Once a week I pick up my grandson at school where he’s experiencing the magic of first grade. Sitting behind me in the back seat he contemplates his little life at a mindful pace that I can never seem to master even with daily meditation (something was lost while I was busy studying German literature and volleyball).

He said he wanted a bike with a microscope installed on the handlebars so he could look for bugs on the sidewalk as he traveled.

“I wake up a lot during the night. It’s quite fascinating,” he proclaims. Several months after my mother died he must have been thinking of her when he broke a pensive silence to ask, “Did Nana Bea just disappear?”

He seems to know things stuck in my head that I don’t remember ever discussing with him. “Do you have this psychic bond to other people too?” I asked recently.

“Only to you, grandmommy. It’s like there’s a room in your head that I go to and I climb under the bed and listen to what’s going on.