After my senior citizen French class yesterday, I met up with my adult kid and the six-year-old grandchild at a little park near the Free Library. The grandchild is off school this week, and my kid takes him on daily adventures during long breaks like that. Today it was lovely and warm out, so they visited the Dilworth Plaza fountains at City Hall, and Sister Cities Park further down the Parkway, and then they were going to the Library for something called Art Club.
The grandchild had already run around in the plaza fountains for a good hour, and when I met up with them my adult kid was sitting on a ledge looking tired and the grandchild, a little elf with long thin legs and a mop of hair, was running around in the tiny maze of paths, trees, rocks and webbing at Sister Cities Park. He saw me and waved, and came over to sit with us. I shared some of my muffin with him, and then we headed over to the library.
On the way, he was reading to us from a book I gave him for his birthday, National Geographic’s Animal Zombies!: And Other Bloodsucking Beasts, Creepy Creatures, and Real-Life Monsters. My kid had been apprehensive when I gave it to him that it would be too scary, but I taught for 30 years and knew it would hit a sweet spot. Indeed, he and I share a number of tastes: a book I recently read was entitled Rise of the Zombie Bugs: The Surprising Science of Parasitic Mind-Control.
He was reading with a bit of a lisp but with fluency, expression, and relish. Guinea worms, tapeworms, dust mites, fleas, all grist for the mill. He was making the pronunciation errors of the fluent silent reader, and I had to pronounce “cadaver” for him, but he understood what he was reading, all right. My kid taught him to read when he was four (as my mother did when I was five, because he wanted to know how to read, dammit), but there’s only so long knowing how to read will take you. You have to know why you read. And knowing about carpet beetles and zombie ladybugs (he explained that particular form of wasp parasitism to me very nicely) is a very nice reason to be able to read.
We found “Art Club,” which was a low-key group of adults in the art books section, seated at a very large table, cheerfully working in parallel on a variety of tasks. My kid and the grandchild took their seats with their sketchbooks, and I worked on my iPad with Procreate, sketching the two of them.
Quietly, as if it was the most normal thing in the world for a six year old to work with a bunch of adults, he filled several pages with designs using his colored pencils. After a long while, he got a little restless, and so we headed down to the children’s library, where I looked up buses and realized I could go home now if I ran for it, so we said goodbye and I caught my bus.
On the bus, my chest was hurting. Not in a bad way but in that way I get when my heart is too big and I can’t believe how remarkable the world is, and how lucky I am.
(All three of us continue to mask against infectious disease; he’s been doing it since he was two. He was born five weeks early and left the NICU just before the COVID shutdown.)