Keeping Track of the Days

Last year, my 11-year-old granddaughter and I decided to take up an email writing project in which every Sunday we would each write a ‘weekly report’ in which we would each detail at least three things that we had done that week and something about the events. She’s a home schooler and learned how to type early, but like anybody with a computer and typing skills, the actual skills of writing tend to drop off little by little, or not to get developed at all. Twenty years of writing email without any capital letters certainly hasn’t improved my work. I don’t have much experience with texting, so I haven’t those habits, that feel for words transmitted only as consonants. That’s more in her line, along with emoticons. But we both share the computer keyboard’s fondness for actual and near homophones: your, you’re, yore—all the same word, however you happen to be spelling it today.

Anyway, we began this in early January of 2008, and with the exception of one week, in the summer when she was actually visiting us, we kept it up every week. At the beginning, her ‘weekly reports’ tended to be a little vague and pretty short. ‘We had breakfast and hung around for awhile and then went swimming.’ But very quickly, she began to write more elaborate and careful accounts of what she was doing. Very quickly, I was given the gift of sharing some bits of her life that would never otherwise have been possible. I can talk to her on the phone, but she’s not likely to tell me all this stuff just on a phone call. It isn’t that she was letting me in on intimate secrets of her life. It was that she was letting me in on the dailyness of her life. Her Girl Scout activities; her trips with friends to museums or camp or Horse Bowl (a team competition that involves knowing a lot about horses), or whatever; her swimming meets, her ballet classes, her piano recital; her struggles with her young brother, those struggles that all siblings have; the books she was reading and the games she was playing; the trips she took. Everything familiar, everything made new from her eyes. After a few months, it was rarely a 3-event report, and never brief.

On my part, I sometimes had to struggle to keep up. I write with facility, but I had to really focus on what I had done during a week that was capable (or worthy) of being reported to an 11-year-old. Easiest when there were adventures with the ponies across the street from us to report on. Some weeks, on Friday (the report was due on Sunday), I’d try to think of something to do so that I could write about it to her: go to the beach, to a parade, to a concert. I quickly realized how very much of my life is internal and not easily conveyed to anyone else.

So we have both learned something: she to write more easily and to write better; I to try to ensure that there is something external in my life, not just thinking and reflecting. And we have surely learned something about one another that would have been hard to achieve otherwise. But now we are at the end. We could go on for another year, I suppose, but we decided to end the experiment as the year ended. Soon, I’ll get around to printing up the by-now 50,000 word set of ‘weekly reports’ so that, years from now, she will know what both she and I were doing in a long ago year. I have no idea whatsoever what I did when I was eleven: at least not in any specific sense. She’ll have it.

And now we are engaged in a new experiment: a virtual book club. We’re starting with her and my older daughter and one of my quilting students and her mother and me. And we’re reading Oliver Twist, the first English language novel that had a child as its central character.

The Long Goodbye

The kids turn eighteen, they move out of the house, and you start saying the long good-bye. Which is to say, that you keep saying ‘goodbye’ to them, over and over, year after year. I suppose you keep saying ‘hello!’ too, but it’s the goodbye that stays in my mind. After five weeks of staying with us, our oldest granddaughter is leaving today to make her way back to her California home and then, a week later, to UC Berkeley to begin her freshman year in college.

She has done us an extraordinary favor coming to spend this time with us. When she was a baby, I used to take care of her one day or one afternoon a week, but when she turned one, her parents moved with her to the Midwest and we, eventually, moved to the Northwest. As a result, our visits with her and them have been regular but not frequent: that is, not frequent as in every week. We have watched her grow up largely from a distance, watched a bit here and a piece there, as is so common now as children not only move out, but leave for far away with the grandchildren in tow. I should be grateful, of course, that my children have at least stayed in the U.S. A friend’s three children each moved to a different continent. The difference of a time zone or two pales when you compare it with an entire continent away and even an international date line.

