Christmas in July
This lucky girl just got a gift package from her Grandma Across the Ocean. Among other things, she now has a soccer ball and a pair of shorts featuring the Ohio University bobcat logo. (My mom, my wife, and I are all OU alumni, hence the choice of apparel.)
She also has an OU T-shirt and new teddy bear (with a tiny OU T-shirt of its own, of course). The bear, we are told, prefers to sleep on a bed of its own—on top of mommy’s dumbbells, for reasons that make sense to a 3-year-old girl, I assume—whenever she is not around to play with it.
Noticeably absent from the gift package were pictures of Grandma herself, which 3-year-old girls need to remember what faraway grandmas look like. In our daughter’s case, it has been more than a year since she last saw her grandma (which is nearly a third of her lifetime!), so she doesn’t have a very clear memory. It has gotten to the point where any white woman could be Grandma in her mind—she’s just not sure anymore. (Then again, she’s not very good at identifying non-Japanese people. She once pointed to an image of Dennis Hastert on TV and said, “Is that Daddy?")
If all goes well, perhaps she will see Grandma again sometime around the Christmas/New Year’s holidays, when there will be another grandchild competing for attention.
