For the past 6 years — in my role as the Inadvertent Grandperson —one evening a week I leave Manhattan (NYers will understand the enormity of this) and go to Queens so that my daughter and son-in-law can have a night out.
Based on my time as an Alternative Parent (long before gay dads were a demographic), I had observed with some dismay the long-term effects the parenting process can have on the parents.
So, I made one condition: whatever night they chose (in our case Thursdays) it had to be a date night. No business. No career-related socializing. Just going out and remembering why they liked each other in the first place.
This has worked out well for all concerned — through the sleeping-infant phase; the dinner-in-the-highchair phase (usually preceded by the screaming-at-the-sight-of-me performance because Moses now knew my appearance meant his mother was going to leave); the pick-up from pre-school (where I became a visiting professor of origami); and, until eight months ago, the pick-up from the after-kindergarten program and buying-something-for-dinner excursion. All of which included a wide range of activities ending with reading to Moses before he went off to sleep.
COVID has changed our routine dramatically. While there are some limited socially distanced outings, Samantha, Jon, and Moses now spend pretty much all their time together, in their apartment — and I spend pretty much all my time in my studio with Emily Dickinson, my Shih-Tzu / wolf mix.
Thursday nights are now on the phone, and I read to Jon and Moses. While I miss the amazement of small talk, math homework, art projects and too many small details to enumerate, I’m deeply grateful for the completely unexpected opportunity to read to both the Good Men in my life. In addition to the fun of the three of us getting together, Jon has told me he’s rediscovering the calming pleasure of being read to. And I’ve revisited some of the pleasant memories of my own dad, who loved to read to us when we were young.
We started what has become our COVID tradition with What Do You Do with an Idea? When we got to the part of how sometimes an idea might seem silly to other people, but that doesn’t mean that it is, I asked Moses whether he ever had any ideas that other people might find strange. He thought about it and responded, “Well, you know CoolJ (always a sign something interesting is coming), water has a memory.”
I asked him to elaborate, and he explained how the ocean always recognizes him when he goes swimming. Jon later told me that a possible explanation of Moses’s quick response was his ongoing obsession with Frozen 2 (he can sing all the songs). So, from Elsa to Moses to me — water ripples of an idea for a poem.
Here’s the result. (I’m working on a collection using an asterisk format, which I hope creates some kind of conversation between two poems — this may, of course, be a side effect of extended sheltering in place):
We just finished The Cricket in Times Square, which both Jon and Moses found to be a great book — the story of a musical cricket from Connecticut who finds himself living in the NYC subway and becomes best friends with a boy, a cat and a mouse. As Jon put it, “It’s genius. It is SOOO New York. And reading together is the next best thing to a vaccine.”
Before / After
[For Samantha Rosenberg Darche]
I had, of course, a suitable amount of time to adjust to the idea but I’m not sure it could ever have been enough since it was only a few years ago she was riding her pink tricycle and how now she is old enough to have career and a husband and a child is beyond comprehension and probably the subject for something else about time and age but I digress.
Before
I imagined a twig in winter — gelid sap and frosty air
just in from somewhere not here
stepping out of a limousine jumping off a motorcycle
immediately identifiable as The One Not Like The Others
with Japanese tattoos and a mysterious companion known only as
Gregg the Surf God with Three Gs.
After
What actually happened is that once a week
a little body sits on my lap as we read about
a bunny named Pat and a spider named Charlotte.
The only connection between the two grandfathers is the sap —
far from hidden deep In a December branch, it is what I have become.
Lucky me.
Poetry is most often experienced unintentionally at private ceremonies such as weddings and funerals, with eighty percent of the potential audience and more than ninety percent of the current audience reporting that they’ve been exposed to poetry at one of these private occasions.
— Poetry in America Study commissioned by the Poetry Foundation
James W. Gaynor, author of 20 Poems about Love + Marriage Inappropriate 4 Weddings and 20 Poems About Life + Death Inappropriate 4 Funerals
Cover Art by Kelly McKinley
Featured Photo: Shutterstock
—
Read James W. Gaynor also on:
Fleas on the Dog https://fleasonthedog.com/
Dodging the Rain https://dodgingtherain.