Nanaville

by Anna Quindlen

  My daughter was entering puberty around the same time that I was in perimenopause, and let me tell you, that was a time! Estrogen up, estrogen down, a category-four mood storm coming in from the east and then circling the kitchen. You know what? It was helpful. Because of my own situation, I was constantly thinking of hormones as controlled dangerous substances, and that gave me a better understanding of how Maria was thinking and feeling.

  Trying to learn Chinese, even at the most basic level, did the same thing for me in my dealings with Arthur. He, too, is learning language from the ground up. Every sentence is a struggle. Every sentence is a triumph. One evening before bed we were watching his statutory fifteen minutes of The Lion King, and I said, “There’s Rafiki.” Arthur replied solemnly, “Rafiki is a mandrill.”

  The following thoughts flashed through my mind:

  A monkey with a wildly colored face: Rafiki is a mandrill. I never noticed that before.

  My son and daughter-in-law are the world’s best parents, because one of them must have noticed and told Arthur that Rafiki was a mandrill.

  Call the newspapers: toddler genius in apartment 2B.

  The thing about language is that it is the ultimate transactional process. And I don’t just say that as a person who makes a living playing Jenga with words. If you watch children acquire language, you can see them not only speaking but arranging the known world. We ask them questions we know they know the answers to—What color is that ball? Where do the frogs live?—so that they can practice the arrangement. It’s also pretty thrilling to be part of the process, and for a grandparent it’s tantamount to learning a new dialect. Arthur was quite chatty as a toddler and discursive in a way that meant you had to pay attention and, like with Mandarin, be aware of tones. Sometimes a long string of sentences unfurled that definitely included the words “cows,” “horns,” “little,” and “Dada,” but it would take an expert in simultaneous translation, like his parents, to report that he had seen cows at the farm, and the male cow was a bull and had horns, and he was the dada of the calves, who were the little cows. It was storytelling as a way of feeling in control of the environment, which is, often without noticing it, what we all do throughout our lives.

  But listening to stories and parroting them back—“You saw cows? And there was a daddy cow and he had horns?”—is not only reinforcing the importance of language, it’s also reinforcing the importance of the individual. After all, it’s only the people who think you have something to say who listen closely, and, conversely, it’s the people who think you are unimportant who conspicuously ignore your stories and communicate that you’re wasting their time and that they can’t understand you.

  When you do this with a child, when you struggle to understand them as they learn what is, at least for a moment, a foreign language, you are not simply indulging this in the present but for the future. We are all of us, mostly, familiar with the spectacular truculence of adolescents:

  How was your day?

  Fine.

  What did you do?

  Nothing.

  Who were you with?

  No one.

  At this point, if your conversational partner (if she can be called that) is a girl of a certain ilk, she will scream, “Leave me alone!” and exit the room. Most boys will merely disappear by inches. Or maybe I’m just extrapolating, and stereotyping, from my own experience.

  My point is that kids who grow up thinking grandparents listen, really listen, might throw an adverb or perhaps a short description into that interchange. They might even go further than they will with their parents, who, they intuit correctly, have so much invested in their interactions. At the very least, they may understand from past behavior that even though Nana is way old—because, face it, when you’re fifteen, anyone over forty has passed into a different time zone—she may be relatively unshockable and amenable.

  Talking with a small child is like talking to yourself—yourself before you forgot to notice things. What evaporates as we age, sadly, is authenticity, that sense of saying your lines for the very first time. When Arthur is running in front of the spray of the hose with his arms outstretched, there is nothing but sensation: the water, the sunshine, the feel of both on his skin. There is no subtext, just text. Just the moment. I suppose the greatest gift we can give to children we love is to make it possible for them to hold on to that for as long as possible.

  But it is not simply a gift to the child. The great short-story writer Grace Paley once sat next to me at a literary dinner, which is a memory I treasure, and she said to me warmly during a conversation about a novelist with an astonishingly long list of books, “Ah, Anna, think how prolific we would have been had we not had children.” And she was right about that, but what I’m certain she knew was that we might have been less good at the work, because our children force us to relive the world in a way that can enrich the page. And because I am somehow more present on those occasions when I am with my grandson, precisely because I have less to do with his day-to-day maintenance, I am even more aware of this. Arthur squats to talk about the bumblebees; I respond with some musings on the failing willow tree. He says frogs say gung; I reply that snakes say sssssss. I say the things that long life has made me forget to say, or even to think. I wish I could do more of this in Mandarin, and we keep talking about resuming our lessons, which fills me with dread, since my head literally hurt when I did my homework, and even our lovely tutor seemed a bit taken aback by the tin ear implicit in my pronunciation. Maybe I will learn more, maybe not. In the meantime I’m speaking the nana language of love and hoping Arthur recognizes, if not every word, then all the tones.

