The Question

I have many happy memories of my late maternal grandmother, Grammy: sitting on her screened-in back porch during a central Florida evening thunder shower while playing Rack-O and eating fudge striped cookies with milk; the way she described anything she didn’t like as “unique”; her delight in escorting my sister Pailin and me to flea markets and all you can eat buffets, both of which seemed to offer a bottomless satisfaction unavailable in the mid-Atlantic. But one year, upon my arrival in DeLand via I-95, Grammy taught me the art of being human.

This may or may not have been the year I dug in my heels about the plastic sheet on my bed, and then, after it had been removed, proceeded to wet the bed that very night. But it was definitely the year my mother, who typically spent the entire week-long stay with Pailin and me at Grammy and Pop-Pop’s, was away for several days, for reasons I don’t recall, but which reasons were sufficient to leave us in Grammy’s care. The most important element of which care was, apparently, to keep Pailin and me regular. Or at least me, because Grammy would daily inquire of me as to whether I had “made a B.M.”

Grammy, you see, had been a pediatric nurse. And it turns out that before the advent of modern pharmaceuticals, a pediatric nurse’s primary duty had been the intensive tracking and charting of children’s bowel movements. What else are you going to do when, e.g., you can’t do a thing in the world to prevent the children on your ward from up and dying from polio. None of which changes the fact that Grammy was my grandmother and not my nurse, and that antibiotics had already been around for decades by the time Grammy and Pop-Pop relocated to the Sunshine State. Which would have made the only appropriate response vis a vis Grammy’s B.M. check-ins a hearty “None of your business,” but for the fact that it is never appropriate to tell one’s grandmother that something is none of her business, at least if one is still wetting the bed.

Because copping to constipation was unthinkable, the consequences of which constipation were as terrifying as they were opaque, I had a golden opportunity to tell someone I cared about exactly what she needed to hear, whether it was true or completely fabricated. Dressed up for polite society, this skill is known as empathy.

But for a few geniuses or brutes, the most important question most of us can ask the world is “What do you need me to be?”

“Regular, you say? Okay, got it.”

It is only by successfully and consistently decoding what the world needs you to be that love and work even becomes a possibility. I’ve been regular now for going on forty years, gainfully employed for nearly twenty, and happily married for ten, with no end in sight now that I’ve started drinking coffee. I’d say that’s the story of my life, and that it was written in stone the second I told Grammy “Yes.”