By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

COVID 19 is an epidemic tailor made for my husband, a man who has at least one pharmaceutical product for every year he has been alive. Calamine. Bendaryl. Lomitrin. Neosporin. Tums. The catalog of ailments we can treat from our master bathroom is astounding. Dry skin. Oily skin. No skin. Name a malady; we have a salve. Warning: we’re really good at buying stuff, less good at knowing what we have.

Not surprisingly, with the threat of impending quarantine, my husband decides we have to stock up on food. Stuck in, we can’t live on the food channel or Netflix alone. Making room in our freezer requires a reckoning that yields some unwelcome news. In various wedged-in spots, we have six boxes of frozen cauliflower pizza crusts, one of them expired.

I go along with my husband. But for me, getting ready for a quarantine feels like a stretch. You make fun of all the people who have four-wheel-drive because you insist it never snows, I remind Hal. Why is this any different? Apparently, it is — and that’s how I find myself with $800 worth of groceries one oddly balmy late February morning. I tell him the sodium in all the cans of Campbell’s Soup he insists on buying will kill us way before coronavirus ever does.

It doesn’t really matter that we aren’t quarantined by this stupid thing. Our conversations have been completely hijacked by it. In our umpteenth discussion about how to protect ourselves, my sister tells me the answer is elderberry. She bought it in gummy form, she says.

According to the Internet, elderberry enhances the immune system and suppresses the appetite — great to have medical sanction for a supplement that allows you to be both skinny and well. The contraindications are fairly minimal, my sister tells me. Just make sure, Medline warns, it doesn’t interfere with anything else you’re taking. Apparently the anything else is mostly birth control. Well, I wouldn’t be in the close-to-high-risk group if birth control were still an issue. Maybe elderberry is a better coping mechanism than denial.

Last night, I had my first coronavirus dream, not surprising because other than the Democratic primary and the dog, it seems it’s all we talk about over breakfast. In my dream, I’m invited to a high school party at a house that appears to be in Jersey City, which is incidentally not where I grew up. I end up spending the entirety of the party sitting with a young woman who has a fever and a cough.

This weekend, my dream comes true. Sort of. We find ourselves at a French movie festival across from Lincoln Center. And that’s when I hear it. I nudge my husband. “That woman behind us? She’s coughing nonstop,” I whisper. “Do you think she has Corona?” I’m half kidding, or at least I think I am. Hal whispers back. “That’s just a nervous cough.” And given what’s going on, is it any wonder that people are nervous?

A nervous cough…hmm. It’s an odd moment of equanimity for the doomsday tsar. But I snuggle into him as I take it.

By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I’m the least likely person to explain sewer caps to a four-year-old. Who even thinks about sewer caps? For the uninitiated, they are the metal bumps that protrude from the ground on the patches of lawn in front of many suburban houses.

The truth is when you’re as close to the ground as my granddaughter is, every prone object — from acorn to cinderblock to sewer cap — feels fascinating, worthy of discussion. What are the caps for, my granddaughter wants to know.

I realize this is one of those defining moments of our relationship: when I’m about to respond to a question, and I don’t have the vaguest idea of what I’m talking about. Do I punt? Does she have to be six before she realizes that sometimes I make stuff up? I was an English major in college, and while I can talk about Blake and Spencer, my sewer knowledge is — yes, I admit it — sparse.

Before I was a grandma, I wasn’t afraid to be imperfect. I was the parent who dreaded being Shabbat Mom in preschool because I was deathly afraid to light a match. My boys used to laugh at me because when I made them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I couldn’t get the two halves of the bread to line up. They probably felt they had a mom who often wore her metaphorical clothes inside out. On the first family vacation after my husband died, I asked my 11-year-old son to go get an emergency tampon for me from the mom in the family we were traveling with. He had no idea what he was delivering or why I needed it so fast. But he appreciated that sometimes I was forgetful, overwhelmed and disorganized.

So, is it any wonder that I want my granddaughter to think I’m all-knowing? That I no longer want to be the person who missed out on all the things adults should know because she was under a tree reading a Nancy Drew mystery? Maybe maturity is realizing that being willing to answer is more important than what is actually said.

Every house has its own sewer cap, I start to explain, which should be painfully obvious since we’ve passed about 20 sewer caps of various stripes on our walk. And then I offer a meager and uninformative nugget — that people need sewer pipes if they want to go to the bathroom in their houses. I just hope my granddaughter overlooks that I haven’t actually said anything substantive about sewer caps. I’m lucky she’s four.

I’ve rarely been with a child who’s as attuned to her surroundings as my granddaughter is. When we pass the man whose drill makes sparks on the sidewalk, she stays still so she can fully process his answer to her question about what he’s doing. And thus unfolds the story of how he’s cutting a baseboard.

