At a Little Free Library there was a really handsome mint-new book all about being a grandparent. There was a famous woman on the cover who we see on the television set. She works with other important people who are also all over the television too. Maybe this book could teach me how to respond in a grandparently manner toward the kiddos already running about in the world, and help them to be more happy and safe?

At home I hunker in for an hour or so of flipping around and reading vignettes. It’s puzzling to see that the book is not Here is how to be another adult in a tight-net web of connections who are there for kids. Instead, the point of the book is We’re all famous people at the top of our field, we’ve totally rocked the world in our professions, we have great spouses and successful children — and now we’re rocking it as grandparents too!

Gosh. Growing up I had four grandparents born in the 1890s. The two grandfathers never held a conversation or shared an activity with me because they were men and worked immensely hard at their jobs. The two grandmothers were happy to fix me meals and snacks but worked immensely hard in the kitchen cooking for stampedes of relatives or scrubbing windows with ammonia & crumpled newspaper or weeding the garden or tending the wringer washing machine with a top lid and a wood paddle to agitate the clothes before hanging them up on the clothesline and then ironing them with starch.

Anyway. The book narrates in lavish detail the pleasures of becoming a new grandparent: new grandchildren with their deep gaze, different from but profound like the gaze of a lover; that wonderful clean baby smell and soft skin; the oxytocin-fueled amazement that after all the rich enjoyments of other human intimacies and lifetime achievements, it’s wonderful to experience a grandchild as a completely new source of radiant euphoria that promotes our healthy aging and can postpone and even reverse chronic illness.

But… Isn’t the first item of business to tune in to what children need, and what we should bring them?

Maybe my issue is that all these anecdotes of personal closeness don’t match anything in my own life. The regrettable conclusion is that here is a whole new core human endeavor that I’ve missed and failed at as a human. My children are only in my dreams, where they run around the kitchen while I’m at the stove fixing breakfast, and then I wake up feeling tearful and not understanding that the kids were never there.

Well, this book needs to go back to the little free library as soon as possible, in its pristine condition, so a woman with more of a real woman life can enjoy its affirming resonance. Time to stop reading and close the pages. On the cover, the author looks absolutely radiant and beautiful, cradling her grandkids. Gazing at the dust jacket I watch my hands do something unusual. They rip the photograph to smithereens. Then the hands proceed through the pages tearing the stories to little shreds. Now it’s a recycle bin of confetti. That felt surprisingly helpful.

That night I tuck into bed with a Russian copy of Way of a Pilgrim. It opens at random to a narrative explaining the nature of spiritual attack. The Orthodox find it normal that Satan is a real presence, out to upset and make us miserable. If he’s trying a temptation on me (and what other bait is he gonna try — violent video games? spinning auto doughnuts at a street takeover? fixing the World Series? airplane glue?) he picked a good one.

Today at the grocery store there was a little boy. His mother held a full shopping cart, examining items on a shelf. Her son was seeing how long he could stand on one foot, then how long he could balance on the other. I said to the mom “Wow, look! Someone has nice balance there! I sure wish I could stand on one foot like that!” The mother avoided my eyes, yanked the boy to the other side of her, and took off with the cart. Later when they came around the next aisle the mother steered well away. But the boy looked back, and caught my eye for a show-offy trick: he could stand with one shoe right on top of the other without falling down. I watched carefully and gave him a very grave impressed nod, and like Robert Lansing through the cockpit window in “Twelve O’Clock High” added a thumb’s up. Good work, soldier.

He looked back to make sure I was still watching. As an encore he picked up one foot, and hopped away.