“I have a cat and a dog,” the little girl said.
“Oh,” said her grandmother. She said it with the universal grandmotherly tone that expresses surprise, happiness, incredulity, validation, concentration, inquisitiveness, and a whole range of distinctly grandmotherly emotions in its rising and falling rhythm; the two letters somehow combined to form a word of indeterminate syllables. It was the very opposite of dismissive.
She paused. “What are their names?”
The little girl continued her drawing, nonplussed. The grandmother waited. The waves crashed on the beach down the hill, and individual puffs of clouds slowly became one with the fog on the horizon. A gull perched on a chimney, stretching its wings.
The grandmother felt the pause was long enough, and a gentle reminder might be needed. “Your cat and dog? What are their names?”
The little girl didn’t look up. “My cat is Paws and my dog is Zippy and they play together sometimes but sometimes they fight and they’re not supposed to in the house because the last time mommy’s lamp broke and daddy had to glue it but I’m not supposed to touch that glue even though I’m a big girl and I help daddy fix things all the time but it has chemicals and I don’t want to you know glue my eyeballs because that would probably be bad and also did you know we’re going to the beach tomorrow because we haven’t been there in ages mommy said and I get to bring two shovels but I don’t want to share even though mommy says I have to but I will because I’m kind and nice but I don’t want to but I will do it then.”
Now, it was the grandmother’s turn to pause, as she absorbed this new information. It was a lot to take in. The girl opened a box of crayons and narrowed her eyes; the perfect shade was in there, somewhere.
The gull had stretched adequately, and decided to go looking for an evening snack as the tide went out. It flew away.
“That all sounds wonderful, my dear,” said the grandmother.
“I need blue because the ocean is blue,” replied the girl.
“Right you are. Right you are.”
