Devil with Dimples

Blog for Joe Bob

            Joe Bob, following in the footsteps of his namesake grandpa, is all boy.  He runs everywhere he goes, like Dash from The Incredibles, and like Dash, he is really fast. Heck, I can’t catch him.  But if he is chasing me, he can catch me.  This makes him laugh a lot.  And when he laughs, his dark hazel eyes sparkle, and he flashes a deep dimple on the right side of his smile.  All his teeth show clear back to his baby molars and he looks a little like an impish crocodile ready to take a big bite.  His blond hair is wiry and coarse, and he sports a whirlwind cowlick right at the base of his hairline in the front --- just like Kenickie in Grease. 

            Joe Bob is practicing to be a husband.  By that I mean that whatever a woman, such as me or his mom or his sister, tells him to do or refrain from doing, he does not hear.  Being not even four years old yet, he is really good at this already.  Another twenty, thirty years of practice, he’ll be about perfect at selective hearing.  Is this genetic, like preferring blue to pink, Batman to Barbie, guns to purses?

            The last time I was at his house we ran an errand to Wal-Mart, and since he and his sister Lily were good as gold, they got to pick out a toy.  Of course they did.  There was a rifle that made a ka-pow, ka-pow sound when the trigger was pulled, so Joe Bob picked out that one.  Of course he did.  That gun saw  lot of action the next two days.  Sometimes he ambushed bad guys or grown-ups or his sister, and sometimes he gazed off into space mindlessly firing from his lap.  Ka-pow, Ka-pow, KA-POW, KA-POW, KA-POW, KA-POW!!  I wondered how long that gun would last before someone tossed it into the trash, but being the grandmother, that was not my concern.

            And he is musically gifted.  I was sitting at the breakfast table one afternoon with Joe Bob, Lily, and their mom Sheila, when Sheila said, “Joe Bob, why don’t you sing that song you learned for WaWa?”

            He and Lily call me WaWa, a baby name for Grandma.  Actually Gus gave that name to me, and some of my grandchildren call me WaWa and some of them call me Mary Glo.  That was Emma’s baby name for Grandma.  But who cares what they call me?  It’s just great to have grandchildren to call me something at all.

            So anyway, Sheila asked Joe Bob to sing a song for me.  He looked blank for a minute.  Then he remembered.  His eyes lit up, he flashed that dimpled crocodile grin and he sang:

            “I see London,

              I see France,

              I see WaWa’s

              Underpants!”

Then hysterical laughter.  Be still my heart.  With this kind of love and affection, he doesn’t have to run fast at all to catch me.