Travels With My Granddaughter

I don’t know about you, but I do some of my best thinking when I’m driving. I used to get lost in thought when I walked, but for the past year or so I’ve been listening to audio-books during my daily 5-miler. 

Driving is now my quiet time.

Pipsqueak in my rear view.  

On Monday morning I was cruising down the interstate with a passenger: my two-year-old granddaughter. It was anything but quiet in my car. She wanted music - “LOUD” - and we were listening to 97.3 The Eagle, country music. 

All of a sudden Scotty McCreery’s hit song, “Five More Minutes,” came on. If you hate country music you’d really dislike this one ‘cause it’s a quintessential country ballad. Sweet and sentimental. All about growing older and always wanting five more minutes.

My granddaughter, the precocious Sawyer Grace, always pretends she knows the lyrics to any song on the radio, so I angled the rear view to see if she was singing along. She was, but when she caught me looking, she stopped and flashed a big surprised smile.

I melted.

I don’t know if it was the warm weather, the blossoms, or the song, but I was suddenly struck by how unimaginably blessed I am to have this child living just 17 miles and two left turns away from me.  

If I’m being honest, I’d admit that I was not someone pining for my kids to reproduce. Unlike many of my friends, I didn’t long to become what I thought of as “the g-word." 

That all changed the moment I saw two-minute-old SG in that maternity ward in Oxford, Mississippi on Dec. 2, 2015.

And as I drove along on a sun-dappled Virginia Beach spring morning with just a pipsqueak for company, I realized it’s the ordinary time we get to share with them, these offspring of our offspring, that make the relationship between grandparent and grandchild so strong and sweet and special.

It’s the bedtime stories, the baths, the bike rides, the ladybugs, the lizards, the flowers and the silly jokes we share. 

Maybe grandchildren are especially precious because we don’t know how long we have with these little people. If we’re honest we know we may not see their big moments: Their proms, their graduations or their weddings. 

But the little moments - the smiles, the innocence, the curiosity - are enough.

Although I want way more than five more minutes.