By G. E.
Shuman
My granddaughter Nahla has followed me
countless times down into our old cellar over the years, always interested in
whatever ‘Papa’ is working on down there. She often, for some reason, also
plays with ‘last year’s’ summer toys in winter down there, and vice versa.
For all of last winter and into spring Nahla has persistently
pestered me about one thing in particular in the cellar, and about her getting
to use it. The thing is a small child’s bike, which, at this time, is almost
too small for her. The thing that interested Nahla in the bike so much is that
it was her mom’s first bicycle. That
bike, with its deflated tires and covering of dust had hung in the corner, from
a cellar ceiling beam, for nearly twenty years, although it doesn’t seem nearly
that long to me. It seems like only a few years ago that Emily became too tall
for it, and I had hung it up there, for ‘someone else, someday’. One day about
two weeks ago I finally realized that the ‘someone else’ and the ‘someday’ were
already here.
On that day, at Nahla’s sincerest urging, I brought the bike
up the cellar stairs, out the back door, and got out the hose, a jug of car
wash liquid, and the tire pump. Nahla spent much of that visit at Papa and
Grammy’s house helping me inflate those tired twenty-plus year-old tires and washing
the bike. Then it was time for her first ride on the very special little
vehicle that had once belonged to her mom. And then came the second ride, and
then the third.
Nahla has a better bike at her own house, but only better
because it’s newer. It will probably never be as special to this granddaughter as
the old, ragged, and rusted one that waited in our cellar for her, for almost
too long.
I think it was the very same day, those few weeks ago, that
Emily sent us a sort of ‘double’ picture of Nahla in a car seat when she was a
year or so old. Beside her, the other pic was of her now, at six years, sitting
like a teenager in their car, with her legs crossed and busily working on the iPad
on her lap.
All of us have heard the expressions that ‘time flies’, and
that ‘kids sprout up like weeds,’ and other similar things. Evidently my
daughter has already learned an important lesson along those lines that I
should have learned long ago. The caption that Em included with the picture
said it all: “Don’t Blink.”
