Theledge.net

Alphie giggled yesterday. Not just the quick giggles we usually get, but a long musical giggle which causes your heart to flop around in your chest like a pile of puppies or a really cute baby... er... yeah, exactly like a really cute baby, who happens to be giggling in a really cute, musical kind of way.

And she has figured out how to aim her feet and hands at specific toys to get them to dangle around and make noise. You can see her puzzle over grabbing things sometimes, but she is not really grabbing things and pulling them to herself yet.

She is still crying a lot, in a manner that is very difficult to console.

And none of these things are especially surprising or unexpected. Lovely, cute, and adorable, but not unexpected.

So what is unexpected? Her smirk.

Not that she smiles, or how she smiles, or what she smiles for. And not even that she has developed a smirk, because a smirk and a smile convey very different emotions (and there is nothing on this planet so filled with emotion as her smile).

She only smirked three times at me, but it blew me away. I was stunned by how she smirked. Or, more precisly, who she looked like when she smirked.

I understand genetics and that some traits are passed through generations. I don’t believe a smirk is one of those traits. I understand that family resemblance can be in small details that you never notice until your mind grasps a pattern. I never believed that pattern would be iterative over four generations. Certainly part of that resemblance must be learned? Perhaps not.

My maternal grandfather passed away five years ago. He was born in 1903 and he knew more about life than I could ever hope to understand. He lost half of his right index finger in a thresher accident as a teenager, and that always kind of freaked me out when I was little. He sometimes used to complain it still itched, which conjured up all sorts of phantom finger nightmares for me. That finger and his age kept him out of both world wars, but he never complained. I think he was wise enough to know you should never be happy to rush into hell, but he would have gone if he could have. He was proud that he had a horse go to World War One, even though it was probably the only thing of value he had his whole childhood.

He had the prospect of going to school to be a doctor, but his family fell on hard times and he returned to the farm to help them. He spent some time as a hobo, riding the trains and doing farm work where he could. This was not the life of a beggar, but of an honest, hardworking man caught in a country full of hard times and he never complained about having to do it. In fact, he was proud he had made his way in the world, without being a burden on anyone, even though it couldn’t have been easy.

He was in middle management during the worst labor disputes of the late forties and early fifties. He worked for fair practices in his company, and respected the employees who worked for him. He had several people try to stop him from crossing picket lines, but I never heard of him having to be physical. He wasn’t a small man, and I don’t doubt that he could intimidate, but he understood that intimidation doesn’t stop fights, but causes them.

He was a card shark, though, and loved a good game. He taught my sister and I Solitaire, Kings-on-the-Corners, Hearts, Rummy and Poker (among many). We’d even play a competitive game of Uno. I used to drive him nuts with Rummy because I was so inattentive and restless. And he used to pester my sister to play when we visited because she was a challenge for him. She is much less scatter-brained than I am.

He was a die hard baseball fan, specifically the St. Louis Cardinals. He loved football until the Cardinals football team moved to Phoenix in 1988, after which he never found a club he liked (or trusted). He lived for “Wheel of Fortune” each night, and was enthralled by “As the World Turns”. He smoked like a chimney. He fought an unending battle with the squirrels in the backyard over access to the birdfeeder. He tended the garden in the backyard, often picking yellow tomatoes because he was colorblind. He had every Louis L’Amour book ever written.

But the single thing that stands out the most in all my memories was his sense of humor. He had a quiet, wicked little sense of humor. He collected knick-knacks of the oddest sort, not because they were collectables, but because he liked them. They made him laugh. For example, he had a beautifully crafted, simply designed little box that he kept on his desk that had the words “For the man who has nothing, here is a box to keep it in” embossed on the surface. When you opened it up, you saw it was simply two pieces of wood, without a hole carved in them, so that it was not a box at all. That was his sense of humor. Subtle, quiet, and intelligent. Not necessarily frivolous, but certainly whimsical.

And he watched us children like we were the most magical things in the world, like we were the most subtle, most sharp, most intelligent, and, yes, perhaps a little whimsical collectables he could imagine. And the whole time I was growing up he always had the same look on his face.

It was a smirk.

And so yesterday, when I picked Alphie up and was bouncing her around I was thrown-for-a-loop to see her look at me with the exact same smirk my grandfather used to gaze at me with. It was a little conspirator’s smirk, like she knew what was funny, and I knew what was funny, and we didn’t have to tell anyone else in the whole world.

I hope she keeps doing it. I think my grandpa would have found it funny.