A Little Boy Turns Five!

Fun and miracles with a growing child.

(Listen to the radio version here.)

I vaguely remember being five years old. My Grandpa was the most beloved person in my life.

I was three years old in this photo, but it’s the only one I have of me and my Grandpa. (I was the flower-girl for my Aunt Pat’s wedding. He was the father-of-the-bride.)

I was five when he gave me the Little Golden Activity Book: Bird Stamps, which I treasured.

I’d taught myself to read before I can remember, but I was five when, as family lore had it, I memorized the “Bird” entry in our family’s encyclopedia. My parents got a kick out of showing that off for company, first handing them the volume to follow along. I’d start out:

Birds are animals with feathers, and this is the thing that makes them different from all other animals. Birds have two feet, and wings instead of arms or front legs. Like men, the bird is warm-blooded, which means…

They were impressed, but I never got much further than that before they handed me back the book and started talking to my parents about other things, so at this late date I can’t be sure I really memorized the whole 8-page entry. The encyclopedia set ended up in a landfill long ago. When I ordered that volume on eBay, the Bird entry seemed only vaguely familiar in the way that memories of long ago do—I didn’t even remember those first sentences. No one ever asked me if I actually understood anything in that article, but had I committed any of it to my long-term memory, much of what I learned in college ornithology wouldn’t have been news to me. So my precociousness was not as impressive as one might think.

Now, 68 years later, my little grandson Walter turns five today. When I was hanging out with him last week, I told him that he was exactly 4 and 51/52 years old, explaining that it was 51 weeks since he turned 4, and a year has 52 weeks. We’ve always had fun counting birds and flowers and Legos and the petals on daisies, and now it’s fun watching him puzzle through fractions.

He’s not obsessed with reading as I was at his age, but that may be because so very many people read to him—his parents, all four of his grandparents, his aunt and uncles and preschool teacher—so it probably doesn’t feel as urgent to him as it did to me—I can’t remember even my Grandpa reading to me.

Walter has read three books aloud to me—Green Eggs and Ham, Dr. Seuss’s ABC, and Go, Dog, Go!, though he insists he didn’t read them “aloud,” but “aquiet.”

Birds have been part of Walter’s life since he was born. We spent so much time looking out my office window and his living room window at chickadees coming to feeders that he even christened me Dee Dee Nana. He recognizes a lot of birds already but doesn’t consider himself a birdwatcher or birder—according to him, the ONLY two real birdwatchers are me and my friend Erik Bruhnke. As he grows older, I don’t think he’ll ever be monomaniacal about birds the way I am, but I’m pretty sure he’ll never, ever vote for anyone whose policies hurt birds.

Lately, Walter’s been learning more about plants than birds. I have five cactus plants that I planted as seeds in 1983, making them older than Walter’s parents.

One is taller than Walter, but the others are much smaller, and he finds that very interesting. When I took him to Bending Birches, a great local garden store, to buy some native plants for my yard, he saw a tiny cactus and wanted to grow that one himself. So far it’s doing well.

This year, Walter helped me pot up four small cherry tomato plants. Now they’re bigger than he is, and one is taller than me. Last week we ate the first ripe tomato. Yum! It’s lucky that tomatoes grow much faster than cactuses.

We’ve grown a few other plants together, like an avocado plant we grew from a seed from Walter’s lunch a couple of years ago. It’s pretty big now.

Last summer when pineapples were on sale, I pulled the tops off a couple and showed him how, when I pulled out the bottom leaves, roots were wound around the stems. We planted them, and they seem to be thriving.

But the coolest plant experience for both of us started with the bumper crop of maple seeds in my yard this year. Walter planted several seeds in little pots on my front porch. They all germinated, but chipmunks started eating them. I moved the survivors to the patio, but the little rodents were merciless, and now just one remains.

Meanwhile, a few weeks ago, I started reading Charlotte’s Web—a chapter or two every time Walter was here. And the very day I read the part where Charlotte tells Wilbur about making an egg sac, when I was watering plants on the patio, I noticed that one of Walter’s little maple tree leaves was curled in. It had been next to one of the cactus plants and I was afraid one of the spines had punctured the leaf and made it stick to itself, but when I examined it, what to my wondering eyes should appear tucked into the curl but a candy-striped spider, her front legs embracing her egg sac!

I’d never seen a spider’s egg sac in all my 73 years of life until this, and the timing felt like a miracle. But then, the whole world seems fresher, more magical, and yes, genuinely miraculous when I’m experiencing it with Walter. I’m the luckiest Dee Dee Nana in the whole wide world.