  WE INTERRUPT THE WORKING WEEK FOR AN ARTHUR WEEKEND

  We are sitting on the bench by a frog pond. I have been ordered to find and catch a frog, and have been a considerable disappointment. So we are just chatting, frogless, although I continue to keep my eyes peeled. So much of being a grandmother is imagined aggrandizement, hearing the words: “I will never forget when my nana plucked a frog from the reeds and handed it to me.” It doesn’t matter if you are a nana nurse / dentist / teacher / Supreme Court justice / neurosurgeon / CEO / MVP / you get the idea. Did you deliver the frog? Of course, later, when the frog is actually delivered, when Nana snags one and offers it held carefully in her fist, because the last thing she wants to produce is a dead frog, it will develop that Arthur doesn’t really want to get up close and personal with it. One part of raising children is discovering the concept of their enormous desire for things it turns out they don’t actually want except in theory. (Our daughter once ordered oysters in a restaurant when she was six. You can imagine how that turned out. Good thing her father and I both like oysters.) Spending time with kids winds up being a series of teachable moments…for you. As Arthur recoils from the reality of frog, we learn again that, young, old, or in between, much of what we think we yearn for loses its allure when it is in hand.

  Not grandchildren, though.

  Most of what I say are full sentences. Most of what Arthur says at this moment in time are phrases, some designed to trick me:

  “A brown cow.”

  “A brown cow.” (Why do we repeat everything they say? Is it to reinforce language or to seem companionable?)

  “A black cow.” One day he had a meltdown because the cows at the farm down the road had ambled into a back field and were therefore not available. Why cows, the most boring of animals? Why not horses? Who can read the mind of a toddler? I had one child who was obsessed with snakes, then bats, later vampires. It’s all a progression. Although I’m not exactly sure where we go from cows. Trucks?

  “And a blue cow,” Arthur says, looking at me searchingly.

  “A blue cow?” I say, miming shock and amazement.

  “Nooooooo,” he says. He loves this, trolling Nana. Will she fall for it? Nooooooo. For some reason at this moment
his “yes” and “no” are elongated and the vowels oddly shaped, so that he sounds vaguely Swedish. After a while you realize that most of us use language to communicate but that that’s not always true of toddlers. They tend to roll the words around in their mouths like hard candy, repeat them over and over to show mastery. Arthur repeats words, but it’s unclear which ones will stick, or are already stuck. We go down the road to the wildlife rehabilitation center, and he mimics us quite clearly. “Eagle.” “Snake.” “Porcupine.” Will he remember “porcupine”? That seems like a boutique word, not necessary for everyday life.

  One of his favorite words now is “Pop.” There’s no question that it feels good in his mouth, but it’s not just that. In the way these things usually go in the house of family, Nana is wallpaper and Pop is a chandelier. “Pop! Pop!” he shouts now, searching for his grandfather. For a while, Pop’s name was uttered in a whisper, like Maria in the West Side Story song: say it soft and it’s almost like praying. Arthur suspects Pop’s devotion makes him a soft touch. When Nana says no to donuts, Arthur cries, “I want Pop!”

  It’s instructive, to compare and contrast his last two summers here in the country. The first summer he was just a little nugget, lying on his back on a quilt on the lawn, looking up glassily into the tree canopy, subsisting on breast milk and fresh air. The signal event of that time for me was one day in the kitchen when, the dogs mobbing their water bowl, he laughed for no reason any of us could apprehend, a deep, rolling chortle that seemed as though it had emerged from a much bigger person, like Henry VIII. The double takes we all did! Where did it come from? What did it mean? What a mystery a baby is.

  Last summer he was becoming a person, staggering across the same lawn, floating around the pool in some inflatable device with a big sun hat shading his little face. Many mornings he would go on my usual four-mile trek in his jogging stroller, his mother and I taking turns pushing, and on the rise where the valley lay spread before us like his kingdom we would purloin a half-grown ear from the cornfield and let him gnaw away, so that the stroller was always full of tiny niblets, white and glossy as baby teeth. It was the morning when I was pushing him solo that a black bear crossed the road some yards in front of me, triggering a primitive response that I suppose must at some level be purely chemical, the sensation built into all humans to protect their young. Not just humans, actually—look at the way a pair of geese will hiss if a dog tries to approach the goslings. I would have hissed had I had the time, but the bear merely toddled on, big and benign, without ever looking at my precious cargo or me.

  If that happened during his third summer, Arthur would likely have pointed and said, “Bear.” He knows bears from his books. Years from now he might take pictures of the bear to send to his friends, who are somewhere doing cool things that he is not because he has to spend the weekend with his grandparents. Now he happily has breakfast, sharing some yogurt, some oatmeal, even the occasional donut. Right now Arthur is a breakfast guy. You know that line about breakfast being the most important meal of the day? Arthur made that up, although no one but us could understand him. Stand by for his Nobel.

