Learning to Jump

My grandson is trying to learn how to jump. I don’t know where he got the idea. Maybe this is part of the curriculum at his nursery school. Walking, running, then jumping. He’s a good little runner and easily runs ahead when we walk together. It makes me a little nervous as falls are common, but he shrieks with pleasure in the running and who could deny him that?

Yesterday, after his two hour after-school nap where he recovers from how much he’s learned at nursery school, he go very excited when I asked him if he wanted to go out for a walk in the rain to go to the corner and watch the cars. Getting him into his blue unicorn rain suit is not an easy task. So I distracted him by being silly and dancing with my bright orange raincoat while his mother and grandmother double-teamed him into the rain suit.

But he drew the line with boots. For some reason he has decided that rain boots are an abomination and to be avoided at all costs. He cooperates in holding his feet up for sneakers, but mounts a vigorous and boisterous campaign whenever someone tries to fit his feet into the boots. Whether this is a principled statement of fashion, a misguided fear of rubber objects or a comfort issue, we don’t yet know. He won the battle so we both headed out in the light rain in sneakers and rain gear.

We both love rain and puddles, me and my grandson. I remember playing outside in the summer rain with my brother, creating dams in the gutters to make giant pools as the rain cascaded down and we got soaked. I remember walking in the fall rain on the residential streets on the outskirts of Nagasaki, Japan. I was sixteen years old and feeling very far from home as the night fell. I walked and walked and was somehow comforted by the familiar rain that fell on me and on my family so far away. I remember starting a fire in the rain after a wet day hiking in the woods with my sister. We gathered a cache of the tenderest small sticks that were still somewhat dry and carefully nursed our small flame until it was a warm and cheerful hearth in the middle of the wet forest. And this, is my newest rain memory—holding a small already wet hand, walking down the large steps by the back door—in palpable anticipation of puddles.

The first one we encountered by the corner of the house was only an inch deep. My grandson immediately dropped my hand, darted to the puddle and began stomping his feet with great delight. Little flurries of stomping would yield to small shrieks of laughter and looking up for my approval of his wondrous functioning. What is it about stomping in puddles? Is it a walking on water thing? Or the power of making the water jump and dance?

Later in the day I heard short item on the radio of some 12,000 year-old footprints that have been unearthed in White Sands National park. The big discovery is the mile-long trail of footprints of a mother or young man carrying a toddler at a quick pace. (Apparently there was danger and anxiety even before our current President.) The same news cast also mentioned large footprints of prehistoric animals that also contain hundreds of little human footprints. The current theory is that the large footprints made a puddle and the little footprints were our toddling and dancing ancestors splashing like my grandson.

But back to our rain and our puddle. As he was stomping his sneakered feet (which were already wet two minutes out of the house), my grandson began crouching down with both feet on the ground and the straightening up quickly. At first I wasn’t sure what he was doing, then I realized he was trying to jump—trying to go airborne—to get both feet off the ground at the same time. Though his coordination and his likelihood of success seemed quite low, his determination and joy was boundless. So I joined in.

I don’t do a lot of jumping up and down these days. Not that I’m against it in principle, it’s just an activity with very little practical value. Occasionally walking quite fast, or even running gets me somewhere (across the street?) as necessity dictates, but getting both feet off the ground is almost never necessary. But yesterday was different.

People driving by, in the rain, on the outskirts of Boston, saw two jumping figures – a large one in a bright orange raincoat and a small one in a blue unicorn rain suit. And if someone had been patient enough they would have even seen the unicorn clad one leave the ground for just an instant – both tiny wet feet happy to self-power themselves off the surface of the earth for the first time.

And which was more miraculous—a small chubby toddler rising briefly toward the heavens or an old man jumping up and down in the rain, laughing and laughing?