My cell phone sang with the unique sound of an incoming FaceTime call, and I quickly identified it as coming from my 12-year-old granddaughter, Imani. I lunged for my phone and slid the bar to “accept” and her face appeared on the screen. “There’s a bright red Cardinal in the tree outside my window,” she said.
I’ve not been able to see my first two grandchildren for an achingly long, COVID-19 period of time. When I would travel to New Jersey to see Imani and her older brother, Xavion, both of them would accompany me to the various outdoor places that verdant state offers, but when it came to my passion for bird watching, Imani was the child who was more interested. I have a picture of her carrying my camera and writing in the bird diary that I gave her. In the woods adjacent to their Cedar Knolls home, Imani would walk with me, and when we heard a bird’s call, we would both be still and look for the bird. This was good experience for when the Carolina wrens built a nest beneath her balcony, and the birds hatched and fletched onto the ground in front of her door. She called me then to tell me that one of the birds had ridden on her foot into the house.
On this day, Imani called me while she was in between virtual classes, at 1 p.m.. But she did have homework to do, and she giggled when she told me it was math. She knows, from her mother, that I don’t do math. She proceeded to bedazzle me with “Angles,” both 2 and 4, and what was “congruent,” and “adjacent;” there was also some buzzy-stuff about “complement,” and “supplement.” I’ll take “language arts” for a billion dollars, Alex.
Imani signed off to attend a virtual class, then called me again at 2:27 p.m. It was during this second session that I got to see her brother’s new hairstyle, her mother’s T-shirt, and to hear her practice her saxophone. I asked Imani if she could play “Somewhere Over The Rainbow,” and she could not. I hummed the notes, and she made me weep by playing what she heard from me: “Over The Rainbow.” (Her mother mocked me, but noted that she tells everyone that her leaky tear ducts were inherited from her father.) I’ve called my first two grandchildren both “grandbeauties” and “grandpuppies.” They should both be graduated to grandbeauties as Imani is twelve, and Xavion is nearing 17 years old, both ages far outside of the puppy range.
Imani is like most people of her age in that she can communicate on a FaceTime call without having to see much face. I saw walls, ceilings and kitchen cabinets as she kept up a running commentary while she made something she called a “mug cake,” asserting that she was a “professional baker, Ok?” She also designs jewelry and clothes, including dresses. Her mother recently posted a video of Imani’s magical folding cubes, concoctions of cardboard and tape that she put together with the aid of a YouTube tutorial.
A few years ago, my daughter called to tell me that “Someone wants to talk to you.” My granddaughter was disappointed to find when she woke up, that I was not in my customary place on the couch in her living room. I spent a lot of time traveling to New Jersey and watching my babies as they played with their friends, or taking them fishing and bird watching. I’m lucky that my grandpuppy Imani is still interested enough to call me.
cjon3acd@att.net