My granddaughter speaks (and listens) in exclamation points. Everything is just so damned interesting to her. I love my granddaughter’s questions. My own answers may sometimes be sketchy, but that doesn’t diminish my joy whenever I see the light in her eyes as I start talking.

By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

My dad on voicemail is an unmitigated pleasure. He hears my recorded voice and assumes he has license to rant.

Today’s tirade involves autonomy, self-determination, and control. I’m hoodwinked by my dad’s facile use of language into thinking he is not demented.

But if he were still rational, he wouldn’t refuse to be evaluated for a walker. Nor would he insist on shuffling around holding onto walls and my 100-pound arthritic mother.

What happens to you if there isn’t a wall? I ask. It’s dangerous; you’re going to break a hip and take mom down with you. He assures me that in the absence of walls, he can always grab onto a car door handle. That’s brilliant. Maybe my dad is onto something that gerontologists have not considered. Picture a BMW handle as an assistive device.

All I can imagine is him sprawled on a sidewalk. And all he can imagine is walking around in a world where there always is a wall or a car door readily accessible. Maybe this is an inadvertent commentary on the current smallness of his life.

The craziest thing is that by grabbing walls for balance, my dad’s not fooling anyone. As I told my friend Fran the other day, no one’s going to see my dad walking and mistake him for Jim Thorpe. They might, however, confuse him for Lurch.

But the worst thing is I can think about is people seeing us together and saying Boy, that poor man could really use some help. And then: why doesn’t his damned daughter get him evaluated for a walker?

When my dad finally meets me to go for the evaluation he needs so Medicare will cover his walker, he tells me that if I continue to try to run his life, he won’t speak to me anymore. What a stroke of luck that would be, I want to tell him. I know the kindest thing for me to do at this point would be to say nothing, but I don’t do that. A thirty-five year history of trying to get the last word dies hard. You need me more than I need you, I remind him. Strange — to this, my dad, who in his younger years could launch a full-blown argument with a gnat, says nothing.

The thing is my dad always told me when it was time for him to step back, he would do it. At 88, he’s doesn’t believe that time is now. Don’t I have the right to make my own decisions, he asks. It’s a dicey thing, this call for agency; he has the desire to do for himself but not the cognitive goods to do so. A few years ago, he was building Excel spreadsheets for me, interpreting instructions on tax forms that I was too lazy to read and reinstalling door stoppers in my house that had come loose from the walls. Last year, he came to my house for a party and in the crowd forgot how to navigate from the first floor bathroom to the garage.

He doesn’t take too kindly to the prescription, or prescriptive, I issued earlier this morning. No more supermarket trips if he doesn’t agree to use a walker. He informs me that if I try to stop him from going to the supermarket to pick up the cookies he wants, I am guilty of elder abuse. Really? As we navigate the halls of his assisted living facility, I ask him why he insists upon throwing around terms like that. That’s when he tells me to “fuck off”. So much for stepping back.

The other day, my parents went out for dinner with friends and for two days afterward, my father couldn’t find his wallet. I offered to call the restaurant where they had been. Neither of my parents could remember its name.

I’ve been thinking a lot about aging — and mostly how to avoid it. This week I even scheduled an appointment with a plastic surgeon to talk about the rings around my eyes and the lines around my chin. The surgeon told me I’d get the results I wanted with an upper quadrant facelift. He advertised that thanks to a procedure that wouldn’t even involve an overnight hospital stay, I’d emerge woken up, refreshed. It sounds like for the same $10,000 I’d pay, I could go on a great vacation. Once I told my friends if I ever thought about plastic surgery, it was time to enroll me in another graduate program. In the end, I thanked the surgeon, went home, and threw away the paperwork.

After all when I see my parents, I know it’s not my face I’m worried about.

By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

Here we are poolside in Cambodia, and all I can think about is what we’ll forget when we get on the plane. My fear has a storied history: hello, wallet left in Cleveland; credit card left in South Boston, Virginia; and kids’ suitcases left in the front hall of the house because I assumed someone else put them in the trunk of the car. Yes, I was and am the mother. But I digress.

On this vacation to Southeast Asia, we’ve already lost a camera at the airport in Saigon and in an indeterminate spot, two envelopes of cash, one with Thai money.

About 20 years ago, my husband and I also lost our more detail-oriented first spouses to cancer. More likely they had tired of the emotional burden it took to organize us.

The only good news here is that my husband and I take our losses with equanimity, which incidentally is one of the tenets of Buddhism, as we learned at our visit to a temple today whose name escapes me. All I know is that it was not Angkor Watt.

