PRIME SEASON
Our playground Every so often, I get my grandson, Mikey, as energetic a six-anda-half-year-old as you’ll ever see, for a full day or so – 24 hours which are as rewarding as they Paul K andarian are exhausting. Much of that last part stems from not just chasing him around while he does his Energizer Bunny thing, but from being jolted awake when we sleep together by a thrashing pair of tiny but accurate feet and knees drilling me in the back. Best rude awakenings ever, though. That boy can do no wrong. Nor is what he says wrong, spoken with an earnest innocence that only children possess. It’s an innate, unabashed, instinctual honesty that allows them the joy of unfiltered expression. In other words, they ain’t us (adults) who have to say the right thing when most of the time we’d rather not. So when we were together recently, we were leaving a playground and when I was backing up, I saw – and avoided – a large stump. Then I turned to make sure he was buckled in, forgot about the stump, put it in drive and drifted right into the stump with a resounding thump. You might think we drove over a cliff. Mikey screamed bloody murder and told me after he settled down, “I thought my heart was gonna explode, Grandpa!” It wasn’t that bad, really. I mean, did the airbags deploy? No. He overreacted and overacted and where this kid gets his penchant for drama is beyond me (cue the eye roll here). But then he said, with that unvarnished earnest innocence, “Grandpa, you’re really not the expert driver you seem to think you are.” I was taken aback and thought about pulling the “You wanna walk home,
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S ou th C oast P r ime T imes
Mikey?” in jest, but I didn’t. And besides, when the kid’s right, the kid’s right. I should’ve remembered that stupid stump was there. Another thing we did, and always do, was walk some nearby conservation land, our “nature hikes,” as my little man calls them, him asking a million questions about various vegetation, me having maybe one or two answers. But he’s happy when I take photos of plants and flowers and use an app on my phone to identify them.
He may have inherited my dramatic inclinations, but his dancing skill is something he definitely did not get from me He is thrilled to see the names pop up and won’t remember them any more than I will, most likely, but I’m instilling a love of nature in him the way my father did with me – minus the app, which really would’ve come in handy, because boy, could my old man just make stuff up about anything, up to an including how these long looping vines we used to see in the woods were called “Hang Me Downs,” ferocious forest creatures famous for scooping up little boys and taking them to the treetops, never to be seen again. Thanks, Dad. It’s a wonder I still walk in the woods.
S ep tember /O c tober 2021
Mikey is not shy about anything, saying anything, doing anything, as most kids his age happily aren’t. We stopped by a restaurant to pick up takeout, and in the waiting area the music was blaring and he just went full out dance mode, caring not one bit if anyone watched, he just boogied to the music to looks, most amused, some aghast, from nearby adults. “I love to dance, Grandpa, what can I say?” he said on our way out. And for the record, x. Kid’s got some moves, I tell ya, unlike his Grandpa with the two left feet. But mostly, it’s his incredible creative mind I love the most – the things he comes up with. On our way to finding a playground on our day together, he was asking over and over when we were going to get there, the way all kids do out of their blessed lack of time awareness. That comes as we mature, when we have places we need to be, when our lives become a schedule and not a blank slate to carve our day into. So as he asked for the millionth time when are we getting to the playground, I laughed and said “Mikey, you’re six and a half, whatever we do, wherever we are, it’s a playground, right?” He mulled that for a second and said, “Grandpa, my life is a playground.” I could not agree more, Mikey my boy. So is mine. Especially when we’re in ours together.
Paul K andarian is a lifelong area resident and, since 1982, has been a profession writer, columnist, and contributor in national magazines, websites, and other publications.
