Missing Bailey

The single most painful part of coming up here was leaving my granddaughter Bailey. I’ve always lived close enough to see her regularly, and in the last months before I left, she and Haley and I lived together. She was my bud; we went swimming and to the parks and the store together, read at night, and played games of her devising. A grandchild really is an opportunity to relive the best parts of being a parent; it’s a bonus, a chance to see the world again through a beloved child’s eyes and as far as I’m concerned, life doesn’t get much better than that. I shed more tears over leaving her than over any other ten things put together. You’d have thought I was shipping to Tunisia for a six-year stint in the Foreign Legion. I was very nervous about telling her I was leaving, and it seemed like an opening when she wanted to play with the styrofoam peanuts in a box in my room.

"No, I need those because I'm going to move after Christmas." Little face becomes solemn.
"I'm going to move up to Tallahassee to go to school -- look, here it is on the map." Face gets longer.
"You and Mommy will stay here and you will have your own room." Mouth pulls down and lip sticks out. I wait for an outburst. What will she say? What if she begs me not to leave? How painful is this going to be? What if I start to cry?
Then, finally, she speaks: "Can't I have just ONE peanut??"

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This is an example of what so delighted me, and what I miss so much now – the daily interaction with her. The three of us drove in to work and school together for a while and I noted this conversation in an email to my mother:

This morning we were treated to an interesting monologue from Bailey. First there was question-and-answer time.
“Everyone who meeds to go to work, raise their hand.” I did. (She still has trouble with her "m's" and "n's")
“Everyone who goes to a big school raise their hand.” Haley did.
“Everyone who goes to a kid school, raise their hand.” She did.
“Everyone who goes to a plain school, raise their hand.” We sat in puzzled silence, until I asked her, “What’s a plain school?”
“It’s. . . . it’s . . . uh . . . it’s just a house, and it’s a bad house. It’s a bad school. Guess what they have.”
“What?”
Bailey’s voice lowers and becomes as ominous as a five-year-old’s voice can get. “They have bad kids. And a bad teacher. They fight.”
“That’s terrible,” Haley and I chorus.
Encouraged, Bailey goes on.
“Guess what they have in the yard. A, uh, a boogey slide.” [I thought at first this meant you had to slide down in mucus but soon it became apparent that “boogey” meant scary.] “And boogey swings. And they have bad treats. They have bad ice cream.”
“There’s such a thing as bad ice cream?”
“Yeah. It has worms in it.”
“Okay, that’s bad.”
“And one eye is in it.”
“Oooh, that’s really bad.”
“Just one eye, and worms.” [Longish pause while we all reflect on this horror.]

“And the kids can’t get out. They have a oogey-boogey door and no one can get out. They can’t ever go back to their moms and dads.”
Haley is starting to look upset.
“And they have bad pets. They have . . . they have . . . a alligator. A big one-eyed alligator.”
“The other eye is in the ice cream,” Haley murmurs.
“And the alligator is really mean. He bites. It’s a ba-a-ad school.”
“Well, we won’t ever go there,” we tell her, wondering about the dark corners in a punkinhead’s mind.
She was wearing her Ariel swimsuit because this is the last week of school and they have lots of fun things planned; today was “wet balloons!” she told us.
“Carly and Catherine and Julia will love my swimsuit,” she said happily. “The boys won’t like it, because they aren’t my friends.”
“Boys don’t care much about swimsuits. Not now, anyway. Just wait,” Haley said.