Blessed Summer Invasions

It's that time of year, school is out, and what to do with young children when parents are away at work? Particularly when said young child huffs indignantly at the very mention of summer camp, and waxes downright offended at the prospect of day care. There have been handy exchanges between parents in like situations, where one child stays with an temporarily at-home parent for a day in and then the favour is returned. But then sometimes serendipity runs out and parents look elsewhere.

To grandparents, for example. And thus it is that last week we had our granddaughter spend three days with us and this week once again. You'll be bored, I warn her, and she responds that she most certainly will not be bored in our company. "In our company" being the operative I remind her that her grandparents were not put on this earth for the purpose of entertaining her. She's heard that often enough to know to agree, to promise she'll find things to do. Ha!

She finds things to do, plenty of things to do - always with us. But that's all right for a temporary shift in out-of-the-ordinary activities for two old duffers. We lend ourselves happily enough to the enterprise of absorbing her presence into our lives on an intensive basis for a portion of the week. Child's play, literally, compared to our having had her with us eight hours of each working day for the first nine years of her life, as her day-care-givers.

She well remembers the menus in this house, and recalls happily enough helping me bake goodies. Only now, she observes, she no longer has to haul over a little step-stool to bring her height sufficiently up to the central baking counter, since she stands a half-head taller than me now. We'd bake cookies; how about butterscotch-chip? And she agrees. In fact, she boasts, she knows how to bake them herself, and I take her up on that, insist she tell me the ingredients we'll use.

She's taken aback at first, then rallies, and remembers; not only from baking with me, but with her mother who usually bakes goodies on Saturday mornings. Butter or margarine, she says, brown or white sugar, eggs, flour, baking power. Hurrah! We proceed to bake the cookies, she insists on doing as much of the physical work as possible, beating the batter, dipping an incautious finger in from time to time, to murmur appreciation. Before they're cool out of the oven, she's at them.

Well, oh dear, it’s been an interesting few days. We picked the child up, as scheduled, early Monday morning, because her mother had a 9:00 am meeting scheduled. Our daughter was not thrilled when we saw her first thing downtown in front of her building, for as we met her sour face informed us something was awry. She had gone in to the office especially for that important meeting; she usually works from home on Monday. The meeting had been called off. Never mind, there was plenty that called her attention at the office and although she meant to leave in the early afternoon, other meetings took her attention.

As for us, the first order of the day was BREAKFAST, as in what’s for breakfast today, Bubbe, I’m starved. I usually take a fruit juice with us that she can suck on while we’re driving home, before she can dive into some real food, and it’s just as well. She deliberately holds back from eating anything at home before leaving, because she anticipates the ritual of our all sitting down together at the table. She has two fruits, then eggs, then toast slathered with cream cheese, a hot cocoa drink, and tea. After which comes a quick clean-up and a departure for a ravine walk. She goes along with either an apple and a cookie or a bagful of cherries which she loves to squish in her mouth, then power-eject the pit in an effort to determine whether she can break her previous long-distance record.

The snacking in between meals is incessant and never-ending, but generally good stuff like fruit or carrots or something equally salubrious to her health. A litre of chocolate milk may last a day. Dinner the first night consisted of chicken soup and rice, a roasted chicken, grated potato and onion quick-stirred in olive oil, candied carrots and a huge slice of watermelon. A half hour later she asked what she could have for a snack. It’s daunting. Yet it all goes down, and settles somewhere - where? Her legs are long and sleek, her body is well proportioned and slender, but the appetite is enormous. Guess I’ve forgotten what it’s like to keep a pre-teen-age child in fine fettle.

Well, we went to the Beacon Hill Sally Ann for a look-about. She and I looked about at the summer tops. Every time she saw a top with monkeys on it, or bears, she asked if she could have it, and ended up with a nice collection of six gently-appreciated summer tops. And then she came across a pair of flip-flops with enormously thick soles and just HAD to have them, Bubbe. Despite the size printed on them they fit her exactly, and they made their way into the shopping cart as well.

Anything I saw that looked as though it would fit and suit her elicited an “eeeuuww, Bubbe!” , so I desisted. But then her grandfather and I came across an absolute bonanza of books, all piled high in a shopping cart preparatory to being priced and put on the shelves. We pawed through them frenetically and each of us amassed a very satisfactory pile of new reading material, well suited to our interests. I came away with a novel by a Japanese writer, Yuko Tsushima, Umberto Eco’s “The Island of the Day Before”; An Oxford Language Reference guide, Mordecai Richter’s “Barney’s Version”, and Michael Ondaatje’s “Anil’s Ghost”. Hey, lucky me.

