My first bride called and left a message on a recent Monday evening; I knew what the message was going to be, without listening to it. I had already gotten a text from our daughter: “Horrible way to start, I know, but she’s fine.” Lisa, my eldest daughter, knows that I am a pool player on Mondays and does not call me if there is no dire emergency. But her text did break some of the rules we have established between ourselves. I had told her that it is not reassuring to start off a message by saying, “she’s fine.” That tells me that something bad has happened, and I have to hyperventilate while waiting to find out what it was. I would rather be told that the building fell down, but everyone made it out okay. My hyperventilating first bride had written a script in her head that was most dire, indeed, but the reality was that my granddaughter had an encounter with furniture that required her to go the ER to get her nugget stitched up. Her mother’s text message to me later that night was that all was okay. When I called to speak to Imani the next night, I asked her if she had been doing ballet and gymnastics on the furniture. She exclaimed — loudly — “I was just being a kid!”
Lisa said that the ER professional who came into the examination room introduced herself. My daughter replied, “Yes, we’ve met before, Stephanie.” The ER professional had helped to staple the meat hanging out from the whack on my grandson’s noggin the previous October. Stephanie laughed: “That is never good.” My granddaughter got three stitches in her forehead, and when she showed no signs of a concussion, she was sent home. When I called Lisa the next day to check on Imani, my daughter said to me, “I knew when I heard the scream that it was an ‘ER’ scream.”
I have written before of my granddaughter’s special way of interacting with life: she considers it a full-contact sport. Dance and gymnastics give her an outlet, but when she gets home, the walls, floors and ceilings are all the equipment of her personal gym, which includes the furniture. I have waved her off the arms of couches, the backs of chairs and the edges of end tables. In the latest incident, her brother — he of the nugget knock — said that Imani flipped off a chair and stuck the landing, then added a cartwheel that ended with her face slamming into a toy on the floor. At the ER, Imani was asked how she managed to bash her face. When she explained the series of events that led up to the hospital, the ER professional said something like, “I guess you were just being a kid.” Imani gobbled up that statement like a hungry pit bull, and regurgitated it to me when I called to check on her.
Imani will have her stitches removed by the time this appears in print, but it is unlikely that she will change her approach to life. The only thing that we — parents and grandparents — can do for our adventurous children is to guide them as much as we can through the bricks and thickets of the lives that they will live. They will all “fall down, go boom” (a description applied to my eldest daughter’s youthful mishaps).
Imani is 6, and she lives life at full tilt. But the wonder and delight of her dance with living is summed up when she says this:
“I’m just being a kid!”