“Why were you being mean to Mimi and Grampy?”
The question from my 3-year-old granddaughter, Summer, was posed to my daughter and son-in-law during the family dinner hour and caught them by surprise.
Janet, now teaching her high school English classes online, and Kevin, a program director for IBM also working from home, were patient and frank in answering her.
We love Mimi and Grampy very much, they told her. But they wanted to make sure her grandparents, Marianne and I, followed directions to stay home and not risk exposure to the coronavirus, or “germs” as they described them her.
Mimi and Grampy could get very sick if the germs got inside them. Just like Summer needed to be told loudly to follow directions not to touch the stove or to run into the street, Mimi and Grampy needed to be told loudly to stay away from the germs, they told her.
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The whole thing started the day before, when Marianne let slip in a phone conversation to our elder daughter, Jackie, that Grampy — yes, yours truly — had gone to Home Depot. This led to multiple text messages between both daughters, and then finally a note to Marianne that the two of us were not being sufficiently safe and responsible.
When Janet and Summer came with the groceries the next day and Janet repeated her concern, I nodded. I think I smiled.
I assured her I acted safely. And that it was, in fact, necessary to travel to the store because I needed a roll of 12-gauge wire to repair an electrical connection. At the store, I wore gloves and stayed clear of any customers and clerks, which is easy to do in Home Depot’s cavernous aisles and at self-service cash registers.
Back home, I cleaned the wire with alcohol and ditched the gloves. No worries.
Summer must have sensed meanness, running to stand behind Grampy’s chair, when her mother “emphatically” reminded me that Mimi and I were over 65. As she had already told us, Janet said, she would go out to get anything we needed because we were too vulnerable to the virus.
It was a case of role reversal for Marianne and me.
To my children, I’ve always been the Dad who can fix anything: A car that won’t start. A bad lightswitch. A school term paper that was stalled.
And Marianne is the problem solver: Financial decisions, dating woes or how to gracefully decline a friend’s request. She is the ultimate Mom, not just raising her own three children but several of their playmates, whom she watched for their working mothers before returning to work herself as a teacher.
We are still those same people to whom our children are “being mean,” at least in the innocent blue eyes of my granddaughter.
So Marianne countered, telling my daughter she reads several daily newspapers and is thoroughly informed of the dangers and how to stay safe. I chime in that my daily hour of aerobic exercise renders my immune system likely stronger than Janet’s own.
Now we are being mean back, I suppose, and Janet is exasperated. She says she just cannot bear to lose us. Or to have to break the news to her daughter that Mimi and Grampy are gone.
Her words, not to mention her tears, jar some sense into my thick skull.
Yes, we are the baby boomer culture, famous for not accepting the status quo. For not blindly accepting the mores of our parents and ushering in the sexual revolution. For not blindly accepting the proclamations of our government and opposing the Vietnam War.
But when we balk at accepting the evidence in medical science that aging naturally causes the production of white cells in the bone marrow to slow down, precipitating a decline in immune function, our children are absolutely right to yell.
Coronavirus does not care about our daily exercise, our yoga, our herbal teas and supplements, or our low-fat diets. Like a hungry wolf on the prowl, it kills more easily the sick, the weak and the old.
And though unpleasant, it’s probably good for our granddaughter to see her parents doing the right thing, even if it means acting mean toward Mimi, who gives the best hugs, and Grampy, who sings “All the Pretty Little Horses” at naptime.
Because this is a matter of life and death.
And of love above all else.
David McGrath is an emeritus English professor at the College of DuPage and the author of “South Siders,” a recently completed collections of columns on life in the Midwest.