"Inside every old person is a young person trying to get out." This is my mother's maxim for the weekend. She always has one of these sayings she walks around with. I am sure she pretty much makes them up, but something in her authoritative delivery has a way of suggesting Aristotle or Benjamin Franklin.
The new saying has been her refrain as she watches my girls, with their infinite energy. She keeps catching herself. She thinks, for a split second, that she can jump out onto the driveway and join them on their tricycles, and then, in a burst of awareness, she remembers.
"Inside every old person -- " she says.
"I know, Mom," I say. "You already told me."
This is the first time in about four years that my parents have visited our house. It is, in that way, a big deal. All their previous attempts over these past years were thwarted by illness -- a broken hip, a heart thing, an intestine thing, a whole bunch of undiagnosed things, neuropathy. "Face it," my mom said to me last summer, "we're too old."
This only made me more determined to help my parents make the five-hour trek to my house. Recently I cooked up a deal with my brother, who would drive them out. When it finally looked like it was really going to happen, I panicked. Would they be comfortable here? We live on a slope. We have . . . mud! We're hardly handicapped-accessible. Would they be able to handle the noise of my rambunctious girls? Not to mention all the stinky pets.
So I reserved a room for them at a nearby hotel. One of those suite places with a walk-in shower and no steps. I washed the dogs. I told my girls, "Now listen, they're old, so you can't be bashing into them."
"They could fall over?" Anna, 5, asked.
"They could fall over," I said.
"Well, I would like to find out how they got so old," she said.
My parents took on celebrity status as we prepared for the visit. Actual old people in our house! We see plenty of senior citizens when we visit my parents in their retirement village, but this would be the first time my girls had them on the home turf. I didn't think the novelty factor would last. In fact, I worried that my kids would quickly grow bored with the old folks, as kids do. I figured my job for the weekend would be to keep the old folks entertained, while at the same time keeping my kids . . . quiet.
And now look. We're already on day three of the visit, and the novelty has not worn off. At the moment, the two old people and the two young people are hunkered down together in my living room. It's raining outside. My mom is on the couch drawing pictures of cats and witches and rainbows with Anna. On the big leather chair next to them, my dad is all smiles and applause, as he watches Sasha, 3, dance and bow and curtsy.
I'm watching this. I'm thinking: Well, this isn't a disaster at all! I'm marveling at just how well old people fit with very young people, and vice versa.
Sasha is all flirt. My father is all flirt. These two have discovered each other in a way they never have been able to before, when we're at the retirement village and all the cousins are around. Sasha has been following my dad, curling up next to him and, in her own special Sasha language, whispering in his ear. "Bess frenz, Granddat," she said this morning. "Bess frenz."
