Why?*

You've got time, you know, when you're retired, so I bought a craigslist super-offer Magnavox combo vhs/dvd player from a guy in South Dakota, a real steal, I thought, after failing miserably with a gizmo that was supposed to turn our ancient vhs tapes into dvds, vhs technology being as dead as movie disks these days.  It's a job I can do in retirement, you know, when I've got all that time. . .

But my legendary clutziness kept me from operating the Magnavox too, so I called in my son-in-law, who proceeded to get it going in no time flat. When he did, what appeared on the screen was an endless loop of endless shots featuring a four-month baby so delightfully boring only a first-time grandparent could shoot it. Anyone else might take two minutes maybe, but this video really was just about a feature film.  It would not end. 

Like I said, you have to be a grandpa. And it has to be the first time.

Or a grandma. Or mom. Or dad. Or the baby herself, who's now edging dangerously close to teenagerism and had never seen this display of her babyness before.

There we sat, five of us, watching this ancient, a four-month old pudgy sweetheart on one of those perpetual baby swings, back and forth, back and forth, the only five people on the face of the earth who could be so totally enchanted. 

Here's what happened. We were sitting there, thus enthralled, smack dab on top of our four-year-old grandson's Lego nation. We were in his way, so to speak, and were paying him no mind because of that dumb baby.

All of which seemed totally mysterious to him.  "Who is that?" he said.  Remember, he's four.

"That's your sister," I told him.

That made zero sense.

"Where's Pieter?" he asked, meaning his big brother, who wasn't anywhere near the drawing boards just then, that swinging sister of his therefore soaking up every last bit of her parents' attention--firstborn and all of that. Where was Pieter when his sister was a baby?--he wondered. Good question.

"Pieter's not around," I said, barely paying him mind.

Okay, but then, "Where was I?" he said. A legitimate question: why wasn't he in this dumb video?

That one got our attention but prompted no answers because we were too taken by the little swinging kid to explain life and death and human destiny to a four-year-old in a pool of Legos.
  
What he could see was that everyone in the room right then was transfixed by a some salivating baby barely capable of holding her head up. Everyone he knows is gone in this goofy video he doesn't begin to understand, the whole room locked in silence, and nobody's answering his perfectly logical questions. What's more, that baby can't even talk or play Legos. 

"Why are we watching this video?" he announced.

A perfectly understandable question. There's no way in heck he could begin to understand the whole thing.  

"Why are we watching this video?" he says again.

That was three days ago,  and my wife and I have been laughing about that question ever since.  Nothing made sense to him right then, nothing at all.

So dear, so darling, and, oh-my-goodness, oh-so-perfectly human. 
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*Posted December 18,2013