Eyebrow Puppets by Gwynne Hunt-(first published in Who Will Wind the Watches?)
If I knew having grandkids was so much fun, I would have had them first.
Until I had my own grandchildren I never appreciated that bumper sticker. I believed such homilies were beneath my superior, intelligent nose. I am, after all, a writer. One who dislikes sappy poems about being allowed to wear purple because age allows anything. I mean, really! Halfway through my fifties I’m so cool I’ve even done slam poetry. I’m a performance artist, not a grandmotherly person who bakes cookies. I never wanted to carry a big purse full of treasures for sticky fingers to explore.
And then there was John. I drove through a snowstorm over a Rocky Mountain Pass to be at his birth; and because of weather missed his arrival by two hours.
“Where were you, mommy?” my daughter asked as I entered her room at 1 a.m.
She then conceded that had I been there, “John would probably still be hanging around inside me, as unfinished as the homework and science projects you and Dad used to complete for me.”
It was good thing I was late, as my first moments with John occurred after the male, cigar-smoking, bunch had gone home. Just John and I – oblivious to Mommy’s snores – wrapped inside the warm hospital room, together in the night light. Outside, the snow melted on the windows; and inside, my heart melted at John’s smell and softness.
It was the defining moment of my life. After years of struggling to find out what I want to be “when I grow up”, as I looked at my grandson I knew all I have ever wanted is to be a grandmother. I’m a writer and words failed me. Precious, amazing, fantastic, life-fulfilling, little bundle of joy – but all I could sputter was “cool.” That was it: John was cool.
For the last six years John has shown me often how right my first reaction was. He is the coolest kid, with an amazing sense of himself; and I know from his struggles to describe the simplest household item that he is a wordsmith, like his gramma.
Just calling an item what it is has never been enough for John. Until he was four I was his “one small boppa.” “Gramma” was just too ordinary for him. After a while, peer pressure changed all that. At about the same time, he told me to quit singing show tunes to him in the car and to settle down because “Gramma, you’re too rowdy”.
John created his own words for things. He called the breadbox a sandwich cupboard. Cookies were mookies, a microphone was a talker, McDonald’s was Ronald’s house, and his beloved blanket was his kitty.
Once, when he was four, I was plucking my eyebrows. Two pair of tweezers lay on the table. I picked one up and made the tongs move like a mouth. He picked up the second pair and became Punch to my Judy. Just a second in time out of a huge and active day. Quite forgotten by Gramma until a couple of months later when John and I were hanging out in my bedroom. John was watching me put on my makeup once again.
John looked into my makeup bag and when he saw the tweezers, a flash of excitement lit his eyes. Grabbing them, he handed one pair to me and the play began. After a few minutes of our performance art with the Big Bad Wolf tweezers scaring the Gramma tweezers, John ran off to do battle with his train set.
I finished applying my makeup and, satisfied I was a fresh looking and respectable grandmother, I snapped the bag shut and called John, “C’mon munchkin, let’s go downstairs. We’ve got a few minutes to play before we have to go get groceries.”
John carefully put the train set in the box and ran to the top of the stairs. He paused, then swung around at the top of the stairs and with a wave of his hand, a full-blown theatrical movement worthy of Macbeth, John cried out, “Oh, Gramma, bring the eyebrow puppets.”
Yes, a wordsmith, an inkslinger…just like Gramma.
Published in 1999
