My youngest daughter, with a keen eye for history, asked if I could watch my granddaughter on Wednesday, January 20th. Since I have been replaced as primary caretaker for the 2.7 version of my youngest granddaughter — she goes to daycare while her mother works, and her grandmother picks her up in the evening — I readily agreed. I don’t get to spend much time with Myah these days, so I wanted to roll around on the floor again, that pesky, history-making inauguration thing notwithstanding.
Just as I did with her cousins, my first two grandchildren, I am 100% invested in the care of Myah. I do not give her a tech device as a diversion so that I can do something else. She has a TV in her room and what she calls “MY PHONE,” a cell phone that her mother allows her to use to watch videos. I turn off all the tech stuff and engage with her, keeping her interested in drawing, painting, singing, dancing, playing hide-and-seek and “catch me!” She has 756,283 containers of what she calls “shlime,” but which are really Play-Doh. And on inauguration day, I did not turn on radio station WSIE so that we could listen to classical music as we made cakes and pies and cookies out of inedible plastic. I turned on the TV and watched the inauguration ceremonies.
In January 1961 I was an 8th grade student who, along with the rest of his school, watched in snowy black and white as 86-year-old Robert Frost shakily read his poem “The Gift Outright” at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. Sixty years later, I split my attention between the future and the present as I worked with Myah to make “cakes,” and “pies,” and listened to Amanda Gorman’s recitation of her magnificent poem.
With one ear and one eye focused on the TV, I helped Myah pick out colors of Play-Doh that she wanted. She ask me to “play me,” and I do play with her. I was startled to hear my granddaughter repeat what television commentator Gayle King said about young girls seeing Kamala Harris being sworn in: “I want to be just like that,” Myah parroted, never raising her head from her “slime” contraptions. But when Harris was sworn in, I placed Myah on my lap, pointed at the TV, and told her to “look.” We clapped together, and her only memory of the event will be through this record, should her mother save it for her to read.
On Monday, January 18th, I was an attendant at a Zoom meeting with my first bride’s family gathering, where their history in Noblesville, Indianapolis and Franklin Indiana was reviewed for those who gathered. In February 2018, I wrote “A Black History Story” for my first two grandchildren, about their mother’s family, many of whom were from Indiana, and one of whom served in the United States Colored Infantry, Company B during the Civil War. I’ve not seen my first two grandbeauties in person since December 2019; on that Monday, I got to see then virtually, listening to the family’s history. Two days later, I held their cousin on my lap and pointed out a momentous occasion for her, a moment that her mother missed.
A good friend sent me a text saying that he and his wife listened to Nina Simone’s song, “New World Coming,” an oblique reference to his readership of my December 2020 column, “Compassion.” I want that “new world” for my three grandpuppies, and I know that Myah will be able to join with her cousins in joy.
cjon3acd@att.net