Grandma's Visit

My mom is in town, neglecting her students to spoil her granddaughters. She arrived on the train from JFK Wednesday evening at about 8:30. Julia and Eli were so excited for her arrival that we hadn’t the heart—or rather the heartlessness—to put them to bed at the normal hour. But Katharine was very ready for bed while Grandma’s train was still en route. We devised upon a stratagem. We proceeded with bed time as usual, but whispered to Julia and Eli that they were to lie in bed, awake, until Grandma called to announce her arrival, at which point I would take both of them with me to the train station to fetch her. The idea was to trick Katharine into falling asleep as usual and then to unleash her older sisters for nocturnal revelries in the company of an indulgent grandmother. After I whispered the plan to Julia and Eli they could hardly contain themselves for the giggling, so conspiratorial and clandestine did they feel.

The plan worked like a charm, but Eli fell for her own ruse. My mom called just a couple minutes after bedtime had ended. I went to rouse the big girls, but Eli was unrousable. She had fallen resoundingly asleep as soon as her head and pillow met and were friends. So Julia and I got Grandma alone.

She came, inevitably, bearing gifts. As soon as an opportune moment arose—i.e. as soon as we entered the apartment—Grandma unveiled her bag of goodies. Julia precipitously donned her new Cinderella gown, complete with tiara and wand. Julia’s rapture induced such a fit of dancing that she could scarcely hold still long enough for the revelation of Grandma’s next gift. Getting Julia at last to bed required no small amount of coaxing.

It is hardly to say whether consciousness or the Cinderella dress fastened itself upon Julia first on Thursday morning. Eli, perceiving the dress in her sleep as though by some sixth sense, awoke in a wallow of jealous desperation. She turned upon me, berating me with the remembered cruelty of the time I destroyed (one of) her (two) Cinderella dresses as punishment for the culminating crime in a foul series of offenses. As Eli unleashed this torrent of tears and invective, Julia furtively frolicked to the living room to fetch Eli’s own prize present, a Sleeping Beauty dress stitched by Grandma’s own hands. In an instant, Eli’s visage morphed from the storm and pitch of tempestuous night to the still and beatification of celestial dawn. Both arrayed in regal attire, Julia and Eli then set about the serious business of awaking their grandmother. This they did by perching next to her ears and crowing like a pair of high-pitched roosters. Music to any grandmother’s ears.

While Julia and I were at school on Thursday, my mom took Lia, Eli, and Katharine with her to indulge in a favorite pastime—redistributing funds from my father’s pocket to Costco’s coffers. Needless to say our shelves were stuffed when I got home. Later in the afternoon, I understand, Mom bought dresses for Julia and Eli of their own choosing. No wonder little girls everywhere sing that it’s always fun when Grandma comes.

Friday was my and Lia’s sixth anniversary. I tried to surprise Lia by sending her a bouquet of lilies—the flowers of both her bridal portraits and her bridal bouquet—but Lia, ever the fiscal hawk, had decided to celebrate another year of connubial bliss by reviewing our family finances. “Six years,” she sighed, as she opened Microsoft Money. “Maybe by our twentieth anniversary Justin will have a job.” But she was soon roused from this melancholy reverie as she glanced over the accounts and celeritously fastened her monetary talons on an unaccounted-for transfer to an eminent on-line florist. “Aha!” she cried in triumph. “You call THAT a surprise! Nice hustle!!!”

Other activities that marked the day were intended to be festive, if not surprising. Taking full advantage of our live-in baby-sitter, Lia and I went to Yale’s Lincoln Bicentennial Symposium where we heard one of my teachers, David Blight, lecture on “Loving and Hating Lincoln in the American South.” It was a good lecture. But the greatest thrill was meeting up with Lia on campus and holding hands with her for more than an hour.

We stopped at one of the SOM food carts on our way to picking up Julia from kindergarten. Julia was thrilled to see both of us. “Where’s Grandma?” was her ebullient salutation.

After the girls had gone to bed, Lia and I went to a play. In looking around on-line for something for us to do I was dismayed that the only semi-interesting-sounding theater piece on offer was an Ibsen piece, tickets for which ran at $67 a piece. It looked as though we would spend our anniversary hearing Evening Song for free at St. Thomas’s, when on further inspection I found that the Yale Rep was running A Winter’s Tale, for which tickets were $6 for students and $12 for civilians. Rashly, I bought the tickets on impulse.

As we looked through our program we learned why tickets were cheap. The cast, every thespian among them a Yale underclassmen, were aloud to spout a paragraph and thundering balderdash under their name in the program. One touted the present production of A Winter’s Tale as “punk-rock Shakespeare,” while another hailed the performance, by contradictory turns, as “pre-historic,” “futurist,” and, most bemusedly of all, “tsarist.”

The play itself wasn’t as bad as such adjectival heralds portended. But neither was it good enough to stay till the bitter end, which wouldn’t have come until after 11:30. So at intermission we broke for ice cream. One can only take so much passionate howling at the hands of toothpick-slender freshman boys. And in any case the ice cream we got—which was labeled “frozen dairy dessert” and which listed corn syrup as its second ingredient—gave Lia the double pleasure of a tasty treat and righteous indignation, delectable dessert mingled with declaiming against the corn industry. No play could have matched that. We went to bed weary, and grateful for another year of grace together.

General conference could make any weekend wonderful. Having my mom here granted the added blessing of actually getting to listen to most of conference without all three girls in tow.

In between conference sessions, as Eli took a nap, Julia grew jealous that Katharine seemed more interested in Lia and (to a far lesser degree) me than in her eldest, magnificent sister. “I need to think about how I can get Katharine to like me more,” she announced. Later, hoping to have for herself the privilege of lying on the floor and getting mauled by the little lady, Julia plopped down on her back and offered: “Katharine, would you like to spend some time on my belly?”

When conference was all over I went out into the courtyard with Eli, who desperately needed a minute outside the apartment (at least the rest of the apartment’s inhabitants needed her outside). Eli ran around in circles and we played a distant cousin of “catch” with a lop-sided kickball. We were gone less than fifteen minutes. At 6:30 we were to return for dinner. At 6:29 I said, “Eli, we have a minute left. What should we do?” Very earnestly, Eli boomed: “We should have one, great, last big MINUTE!!!” Now let us close this post with one great, last, big sentence.