These five weeks have been filled with lots of activities (rock-climbing, kayaking, cooking—she learned to make ravioli and pie crust, for example), but also with lots of conversation, which is far and away the best part from my perspective. I was fearful, before she came, that she’d be expecting a kind of Disneyland vacation and, although I suppose it would be possible to provide it given the many possibilities of the Vancouver-Seattle nexus, we weren’t really planning to provide it. Fortunately, she seemed open to the possibilities of ‘meeting the grandparents.’ Ed and I do feel well met; and we think and feel that we have met her as she stands on this cusp between childhood and adulthood. Now we look forward to hearing from her as she progresses through Berkeley, even as we know that we are beginning that same long goodbye to her, as well as continuing the long goodbye to her dad.

Spending extended time with an eighteen-year-old inevitably makes you think about what it was like to be eighteen yourself. By that age, I was finishing my first year of college in Idaho, and I, too, was planning to go to UC Berkeley a year later (a goal I never reached, though). I am sure I was naïve, guileless, and unworldly, given that I had almost never left my small, Idaho hometown. And yet, looking back in my own memory, I don’t see the naivete, the guilelessness, the unwordliness that was doubtless there because I never knew about it; even in memory it has been as if varnished over with all that came later. A long goodbye to one’s self, as well, I guess. Turning eighteen looks less Janus-faced than I would have thought: not so much looking both backwards and forwards, but more a division between what went before and what will be a long process of becoming. Which serves to balance the parents' and grandparents' recognition of the beginning of that long goodbye.

Swing Time

For the past several days, we’ve been learning West Coast Swing dancing, compliments of the 18-year-old. She’s off to Berkeley shortly where she is hoping to really learn how to do it and to find someone to really dance with. But in the meantime, there’s Ed and me. And there’s YouTube. She calls up some videos showing people doing it. Then she calls up some instruction videos, same source. And we watch intently on our fairly big, flat screen monitor. It’s 1, 2, 3 4, 5&6. Or something like that.

We try singly, then partner up, then back to singles. And we sort of get it. And then we lose it. We give up on the YouTube videos and try to find some music in our own CD collection, since the YouTube videos are fairly short in length. Maybe Abba? No, too, too, too fast. Maybe Manhattan Transfer? Should work but doesn’t. Maybe I’ll just sing ‘42nd Street’? No one waxes enthusiastic about that attempt. It turns out that we have only singing music, and no dancing music in our CD collection.

Finally, we borrow a Fred Astaire CD from a quilting friend and we discover that ‘Swonderful’ works perfectly. Eventually, near exhaustion, I go to bed, only to find myself lying there, moving my feet in that 1,2,3 and 4,5&6 pattern. Do I have the triplet right? If I do, why am I ending up on my right foot, which I need for the next 1? Can’t sleep, can’t dance.

I’ve never been much of a dancer. My older brother taught me to jitterbug in the early 50’s, but I was never sure he knew how to do it, so didn’t trust that I was actually learning anything useful. When I was in high school, maybe 14 or 15, I went to an LDS Stake House dance and danced with an 18-year-old who obligingly told me I was a terrible dancer and didn’t follow. That probably sealed my doom.

The sixties worked pretty well for me because during that time we just gave up on the idea of partners who do the same thing but in reverse. I can move my feet to the music; I can keep the time and even feel it as I move. But I don’t get the idea that we all have to be doing the same thing at the same time. I like doing my own steps, my own way. Which may be true in more ways than dancing.

Nevertheless, there we are, dancing to YouTube, learning the steps that I will sooner or later refuse to follow. Ed and I and the granddaughter are all in giggles by the time the first evening of dance lessons is over. Ed and I couldn’t be more pleased to be doing this with her, couldn’t be more surprised to be doing this at all. We tend to think about what we can do for the grandchildren, and here is a grandchild doing something for us, instead. Even if I never do West Coast Swing dancing again, we’ll always have this week in August. Which is at least as good as always having Paris.

Summer at the Cottage

August brings the flood of family and friends for those who live in Point Roberts and all the other resort communities around. Houses slightly too small for the number suddenly accommodated; tight quarters at the dinner table, not quite enough beds, and an endless amount of dishes constantly gathering up in the sink. Grandchildren who are amazingly bigger and older than they were when last seen. Hard to know why this is so amazing, but somehow it always is. Surely we don’t expect them to grow smaller or even stay the same? I think it is more that they are so amazingly themselves at, say, ten, we can’t quite imagine they will give all that up to become some other amazingly themself person of eleven.

