WHAT I LEARN

It is amazing how much I think about things that prove to be different, very different and yet when they happen I see clearly.

A case in point is my granddaughter, Darby Shea, the absolute apple of my eye and the love of my heart. She is what we used to call; COOL in high school. She is charming, very cultivated, intelligent and inquisitive. Darby comes to Grandpa for help when she can’t do something for herself, although she tries first.

Something about her that amazes me is she doesn’t like to play with dolls! What little 4 or 5-year old girl doesn’t own a doll? She states that she finds them “Creepy” and rather own stuffed animals, which inhabit her room, on her bed and in her toy box. But the things that most intrigues me is her sense of humor and her high vocabulary. She definitely has a mind of her own and is not afraid to express herself.

The other day she was engrossed with her grandma and having a great time. She was showing signs that she had to go to the bathroom. I said: “Darby, why don’t you go to the toilet now?” She runs over to me, stands on my knees as I am sitting down on an easy chair and says: “How about I pee on YOU, instead?”

Is that any way for a grandchild to speak to her grandfather? Yes. Why? Because she expressed herself with her soon to be 5-year old personality and humor that came across immediately. No pretense, no fear, and the sense that what she said was not wrong.

We were driving home from her play-school one morning and Grandpa ran into some construction that made me merge into the right lane and I got annoyed. She took me to a new level, instead of fixating on the traffic situation; she made me explain to her what was going on, why it was happening and the process. All of this took me to the end of the jam and I felt that I had a conversation with a teenager.

You see a 5-year old and you think a certain level of cognizance, knowledge, and level of conversation will be limited, then you meet Darby Shea and say: WOW! I think she got this from her beautiful Mom Courtney. Courtney has a wacky sense of humor, valedictorian of her college graduation class, and beautiful. It is all there in my gorgeous granddaughter.