I had the chance to feed Buddy and Sis their dinner the other day, and when thinking ahead to the menu, I thought I’d try something easy that might be a fun change of pace. We’ve always been big breakfast fans in my family, and upending the routine to serve morning food at the end of the day can be an appealing variation (or why else would Cracker Barrel be open at all hours, and Waffle House a favorite hangout after parties? clearly the marketplace has tested this concept favorably). In my mind, the old “breakfast for dinner” act would feature scrambled eggs, crisp bacon, warm biscuits with honey, complete with homemade applesauce. Sounds pretty good, right?

Late afternoon soon arrived, and as the entertainment value of the activity in progress began to wane, I sought some early mileage out of my menu concept with a morsel of advance anticipation. However, it quickly became apparent that when it came to creative menu planning, I was a mere fast-food fry cook competing with the likes of Julia Child or Emeril Lagasse.

Guess what’s for dinner? I begin brightly.

“WHAT?” shouted Sis, who cares less about the particulars of the menu than the frequency at which food is proffered.

Her brother had other questions.

“Is it eyeball pizza?” he began. (Buddy has a thing about eyeballs. They loom large in his imagery and conversation. It’s probably best not to ask why.)

Nope, say I, we are all out of eyeballs for pizza topping.

“Can we have a cockroach sandwich?” he continues, picking up steam.

Could a turnip substitute for an eyeball as pizza topping?

Yuk! I retort instinctively, providing the perfect provocation to escalate the repulsion efforts.

“Then how ‘bout a crab pizza!” he enthuses, collapsing into peals of laughter at his own joke (self-appreciation of humor is another family characteristic, I might note).

I like crabs, I riposte—I’ve had crab on pizza before. It’s good.

“But this crab is alive and will PINCH YOUR GUMS OUT if you eat it!” and by now the joke has escalated to shouting, with Sis bleating her own fond appreciation of her brother’s comedy.

Then let’s don’t eat crab pizza, I answer, watching my menu idea fade rapidly away on the inspirational horizon. Our gums hold our teeth in, so we wouldn’t want that. (And why bother to address imagination with logic? It is a fool’s errand.)

“I KNOW!” comes his last and best idea. “BOOGER PIZZA!”

Wondering why nasal mucus continues to inspire small boys over the march of centuries, I am saved by the diversion of the ringing phone. When I finish this call, I think, maybe just cave in and call for pizza delivery. And inquire about the day’s most unusual toppings.

It seems indisputable that today’s world harbors parenting challenges that we never imagined when my daughter was young. Yet one essential truth remains, universally acknowledged then and now:

Two-year-olds are impossible.

The other night my daughter, a devoted, creative, and loving mother, sank back into the cushions on my living room couch with a massive sigh of frustration. She was fresh from another face-off with her own two-year-old, a deceptively beautiful, tiny female to  whom I lovingly refer as Rambo in a Tutu. My daughter stared at me in utter desolation. “Mom,” she said, despair shadowing every syllable, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with her. I really, really don’t.” I returned her sigh in a spirit of comradeship, thinking I could dare anyone to find a parent who has not agonized their way through this developmental stage, a period of time unlike anything a rational person can fathom in life as we know it.

And what exactly makes these Pint-Sized Revolutionaries so vexing, anyway? Is it the astonishing strength of the opposition force? The utter lack of logic and reason that governs their every move? The terroristic unpredictability, the realization that one never knows when a strike may occur?

Long before the day for my daughter’s lament arrived, I foresaw a time when my heart’s desire at this moment would be nothing more than simple justice and fair retribution. Payback time, I imagined, would be ever so delicious and sweet. The memories that drove me to that cold and bitter anticipation are remarkably fresh. My daughter’s tantrums at two were the stuff of story and song (the blues, of course), and at their peak I often tried to remove her to her room and shut the door. This pathetically ineffective strategy generated more, better screaming and motivated her to pull on the doorknob with all her maniacal might, demanding escape. Refusing to cave (and lacking a lock), I pulled against the doorknob on the opposing side in a classic tug of proverbial war. The screaming generally lasted about six weeks or so, and about halfway through I was generally reduced to sobbing myself.