And then they get to be old enough to be one of the grownups, or at least almost one. A near 18-year-old grandchild seems to be thinking about whether she’ll ever be considered an adult, while all the grownups are thinking about how very adult she suddenly has become. Point Roberts is full of people who have been coming here for summers all their lives and their parents and even grandparents share that history. Thus, it seems that summers are particularly the time where you are aware of all that family history, of who they were and who they are becoming and who they indeed have solidly become. I’m not particularly interested in genealogy or in nostalgia, but both begin to fight for room in my field of attention on these occasions.

I find myself glancing at a grown daughter and suddenly noticing for the first time ever that she looks, from the side, rather like my aunt, my mother’s younger sister, a woman who has been dead for 15 years and whom I have not seen for 45 years. Her image is there inside my brain though because we spent summer vacations at her house in southern California for a few years after the war. A grandchild, we all suddenly notice, looks surprisingly like an older cousin, whom we never before thought she looked like. When did this happen? Is it something new or had we been unobservant before? It is all that history of summer vacations rattling around inside our heads, I think, mixing up our memories, comparing and reassessing our memories.

Today, we went to Maple Beach at low tide on a cloudy and occasionally rainy day, and, as time passed, we found ourselves in more water than I had expected, resulting in soaked shoes and socks and my long pants rolled up above my knees to stay dry. Walking back through eel-grass filled deep water, I was surprised at how strong the tide was, moving me along. But that’s how this week feels: the tide coming in strong and much more quickly than I had expected.

Generational Drift

We are lucky to have our oldest granddaughter (18) spending a month with us before she makes her way off to UC Berkeley. It’s oddly difficult being a grandparent. Well, it’s easy when the grandchildren are little because mostly you hold them and then you play with them. Then as they get a little older, you still play with them, but the games are more complex, and you marvel—to put it kindly--at the way their parents are raising them. A little later, you are still restraining yourself from criticizing the parents, but you are beginning to think about starting to criticize the grandchildren (these are the early teenage years). But the thing about it is, I have very little idea of what the grandparent role is actually supposed to be about. I don’t know whether I’ve been badly cast or this is just one more of those things (like being a parent) that you just have to invent as you go along. And good luck!

I had only one set of grandparents and mostly that involved my grandmother cooking for me and my grandfather frightening me because he tended to yell. Not so much at me, but it always seemed possible that I might be next. I saw them occasionally when I was in my 20’s and after my grandmother had a stroke and my grandfather took over housekeeping, our conversations were fairly limited. With my grandmother, who had lost most of her ability to get around, there was TV to talk about; with my grandfather, it was more like talking about grocery shopping and exchanging recipes, since each of us was fairly new to housekeeping.

When a grandchild comes to spend a month with us, she gets the full range of our isolation of our mobility: the two weeks on the Sunshine Coast and then the two+weeks in Point Roberts, the ferry rides, the border crossing, the whole 9 yards, our entire peculiar set of arrangements. Fortunately, kids come equipped with computers nowadays and that engages quite a bit of their time. I mostly read and sew and garden and cross international borders, and so I offer those activities if they have any appeal. And all three of us cook for one another. But Ed comes into his own in this situation. For the past week, the granddaughter has been rock climbing and kayaking on alternate days. And as preparation, she climbs the side of our two-story log house.

This is how the culture has changed, maybe. Or maybe, it’s just chance variation. But I simply cannot imagine any of the grandparent people I ever knew 54 years ago (not my grandparents or the grandparents of friends) doing these things with their 18 year-old grandchildren. And perhaps that’s why we have to invent what the grandparent role is each generation. But, neither can I imagine any of the 18-year-olds that I knew or the one that I was 54 years ago even thinking of spending a month of summer with their grandparents. So, perhaps the grandchildren are having to invent their role as well. Many thanks to this granddaughter for inventing a role that gives us so very much pleasure.