Grandpa Is In Da House!!

I really do have some very lovable kiddos this year. I've really grown attached to some, one in particular, to even a greater degree.

When I started the school year, I had a clean shaven face. When Thanksgiving came around, I had a week off, and decided to experiment with a goatee. When I showed up back to school after the week, you should've seen the look on everyone's faces. They were shocked! How could I go from clean-shaven to caveman in a week? They really have no concept of time. But, I knew that already. Believe me, I knew that. Their total cluelessness on the concept of "elapsed time", however, is for another blog at another time.

Anyway, the kids were mesmerized by the hair on my face. Some asked me if it was fake, even. It had to be fake! How could it just happen overnight like that? They just seemed to forget the fact that it had been 9 days since they had last seen me.

One student, whom I'll call B, kept playfully ribbing me about it. She kept telling me that she was going to sneak up with scissors and cut it off. Everytime she saw me after school on her way to the bus, she would wag her finger at me and say, "cut it off!" By the time Christmas rolled around she joked that she was going to give me a razor and shaving cream for Christmas. She had also noticed that the goatee had many many colorful strands of hair... brown, blonde, black, silver, gray. She really picked up on the silver and gray, which of course led her to the Santa Claus theory. She would ask me if I was Santa in disguise, spying on kids to see if they were naughty or nice.

Well, Christmas passed, and my identity eventually morphed into "grandpa". Now, she calls me grandpa all the time, and you know... I kind of like it. It's not Mr. Cater. It's grandpa! And she says it so nonchalantly now. Almost like I'm actually her grandpa! At the end of the day, on her way to buses, she says, "bye grandpa!" And, I say "bye," right back to her. Other kids just look at each other with a I-didn't-know-they-were-related look on their face.

Even though I'm young enough to be her dad, I'll gladly accept the title of grandpa. I think it really taps into my deep-seeded desire to be a parent, more than anything else has before. She greets me everyday with a hug that practically squeezes the life out of me, and at the same time, reassures me. I could be having a totally crappy day. However, when her class comes to me, that hug makes everything right again.

With the end of the year near at hand, several students in that class now call me grandpa as well. And, you know.... I kind of like it!

I hope I'm a good one.