Nana Grimley loves having her grandson Bobby Thompson over. Now that school is done for the summer, the precocious child stays a full week with her. Bobby Thomson loves staying with Nana. She lets him get away with murder. Mom never told her to take away his iPad when he goes to bed, so he gets to play games and watch videos until he can’t keep his eyes open anymore.
Both of them see only one wrinkle with their good time. Evolution.
Bobby became an atheist a few months ago. He’s been keeping that under wraps. Life is tough enough with some of his teachers not doing their jobs, bullies (do bad teachers and bullies have a secret agreement?), and the general poor state of online fan fiction. Why make things worse with the truth?
Bobby may only be 10, but he knows you can believe in God and realize evolution is a thing. And it’s a real thing, too. He made the tactical decision that he can come out of the process of how current organisms developed from earlier ones closet. That should be OK, right?
Nana loves Bobby. That child has a love for salamanders and frogs. There’s a forest out back and he goes there and brings back some interesting critters to show her. He corrected her one time when she called a salamander a lizard. Lizards lay eggs on dry land and are reptiles. Salamanders are amphibians. Most of them lay eggs in water. That’s how they evolved.
She chose to ignore the “e” word.
But the funny thing is now that she heard little Bobby use the word, she couldn’t help not noticing other things.
Most of the time her grandson watches videos. She never paid much attention to what videos they were. Most of them seemed to be about a game called Minecraft. She may be old but Minecraft looked like a game from 1983. Why anyone would be interested in that is beyond her. However, now she notices that in between the fluffy and harmless videos, Bobby is watching adults talk about weird things. Things Pastor Tidwell at church would not like.
Videos about evolution.
She came up with her own strategy. Whenever she suspected Bobby was watching a suspicious video she’d tell him it was time for a snack. He loves her sugar cookies. And that worked for a little while.
Bobby quickly picked up on the Richard Dawkins-sugar cookies connection and decided to ride that train as long as possible.
But how many sugar cookies can a kid eat in a day? Is it possible to have too much of a good thing?
And then the impossible happened — he told Nana he didn’t want a sugar cookie.
Something in Nana snapped. It was all that “e” word’s fault.
“I don’t see why you’re so interested in those videos,” she said. “If evolution was true, then why are there still monkeys?”
Oh, no, she didn’t just say that!
But Nana dug her hole a little deeper.
“If we came from monkeys,” she refused to use that “e” word, “wouldn’t all the monkeys be people by now?”
He lifted his right hand and showed her two fingers.
“See, one is monkeys. One is people. They separated a long time ago,” he ran a finger from his left hand down to where the two digits of his right hand connected to the palm. “A long long time ago we had a common ancestor. That common ancestor evolved into two branches. Monkeys and people.” He motioned how in time that one species of animal separated and became two different animals, i.e., the two fingers.
He was only a ten-year-old kid, but maybe he explained it right. Maybe.
“I’m going to bake a pie.” And with that Nana went into the kitchen.
All in all, Bobby considered it a win.
Not a total win.
But at least he’s getting pie.
Andrew Hall is the author of Laughing in Disbelief. Besides writing a blog, co-hosting the Naked Diner, he wrote two books, Vampires, Lovers, and Other Strangers and God’s Diary: January 2017
Stay in touch! Like Laughing in Disbelief on Facebook: