My first granddaughter was thumping and thundering around in the background as I spoke to her mother on the phone. Imani was packing for a retreat that she was to attend that weekend but halted her preparations when she overheard her mother give me important “teen-formation” about her brother.
“What! He has a new girlfriend? And he didn’t tell me? I’m calling him right now!”
Imani’s brother Xavion will be 20 years old in March and is a sophomore at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pa., which is not far from their home in Cedar Knolls, New Jersey. 15-year-old Imani is close to her brother, and protective of him. She shared his pain when his first serious relationship crumbled and is apparently on “bulldog alert” for anyone new who might bump into her brother’s emotional pilings. My conversation with her mother was overridden by Imani’s loud exclamations of sisterly concern, and the speakerphone sound of a number being dialed. “He’s not answering!” Imani cried out in the background, continuing, “I’m gonna keep calling until he answers.” The speaker-phone buzz was soon interrupted by Xavion’s bass: “Hullo.”
I call my grandson a “frat rat” since he has moved into the Alpha Pi Lambda fraternity house, having become an “Apple Pi” himself. Whatever “studies” he might have been up to that night were interrupted by his sister’s inquisition: “Who is she? Where is she? Why didn’t you tell me?” The speakerphone picked up my voice in the background of this interrogation and my grandson tried a deflective move: “Is that Cool Papa?” Imani wasn’t having it and continued to harangue her brother while she slammed clothes into luggage in preparation for her overnight, school sponsored retreat. The retreat was dubbed “DEIB,” which is an acronym for “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging,” all of which are things that her school encourages.
Imani is a high energy athlete who plays soccer, runs track, and recently scored her first points in basketball. She has also immersed herself in Korean culture, initially stimulated by K-Pop (Korean popular) music. She has written an independent study program for herself and gotten a teacher to sponsor it, and plans to go to Korea with my niece, who was stationed there when she was in the U.S. Army. “S’arn” (sergeant) Kelli Daniels is as excited as Imani about visiting the country in which she had spent so much time with her two sons.
As her grandfather and mother closed out their conversation, Imani finished her packing for the retreat, still vocalizing her disappointment in her brother for his failure to apprise her of his newest romantic engagement. I visualized her storming about the apartment, muttering her discontent with Xavion’s failure to keep her in the loop about the life he is living. I flashed back to her younger self leaping onto his back and wrestling him to the floor; commandeering his Hoverboard and showing off her dancing moves and following him down the street with her grandfather to the basketball court where they both honed their skills.
I’m sure that my daughter did not envision the teenaged storm produced by her daughter evolving from the quiet child who had “adopted” poor lonely frogs, bunnies, and crayfish that she found in the woods behind their house; the girl who had stood motionless with her grandfather as we watched a doe emerge from that wood to claim its fawn; the girl who had called me to help her to rescue a Carolina Wren (“Imani and the Carolina Wrens,” Weekly View, July 4, 2018.)
Batten down the hatches, mom: A storm’s coming.
cjon3acd@att.net