A nightime chat with my grandson

Photo by Enis Yavuz on Unsplash

First off, this is not anyone I know; this is a stock photo. But the image is right for what I am about to tell you.

When I was a mother of young children, my favorite thing to do was to chat with them before they went to sleep. All kinds of things came out as we lay closely beside each other in the dimness: things they wondered about or worried about or had noticed briefly but now had time to consider more fully. Funny things. Poignant things. Surprising things. These talks always reminded me of writer Phyllis Theroux’s story of trying to elicit more details from a story her son was telling her, only to have him say, “Is this going in the Times or the Washington Post?” (She wrote a lot about children, you see. Wrote wonderful pieces about them for newspapers and magazines, and she has a number of books. If you’ve never read her, you’re in for a treat.)

I now love to talk to my seven-year old grandson, Nate, before he goes to sleep. Not that he always goes to sleep. Correction. Not that he ever goes to sleep. The kid seems to need about fourteen minutes of sleep a night. When it’s time for him to go to sleep— or, more often, long past time for him to go to sleep, I’ll say something like, “Oh my goodness, look at the time, you really have to go to sleep now or I’ll get in trouble with your parents.” “Okay” he’ll say cheerfully and ask me to close his bedroom door. But he doesn’t go to sleep. He reads, or talks to his stuffed animals, or does math problems in his head, the kid loves math, which makes me have a hard time believing that he is really related to me.

Anyway, the other night, I was babysitting and when it was time for him to go to sleep, we lay on his bed and, to my surprise, talked about intimations of mortality.