“Train a child in the way he should go, and when they are older they will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6

Yesterday morning I stopped at one of my regular coffee haunts for a short respite before heading to the office. I had settled into my favorite chair that provides a particularly appealing view of two of the crossroads in our neighborhood. I enjoy watching the movement of the community from this view. Across the street, teenagers stood in sleepy clumps waiting for the school bus to arrive. They each carried their own brand of disengaged looks on their faces and their body language continued the theme. Cars zoomed past the window going east and west, north and south, some with more care and attention to driving than others. With a certain rhythm, the front door of the coffee shop opened and closed as people came and went. This door, which has been there since the early nineteen hundreds when the building was built, has known many comings and goings.

One such arrival was a couple accompanied by a little boy probably about five years old. As the door opened, he looked me square in the face and grinned. I melted. He was wearing a SpiderMan stocking cap pulled down to warm his young ears against the frigid morning. His adult companions followed and I began to piece together the picture of this threesome. It became clearer as the man walked up to the counter and began to order. He told the barista what he was having and, I’m assuming, gave his wife’s order as well. Then he said:”And Zach will have his regular. Hot chocolate, not too hot. And potato chips.”

First of all, I have always loved the idea of having ‘a regular’ order at any shop or restaurant. It says volumes about being known. It is one of the reasons I frequent this shop. They know my ‘regular’. But to think that Zach has a regular and that it is made up of hot chocolate(not too hot) and potato chips made me weak with joy. These were obviously Zach’s grandparents who brought him here frequently enough that he had a ‘regular’.

Now I am, I know, assuming much in this picture I have painted. But the observation of this young one in the company of these adults who would allow such a snack concoction said grandparents to me. And it said much about the kind of grandparent I hope to be. One that knows a child’s parents need to be about nutrition and what is ‘right’. But grandparents can have the role of bending the rules, of allowing a perfectly appropriate food experience made up of cocoa and chips. I thought of my own children who have always known that their Gee, their grandma,my mom, was always a bottomless source of peppermints and other candies, slipped secretly between them when I was not looking. Before dinner. After dinner. Even, I suspect, after teeth had been brushed.

I am not suggesting that children be given all manner of junk food on a whim. What I am recognizing is that children need a few adults in their lives who gently break the rules in places where little harm will be done. It provides them with the nests to which they can flee when they have broken more important rules, rules that may have the ability to do great harm. These can become the adults who are the safety nets of unconditional love that help those young ones make the slow slog back toward remembering who, and whose, they are.

As I left the coffee shop yesterday, Zach was perched on his knees on the end of his chair. On each side of him was an adult who had  brought him to a place where he is known and has a ‘regular’. On the table a board game was being spread out. In front of his fresh, happy face? A hot chocolate, not too hot, and an open bag of potato chips. He was looking up at his grown up companion smiling at the recklessness of it all.

For all the children who will break the rules this day, may they be surrounded by those who will hold them in care and listen well. And for all the grown ups who are building nests of safety, may they be blessed with hearts of compassion and love.