  I know this may not last. I have been here before, and so I can envision it, a time when he may stay at our house as a teenager, the door to what was once his father’s room and is now his closed for privacy, and rush out of the house as I toast him an English muffin or fill a bowl with a clatter of granola. Maybe he will grab his own donut at the corner bodega, or a cup of coffee with three sugars, because teenagers like the idea of coffee better than the reality. “The most important meal of the day!” I will shout after him. I hope I will know not to be offended. I have been here before. I know that the annoyance of the early teens gives way to the companionship of the late twenties. The progression is so satisfying.

  For us, some of the progression is unseen. Most grandparents know their grandchildren in what amount to snapshots. You see him on a Tuesday, and then a week later he’s back with ten additional words and a new fascination with turtles or fire trucks or his own feet. Sunday he’s fractious, Monday apparently a delightful dream, when he’s out of your sight but not out of your mind. Except for those who care for their grandchildren every day, we don’t see the continuous documentary loop that parents do. “His language has grown so much!” we say, delighted. “Look at how he’s holding the pencil!” A big part of our grandparent job is expressing ecstatic appreciation for everything from urination to reflexes. We must always silence the irritated voice of adult competency: Okay, I get it, I get it, you drew a 3. But, honestly, a 3 isn’t that hard. A 5, now, there’s a number. And this 3 doesn’t even look that much like a 3.

  No. It is the greatest 3 that anyone has ever drawn. Look at that 3!

  As one of them I should note that the current crop of grandparents is a good news/bad news bunch. First of all, let us acknowledge that, like virtually everything else they’ve done, the baby boomers tend to act as though they’ve invented grandparenting. Certainly the size of our demographic has inflated the state. The census bureau says that in the year Arthur was born, there were more grandparents in the United States than ever before in our history, up by nearly 25 percent in the last two decades. At the same time, we are part of a funnel, the net effect of changing ideas about how many people reasonably constitute a family. My paternal grandfather had thirty-two grandchildren. His son, my father, had twelve. I don’t know how many grandchildren we will eventually have—and that is not a hint, a directive, or a rebuke—but I can easily figure out that it would take some extraordinary act of either conception or adoption for me to come anywhere close to twelve.

  Besides, I must admit that while I would welcome more, I treasure this time of JA—Just Arthur. My elder son was followed in quick succession by his brother, which was a very good thing in many ways, but it didn’t leave much time for JQ—Just Quin. Someday perhaps there will be a cousin scrum, with Arthur leading it, but for right now it is just the two of us. Arthur is telling me a long, involved story about a turtle coming out from under the dock. I am getting maybe every third word, in part because his diction remains imprecise, in part because if he invented fire at the end of the dock I would not notice because I would be distracted by worrying about him falling into the pond. If he fell into the pond there would follow for many weeks a long, involved story about falling into the pond. There are these breathless “uh”s that punctuate every story at the moment, as though his mind is racing and neither his vocabulary nor his mouth can catch up with it: “And…uh…the turtle…swimming…and the bass…and the trout…and the turtle…uh…came out…uh…swimming…” Pop said the other day that Arthur is surely a storyteller, and I thrilled to the words, because of course that is what I am. But then I stopped and thought, no, don’t do that. Let him find his own way. Let him realize that in our family, his family, the family business is not storytelling or law or anything but individuality.

  “Let’s go look at the bird’s nest,” I say, but he doesn’t move, still crouched at the end of the dock. “Bass,” he says authoritatively as a bass swims by, and then he begins the turtle story again.

  REVELATION

  My elder son is the kind of guy who knows things. Moby-Dick. Marvel comics. Popular music. Chinese history. He’s very precise in language and usage and one of the best-read people I’ve ever known. He does the last copyedit on the typeset manuscript of my novels, and he always manages to spot something that needs fixing. For Christmas I got him a T-shirt that says GRAMMAR POLICE: TO CORRECT AND SERVE. He wears it, too.

  He has the ability to focus deeply in a way I do not, and while I am on the scattered side he is exceptionally good at detail work, perhaps to a fault: uncounted are the number of times I have quoted to him the adage “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” When he wanted to get the entire family around the table to spring the news on us that he and his wife were expecting their first child, he did it by saying we needed to discuss esta
te planning. The fact that we all took him at his word tells you something about how methodical and mature he is.

  And because of many of these traits, which are challenged by and even contrary to the chaos of life with a child, I am not sure I would have predicted how excellent a father he would turn out to be. There are many thrilling things about being a grandmother—who knew it would be so satisfying at my age to put my right foot in, to take my right foot out, to put my right foot in, and to shake it all about?—but for me one of the most thrilling is watching my eldest child be a first-rate parent. Conversely, men and women I’ve met who are raising their own grandchildren say that one of the hardest parts of their lives is not the school run or the sports games, chasing a Frisbee around the yard or laying down the law about lights-out. It’s the constant distress about having raised a son or daughter who is unwilling or unable to be a good parent. When I see my son and Arthur at the school pickup, the man and the boy both with joyous smiles and arms outstretched, I can only conclude that Arthur’s father is really good at this. I have to be honest and say I didn’t entirely see that coming.