The Joy of (Re)Discovery - Grandparents.com

Can't tell a frog from a toad? Having grandchildren can reacquaint you with the wonders of the natural world.

I wake to birdsong these days, to trills and cheeps and caws, a chorus that begins in the dark. It doesn't obliterate the noise of traffic and trains and planes and sirens. But I hear the birds first and I wake up smiling.

I don't know what kinds of birds are singing, but my friend Anne does. She can identify them by their sounds. Sometimes I'll walk outside and call her. I'll hold the phone high in the air and say, "What bird is this?" and she'll tell me and I'll listen hard to the music the bird makes and repeat the bird's name, once, twice, three times. But ten minutes later, after I've hung up, the song and the name are gone.

Why is this? I've lived on this earth a long time. How is it possible that I don't know who's hooting from who's howling? I can distinguish by sight a robin from a blue jay and a cardinal from a crow. But that's about it. I'm like this with all of nature, barely smarter than a first-grader, never mind a fifth-grader.

I say tree instead of oak because I'm unsure of even the basics. I don't know the names of constellations. I don't know the difference between a frog and a toad. I hardly know a gerbil from a hamster. God went to all the trouble of making species and galaxies, sets, and subsets, and I point like a toddler to the sky and say, "Look at that yellow bird."

I took my grandson Adam, who is 4, to Petco the other day. We love Petco. It's the Arnold Arboretum of pet stores. There are labels everywhere explaining and identifying rodents, fish, snakes, even spiders.

It was the fish, tanks, and tanks of them, that made me realize how little I know. Once upon a time there were just goldfish for sale. You went to Woolworth's or Kresge's, bought a small oval bowl, a little fish food, and a bright yellow fish, which you carried home in a plastic bag full of water. You fed the fish and made faces at it until it died, then you buried it in your backyard or flushed it down the toilet.

After which the whole process, minus the fish food and bowl, began again.
Now, although you can get a goldfish at Petco, you can also get hundreds of other fish, Nemos and Dories and Marlins, so many different and beautiful creatures with so many different and beautiful names, and all of them new, not just to Adam but to me too.

On the way home, we stopped at the library and got a children's book, My Visit to the Aquarium, for both of us to read. On just one page, we saw banner fish and lookdown fish and triggerfish and an emperor angelfish and four four-eyed butterfly fish and a blue-ringed angelfish and a blue chromis.

You'd think that human beings would pay more attention to all the life and beauty that's in this world. I see it now, of course, some of it, what's right in front of me, because it's summer and the earth is like a mad magician pulling all kinds of sweet surprises out of its hat. Everything in bloom. Everything lavish — trees and flowers, vines and ivies, even the days hot and steamy and long.

You can't ignore all of this.

But what soars above me? What lives in the sea? What grows outside my yard in places hidden to me? What exists a half a world away and what lives just down the street at a pet store?

I think I have given this world short shrift.

Maybe you don't have to know the names of things to appreciate them. Maybe just looking and seeing is enough.

But sometimes we don't see.

Children open our eyes. Grandchildren ask questions. "What's that, Mimi?" They lead you to Petco and to other places you’ve never gone.

And so I am teaching Adam this summer and he is teaching me. We are learning together, or at least trying to learn, the names of things, not just yellow bird but yellow warbler. "Hey Adam, look at that giant tree," I say. But then I go home and call my friend Anne and say, "You know the tree on the corner of Chapman Street and Spring Lane?"

"The monarch oak," she says?

"Monarch oak," I repeat. And then I tell Adam.