The truth is, I feel extremely lucky to be here and to have travelled to Asia at all. When I was younger, I remember being scared to travel to exotic places. In 1987, my first husband wanted to go to Marrakesh as part of our honeymoon. I refused because I didn’t want to get the shots required in the event I got pregnant, which, by the way, neither of us had any intention of letting happen on our honeymoon.

Now it is 34 years later, and I no longer suffer from a pathological fear of shots. Prior to this trip, I was inoculated against Japanese encephalitis, typhoid, MMR (round 2), and tetanus. What I didn’t get an injection for, however, was spacey absentmindedness. Well, there’s always the next trip.

Just the other day, I read a piece in the paper about whether when traveling it’s smart to unpack suitcases or leave everything folded in a bag. Maybe for us, the key is never to open the packed suitcases in the first place.

By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I still remember how I deliberated for a minute about whether to take them or not to take them.It was like the button you see on a wall that says “never push” and yet you do. And so take them I did.

By 8 am with two sets of car keys in my bag, I’d done enough errands for someone driving two cars. I’d had my blood taken, picked up a Smoothie, called my mother, spoken to my best friend, and was on my way to the gym.

I was putting my coat into my gym locker, praising myself for my efficiency when my cellphone rang.  It was my husband.  “By any chance, do you have my car keys?” he asked.

Uh oh. I started to think back to that hook.  It had never occurred that I’d run off with something that wasn’t actually mine. Did I have his keys?  Hmm.  Well, yeah.  In a real stroke of organization the night before, I’d put my second set into the kitchen drawer where they’d be safe.  I remembered that but assumed by some weird kind of magic they’d materialized on the hook.  Let’s just say they hadn’t.

Now in most cases when people buy or lease cars, they have two sets of keys.  There is a good reason for this.  BMW probably never foresaw the particulars of this key fiasco.  But people run off with keys all the time.  They, as in me, take off into restaurants with the key fobs in their pockets, so their husbands, as in Hal, can park but have no keys to hand off to a parking attendant or if they’re lucky enough to find a space, lock the car with.  Yes, this has happened to us on multiple occasions.  Does it happen to other couples? Hmm. The bottom line is, spares are a savior.

In the course of lending cars to four sons, Hal and I had been down to one set of car keys each.  That’s the sorry background to this story. And while I now have a new leased car and two shiny sets of keys, Hal still has his measly one set, and it was now in my  gym locker.  “I’ve got to get to work.  You’re going to have to come home,” he said “I’m sorry about your class.”

In the scheme of tragedies, missing one session of Pilates is hardly sob worthy, but then I had a revelation.  I told him I didn’t have to miss anything.  He could Uber to the gym and pick up his keys. In our infinite wisdom, he and I both agreed this was a wonderful idea.  From the gym, he’d be closer to the office.  I didn’t have to miss my class; he’d be able to get to work on time.  All I had to do was leave his car keys at the front desk of the gym.  I got off the phone, handed his keys over to the person at the desk, and went on my not-so-merry way to the treadmill where I eked out ten minutes doing cardio and headed down to the Pilates room.

When I was in the middle of what’s known as the one hundred with my trainer, my husband  walked into the room; his face read “one hundred lashes with a wet noodle,” not I’m lovestruck and thrilled to see you exercising, Second Wife.  Yes, he had his keys.  What he and I conveniently overlooked was that he didn’t have his car.  It was home in the garage where he’d left it because, you guessed it, he didn’t have his keys.

Hal and I are very well matched.  Our friends tell me they think we’re oddly similar.   We both like Netflix mysteries, new dramas on Broadway, and sitting on the couch on Sundays doing the crossword and seeing who we know in the Times wedding announcements.   “Sports for chicks” is what my late husband called that section; okay, maybe that was harsh. But the thing is, the debacle with the keys never would have happened in my first marriage.  There were schedules.  There was order.  The keys would have never have been unmarked on the hook waiting to be grabbed. They would have been set purposely by a briefcase and long gone, in the ignition of a car idling by the Holland Tunnel by 7 in the morning. That precision was a great thing when my kids were small. 

But the boys are grown now.   Things are different, more laid back, less but also more chaotic.  But it’s all in a good way.

“This is a little like “The Stupids Try To Go To Work”,” I said to Hal.  I picked up my phone to call myself an Uber. He laughed as I handed him my keys, and he took off in my new car.

By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

My iPhone photo stream features a picture of my dog’s back left paw. The picture wasn’t a mistake, the photographic version of a butt dial. It’s actually a medical record.

