Nothing starts a day better than to be awakened by an 8-year-old girl dancing at the foot of your bed.
The words above were written in 2017, when my 8-year-old granddaughter Imani was waking early and going into her living room to see if her Cool Papa was still asleep on the bed that pulls out from her family’s sofa. She is twelve now and as she told me, “soon to be a teenager.”
If she is not at some athletic event that she participates in, I can reach Imani via FaceTime video conference. She is the only one in her family who always answers my call. Her mother does not pay attention to her cellphone once she is off work, and her (now) 17-year-old brother rarely answers when I call his cell phone. When I call the house phone (yes: they still have one) I imagine that they do “rock, paper, scissors” to see who will answer it. I guess they all throw rocks and pulverize each other so that no one has to answer. But I can FaceTime Imani and she is always willing to talk to Cool Papa.
We had some good times together; Imani was the most eager of my first two grandchildren to go into the woods with me. She was with me when we saw a fawn curled up in the grasses at the edge of a line of trees. I told her to be still and quiet and we might see the mother come to get her baby. I still remember her breathless wonder as we watched a doe come out of the woods, and saw the fawn gather its spindly legs to stand and walk beside its mother. Imani would ask to go on a “bird walk” with me and would scribble in the little bird diary that I bought her. Her grandmother told me that when the two of them speak, Imani talks of spending “bird time” with me.
Her mother told me recently that she and her daughter were gathering books to be passed on to other readers. She told me this reluctantly, having claimed in the past that I forbade her, as a child, to ever give up a book once it was acquired. As the two of them reviewed the books to be retired from the bedroom, Imani pulled a book from the pile. “Not this one, Mom. Cool Papa braved 7 million kids to get this book for me.” (See “The Story of 7 Million Kids,” The Weekly View, March 29, 2018.) *sniff*
These pandemic days have kept me away from my first two grandbeauties, and I recognize that the time is nearing when Imani will not find conversation with me as interesting as it has been in the past. But she calls me now, and tells me of her desire to design clothing, subjects me to the indignity of angles, congruent and adjacent, or complement and supplement, giggling at my lack of math; she makes “mug cakes” while we speak, and then attends virtual band practice, playing her saxophone for me (and the band.) She can also play by ear: I intoned the notes leading into the song “Somewhere Over The Rainbow,” and she made me weep when she matched them.
Imani is long past the days of bouncing from the bed and running to look for me in the living room; she is neither an early nor enthusiastic riser in the mornings. But she still calls me, and when she plays me a song on her sax, it is much like dancing at the foot of my bed.
cjon3acd@att.net