When I attended my 25th high school reunion, the reunion committee had organized, among other festivities, a banquet and boat ride. As I danced the night away on the boat ride, I remember thinking that I had attended high school with some really old people. At the banquet, awards were given out for various categories, such as “Greatest Distance Traveled” to the reunion site in Pittsburgh, Penn. I attended the reunion with my second bride, and we received an award for “Youngest Children,” as I was the only 43-year-old in attendance who had a two-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son. And Lauren, that 2-year-old from 1990, has now become my second “grandchild delivery device.” My youngest daughter, though fearful, does allow her father to spend Tuesdays with his third grandchild.
I remember a time, about 12 years ago, when I sat with my first grandchild, my Xavion Crosby. He knew me and smiled at me often as I sang and played with him. When I would sing out, “Meet me in the mall,” he would finish, “it’s goin’ down!” He would then say to me, “You’re crazy, Cool Papa,” a statement learned from his mother. And one night, when his parents went out to play and left him in my care, the two-year-old climbed out of his bed and came to me, and asked, “Would you rub my back, Cool Papa?” When he was four, he got a little sister, and when I turned my camera away from him and toward Imani, he inserted himself into the pictures, playing for the camera and posing with her in creative ways. I have compiled an immense digital record of my first two grandbeauties, and now they have their first cousin on their mother’s side.
I was at the hospital with my youngest daughter when she delivered the second of my two granddaughters into the world. Myah will be three months old in the first week of August, and we have had some moments, she and I. She was just past a month old when I locked her into the combination car seat/stroller and rolled her through the sunlight and around Irving Circle. I spoke to her as we rolled, though she may not have been able to see me: the mesh screen across the small opening in the stroller’s cover was small enough to block most of the sunlight. But I was loud as I sang to her, and we stopped beneath a tree in the front yard of my apartment to listen to a song sparrow trying to do a duet with me. I named each bird I saw in our travels, and once inside, I changed her and fed her and made up a song about the way she pukes on my shoulder.
Lauren brings Myah to me on Tuesdays, when I am in town, and my granddaughter seems content with the arrangement. I try to imprint myself on her, and she spends very little time out of my arms. When I do relinquish her little body to a playmat or a reclining swing, I keep my face in front of her blue eyes, singing songs and talking incessantly, telling her about the birds on my feeders and the cat below and how much like her mother she looks.
Lauren passed a separation milestone with her daughter on a recent Tuesday: Cool Papa (my “grampaw” name) got 7 1/2 hours with Myah, the longest time that she has been away from her mother. Everything was all right, as I sang to her in Stevie Wonder’s voice, “isn’t she lovely?” Tuesday has become a lovely time.