Grandpa's Bedtime Stories

This evening my Dad looked sufficiently awake and frisky. So when Vivian brought her bedtime book to me to read I sent her and Evan off to Grandpa. Pretty soon they were sitting around him and he read Bossy Bear to them. Sometimes painfully slowly. Sometimes he'd forget a page and Vivian would bring him back on track. Sometimes his voice would drop to almost a whisper. But he read it and the kids followed every word spellbound.

When he finished they thanked him and kissed him goodnight and then made me re-read the book while they sat on top of me in Vivian's bed.

When I was a child we had three cloth-bound hardcover Bangla books called "Thakur Ma er Jhuli" or something like that. It literally translates to "Grandma's Bag" and refers to a collection of grandma's stories. My mother's mother died when my mother was a child. And my father's mother rarely came to visit when I was little (most of her family lived near each other and a couple of days of train trips away from us). So I never had the pleasure of a grandma read them to me.

I took a couple of photos of my dad earlier this afternoon. After I took the first photo I showed it to him and made a serious face like he had. He smiled and I took the second photo.