She adores going out into the gardens, right after breakfast, as her grandfather and I are wont to do, when it’s still nice and cool out, and there’s dew on leaves and flower blossoms, and I get caught up in doing little things like staking up plants, and dead-heading flowers. She thinks it’s neat to grab one of the secateurs and dead-head right alongside me. On Tuesday afternoon, despite that it was a really hot day (a temporary aberration this week) she helped me to fertilize the garden pots, dissolving fertilizer into the garden watering pails then having a go at drowning all the flowers in the pots. I swear, I can see the increased vigour beginning to take hold immediately, as the plants swill down that bloom-affirming liquid.

When I went next door to look after our neighbour's garden in their vacation absence, she was eager to accompany me, to resurrect an old ritual she well remembers from her many years of living with us. Next door we went, looking about to ensure there was nothing amiss in our neighbours' absence, watering the vegetable garden in the backyard, picking the ripe red tomatoes for our own dinner salad, as per instructions, and watering all the flowers in pots hung here and there for decorative effect. A tiny rabbit ran across Angie's feet in its startled rush to evade our unanticipated presence.

And that evening she was an honourable trencherman again, digging into her fresh vegetable salad, leaving only the tomatoes (like her great-grandfather, she eschews tomatoes; go figure), carefully selecting two ears of corn on the cob, and vastly appreciating the delicate flavours of the barbecued steelhead salmon we had for dinner. She dug caverns with her serrated spoon throughout the bright red, yielding flesh of the watermelon dessert, and dinner was proclaimed a success. Oh, is it snack time yet?

She thought it was great fun going downstairs to visit with her Zayde in his workshop, where he had her put on gloves so she could help cut the stained glass under his direction, form the lead around it, and feel she had accomplished something. He has great patience with her, but then he also demonstrates that same kind of patience with anyone who is interested in anything he’s doing. He's done the same with neighbour children who express an interest in observing him at that kind of work, on occasion.

After dinner she thought it was great fun for both of us to sit out back on the deck, swinging in the glider, little Riley stuck in between us, snoozing. I would be trying, finally, to snatch a peek at the day’s newspapers, while urging her to get on with her novel about cat rescues, and she would read for a while, and then sneak a sideways glance at me, anxious to begin a gossip-type conversation about something I’d read, or something she had noticed, and then we would make great fun out of whatever it was and she would collapse with shrieking giggles. Occasionally she would offer her own pithy observation and I’d think it so cleverly observant that I would be the one to break out in shrieking laughter.

The only fly in the ointment, what turned out to be the real bane in the treat of having her with us for this half-week, was trying to programme and download music to her MP3 player. Instructions that come with the device are almost useless; they don’t address the formula for downloading from the Internet. Mind, the CD that came with the player had to be downloaded with the appropriate software (ha!) most of which was devoted to Yahoo! programmes and when we went on line to check them out they weren’t at all what I’d anticipated. Mostly to encourage anxious music down-loaders to sign up for a monthly fee enabling one to access music downloads.

I'd initially cautioned her grandfather not to buy her the thing; she's still, at two weeks into eleven years of age, a trifle young. And her mother's computer is a groaning oldie, hasn't the require speed or capability and she's also on dial-up service. This kid is interested in Pop and (shudder!) Rap music, appropriate for her age, as an eleven-year-old. I found it awkward and quite nasty to navigate the various web sites that I went to, once I left the Yahoo! site in disgust at their hard sell. And guess what? With dial-up Internet service it takes an average of 20 to 30 minutes to download a single song.

I’d suggested that she bring along some of her CD s of performers she likes, like Christina Aguillera, and others of her ilk, and it wasn’t difficult to transfer the songs she liked (which turned out to be a mere two or three tunes from each disc) onto the MP3 player, but getting them off the Internet was another thing altogether. Guess I’m too old and too dumb to manipulate and intuit the required moves properly. We spent two feverish nights trying to overcome the difficulties that seemed to assail us at every turn, trying to understand the process sufficiently to proceed. I even copied a set of instructions I found on line, but they hardly managed to instruct me to proceed with any degree of confidence.

Then on Wednesday she finally suggested we return the MP3 player. She had been so anxious to acquire one, you wouldn’t believe it. And her Zayde, of course, wanted to accommodate her every whim. Wasn’t he surprised when she finally said she didn’t think much of it, and even less of the procedure whereby it might be rendered useful. Whereupon they both undertook to return it to the Source where it had been purchased - no problem! then took her to another store and bought, at her request, a stuffed animal in place of it.