"Chips......................."

My oldest daughter’s two sons are both now in college, the twenty year-old also working part-time with Fed Ex. His younger brother is only a month older than their cousin who lives in Lexington; but, having skipped a grade along the way, preceded the latter boy in graduating from high-school. Third out on my list of grandchildren, then, Steven, for most of his life, has been a relationship maintained from afar, the hundred miles or so between us being but one of several hindrances to our knowing him as well as the others. It seems like, from the very beginning, once diapers were abandoned, his dad has had him continually involved in sports, basketball and baseball both, round the calendar, and often playing in two or three leagues at the same time. Visits were short, mostly a matter of waving from the bleachers and sometimes a hour shared around a meal taken in a nearby restaurant. Recently, though, we have discovered common ground between us and this old man is in seventh heaven, texting messages back and forth, discussing our literary pursuits. He has developed an interest, it seems, in the writing of C.S. Lewis, born out of reading the “Chronicles of Narnia”, but now venturing into deeper waters. Nothing so complicated as “Mere Christianity” yet. “The Screwtape Letters”, though, has been conquered, along with “Pilgrim’s Regress”; and I have supplied him with a few others from my bookshelf, believing that “The Chosen “ by Chaim Potok might be right up his alley. It may be late in the game, but the lack of any prior one-on-one has in no way eliminated his hold on my heart. His mother is visiting today and showed me one of his messages to her, a quote from something he has read and meant for no more than a laugh with her about something. “Manna kept is worms”, it read. Biblical in content, the translation thereof would probably be lost to most people. Papaw, though, smiled, thinking to himself that the two of us might be connected in ways that mileage can’t erase……