What a bargain grandchildren are! I give them my loose change, and they give me a million dollars’ worth of pleasure. (Gene Perret)
Rebe (Rebecca) and I are the only persons in the playground at two in the afternoon on a Wednesday. It’s Grandma and Rebe time, those precious moments when I take our middle granddaughter out of the house so Grandpa can get her cousin Ella ready for a nap. Then, Rebe and I will pick up Kate from school.
The playground soon turns into an imaginative world.
“Come on up to the top with me, Grandma?” Rebe calls from the other side of an orange tunnel, on a metal portion of one of the play structures.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t consider it. I mean, this stuff was designed for children between the ages of five and twelve. I hesitate mentioning how many times I have been twelve. Besides, there’s no sign mentioning weight limit. However, Rebe doesn’t have anyone else to play with.
“Okay, sweetie. But if there is any hint of a creaking sound, I’m going to have to go back.”
The wide, but low tunnel between slide and steps doesn’t groan. I’m grateful that I am barely five feet tall. Perhaps a parent or two has needed to rescue a sobbing child once in awhile. Maybe the engineer had that in mind. Nevertheless, I regret a hardy lunch.
“This is kindergarten,” she announces in her official I’m-the-teacher voice, then begins mimicking the sign language posted in one corner. Good. Reality. I can follow this, even with an almost five-year-old girl as instructor. Then Rebe says she is going to sit in the old person corner of the classroom—the entrance to the slide. (The way downhill, I guess)
“In the where?” I’m lost again.
“I’m an old person now, so that’s where I go in the kindergarten room.”
“Okay.” Rule number one in let’s-pretend interaction: Accept any scene as long as it is innocuous. “How old are you, old person?”
“Ninety-nine.”
Well, at least that truly is old. I expected her to say nineteen or twelve—or something closer to my age.
I break pretend mode and ask, “When you go to kindergarten next year, can I go with you? I didn’t get to go when I was five.”
She shrugs. “Sure.”
That game ends. Perhaps I broke the spell. We go to a bench with a steering wheel attached at ground level. Rebe is now my mother. The front and back seats merge in the imaginative world—no sense mentioning inconsistencies. That would only confirm my lack of pretending experience.
“Can I drive, Mommy?” I ask.
“No, Mommy has to do it.”
“Because it is dangerous for kids to drive?”
“Yes,” she says with mock certainty.
But I have brought too much adult truth into play. “Why is it dangerous for kids to drive?” she asks later as we leave to get her older sister.
“Because kids don’t know how to do it yet.”
But that doesn’t mean you aren’t someone now, I think. That what you know, decides much of anything. Sometimes simply being is enough. I notice that the tightness in the back of my neck from weeks of stress, has relaxed.
“I love you, Grandma.”
“I love you, too.”
terrypetersen 