Savoring the Many Faces of Grandparenthood

This is Anna.

She is vivacious, impishly twinkle-eyed. When I sit resting in my wing chair before dinner, drink in hand, Anna leaps upon me, walks up my frame like only a budding gymnast can, stomps on my stomach, stands on my shoulders, knocks off my glasses and causes me to spill my drink in my lap.

She calls me Grandpa. I feel like calling her more than that during that evening ritual of hers upon me. It always ends with a kiss. That heals everything. It’s remarkable how therapeutic a kiss can be from a little grandchild who is 3 1/2.

I know she is 3 1/2 because she reminded me again just the other evening, while she was walking all over me. She is very good at figures and words. She never says “you know” a dozen times in a sentence, or “um” about the same amount. Nor has she learned to elongate her vowels ridiculously in such words as good, school, fool.

This is Neil.

He likes to play thumping games of football with his older brother on the stairs leading to the hall just outside our bedroom, where his grandmother and I are drinking our morning coffee to fortify us for another day with three visiting grandchildren from Colorado. He is a bright, smiling, roundish, handsome little fellow. I’m grateful that he does not walk on me, and he is very good at figures and talking fine straight English, too. He also can read. I think Neil is 5.

This is Ben.

He is mad about fishing. He was hardly in the house for a day when, without consulting me, he bought a fishhook, panhandled a spool of black button thread from his grandmother and, with a stick and some cheese, went off to the seawall to catch fish.

Fortunately for my reputation, he failed. I would never have heard the last of it if he’d come home with a mess of corbina and bass. After that I provided Ben with one of my proper rods and reels, showed him where to find mussels in the bay and taught him to cast. He didn’t catch anything that way either, and I think he has lost confidence in my knowledge of angling.

Ben has all the intellectual attributes of his sister and brother, only he’s quieter and more serious minded, as befits an older brother who is 9--I think.

Except for Anna, I’m uncertain of all of our grandchildren’s ages. (I’ve just counted up on my fingers a total of seven grandchildren . . . or is it eight? Let’s see, there’s the new one, Isaac, in Evergreen, Colo. He makes eight.)

The years seem to melt by so kaleidoscopically that grandchildren’s birthdays, along with children’s birthdays, get all muddled up in my memory. My weak excuse for not remembering is that everybody has a lot birthdays if they live long enough, so why make a big thing out of them?

It’s an unsettling observation, but there are more nuts in a bag of peanuts than most people have birthdays in a lifetime. And this brings me to the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus that played in Anaheim. Anna, Neil, Ben and their mother, Kim Browne, were our guests at the circus.

If you’ve never seen a big, noisy, spectacular three-ring circus through the eyes, as it were, of three grandchildren who’ve never been to a circus before, then you’ve missed one of parenthood’s rare experiences.

For me it was a six-ring circus. My head was in a whirl trying to watch three rings and three faces. I saw the best expression on young faces it is possible to see. It is an expression you don’t see on children’s faces watching television. It is the expression of rapt wonder, of keen enjoyment, in seeing real live people and animals, not shadows, doing marvelous, disciplined things never dreamt of before. It is caused by the unique, immediate, bewitching spell of live theater.

And what did they like best about the circus? Neil and Ben agreed that the noisy, death-defying motorcyclists who rode around and around and upside down inside a huge grillwork globe were the finest--next to the clowns, the dancing elephants and the aerialists. Anna liked the aerialists and the acrobats best, and she said she wasn’t fooled by the costumed elephants.

“They were wearing lady’s clothes, but I knew they were elephants,” she said.

“And what did I like best?” they asked.

“You and you and you,” I said.

And then Anna walked up my body and stood on my shoulders, and I began wishing I was back watching the circus again instead of being in one at home.