When second childhood walked into my arms

‘NANA, I AM A GROWN-UP GIRL NOW,’ OUR CANADIAN-BORN GRANDDAUGHTER, NOW 5, HAD WARNED ME

The aircraft was at the Terminal 1 gate in Toronto, the aerobridge connected, and the line moving already. My wife and I joined the crawl of passengers towards the exit. Outside, we started our long trudge to the immigration counter, with passports and forms in hand. Procedures over quickly, we picked up our luggage, put it on the trolleys, and with ‘nothing to declare’ customs slips in hand, walked through the green channel. A turn to the left and the door to the arrival lounge was visible. It takes a while to get there, so all my thoughts and misgivings started bothering me again.

Our daughter had volunteered to pick us up and said she’d be alone, as our granddaughter would be at school. “Nana, I am a grown-up girl now,” our Canadian-born granddaughter, now 5, had warned me. How we grandparents wish that our grandchildren never grew up. Growing up means spending less time together, which will rob us of our second childhood. I enjoyed my granddaughter’s growingup years more than I did my children’s, because of career demands maybe.

Last year, we had accompanied her to the bird trail and admired her as she fed the squirrels out of her tiny hands. My little acrobat would enjoy being thrown in the air, and being twisted and turned. She never got tired of the game and would plead: ‘Nana, once more, please’. We’d hunt for ladybirds in the backyard shrubs. She would hold them in her tiny palms and exult to see them fly away. I once got her a soap-bubble kit for hours of fun blowing and smashing the bubbles.

One day, I was tending to the backyard lawn when she came over to ask if there were any earthworms in the soil. On my saying yes, she told me to place one on her palm. “Do you like earthworms?” I said. No, she replied. “Then why do you ask?,” I said, transferring an earthworm to her palm. She patted it gently and told me to put it back into the soil. “My teacher asked me to catch an earthworm, be gentle with it, admire it, love it, but return it to the soil later,” she said. I was surprised to know she found earthworms creepy but couldn’t say no to a job. With these thoughts in mind, I was wondering if this trip would be as exciting as the last few.

We had just swung the exit door open and were looking for our daughter in the visitors’ lounge when we heard a scream of ‘Naanaa!’ and saw our granddaughter charging full gallop towards us. I had just enough time to stop my cart, run forward, and lift her. We hugged each other tight, as the world stood by, admiring. All my misgivings about her being ‘grown-up’ vanished and that instant I knew we were going to have fun as children once more.