Early one recent morning as I stirred awake, I slid my hand across the sheet and encountered a hard, flat object: a book. Though barely awake, I smiled at the memory of how it came to be underneath the sheet and comforter that had warmed me through the night, remembering that my youngest granddaughter had brought “Good Dog Carl” with her when we hid together.
Myah is 2 ½ years old and likes to play “hide and seek,” though she has a unique understanding of how the game is played. She begins with the format she learned from me, placing her hands over her eyes and counting while I find a hiding place. She finishes with “ready or not, here I come” then, looks for me. But she cheats: she only partially covers her eyes, and peering through her fingers, follows me to my hiding spot. Dropping her hands, she pretends to look for me, calling out, “Clop, where are you” in imitation of my inquiring whisper. When she hides, I wander about the room, gently calling out for her; she giggles to give me a hint as to her location, though she rarely hides her whole body. She will lay on the floor beneath her toy slide, with nothing concealed but her head, giggling as I approach, waiting for me to exclaim, “There she is!”
Myah has learned a new word and concept. When her mother carries her down the steps to my basement room to say, “good night” she now insists that we hug, “together.” She understands the first definition of the adverb: “with or in proximity to another person or people.” In 1967 the R&B group The Intruders released the song, “Together,” and I can hear their voices singing when Myah cries out to me or her mother, “Let’s run together!” The other day while her father was visiting, she included him in the hugging ritual. “You’re making this awkward,” her mother laughed, as we four – mother, father, grandfather and child – “hugged together.” Which is not to imply that guys don’t hug, for we do; we just don’t often do the “Geico bundle hug.” When Myah calls out “get me Clop,” (her conflation of Cool Pop) I chase her from the living room, down a short hallway, into and through the kitchen and back into the living room, a circle that she, at 2 ½ years-old, is capable of running forever. Now, she’ll halt and call out to her mother: “Let’s run together!” They gallop around the course with me stomping and roaring behind them. Her newest modification to “Hide and Seek” is to hide together. It doesn’t matter that no one is left to seek for us, as long as we are together in hiding.
In the week following the publication of this issue of the paper, my oldest daughter will celebrate her December 22nd birthday. (She came home from the hospital on December 25th.) I will miss the warm Christmas feeling of snuggling with my oldest granddaughter, Imani, and the awkward love of my 16-year-old grandson, Xavion. At 7 months old, Myah spent her first Christmas with her cousins and her aunt and though I’ve spent many Christmas mornings with them, I cannot repeat that in this pandemic-riddled year. I won’t be able to watch Xavion and Imani play the trombone and sax together for me, nor celebrate together with their parents, the beginning of the new year. But my “pod-crew,” my youngest daughter and her gift to me, will be able to hug together around our little Christmas tree.
And hide together until the ball drops.
cjon3acd@att.net