Such stories, and those of more comedic antics, are often traded among empathetic parents. I have a niece, now one of my favorite women on the planet, who demonstrated will of breathtaking scope at this age. Instructed by her mother to stop hurling bits of broccoli off her high chair tray and onto the floor, she resumed the aforementioned sport the minute her mother turned around. Mother escalated to a more direct confrontation, positioning herself about six inches from Niece’s face, firmly and slowly intoning, “I SAID: Stop. Throwing. Your. Food.” The child locked eyes with her foe, leaning even closer, and resumed slow-pitching the veg without moving her eyes from Mother’s face. (I had to run from the room to howl unobserved. These things are always funny when it isn’t your kid.) A good friend shares a tale of instructing his twin daughters that eating with their hands was hereby disallowed. Planting their hands at their sides, they solved this dilemma ingeniously by dropping their heads face down into the plate, to graze like puppies in a dog bowl. Yet another good friend summarizes the time period poignantly as “the longest days of the shortest years” of her life.

Oddly, when my moment to savor sweet justice arrived, it lacked the thrill of victory. I longed to to reassure and soothe the mother’s soul—because, of course, nothing can be done with the child—but standard alms like a stiff shot of bourbon and a long hot bath did not seem like particularly original suggestions.

A few days later, in a fit of New Year’s purging, I sorted a box of old books and came upon a small, worn, cloth-covered volume called “The Fine Art of Motherhood” and dated 1930. That would mean it likely belonged to my grandmother and was given to her around the time my mother was born in the spring of 1931. Could there be any time-honored recommendations here? Skimming through, I failed to uncover specific solutions for surviving two-year-olds, but other, related observations made intriguing reading. “Conquering a child’s will is not what we are after, but training it,” the author opines. Indeed. And easier said than done, perhaps.

On the final page, however, I lingered over her closing statement, where she quotes an authority who “….names as attributes of little children sincerity, faith, democracy, forgiveness, and the tender heart. If we can meet them on this plane, they will teach us more than we can teach them.”

It’s a crisp, clear fall Saturday morning, and Small Sister and I are hanging at the park. Her mother’s in a yoga class nearby, and I’m happy to entertain Sis while my daughter gets an hour of stretching and peaceful introspection. Sis currently occupies the mid-point in that sanity-stretching, two-year-old year, when hanging with her can be many wonderful things, but peaceful is not among them.

We soon make our way on the playground to the People’s Choice, the swings (in Sis-Speak, known as sfings) and settle in for some prolonged sfinging. Great upper-body exercise, as I push from behind, striving to accommodate pleas of “higher, higher,” when she stops me in mid-push with an unexpected request. “Evie,” she asks intently, twisting around in her seat to look me in the eye, “Will you sing to me?”

Now, I confess this fundamental truth: Asking me to sing is a bit like asking a Formula One driver if he would care to push the gas pedal just a wee bit harder. I sang everywhere I went as a child, starting not much older than Sis is now, and music has been one of the richest threads running through my life since. In church choirs, in the shower, as lead at birthday parties, any place, any time, I will jump into the tune. I’ve often daydreamed about how music might play a role in the lives of Sis and her brother, and how I might nurture that along.

But when called upon to provide a Spontaneous Soundtrack for Sfinging, I suddenly freeze. Can’t recall a single line of an appropriate children’s song. Are there any? Rockabye baby? Trilling on about a baby who falls from a treetop, while she’s sfinging? Perhaps not.

So the mind wings instead to the musical catalogue of the heart, residing in the imagination like one of those old table-top jukeboxes at Jerry’s, where you could page through the metal-bound lists of selections before plunking in your coins and shoving the red button. What selection to sing for Sis?

The songs of my impressionable young fan years were mostly folkie—James Taylor, Carole King, and forever favorites Simon and Garfunkel, with their lyrics of unforgettable poetry. (“This is my song, for the asking, ask me and I will play, so sweetly, I will make you smile…”) Later, no doubt in an angry phase, there were the screaming edges of classic rock. Come to think of it, with her personality, I can easily picture Sis as a Led Zeppelin fan (“Wanna Whole Lotta Love!”). More recently, in my beloved Music City, there’s been full immersion in the omnipresent American roots music, in all its glorious forms, traditional and new. I Saw the Light? A few bars of Vince Gill’s Whenever I Call Your Name?

We were a musical family, growing up, though strictly as amateurs. My parents kept one of those massive cabinet record players in the front hall, and their frequent cocktail parties featured background soundtracks of great Broadway shows like The King and I, along with the smoky rhythms of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. We studied and played, too. My older sister, the most gifted among us by far, progressed to prodigy-level skill at the piano as a young teen. Even better, she tumbled permanently into family lore one year by falling flat on her face while ascending the stage steps at her piano recital. The best part was she laughed so hard at herself that she could hardly lift her fingers to the keyboard when she finally got there.

