Andre can strap himself into his car seat now. On a recent Saturday, as he fed his arms through the upper straps he said, “I’ve got to start again. They are all twisted.” I started to help him but he told me, “I can do it, Aunt Sally.” And he can. I still marvel at the passing of time.
It was the same day we got into a long and crazy discussion about Sears and Kmart. I was telling the story to his mother, my dear sister Laura, about how I went to my local Kmart and it was now a Sears. I couldn’t find the mini ice cube trays I was looking for. When I asked for help and admitted my frustration, the clerk said she felt the same way.
“Why is it Sears now?” Andre asked and I had to go through a similar scenario as when his mother told him about Bank of America buying Fleet at the store. His retort at the end of that story was, “Why don’t they call it Fleet of America?” I don’t know, his mom said.
Back to the problems of middle America. “But why did Sears buy it?” he asked. I don’t know, I told him, they want to be bigger, I guess. “Why?” he asked. “Why don’t you like it?” So I told the story again, about all the items being moved around and then it turned out there were no mini ice cube trays and I couldn’t find something like wrapping paper.
“Do you like Sears?” he asked. I told him, no, I didn’t. I didn’t like that they took over the Kmart. I didn’t like how the store was set up. I got a little more heated up about it then I usually might. He was quiet. A few miles went by. “What about Sears?” he asked me with that grin on his face. We laughed.
Half a day went by with many activities and words and beverages and foodstuffs and actions and body movements. On the way home, he turned to me, very seriously. “What about Sears?” he asked. We laughed.
In the middle of a night when he wasn’t feeling good and had trouble sleeping, I tucked him into my bed and got in for a bit. “So,” he said at 2:30 in the morning, “what did you do today?” I recounted several activities. “What about yesterday?” I went over that day with its chillingly similar schedule. “Do you have any marshmallows?” was his next question.
He loves Shecky, my dog, and has quickly picked up on how to take care of him, including carrying him around in such a way that Shecky is nearly folded in half. “Where’s your banana?” he asks Shecky when he gets rambunctious and needs a toy. “He needs to go to school,” he told me recently. “He needs to learn how to behave.” This is all true. Here they are, riding the bumpy frontiers of the backyard with all the necessities of life -- calculator and sand toys.
Andre’s latest obsession is John Denver. Don’t ask. I’ll tell you. My dad has a DVD of the late John Denver. He put it on one day and Andre sat, transfixed.
He didn’t like John’s rendition of “Leaving on a Jet Plane” as it was too sad. He didn’t like knowing that John Denver died in a plane accident and it meant he wasn’t coming back.
He’ll put on his boots, even his rain boots, and get up on a stool and strum his guitar and mouth what looks like every word to “Country Road,” “Sunshine on My Shoulders,” and of course, “Country Boy.”
“Whoo! Thank god I’m a country boy, yessah,” he yells.
My dad, his beloved Baba, fashioned a fiddle for him out of wood. It’s a cutout, no strings yet. It has a bow. He can play it both sides, though he twists his arm underneath so he is holding it awkwardly, humorously. We laugh at this. “Don’t laugh at this,” he said, pointing with the bow to his hand.
Here he is, WHOOing it up with his guitar.
