By David Heiller
Our son, Noah,
and his great-grandma Schnick have always had a special relationship. He took a
shine to her from the first time he could first crawl onto her lap.
When we visit
her and Grandma Heiller (my mother), Noah spends most of the day upstairs with
Grandma Schnick. He shows off his block building skills, or talks non-stop
about lions. Adventures come racing from his mouth faster than a three-year-old
brain can process. Often Grandma will turn to me and ask, “What in the world is
he talking about?”
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| Noah and his Grandma Schnick |
“Your guess is
as good as mine,” I answer.
At night, he
crawls into Grandma Schnick’s soft bed and sleeps by her side. Grandma has a
lot of confidence in Noah to allow this. She knows she is playing Russian roulette
with his bladder, which half the time can give a sleeping partner a rather rude
awakening.
Grandma
Schnick doesn’t play favorites with her great grandchildren. At age 91, she
knows better than that. She doesn’t love any one less. But she does have a
special place for Noah. You see it in the way she talks with him, reads to him,
even just sits and listens and watches as he talks and plays.
At least, that
is until this past weekend. He had been walking on water, but now it may have
frozen to thin ice. It started Saturday night, at the supper table. Grandma
Heiller had fried up fresh rainbow trout, along with potatoes, peas and salad.
Noah wouldn’t look at his plate. Instead, he started sliding off the front of
his chair.
“You take at
least one bite of everything,” Cindy said. “Or you don’t leave the table.”
“Yeah, but I
don’t want to,” Noah said, caught in mid-slide off his chair.
“Don’t whine,”
I said. “One bite or sit still.”
“Yeah, but I
have to play,” Noah answered, arching further down.
“You’ll go in
the bedroom if you get off that chair,” Cindy said.
“No I won’t!”
Noah said, completing his slide off the chair.
Cindy swept
him off the floor as he crawled out from under the table, and dropped him on
the bed in the adjoining room. She shut the door behind her.
Grandma had
watched the episode without a word. “Well, that’s not the Noah I know,” she
said.
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| Noah was a little older for this visit, things went much better. |
Noah finally
quieted down from crying in the bedroom, and rejoined us at the supper table,
as he always does when this happens. But Noah’s angel wings had lost a few feathers
in Grandma’s eyes.
The next
morning, Cindy and I woke up at 6:30, which is quite late for us. It is late
for Noah too, as Grandma found out. The good news was she woke up in a dry bed.
The bad news was she woke up at 4:30 in the morning. That’s when Noah had
decided to talk about those lions of his. He did a fair imitation of them too,
growling under the covers, clawing and crawling into a den at the foot of the
bed.
Grandma
greeted us at the living room as we said our good mornings. “How did you sleep,”
I asked.
“Fine,”
Grandma answered, looking at me through eyes ringed with sleepless circles that
told otherwise.
Those angel
feathers had been clipped even shorter. I doubt if Noah could have flown at
that point. But he came crashing to the ground an hour later. He had been
complaining about his shirt, which had tiny dinosaurs on the front. He would
have complained if you had offered him ice cream—4:30 risings do that to kids.
I offered to
put a vest on over the dinosaurs. “I don’t like this damn shirt,” Noah said.
Grandma sat up
straight in her chair.
“Noah, we don’t
talk like that, that’s not nice,” I said. “I don’t know where he picked that
up,” I said to Grandma.
Grandma didn’t
dignify that statement with an answer.
It could have
been a worse four letter word, but Noah’s got plenty of time to pick those up.
Meanwhile, his shocker at the breakfast table plucked what few angel feathers
had remained clean out. He was wingless.
As we strapped
ourselves into the car later Sunday morning, for our trip home, the two
Grandmas stood on the porch and waved goodbye. They leaned against each other
for support. (Malika had slept with Grandma Heiller, and had complained about
her imaginary “owies” for two hours that pre-dawn morning too. But that’s
another story.)
We waved
goodbye, and they smiled and waved too. They were smiles of happiness, but also
of relief and fatigue.
“Those were
two of the best night’s sleep of my life,” Cindy said as we drove off.
“Yeah,” I
agreed. “We’ve really got to come visit them more often.”
“Yeah, but I’d
like to stay with Grandma Schnick and Grandma Heiller all alone,” Noah added.
I think we’ll
wait a while before we return. At least until they catch up on their sleep.
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