Joanna leads a happier life than I. Besides the fact she gets to live with me (your groan is entirely appropriate here), she gets to see our new grandson more often than I.
Ezra is 9 1/2 months old and lives with his mama and daddy in Buda, which is about four hours or so south of our home in Coppell.
They live just far enough away so that if a person has anything else to do on a weekend—like teach Sunday school or tackle a mess of chores around the house—he or she cannot also work in a trip down to their house.
Far too often, said person would be me.
Take, for example, the other weekend. The Texas Baptist convention's annual meeting was coming up, and I needed to pick up a cargo van, load it with all the materials for the Baptist Standard booth, and drive it up to Amarillo. Since I was going to be busy and/or gone for much of the weekend, Jo told me, "I'm going to go see Ezra (oh, and Lindsay and Aaron, too)."
So, while Marvo—that's my self-selected grandpa name; we'll see if it passes Ezra's muster—lugged a load of boxes and played long-haul trucker, Jody drove to Central Texas and played with the grandbaby.
Call me slow, but I'm beginning to realize one of the imbalanced aspects of parenthood replicates itself in grandparenthood. Mothers and grandmothers tend to get more time with the kiddoes than do fathers and grandfathers.
When our daughters, Lindsay and Molly, were growing up, I always felt jealous of Jo for getting to spend more time with them. Of course, when they were preschoolers, I often realized my job—getting in a car and driving downtown to work in an office—was lots easier than Jo's job—spending the day tending to two little girls. But still, even on those days, I envied the time she spent with those young ladies.
Well now, life seems to be repeating itself. On occasion, Jo will hang out with Ezra and his siblings and cousins we hope come along later, while I get up and go to work.
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The ancient Greeks differentiated between chronos time, the kind of time you measure with clocks and calendars, and kairos time, the special moments you measure by the way they make your heart miss a beat or how they blaze themselves into your memory. As Marvo, I'm going to set the clock of my heart to kairos time. I plan on thoroughly absorbing the moments I spend with Ezra.
Meanwhile, the other weekend, I enjoyed my consolation prize. When Jo drove down to Buda, we "called" each other on our computers. She sat her laptop on the floor beside Ezra, and the tiny video camera broadcast his play and jibber-jabber onto the screen sitting on my lap.
At first, I tried to talk to him, but he really didn't know what to make of the old bald guy yakking to him through a little screen. So, I shut up and watched him play. A beautiful kairos moment.
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