Just before midnight came Mom's anxious rapping at my bedroom door. "Can you help us? The lift won't work, and Dad's stuck downstairs in the chair." Worry dripped from her sagging face. I knew instantly the trouble. Little Owen, 18 months, carries around an irresistible curiosity about buttons and switches and the wondrous things that happen when he pushes them. His favorite is the light button on my Aero Garden: he taps it rapidly and repeatedly to make the bright multi-colored LEDs flicker off and on and off and on and off and on. A toddler's delight! A close second is the illuminated cherry red switch on the back of the stair lift chair, installed at perfect toddler height and with just the right color to attract his attention. Owen and Lila, his four-and-a-half-year-old big sister, two of my six prodigious precocious grandchildren (number seven arrives in May!), had joined Mom and Dad and me for an Easter Eve dinner of traditional Polish pirogi, homemade potato cheese dumplings, expertly fashioned by their generous mother. Lila's first and familiar impulse was to pull out the old wooden blocks Mom and Dad brought back from Brazil, dump out the box of dominoes, lay out Connect Four, and spill the enormous tote of Legos, the standard four go-to great-grandchildren games, which she invited me irresistibly to play with her. Dinner segued into the hunt for plastic eggs filled with chocolate eggs and jelly bean eggs and malt ball eggs. At age four, Lila knew exactly what to do, and chased out the not-so-inconspicuous bright ovals. Owen, at just one, gripped one colorful egg in each hand, dancing thrilled and contended with his prizes. Mom and Dad watched on from their respective arm chair and wheelchair, wearing the peaceful smiles of the gentle joy of young posterity. "We just love having you here, Brian," Dad called as the little family bundled out the door at evening's end for the long drive to Stockton. And sure enough, Owen's last curious-child deed was to switch the red toggle to "off." Mom had completely forgotten her panic of a month ago when the lift would not work, from precisely the same guileless cause. I flipped the red switch, and, with Mom feeling much relieved, up Dad rode to his bed.
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