Posted by
AudiR10TDI on Wednesday, July 11, 2007 1:53:25 PM
July 11, 2007 -- Most of the time I don't think about my age or the passing of time. Oh, occasionally I do, like when I read the birth date of someone retiring from racing and realize he was born when I was a sophomore in college. Or when an indignant driver tells me age is just a number and I consider asking him for a date because I am 39 years older than he is, just to see him jump.
But this week I am uncomfortably aware of my age, because the new Harry Potter movie is out and my grandson, who has gone to every one of them with me until now, is 16 years old and frankly would rather not be seen in the same city as his Grandma, much less waiting in line for a movie. Yes, I know he will come around one day. But presently I am feeling rather old.
Paul was 8 when we met; he is a foster grandson from the Foster Grandparents Program and had worn out two Grandmas before he found me. I had brought up two boys and knew all about active, athletic boys; his mother, a single parent who had adopted him, knew nothing at all about boys and because she'd had two hip replacements she found him more than the ordinary handful. What he needed was a Grandma who could ride bikes, play goal, go on the log ride and see the same movie five times in a row, and that he found in me. The first time the three of us went to the park together, his mother said that she just couldn't make him walk nicely with her; he was always running ahead. We old folk settled on a bench and I said, "Paul, lets see how many times you can run around that tree. You run and I will count." I can't remember how many times he ran around the tree, but when he finally collapsed I gave him a huge cheer and bought him an ice cream cone and he walked along happily next to us just the way his Mama wanted him to. The secret with boys is to wear them out. His mother said he could not get along with other kids. I took him to the kiddie pool at our apartments (which had a life guard) and the kids pretty soon taught him what he had to do to get along. When we were out on a bike ride once, he shouted "Grandma, look at the ducks!" and another kid looked at me (in a baseball cap, Penske Motorsports jacket and jeans) and said "THAT is your Grandma?" "Well," said Paul, "She's not an OLD Grandma."
But Harry Potter was a whole new dimension in our relationship. Paul had been adopted from an orphanage and let us say that it was not exactly state of the art first world stuff over there. At the age of 10 he was reading at a low level and the teacher said he would never learn to read any better. We came out of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and he wanted to go right back and see it again. "There's a book," I told him. "Can we buy it?" he said. We bought it. He struggled and sweated and worked and fought his way through it, and raised his reading level two grades by the time he got to the end. After the second book, he asked me, "Is Snape a good guy or a bad guy?" and I told him that I didn't think Snape had decided which he wanted to be. That was the first he'd ever heard that you got to CHOOSE whether you were a good guy or a bad guy, and it opened up a line of discussion that would have astonished his mother, much less his teacher. (He also asked me what gremlins looked like and I told him that since they were imaginary, they could look like anything he wanted them to look like. Believe it or not, we ended up discussing Sartre's Psychology of Imagination before we got to the end of that one!) Each new book raised questions of philosophy and ethics, of what we owe our teachers and other adults even if they don't treat us right, of what "Pure Blood" means and does not mean....and about how some things happen for no reason.
Paul has grown beyond me now and that is as it should be. But as I line up to see "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" this weekend I am going to miss his eager questions and the long discussion afterwards at the Pickle Barrel over giant milk shakes and chicken fingers and fries. Growing up and growing old have their disadvantages.