Easter Sin and Quality Time

It was her idea from the get-go, but I was more than willing, it being Easter Sunday. Besides, lately it seems I haven't been getting enough sweet time with my granddaughter.

"You take my picture," she says, "and we'll put it on a card to send to Great-Grandma Schaap."

Maybe Easter brings out the best in us. I’m willing, and besides, she's getting to the age when Grandpa is rapidly becoming an old pair of argyle socks.

Outside we go. I take a few shots, show them to her, but she doesn't like them. “Too much wind,” she says. Her hair was messy. I’m thinking, Cute as a bug's ear, as my father used to say. They're all plenty good to me.

Downstairs we go, out of the wind. The girl knows how to pose, believe me, but that's my fault, taking pictures of her constantly.

She climbs onto my lap, and we bring them up on the computer. To her, not one of them is perfect. Of course, I can excuse that; after all, no picture is, if you're in it.

She likes the same shot I do, so I get the picture up, Photoshop her a bit of sun tan, which she likes, and then she says, "Can you take this thing off?" There's a slight tan-ish mole on her cheek, hardly visible, I think; but the little artist is smart enough to know that the computer can handle skin grafts.

Done. By now I’m thinking this whole idea is almost Easter-like in its selflessness. All of it for Great-Grandma Schaap, who otherwise hardly gets the time of day, way out east in Wisconsin. What a granddaughter I've got.

So I'm getting the card stock out and outfitting the printer, when she says, "Can you whiten my teeth?"

She's eight years old. Just. And she wants her teeth whitened? Those lilies of the field come into bloom, straight out of Scripture, the ones that toil not, neither do they spin; and I'm thinking there ought to be a lesson there, even a sermon.

But then—hey, it's Easter, right? Here we are, the two of us on my desk chair, quality time, fiddling with her picture; and the outcome is going to please my mother like no letter from her way-too-liberal son ever could.

So what if that's an old "means-and-ends" argument. Her vanity is childishness, and therefore excusable, I say, convinced that when it comes to our grandchildren, we really can’t sin.

And did I say she was sitting on my lap? Forget the sermon, Jeremiah. There'll be time enough for all of that later.

"Whitened teeth," I say, "I can give that a try."

Vanity, vanity—all is vanity.

Except for a grandpa—and his aged mother—on Easter.

Image by Irina Patrascu. Used with permission. Sourced via Flickr. Post by Jim Schaap, author of Honest to God: Psalms for Scribblers, Scrawlers and Sketchers.