GRAND Magazine - November/December 2008 - (Page 12) isn’t it grand? All settled down for a long winter’s nap B y the time i was old enough to visit overnight with my grandparents, who lived eight hours away, my grandparents were too old to enjoy a child crawling into their bed at the crack of dawn. We all missed something beautiful. Before these last few months, when I visited my son and daughter-in-law, I was privileged to have “Nana’s room,” a guest room named after me because I was the first occupant. Once the room was established as my room, my grandsons were annoyed when other guests would stay there. “That’s Nana’s room!” they protested—an anecdote that, when reported to me, filled my heart with conspiratorial joy. There is no longer a Nana’s room because my son was—and, knock on wood, still is—a mortgage broker. Now, they live in a two-bedroom condo. On my last visit, the boys slept in the Big Bed with their mother, while their father camped out on the living room sofa. And Nana slept in the top bunk in the boys’ room. In the top bunk with me were 30 or 40 stuffed toys, including what seemed to be a full-size SpiderMan and his equally massive friend, the Incredible Hulk. There also were two live terriers, who were familiar with the territory and considered it theirs, as well as a nearby tank containing a very large and surprisingly noisy turtle. Nevertheless, I slept well, as all grandmothers do after spending 15 hours with two boys, ages 4 1/2 and 2 1/2. I slept well, that is, until the first glimmer of rosyfingered dawn. Then, the menagerie was augmented by Cooper, the older grandson, leaping onto the top bunk and shouting with excitement. “Nana, look! It’s light outside! You don’t have to sleep anymore!” I had completely forgotten that childhood understanding: that dark-time is an unwelcome withdrawal from life, that light brings the right to be alive again. In the long decades since I was 4, I’d adopted the concept of sleep as recuperation and escape. Cooper curled up with me and the dogs and Spider-Man and the Hulk, and we discussed whether or not pirates lived outside, along the walkways, under the metal gratings that were buried in the grass. (I said, I thought perhaps they might; if I were a pirate living in a development in a New York suburb, the drainage system would be my choice of refuge.) We laughed a lot—muffled laughter, stuffing our faces into an oversized Elmo, so as not to awaken the parents, who would hold me responsible for “stirring things up” and encouraging Cooper to get “carried away.” “I love you, Nana,” he said suddenly. And I wanted to say, “I love you, too,” but it wasn’t enough, somehow; it was insufficient to express how completely full I was of absolute joy. So, I said, “You are the giant exploding star of my heart,” and that seemed to be just right. Even the turtle sighed. Photo by John lestina Editor in Chief 12 GRAND NOVEMBER DECEMBER 2008
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