While walking through our neighborhood with my youngest granddaughter, I heard a rapping sound. We stopped, and I told Myah to listen: “That’s a woodpecker!” We stood still on the street until I saw the bird, which was working to find some insects beneath the shingles of a house. I pointed it out to Myah; we watched it work for awhile. She then wanted to go home to find it in our bird books, a desire that echoed one expressed by her cousin, my first granddaughter, Imani, who gladly followed me into the New Jersey woods in the search for birds.
When the country was free of the COVID-19 pandemic, I used to travel to New Jersey to spend time with my first two grandchildren, and their parents. When my grandson was very young, I offered to sit with him so that those parents could take a mini vacation to the pubs. Xavion was the first of the little people gifted to me by my daughters and the first to learn my “grampaw” name: “Cool Papa.” That night, as his parents partied, I learned of a ritual requirement for Xavion’s peaceful sleeping when he climbed from his toddler bed and came to me in the living room and gently whined, “Cool Papa, would you rub my back?” The hook, long set, was yanked deep into my heart. Xavi was four years old when his sister was born, and once he got over the yearning to nurse — “Mommy! She’s gonna drink it all up!” — he showed a sweet adoration of Imani and helped her to be comfortable with their Cool Papa.
The time that I spend with Myah reverberates with the sounds and habits of her two cousins. And her mother. Myah loves to go airborne, to be picked up and carried. She raises her arms to me and repeats the phrase her mother used: “Up, please,” and I carry on the tradition. When I put her to bed for her afternoon nap, she asks of me what her cousin Xavion did: “Rub my back?” She will come into my basement bedroom, climb into the bed with me and ask to “sungle.” Her cousin Imani used to wake and come to the fold-out bed that I slept on in her living room and ask to “snuggle” with me. Imani became my avid birder and would willingly go into the woods with me to see them. She called when the Carolina wrens hatched and told me that one of them had come into the house with her. My daughter Lisa was staying with me when her sister startled us by using the adverb “actually” in the appropriate context. Now, I hear Lauren’s daughter using that same adverb in the same, appropriate way.
I gave my young son an acoustic guitar that I never learned to play; he mastered it, along with the drums and keyboards. When Myah returns from visits with her uncle and grandmother to the home she shares with me, she will bring her toy ukulele from her room and hand it to me. Next will come her electronic drum set and a xylophone and then, we jam – she on drums or xylophone and me on the uke. She will occasionally take her xylophone mallets and beat them on the top of her djembe drum. Her cousin Xavion plays the trombone, and Imani, the saxophone. Music echoes everywhere.
The echoes of the lives of my three grandchildren are the returns of shouted joy into the canyons of love, and I am enriched by the sounds.
cjon3acd@att.net