusual for someone whose life depends upon such a device to simply forget to attach it after his morning shower. But Pop Pop, who has had the weight of the world on his shoulders lately, did not slept well last night and he just simply forgot to reattach it. So he was dependent upon me, his angel of mercy, to deliver his insulin pump to him. 

When I got Pop Pop’s text, the kids were still in their pajamas. And very rambunctious. I knew it would be a herculean effort to get the kids dressed and out the door this morning. I warned Scott that my pump run might take a little longer than usual.

“Adella and Marshall,” I announced to the children, “Pop Pop forgot his pump. We’ve got to get dressed and take it to him.”

“But I don’t want to. It takes too long,” Adella whined. She clearly remembered the long ride the last time we took Pop Pop his pump. “Why do we have to take it to him?”

“Because he cannot leave work,” I replied. “And this pump is very important to him. We must get dressed.”

“I’m not going with you,” she protested.

I let her be for a few moments. I knew I might need to circle around the issue a few times to achieve my goal of getting all three of us dressed and out the door. So I went to my bedroom and threw on some clothes, some regular clothes. The last time I took Scott his pump, I looked like a hobo. Today, I was determined to look a little more presentable. Besides I figured if I got the kids in the car, we might as well also stop at library for story time afterwards.

Dressed, I came back to the family room. I reminded Adella again. She responded by stripping and running to the bathroom. 

After her potty break, she danced back to the family room, a few pirouettes followed by several slides down the smooth hardwood floors as she gleefully sang, “I’m naked. I’m naked.” On any other day, I might have admired the freedom of her nakedness and the joy of her song. But today I needed her dressed.

“I need you dressed,” I repeated, amping up the seriousness of my voice.

She promptly pulled on three different pairs of panties and declared, “Look at me. I’m dressed.”

At least that’s progress, I thought, and went to work on Marshall. I changed his poopy diaper and dressed him. 

Adella was down to one pair of panties by the time I finished with Marshall. But then she began dancing a taunting dance, one intended to egg me into chasing and grabbing her. I did not give chase. At five, she is too old to chase. And at my age, I am far too old to chase her.

“Pop Pop really needs our help,” I repeated. 

Then I lowered my voice register and increased my volume to serious Granma mode, a tone I rarely use, a stage akin to DEFCON 3, so rarely used that it usually shocks my grandchildren scurrying into action. “Please get dressed, NOW.” 

“I don't want to,” Adella pouted, deaf to my histrionics.

“But if we don’t take the pump to Pop Pop right now, he will get sick. He needs his insulin,” I said.

“But why?” she replied loudly and defiantly. “Why? Why do we have to go to his work? Why can’t he come home? WHY?”

Enough was enough. I snapped. 

“Why?” I said. “Because Pop Pop will die without his insulin.”

I regretted saying the D-word immediately. But I knew what had been said could not be unsaid and that given Adella’s memory, I might be writing checks for therapy in twenty years. It was unfair of me to place the burdens of life and death on a five-year-old. Furthermore, it was a conversation reserved for parents, not grandparents.

I reflected on my conversations with my own children about death. Because of cancer and heart disease, my parents had begun walking a tightrope between life and death five years before my children were even born. I had talked openly and frankly about death with them from the time they were young. Of course, sometimes my conversations were misconstrued by their young minds, as when Nathan, about the same age as Adella now is, began telling anyone who cared to ask that his grandfather ate too much ice cream and then died. But my children at some level understood death as a part of life.

And now I had circumvented an opportunity for my daughter to have a discussion with her own daughter. True, they had discussed death with Adella two months ago when Great-Grandpop Wake had passed away, but his death had seemed more remote. He was much older and lived many miles away. Her greatest concern was that Great Grandpop’s memorial service conflicted with her best friend’s Bruce’s birthday party, a dance party, no less. Pop Pop, on the other hand, was a part of Adella’s daily life. I had unwisely upgraded an urgent situation into a matter of life and death. Oh, how I wished that I had framed the urgency of the situation in terms of life, not death, like my daughter who, when her impish son steals her pump while she showers, reminds him that she needs her insulin pump to live.

Nonetheless, my regrettable words did inspire immediate action. Soon Adella was dressed, and we were all strapped in my car. 

“Hurry up, Granma,” Adella, she who had dawdled, urged as I started the car. “You need to drive fast. We don’t want Pop Pop to die.”

Granma did not speed, at least no more than usual, but we made it to the high school in record time. Once I was parked, I texted Pop Pop, then called. Three times. But he was busy doing what teachers do--teaching. 

“Scott, Scott, Adella’s here,” Adella yelled from the backseat each time she heard his voice mail greeting over the bluetooth car speaker.

And indeed she was. Ready to save the day by delivering his pump. I was less fervent, just hoping Scott would see my texts or listen to my messages, for I did not want to unbuckle the carseats, zip coats, and shuffle my two little charges into the high school.

We sat in the car for a few minutes, waiting. Marshall expectantly squirmed in his seat. 

"Well," Adella said after a while and then paused. It was clear she had been thinking and was ready to make a pronouncement. 

“I’ll miss Pop Pop if he dies,” she said as matter-of-factly as if she were commenting on the state of the weather or what she had eaten for lunch at school.

And then I knew. I would not need to write any checks for therapy after all. Adella was not nearly as traumatized as I by my warnings of Pop Pop's death. 

Eventually, we got out of the car, rushed through the winter cold to the school, and were buzzed into the building. Soon four little feet were on tiptoes and four little hands grasped at the edge of the security guard’s tall desk. Only two little eyes peered over the desk at the very congenial security guard, for despite his best efforts, Marshall could not quite see over the top. He grunted as he tried to pull himself up.

“We have Scott’s insulin pump,” Adella announced proudly as she tried to reach over the desk to pass the pump to the guard.

“Why don’t you give it to him yourself?” the guard suggested, and then paged Scott. 

In a few minutes, Pop Pop was walking down the center of a very long, empty school hall. 

“Look, there’s Pop Pop,” I said and the children ran off down the hall to him, Adella holding the pump aloft.

Pop Pop saw them and grinned widely. Then as they neared him, he stopped and squatted down. Adella jumped into his arms. Marshall, just happy to be out of the car and running down the hall like a typical two-year-old, missed his mark and ran right past Pop Pop. Agile beyond his years, Pop Pop leaned back and scooped him up. 

Then the bell rang. And as students erupted from the classrooms and spewed into the halls, Pop Pop embraced Adella and Marshall, shielding them from the noisy swirl of students and backpacks and adolescent angst. He looked at me, smiling, basking in this brief moment of everyday ordinariness. Fully alive. At least for today.