When begged by my mother, who to this day sees brilliance in her progeny that remains invisible to the rest of humanity, we sometimes clustered our efforts into duos or trios that must have mystified visiting family and friends. (“Were you there the night their kids played the piano, tuba, and ukulele, YES, all at the same time!?”) Let me digress here and offer a blanket apology to anyone still living who endured one of these mash-ups. We appreciate your kindness in not laughing your way straight back to the bar before the song was over.

Suddenly, I am jerked out of my reverie by Sis insistently repeating her request. “Evie! Will you sing?”

And I am as surprised as anyone by what flows from my throat, out into the fall breeze that tangles her blonde curls and rustles the tree limbs above us.

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost…”

When the news came awhile back that my first grandchild was on the way, it was, in all candor, a major shock–a two-step process, like an earthquake and its attendant after-shock. The first-wave tremors brought joy, of course; I knew my daughter and her husband would be terrific parents and would cherish the child to come.

Then the aftershock rippled out: Wait! My daughter is having a baby, which means I’m about to become a…..well, I just couldn’t say it. The g-word simply would not emerge from my mouth. Sure, of course, naturally, the baby would be wonderful. But that, in turn, meant I was old enough to be a….(help me out and fill in that word here). Anyone who has been through this for the first time and has not been astonished to find herself old enough to welcome a new generation is…perhaps a more mature, self-aware adult than yours truly. But, I digress.

Once this news begins to spread, one of the first questions you get is, “What do you want to be called?”

This query generated enormous pressure, along with uncertainty, because, after all, don’t the children often make this decision by some comic happenstance? Best come up with a preference, I was advised, to at least steer it in a direction you like.

Still in denial, I began with the process of elimination. First: No g-words. Not Grandma, heaven forbid, or Granny, so much worse, or Nana (endearing and slightly historical, but not for me) or Grandmother (we are not the Queen of England, after all).

When scanning history for precedents, we all hear of examples that, like mosquitoes in August, cannot be eradicated with the most Olympian of efforts, but remain a bit embarrassing to explain to outsiders. Thankfully, these seem to victimize men a bit more frequently, who perhaps take it in better stride. There’s Peepaw (surely an accidental derivation of potty-training terminology), Pap-pap (is the grandfather a gynecologist?), and so forth.

Our family has its own share of these so-called originals. Addressing the relational question “Who’s that?” when my toddler older sister pointed at my grandmother, my Mom answered logically, “That’s MY mama.” This quickly morphed into, and forever remained, Mamama, along with, its companion, Dadaddy. (Imagine our surprise to learn, decades later, of another family, completely unrelated, whose children coined exactly the same names for exactly the same reasons. Another illusion of uniqueness, gone like the wind.) We called my paternal grandfather Bubba, which seems ironic, in these times. He was a highly successful dentist, an excellent golfer, a lover of fine cars and elegant clothes; he certainly bore no resemblance to the rough-edged image currently conjured by that moniker in the South, rightly or wrongly. However, I sense that he and I are kindred spirits across the generations. The story goes that he told my older sister that he was his son’s (my father’s) brother, unwilling, like me, to acknowledge his age. My sister babbled “Bubba” for “brother,” and so he became.

A formal market research survey—okay, I asked a few of my friends—revealed I was not alone in seeking a G-title that would not evoke gray hair in a bun, an apron at the waist, and enthronement in a rocking chair. One chose Mimi, which I think rather elegant and continental. Someone mentioned Lovie, which is charming, but on the sugary side. “I’m going to be called Gran,” said another. “To me, that’s much sexier than other versions of the G-word. I don’t want people to think I’m 100 years old.” And so, the new generations arrive, while some of us—and you know who you are–still look in the mirror and defy it to tell us the truth.

As for me, I finally landed on a derivation of my own name, the endearment my father called me: Evie. It’s informal enough to convey a special bond, short enough for a child to say easily, and, far, far away from other realities, with which I continue to grapple in my head and heart.

Nevertheless, I am especially partial to the name my small grandson came up with, for reasons that escaped us all, for his grandfather on his dad’s side. After all, when genius comes from your own flesh and blood, how can you resist? It is pithy, features alliteration, and it even conjures a classic Stephen Foster tune:

Dooda.

Sometimes you just can’t improve on the work of a master.