Ever since my daughter Raine was perhaps 18 or so, I'd remind her every now and then that I was eager for grandchildren. Her standard response, appropriately, was, "Daaaaaaad."
Though Raine's still a blast to be with at 24, I still fondly remember the days when she was four or five and would seem to bounce around the house more on her toes than on her feet, eager for any and everything offered to her.
I have a pair of friends I've known for almost twenty years; Susan, since 1987, and her husband Tito, since Susan married him in 1991. I've known their two boys, Gus, 12, and Max 13, ever since they were born. In the ten years they lived near my home until Tito's work took him to Bolivia in 2000, this couple and their children were the four human beings with whom I and my daughter spent the most of our free time.
Susan is from Rhode Island but Tito is from A Coruña, Spain (formerly known as La Coruña until the city recently removed Franco's imposition of it's Latinized form and returned to the original spelling in the local language of Galego).
I've never had the chance to visit with these friends in Tito's native city until this summer, when a vacation from their current residence in Lima, Peru coincided with a few days I had free during these hectic final days before the race. Unfortunately, their oldest son Max was back in the states on an educational program.
I first met their daughter Nina in March of 2005, when she was two and a half years old and only recently adopted from an orphanage in La Paz, Bolivia. Susan and all her children had traveled to Florida to join Susan's mother for a week in Disneyland. Somebody had to ride on the Disneyland roller coaster rides with the boys and it certainly wasn't going to be Susan or Grandma. I got the happy job.
From the start, Nina has always been wonderfully affectionate and engaging. When I next saw her while visiting the family in Peru 18 months ago, she was as warm as ever, and full of as much energy as I could possibly match.
This visit last weekend to A Coruña was no different. Now, just a few days short of five years old, she is quite the handful...perhaps challengingly so to her parents but only delightfully so to me.
The joys of being a grandparent, uncle, or visiting guest is that you get the best of it and little, if any at all, of the worst of it. You show up fresh and full of energy and have nothing but enthusiasm to give. Children seem to know this, and respond in kind.
Nina had a small plastic wheeled vehicle that she would love to ride down a small hill just in front of her house, shouting "¡Corre con mígo!" towards me over her shoulder: run with me!
I'd jog down with her, carry the toy back up, and we'd do it over and over again, neither of us losing any enthusiasm for it.
Where ever we'd go, it was assumed that Nina would sit beside me, be it in the car or anywhere else. If it didn't happen naturally, Nina made sure it happened. I loved it.
Always...always, it seemed, her arms were around my neck.
Though her parents speak to her in both English and Spanish, she'd only spoken Spanish to me when I first arrived. I struggled to respond in kind but my Spanish is very limited. One morning, after I'd finished taking a shower, I opened the bathroom door to defog the mirror to shave. Nina came in and looked around the bathroom in silence for a moment before bursting out,
"¡Hay agua por todos partes! Tu has hecho todo mojado. El piso mojado, el tocador esta mojado, las paredes esta mojado. ¡Todo esta mojado!"
Clearly I was in trouble, but there was one word I just couldn't translate, so I asked her how to say it in English,
¿Cómo se dice "mojado" en inglés?
With her tiny hands on her tiny hips, she heaved a tiny sigh with her tiny chest. With a dramatic pause that would have seemed scripted had she not been so young, she replied with a stern gaze,
"Wet."
Ahhh. The shower was the kind that baffles most Americans; a spray on a hose mounted on a removable clip on the wall at about chest level, but no shower curtain. I was the ultimate ignorant and unskilled American, having made a mess of her bathroom.
The next morning I sat in the tub instead of standing and took great care to make sure no water escaped to anywhere but the bathtub. The moment I turned the water off, a small knock sounded very low on the door. Nina wanted to inspect.
I wrapped myself in a towel and opened the door. Wordlessly she came in and looked around. She seemed content until she ran a finger across the top of the toilet's tank. Holding her finger tip up to me with an even gaze, she said only, "Mojado."
It would have been no use explaining to her that condensation probably had more to do with that than my lack of European showering skills, so I just bowed my head and accepted her happy scorn.
Such playful delights abounded the entire weekend. I was in grandfather/uncle/guest heaven.
Our last adventure was a family trip to nearby Santiago de Compostella, the goal of one of the worlds most famous pilgrimages. The next morning I would fly home to England. Nina and I made the most of it, playing games and chasing each other around other sedentary adults like a dog and a cat around two chairs. If not playing together, then at least I carried her as often as I could.
I've always been partial to brown eyes. Something about them just melts my heart.
