‘The Boys,” as we call my twin grandsons, Tyler and Bryce, turned 2 last Saturday. What a journey it has been. From helpless to sitting to crawling to standing to walking to running. From bald to fuzzy to goldilocks. From wordless to babbling to books. The inner journey just as dynamic as the outer. They are ever-evolving and endlessly fascinating.
But I’m not just sitting back observing. Two or three Saturdays a month, I’m their guy. Grandfathering is different when you’re the sole playmate. You can’t hang back. We have gotten to know one another.
When it’s time for us to go out, Bryce hands me my hat. When it’s time to read books, they toss them in my lap and sit, one on each thigh. I put on music and sing to them, a solo performance almost no one else in my life gets to hear.
Their vocabulary is expanding exponentially, but they’re also fond of onomatopoeia. Cars are vroom-vroom. Dogs are woof-woof. They adore dogs from a distance, up close not so much. But I can’t blame them. The world must seem a large and overwhelming place to a 2-year-old. They’re gradually getting acquainted with it.
On the other hand, playgrounds do not intimidate them. Their father and I wheel them over in their beloved wagon while their senses sponge everything all around, pointing and naming, much as my son did at that age in the bike seat behind me in Colorado in the mid-1980s. Just yesterday.
I need him now for reinforcement because with two 2-year-olds on a playground, you can’t afford to be outnumbered.
At the playground, Tyler and Bryce display fearlessness born of blissful ignorance, so my son and I play man-to-boy defense, frequently calling “switch,” because the boys, moving in opposite directions, are all business, heading for the Armageddon slide by the most perilous path possible. The only break we get is when we slip them into the bucket swings. Then we have a few minutes to talk.
Strange how life unfurls. Dylan and Kristen are no longer together, which is the main reason I have this gig. Grandfathers don’t always get so much one-on-one time (or, in my case, one-on-two), but I love spending Saturdays with my dynamic duo. They range from conflict to harmony to indifference with respect to one another. Yet they will someday respect one another, and feel less loneliness than most, as they learn, however grudgingly at times, that life is largely about sharing.
They’re still working that out, of course. Inevitably, they want whatever the other one has. For a time, Bryce, the bull, had the upper — or at least the quicker — hand for a time, but Tyler is feisty and holding his own now. They are individuals but tied by life’s circumstances — unique personalities who will someday, we hope, be best of friends. Even now they start most days with conversations across the gulf between their cribs.
Though not identical, they look enough alike to fool those who don’t see them often. There are still times when I start reading a book to one of them and by the time I finish, the other has somehow taken his place.
Bald-ish for the longest time, they now have fine, straight, strawberry blond hair on top with a patch of ringlet curls in back.
Quite angelic, but when Bryce clocked his brother, recently, following an altercation, Kristen, who has been mom-of-the-year wonderful with these boys, timed him out. A few seconds later, he let out a wail of abject keening that broke my heart.
When it’s time to say goodbye, they cry inconsolably, which is adorable, their faces crumpled against the glass, but I can’t help feeling good that they don’t want our time to end.
I don’t either.
Conventional characterizations aside, however, I’m not there to “spoil them.” My mission is to lavish them with love, even when that means saying, “No.”
The future will hold more heartbreaks, of course. More “time outs.” That’s the nature of life. But I know there will be joy in equal measure — or more, if we’re blessed.
I hope and pray and even believe that in the final reckoning, the final word will belong to joy.