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Peninsula Daily News Port Angeles, Washington Copyright 2000 Eric Rush www.ericrush.com |
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Tim and Trevor, ages 9 and 8, were as delighted to see their names in the paper as I was when I was their age and saw my name in print in a list of Cub Scouts receiving awards. Trevor thought his picture should have been in the column, not mine. I told him I wasn’t in charge of pictures. The boys are eager to go fishing and camping today. I’d showed them the column and read it to them partly to help explain why I had to be left alone for a couple of hours to write a column for this week before we could go anywhere. So now they’re giving Grandma a hard time and leaving me alone—behind the locked basement door. “Write about our airplane, Grandpa!” They brought toys with them for their four-week stay, but children often have less fun with toys than with the boxes they come in. We have a “No TV” rule during their visit, and we don’t have computer games, so, like children in simpler times, they have to use their imaginations. When Barb described their airplane over the phone before I got home from work, I thought of another airplane built by boys, an airplane I’d never seen because the young boys who built it were my father’s brother, Al, and a cousin. They built their airplane out of lumber on a shed roof. Al gave his cousin the honor of the first flight. The test pilot wasn’t seriously hurt when the airplane fell straight down off the edge of the roof and was instantly converted from aircraft to kindling. Tim and Trevor built their airplane on the ground. It doesn’t fly, except in the imaginations of its builders, but that is high enough and relatively safe. They started with the garden cart and added an eight-foot sheet of plywood for a wing. Grandma wouldn’t let them use Grandpa’s “pointy thing for making holes” in their effort to fasten their creation together, so they tied the wing on with bungee cords liberated from the camping supply box. An old boat cushion made a fine passenger seat. They took turns crawling inside and riding under the “wing” as the other pushed the airplane around the yard. It wasn’t long before they realized it’s more fun to get a good run down the driveway and let the cart go. I cringed at the thought of it taking a tumble and filling a kid with plywood splinters, or, worse, swerving into the garden and knocking down plants. Even the excitement of flying their own airplane waned, but, like a cardboard box, a garden cart and a piece of plywood can take on a variety of identities. It didn’t take them long to fill the foxhole they’d dug under the deck—prerequisite to doing anything else—and by the time they’d finished, I had the pump running and sprinklers going all over the yard and garden. The next thing I knew, the airplane had become a fort, standing on end in range of a sprinkler with both boys peeking over the top. When the rotating spray came by, pulsing water like a machine gun, they ducked the main stream and squealed as spray found them anyway. Sure, they were getting soaked, but to ask them to put on swimsuits would have broken the fantasy. Besides, they were already as wet as they were going to get, and it was a warm day. Tim and Trevor spend more time with the garden cart than with anything else around here. I don’t intrude to ask what other incarnations the cart has taken on as I watch them play together, arguing over procedures and whose turn it is, but settling their disagreements amicably. It would have been easy, when they say, as they do several times a day, “I’m bored,” to tell them to turn on the TV. It is difficult to let them make messes of things that we know we’ll have to help clean up. But neither parenting nor grandparenting is supposed to be easy. If it’s easy, we’re probably not doing it right.
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