My birthday is in November and I will be 58. At some point over the summer I passed over an invisible boundary line — a gravitational tipping point, pitching forward like a balancing-toy rocking horse tottering on a wire — and began looking ahead to that golden day when I will become a grandmother.
My son, who is turning 16 on Saturday and never reads his mother’s newspaper column, will happily be spared the news in print that his mother has begun to hope fervently to still be alive and enthusiastically pricing Silver Cross baby prams at the hazy, distant future point at which he becomes a father — surely at least a decade into the future, perhaps a decade and a half or, in his case, two — but my daughter, at 18, is fully eager to step into her maternal role. That is, after she is done getting her law degree (with a specialization in human rights) and bringing the plight of the child cobalt miners of the Democratic Republic of Congo before an international court.
Patience is not my virtue.
These days, most days, I have the pleasure of strolling to work up Main Street and I count myself on time if I am crossing the road — in the fall, waving to a friendly motorist who flashes their lights to signal I can pass through the eastbound lane — by the time the electronic carillon is ringing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” at 9 a.m. high up in the steeple. This morning, I felt a small, phantom hand in my right hand, pulling with the gentle tug-tug of a child skipping alongside me as we crossed. Aha!, I thought. If I am lucky, this future tiny person and I will march up and down Main Street on a very important errand to feed bread to the ducks at the Nature Trail or buy a Hershey Bar, as I once did with my father, one body walking with the weight of age and the other weightlessly skipping, two opposite energetic poles connected.
Let’s go!
High on the list of several things I have started looking forward to once I become a grandparent is planning children’s birthday parties again. You should have seen me last week in HomeGoods in Wainscott, mightily battling my impulse to buy a set of circus-theme paper party goods from a brand called Meri Meri. I picked the packets up and put them down, picked them up and put them down: loot bags striped in red and white like the big top; glitter pointy clown hats with pompoms at the peak; napkins with a lion and the word “circus”; a bear riding a unicycle for a cupcake topper . . . I nearly blew a fuse forcing myself not to buy the set for some future child, as yet unborn and only likely to be born if we avoid climate holocaust, civil war, and HSN1 avian flu, and, if then, appearing perhaps 10 years from now in the best-case scenario and not requiring circus party paper goods until I am nearing 70.
Another ritual I have begun looking forward to rather prematurely is taking a kid — or, better yet, a passel of kids — to see the Rockettes Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall. On Rockettes day, we set out on the Hampton Jitney by 9 a.m. and the children each carry in their lap a small festive-colored cardboard treat box, tied with red and white string, in which, on top of napkins printed with berries and holly, I have carefully packed pimento-cheese sandwiches cut into stars, sugar cookies shaped like stockings and mittens, and the foil-wrapped chocolates with a gold string made in Germany that are meant to be hung on the tree. The last time I did this with Nettie and Teddy was before Covid.
And, of course, I look forward to being the grandma at the sidelines of whatever sport a future grandchild may play. Is it less embarrassing if grandma shouts “Run, run, run!” and “That’s okay, get up, get up!” than when an actual parent does it? I think so. Mothers may not be forgiven, but Grandma is forgiven. I always told my kids that this was “the parents’ reward,” standing and leaning on a chain-link fence, wishing you’d worn a warmer sweater, as they run up and down in the clear air of October chasing a ball. In adolescence, my daughter tried to tell me I shouldn’t come to her soccer or lacrosse games, that I wasn’t allowed, but in this I put my foot down: Nothing could keep me from the playing fields of autumn.
It’s nice to have found something to look forward to. My 40s and 50s were a bit awkward in terms of daydreaming, because it was both pointless and bad for morale, as my ex-husband likes to say, to daydream retroactively, in reverse, about what I used to daydream about in my youth. (Meeting Jack Kerouac in a smoky bar and beguiling him with my jive dancing. Bringing down the house with a loud rendition of “X Offender” off Blondie’s first album on the basement stage at the Lismar Lounge, backed by the drummer of Sharky’s Machine, and thus making the lead singer of the Raunch Hands fall more in love. These dreams are best left in the past. The spirit may remain the same but the body betrays us.)
Grandma will take them to the fair.
Grandma will bake the Tollhouse cookies in her special way, and pack them in her special way and ship the care package to them at summer camp.
You need to put the Tollhouse cookies into a tight tin canister while still slightly warm, but don’t forget to pack paper towels between each one. It’s been a long time since I’ve done that.
Now I just have to maintain a diet of wholesome vegetables and high fiber and avoid the black ice when driving at night and I may get there. Get behind me, Satan!