Grambo Had a Great Day

By Elizabeth Hemmerdinger

I took my granddaughter, 5 weeks short of 5 years, to Central Park yesterday afternoon.  She’s the one who gave me my nickname.   “Rocks, Grambo!  Can I climb them?”

I checked the soles of her shiny Mary Janes.  Yes, indeed, rubber soles.  Do you remember that the man in the shoe store used to score your new shoes with the tip of his house key? Still they stayed slippery and you could sort of shush along the sidewalk for days until the leather soles gained “natural” traction.  But these days, Mary Janes are ready from the outset.  Love that.    And so off she went.

Up and down the rocks, proudest when she could make it to the bottom, merely crouching for balance, without using her hands at all.  “I’m a princess and I’m up here all alone. Would you like to come up, too?” she asked.   Favoring the pinched nerve in by back over the impulse to be beside her, I answered, “I’m just a lowly subject in your kingdom and don’t deserve to be way up there with you, oh, beautiful princess.”

“Okay, I’m not a princess, anymore.”  She spread her arms wide and twirled and curtseyed.  “I’m Belle and you’re…” well, it all doesn’t matter, really, what we were shouting back and forth to each other, she a good twenty feet above me, silhouetted against a drizzly sky.  For there was this dear little child delighting in her conquest of nature and the ramblings of her own imagination.

And what did I see?  Good Lord!  Myself, at just her age.  Of the five grandchildren, I see myself most in this one.  Certainly, I don’t love her any more than the others, I love them all deeply and individually.  And yet, to visit myself, also a tireless rockclimber, using Manhattan’s granite to loft me into familiar and unknown worlds, was to travel back almost 60 years and to feel myself in that moment, just that age, just that agile.

It was a gift of time travel that I wish on all of you, particularly as we celebrate the new birth of our site.  Successful aging brings sophistication, the ability to consider several things at once, to compare and contrast ideas and emotions.  But I did so enjoy getting back in touch with the little girl with straight auburn hair and bangs..    The moment might have gone on forever, but that I finally managed a whispered shout, “Grambo’s got to go… to the bathroom.”    “Me, too,” admitted Minime, and scampered back into my arms and the ordinary day.

Elizabeth Hemmerdinger is a born-and-bred New Yorker as well as an award-winning playwright and screenwriter. She is the founder of “Behind The Scenes at Tisch,” a program dedicated to developing new works by new writers at New York University, where she received her MFA in 2003. Her plays have been presented in a number of venues in New York and Los Angeles as well as at the Williamstown Theater Festival and The Denver Center. Her full length piece Squall is available through Playscripts, Inc., which is also publishing a volume of her short works this fall. She is currently working with Larry Gatlin on a musical about Rosie the Riveter. Hemmerdinger is a founding board member of Dancing Dreams, a program specially designed for children with physical challenges that focuses on establishing an environment where children, aided by a teenage volunteer, participate in the art of dance, giving them the chance to experience the pure joy of movement. She is affectionately known as “Grambo” to her five delicious grandchildren.

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