Bibs and Chickendaries

Smooth on peanut butter, layer grape jelly and remove all crusts. Arrange triangles on Winnie-the-Pooh plate. So far, so good. Pour milk into spill-proof Mickey Mouse cup. Jayma, my two year old granddaughter, nods approval.

It's when I offer to lift her into the high chair that I meet with resistance. She will sit at the big table today. Oh. Okay. Jayma and I are doing lunch alone at her house on this day in 1997, and we both want the exact same thing. Jayma's happiness. She will sit wherever she will sit.

With her sweet bottom resting on Mommy's cloth covered chair, the edge of Mommy's highly polished, off-limits-to-children dining table is level with Jayma's eyebrows.

"I need the chickendary," she announces.

Yes. Right. Hmmm ...

Ketchup, maybe, to dribble on her sandwich?
No, thank you.
A pickle?
No.
Yogurt?

"The chickendary, Grandma Jo," She begins the long climb down. Obviously, this request will require more than the spoken word. Taking a firm grip on my finger, she leads me to the den and points to the bookcase. Of course. I should have known. Grandmothers are sometimes so slow.

I lift down Webster's heaviest volume and we retrace our steps to the dining room where we are not supposed to be in the first place.

Sitting on a chickendary - now chin-level with the table - a Barney bib protecting her Sleeping Beauty T-shirt, Jayma is finally able to eat.

Eyes remaining on duty, my mind slips away to a long-ago kitchen and five hungry children who ate peanut butter sandwiches, crust and all, while gulping kool-aid from mis-matched jelly glasses. The youngest, destined to become Jayma's mother, wearing a ragged dish towel pinned around her neck to protect a Buster Brown T-shirt already stained by the past meals of two or three older sisters, perched proudly upon two obsolete Sears Roebuck catalogs ... until a sibling knocked her off.