At my father’s suggestion, I’ve gotten in the habit of sending my grandmother an email every week. The fact of the matter is, I am not very close to my grandmother so I haven’t been very admirable about corresponding with her. But she is increasingly sick and has reached a point where she can’t even read or watch TV because her eyes are too weak. So I email updates on my life to my aunt, who prints them out and reads them to her.
The one I sent her last night seemed to me like something I might post here, so I am, in fact, posting it here.
Dear Grandma,
Today I spent the afternoon with [my niece] Cameron. It was fun. [My brother’s wife] Deborah dropped us off at the park, but not before [my brother] Geoff gave me all the supplies I needed: spare diapers, crackers, and a water bottle.
“You also need one more thing,” Geoff warned me. “You need to know what to say to all the nannies at the park. When they say ‘Oh, you have a beautiful daughter,’ you need to say ‘Oh, she’s not my daughter. I just happen to love children.’ They will all melt.”
Sound advice. However, if any nannies were giving me the eye, I had no time to find out. I was too busy following Cam around the park and preventing her from getting into trouble. A park may seem like a very safe place, but in fact it’s full of danger. In the brief time I was there, I catalogued the following deathtraps:
None of these dangers affected Cam, of course, but that’s only due to my careful diligence.
We came back home and I continued to play with her for a while. One thing Geoff and Deb have done brilliantly is to make Cam love books. They gave her books as soon as she was born, and she’s very used to them. She’s too young to read, but she loves to pull all her books out of her shelf and give them to you so you can read to her. She will follow along and look at the pictures and the colors.
The problem is, the actual content of these books is, I’m sorry to say, poisonous. Have you ever actually read a Dr. Seuss book? Take this incendiary passage from The Foot Book: “One feet, two feet, pig feet, big feet.” What kind of talk is that? How is my niece supposed to ever learn English? She could be permanently impaired as a result of exposure to this sort of thing. And if you think I’m kidding, listen to our President give a speech some time.
At the end of my visit, Cam gave me a big hug, and I was very touched until I went to the door and turned around and said “Bye Cam!” and there was no response and Geoff said “You’ve already been replaced in her affections by a pair of legos.”
Such is the life of an uncle.
Love,
Greg
Posted by Greg at 05:04 AM on 08/29/05