You never know who it will be when a young person arrives, especially one you only see annually. With adults, you have a good idea who you’re going to get. More timeworn, maybe, but the same person you knew before. With growing grandsons, it’s someone somewhat new every time. A year ago, I was shocked by Shane, our eldest grandson: taller, heavier, fuzz on his face. Our beautiful boy was becoming a man.
When he was thirteen, Chance, our younger grandson, came with his mother, passed hours tossing the ball in the backyard and spent his vacation money on candy. This year, fourteen, he arrived alone, striding off the plane in a business-like manner, wearing a slick new haircut. He’s trying out being vegan, sent us links to recipes, saved his money for books and spent no time tossing the ball around.
As soon as he’d unpacked, Chance selected a stack of DVDs from his grandfather’s collection: Dr. Strangelove, The Manchurian Candidate, In the Heat of the Night, Nosferatu, The Most Dangerous Game, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Bonnie and Clyde. He wanted to see classics made long before he was born. To paraphrase Frank O’Hara, he wanted to see movies we wouldn’t let him see when he was young.
We went on a Stanley Hotel tour Chance requested and then he wanted to see The Shining, which he watched with his grandfather, because I never liked that movie. Afterwards he thought the film wasn’t all that scary and Nicholson’s performance was way over the top.
A trip to Tattered Cover is traditional in this family, but Chance also wanted to visit second-hand bookstores. We browsed five bookstores in six days and he found books to buy in each. “Oh, dear, I think he’s related to you,” I told his grandfather, the inveterate book collector.
When we were done, he had this stack of paperbacks, organized by size, the accomplishment of his 2017 visit to the Denver grandparents.
23 neatly stacked additions to Chance’s library
Being introverts, we relish entertaining one child at a time. Groups exhaust us, and by groups, we mean in excess of four people. We also thought our grandsons would get to know us better by coming to see us in our natural habitat than by us always going to San Francisco to see them, as we did in their younger years. But as teachers and social scientists have known forever, introducing a new individual into a group changes it.
Our normal patterns—breakfast and lunch in the breakfast nook while reading, dinner while watching the news, mornings at our computers—were of course disrupted. While Chance was here, we had dinner in the dining room, spent our days in bookstores and mountains and museums. We ate at vegan Watercourse and vegetarian City ‘o City, places we rarely patronize. We prepared notably larger amounts of food and were mesmerized by the rapidity with which it vanished.
On the go every day, we lost track of politics—an overdue respite. After Chance left, we returned to Trump-bashing with refreshed vitriol. But for now we were on vacation, enjoying this good-looking, intelligent kid while he was here. We had a beautiful day in Estes Park, a fine morning at Red Rocks—who knew they were doing shows there every night now? Overkill, isn’t it? We spent hours in DAM’s fascinating The Western: An Epic in Art and Film exhibit.
But bookstores were the highlight of this visit. I was pleased to find two copies of my old book on Capitol Hill shelves. I signed them, slid them back into place. We resisted trying to assist Chance’s search—the hunt for and selection of books is a particularly private matter—but were intrigued by what he bought, a glimpse into who he might become.
Ah, that black Vantage paperback of Ulysses! I bought that very edition when young, kept it for decades, never read it. Started it many times. Memory is unreliable, and in mine Leopold Bloom sautés those kidneys in the first pages, dropping the bloody wrapping to the floor for the cat. That’s not how it begins. Everyone knows Molly Bloom’s ending monologue, but I have no idea what’s between those kidneys and asking him with my eyes to ask again yes. Seeing what Chance bought was a flash nostalgia trip. And you never know: he could actually read Ulysses. He’s that kind of kid.
Who we were when he was here, while closer to truth than who we are when we go there, is still not quite us. Nor was he precisely who he is at home, where he is more garrulous and a baseball player. You don’t necessarily assess each other accurately based on a stack of books or a brief week’s sojourn.
For example, as it turned out, there was no baseball tossing this year only because he forgot to pack ball and glove.