My daughter & her husband are on a trip. I’m babysitting my granddaughters for 5 days. The tall one: age 5, the short one: age 2.
We’ve painted rocks.
Watched mermaid movies.
We went out for ice cream.
For some reason, the tall one has lost interest in Taylor Swift.
Sad.
It was fun to enjoy watching the same thing on TV, albeit for very different reasons.
“Girls. Let’s do something fun tonight.”
“We wanna popcorn and pizza and movie party!!” The tall one shouts a proposal. The short one jumps and cheers with less intelligible but, cuter words.
“Okay!! We’ll do it! I want you to start thinking about what movie we’ll watch, okay?
“YAY!!” They jump and cheer.
I order a cheese pizza for them, double pepperoni pizza for me.
And crazy bread.
And a 2 liter of pink lemonade for the girls.
We walk into Little Caesar’s Pizza. to pick up our order. Two teenagers with big hair are blasting Suicidal Tendencies while they bust out pizzas.
I nod with upside down smile, bottom lip out, scrunchy stank-face approval.
“Someone raised these kids right”.
I like my pizzas seasoned with skate-punk-funk-thrash metal.
We wait at the counter to pick up our order.
Despite being in princess dresses, (the girls, not me), the hired help takes approximately 11 years to acknowledge our existence.
Idiot kids these days. Who raised them?
We arrive home.
I cut up two slices of cheese pizza into small manageable pieces. I plate them up, and serve them to the patrons in princess dresses seated at Table #2 in the east side of the kitchen.
I return to the prep area of the kitchen to have a slice of my double pepperoni. Three bites into my slice:
“I want more!!”
“Meee toooo!!”
They place an order for another round.
I begin my second slice.
“IWA MOOOR!”
“ME TOO!”
They order round three.
I open the crazy bread & sauce.
Thank God these things have not changed since the mid-80’s. They aren’t great, but it’s good that they are still the same kind of bad.
There is very little left of their cheese pizza.
I do not know where in their little bodies all this pizza has been going.
“WE WANNA WATCH THE MOVIE NOW!!!”
“YAAAAYYY!!!”
The patrons at Table #2 are ready for their check.
They didn’t even ask to see a dessert menu.
“What do you want to watch?”
“Uuummmm…. I don’t know”
I’ve been noticing a movie in their “suggested” list.
It’s an animated Bible story.
I’m not a church-going man (anymore).
Not a Bible-believing man (in the conventional sense).
However – I do love the teachings of Jesus – and – don’t believe for a second that an all-loving Father In Heaven is keeping score on each of us, and requires his favorite child to be grotesquely humiliated and slowly murdered so that he can let us off the hook for all the times we played hooky.
Nope.
I believe in a God who dwells in an eternal state. No need for scorekeeping, or fancy prayers or strange rituals or people dedicated to kissing his ass for all eternity. Ever looked up at a starry night sky? God has far more interesting things to do.
While I have little interest in church-like matters,
I am a storyteller.
Despite there being no Jesus in this particular movie (wrong part of the Bible), I’m oddly curious to see how Angel Studios approaches telling this tale.
“Hey girls, what do you think about ‘David’?
I’m positive they will refute the idea in favor of another mermaid movie.
Part of me doesn’t blame them.
“Let’s watch David!!” The tall one votes.
The short one recuses herself.
David, it is.
The movie begins.
The girls grab bags of popcorn from the snack drawer.
“We brought one for you Grandpa!”
My gut is still working through the pizza. I do not know how in Jehovah’s name their little bellies have room for popcorn.
We hit play.
We cuddle up on the couch.
We find David tending his flocks.
We learn that David had serious harp chops, that he knew a secret chord, that pleased The Lord… and also pleased King Saul.
We discover that David’s little sister Zeruiah is kind of hot and there’s a funny kiss vibe between them, but whatever, it’s the Old Testament. Things were different back then.
Spoiler alert: Goliath dies.
In the story, the Amalekites are a brutal nomadic tribe, the fiercest enemy of David’s people.
Faceless, masked and armored, they resembled cold robots more than evil humans.
They ride by night.
Despite being set thousands of years ago, the scene has a mad max, sci-fi feeling to it.
I hope the Amalekites don’t give the girls nightmares.
To my utter surprise, they watch the movie without turning the couch into a trampoline or a wrestling mat, or without needing more treats.
I have never witnessed such a miracle.
We brush teeth and put a fresh diaper on the short one.
We gather in the tall one’s bedroom in an attempt to have a bedtime story & prayers.
I attempt to read a bedtime story to them both. I should have known better – The short one’s inner MMA fighter emerges. She is jumping, squealing and harassing the tall one.
I excuse Ira from the nighttime proceedings and put her to bed.
I return to the Lennon’s room and finish reading a bed time story about Barbies or Elsa or whoever. They all start looking the same to me. Similar hairstyles, similar outfits, similar problems with men.
“Who is going to say the prayer tonight?” I ask her.
Lennon points at me. Kids always shirk prayer duty when given the chance.
Ah, you’ve learned young – forced praying sucks. Well done, Lennon.
I keep that one to myself.
While I am not a praying man in the conventional sense of things, I still know how it’s done.
My daughter is raising them to be praying girls.
I honor her parenting.
A profane, retired Mormon, I kick off the evening comms with Alpha and Omega.
“….and please help mommy and daddy travel safe”
“…in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen”.
“Amen” is such a funny tradition.
We talk to God like truckers on a midnight highway, then formally announce that we have finished transmitting.
Over and out.
“Did you like the movie tonight?”
“Mmmm hmmm!” Lennon nods her head vigorously.
“What was your favorite part?”
“The part when David came to scare away the bad guys at the end”.
She wasn’t even that impressed with David killing Goliath – she was captivated by David leading the Israelite army to chase away the Amalekites and save the terrified and innocent people at the end.
“That was really cool, huh”.
“Yeah. That was my favorite part.”
“They were really scary!”
“Was that real? Did David really kill Goliath?”
“I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter if it was real or not. All that matters is that we have his story to help us learn how to be brave.”
“I would be so scared” Lennon confesses.
“It’s okay to be scared. Being brave happens when you really are scared, but you do the right thing anyway.”
Lennon nods her head.
“That’s what David teaches us: that sometimes doing the right thing feels so big and so scary, but if we believe in ourselves enough, we can do anything. We can help lots of other people. But it’s almost always scary at first. It’s okay to be scared. We can be brave and do what’s right anyway.”
“I want to be brave like David someday.”
Now is not the time to tell her about the hellish techno-horror we are about to plunge into and how she’ll have to battle against the AI murder drones and help save the world from an evil AI overlord.
Tonight, I just hope the scary Amalekites doesn’t give her or her little sister nightmares.
“You will be brave, Lennon.”
I kiss her on the forehead and turn out the lights.
You will have to be.
~ the end ~
