Swingin’ On a Star: Photo Reflection

I’m back to the blog and back to teaching. Here’s my photo reflection essay.

Swingin’ On a Star

            Grandpa says, “Ok, here ya go, Leesie,” as he places a pink corsage on my orange brownie uniform and begins to fasten it on with a pin. It’s a pink carnation with a spray of baby’s breath and a pink ribbon. When he first gave it to me a few minutes ago, the clear plastic package was dusted with snow. I opened the package and when I touched the flower it was still cold from being kept in the refrigerator. Grandpa’s my date for the night and this is my very first corsage.

I feel like I’m getting ready to go to a very adult, very formal dinner party rather than a Father-Daughter Girl Scout Dinner. Grandpa’s dressed up in a light bluish suit and tie, his dark hair elegantly slicked to the side. He’s wearing Old Spice. I, too, am sophisticated, with my curled hair in an owl headband, my jean skirt, and my white tights with tennis shoes. That’s how it feels to me, anyway. I’m tingling with giddy anticipation. Everything we do to prepare for the dinner seems to have a tinge of shining electricity.

Grandpa tries again to maneuver the pin through the stalk of the flower. I trust him completely, but I’m still nervous with that pin so close to my skin.

Mom hovers nearby. “He won’t hurt you, Elise.”

“I know,” I say, smiling, flashing Grandpa my assortment of adult teeth and baby teeth and gaps where teeth should be. Grandpa takes another stab at attaching the pin, and even though I try not to, I curl up and giggle as though he were tickling me. So very sophisticated.

Grandpa has a favorite story about his childhood. He doesn’t tell it as we drive in the snow to our Daddy-Daughter dinner, but I have heard it before. And later, as an adult, I can’t help but notice of how different my childhood was from his, especially as I think about my corsage. Grandpa was a child during the Depression, when money was tight and work hard to come by. When he was about the same age I am as we head to the Girl Scout dinner, Grandpa got his first job, trapping rats for the local baker. He got a penny a rat and as many raisins as he could eat for this job. I’m fairly certain that at one point, the story included a rat attack, but I’m fuzzy on that detail right now. Regardless, Grandpa started working young and retired late, that good old fashioned Midwestern-Protestant-Work-Ethic knitted deep into the fiber of his bones. Thinking about that now, I see how much Grandpa wanted to give us grandkids every luxury he possibly could provide. It’s a common cliché that parents and grandparents want better for their kids, but it doesn’t seem so cliché when you actually experience it. By dressing up and getting me a corsage, Grandpa took this little party seriously and it strikes me as an exceptionally tender expression of love.

As we drive to my school in the dark, with the snow glittering, lighted up by the headlights of Grandpa’s station wagon and a warm box filled with a dinner that smells of gravy and green beans, he starts singing an old song from the 1940s, as he often does to fill the silence:

Would you like to swing on a star, carry moonbeams home in a jar? You can be better off than you are. You could be swingin’ on a star.