Jill will definitely be going to Texas for 4 weeks for work.

She leaves Monday.

For those of you not keeping track at home, here’s a family timeline:

November 22 – February 3, family separated with a few short exceptions. Jill was alone in Atlanta and I had both kids in Milwaukee. 10.5 weeks apart.

February 4 – May 2, all of us together with a few short exceptions. 12.5 weeks together.

May 3 – May 29, all of us separated with Jill in Texas and me and the kids in Milwaukee. 4 weeks apart. Exceptions TBD.

My last living grandparent, Gran’papa, died today.

He was my maternal grandfather. I think he was 95 years old; he might have been 94. I remember celebrating his 90th birthday, but I don’t seem to have a grip on exactly when that was.

My thoughts are so scattered that I’m not sure this post will make a lot of sense. But in no particular order:

• The story of how he and my Gran’mama met was very funny. She had dinner plans with one of his co-workers, a family friend, who apparently forgot about the date and left work early. When she showed, up, Gran’papa called the guy, and said, “Introduce us!” Then he insisted on taking her to dinner. Gran’mama had been working like crazy and her boss ordered to take the afternoon off from her job and relax, so she’d been horseback riding before going to dinner. She was so hungry that she ordered the largest steak on the menu and ate it with such gusto that he immediately decided this was the woman he was going to marry. (That she was a Texas redhead and was Vogue model pretty probably didn’t hurt.)
• He was so tall.
• My parents had a complicated relationship with my maternal grandparents. But when I was a kid, they all did a great job of making sure that they kept any tension from us, so that I could just love both my grandparents and my parents.
• I spent my 21st birthday with my grandparents, at Disney World. Really. Except for the part where the only vegetarian food available in the Magic Kingdom at that time was a cheese plate in the futuristic section, it was great.
• I’m glad he got to meet Noah a couple of years ago, and Josie. Even if he didn’t understand who was there, or maybe even know that anyone was there.
• I’m glad Josie and I came down here, and that we did all this crazy shit to get down here yesterday instead of today.
• I have to go to sleep.

This morning, Noah decided that it was vitally important to take his large bottle of sunscreen with him in the car to school.

After we worked through why you CAN NOT put the bottle cap into your mouth, because sunscreen is good for the outside of your body, but bad for the inside of your body, we started discussing what sunscreen is for.

“Noah, you and I have very pale skin. When the sun is bright, it can burn our skin, so we have to wear sunscreen when we play outside in the summer.”

Yes, I know that skin cancer does not discriminate, and that even dark skinned people should wear sunscreen. But friends, almost no one with medically normal skin will sunburn faster than me. I have been described on more than one occasion as “the whitest white person” someone knows — and not only culturally, but physically. That almost-glow-in-the-dark pale skin is part of Josie’s and Noah’s genetic legacy from me.

“My skin is pink!”

“Yes, it is. So is mine.”

“Darius’s skin is brown.”

We play a lot of “what else is like this? what else is like that?” identification games in the car, so I step cautiously into the game mode.

“Yes, that’s true. Who else has brown skin?”

“Miss Pat!”

“That’s right.”

“Jack at my Atlanta school has pink skin. Avery at my Atlanta school has brown skin.”

“What about at your school here?”

“Ava has pink skin. Miss Cathy has pink skin.”

Pause.

“What color skin do you like, Mommy?”

Pause.

“I like all colors of skin, Noah. Everyone’s skin is a little bit different.”

In the ordinary course of our games, I am supposed to ask the same question back.

Pause.

“What color skin do you like, Noah?”

“YELLOW!”

“Who has yellow skin, Noah?”

“I don’t know.”

I pause again, and then pick up discussing friends with different skin tones, and how everyone looks different.

And I wonder, am I using his literal views of the world to push off trying to explain why pink people are called white and brown people are called black, unless they are certain shades of brown, in which case they might be called Latino or Asian or Indian?

It is so interesting to watch the social construction of race, as it happens, in the mind of a little boy. Please, oh please, let us do a good job of helping him not to grow up racist, but to grow up as someone who challenges racism.