Just to be clear: my dog wasn’t limping on or licking the paw. It didn’t seem to bother her. But while the little swelling around her toe had seemed innocuous enough to both of us, it didn’t go away. Not with coconut oil, which Maisie seemed to view as more of a condiment than a salve. And not with the neglect I decided to lavish on it that, in retrospect, may not have been benign.

Can a dog stub her toe? Get a hangnail? That’s what I assumed when I ignored the redness on her paw for about two weeks. I couldn’t even see it unless I picked up the paw and searched. But because I’m no vet and the swelling didn’t go down, I finally took her to the doctor.

Apparently some dogs have a proprietary relationship with their paws. They don’t like anyone touching them; if I suffered from the same kind of reluctance, I’d save a fortune on pedicures.

Will she mind this, the doctor asked before lifting up her back foot. When I shook my head, I felt like I was saving Maisie from some kind of canine metoo moment.

In no way is Maisie touch-phobic. If it involves what she perceives as petting on any part of her body, Maisie’s all in. The vet examined the foot. “It’s probably a bacterial or fungal infection. But I have to give you the bad news, too.”

I didn’t want the bad news, too, at least if there was a way to get only the good news. So, I steeled myself. I’ve already lost one husband to a brain tumor. Surely I wasn’t about to see a five-year-old dog expire from a hangnail.

She’s a young dog, the vet conceded. But sometimes these things are tumors. What?

The tumor had a fancy name, which I don’t remember and could probably look up. But I’m just impressed that I recall the medical name for her afflicted toe, digit p3.

A tumor like this is localized, the vet explained. In the worst case scenario, it will involve digit amputation. It’s extremely painful, but the dog will survive. Yes, but will I?

She gets antibiotics for what might be a bacterial infection for two weeks, and every day, I have to soak her foot in Epsom salts. Soak her foot? Good luck with that, my husband said when I told him.

And after 21 days if the swelling is still there, we assume it’s fungal and try another medicine. All that to try to rule out what else it could be: a tumor and what follows. This is the dog version of bunion surgery. That’s what the picture on my phone is for: to have a record of what the toe looked like at the end of October, so we can tell if it gets better.

So, I hereby issue a warning . If I’m scrolling through the phone to share the latest pictures of my granddaughters, I may inadvertently get sidetracked by a photo of a dog toe.

I can’t wait to get rid of it. Just to be clear: I mean the photo, not the toe….

By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

Forget pushing my boys in a baby carriage. I couldn’t wait for them to drive me in a car.

All too willingly, I thrust them headlong toward maturity, thinking what? That I needed more time to read mysteries? Do yoga? Drink coffee? Come on.

I wished myself into parenting obsolescence.

You’re too big for a bottle,” I told my 11-month-old, and I pushed the little green sippy cup on him like it would add 20 points to his IQ. “No baby talk,” I told my other son. “Say periphery,” I said. My legacy would be to pass on a word I’ve been obsessed with for 42 years — to a preschooler. That made sense.

And I was beyond thrilled to turn ratty baby blankets in and shop for college comforters. What was I thinking?

I remember exactly what I was thinking. Good riddance, Pokémon. Figuring out your powers was as confounding to me as differential calculus. But when Pikachu finally disappeared from my life, so did something else.

Ah, battles over homework. My sons saw the ubiqitous worksheets not as a valuable review of the wonderful things they’d learned during the day. Nope. All they were were impediments to Nintendo.

The arguments that I waged over doing the extra credit spelling words were ridiculous. Like a benighted Benjamin Franklin, I conducted many a battle on the virtues of doing more than expected. I don’t think the life lessons captured in Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac were intended to make sure third grade kids got more than 100 on spelling tests. Eventually, wouldn’t my sons have learned to spell the word accumulate anyway?

At one time, I wanted to turn my sons into the kind of kids who saw multi-step math problems as a challenge not a burden. Clearly I viewed the “A’s” on their report cards as a not-so-secret referendum on my parenting.

You don’t always get what you order. What stands out about my youngest son’s childhood was not his abiding commitment to Shakespeare. He used to leave little totems behind when he’d been in my room. Like Kilroy writing “I was here,” he’d throw an old sock on top of the non-spinning blade of the ceiling fan. I’d find a Beanie Baby on my bedpost. That is always more who he was than the millennial version of Doogie Howser.

Whenever I was trying to rush, these little tokens would make me pause, slow down. When he visits today, my son doesn’t leave anything but an open screen on my computer where’s he’s been doing something mysterious with data. Much as I was in a rush to put in my parenting time, and to see how it all turned out, I miss those socks.

Of course, I love my adult children. They grew up to be good people; they’re even fun. If I like Fleabag and Sex Education as much as they do, I assume I’m still relevant.

Of course, the conversation is different than it was 18 years ago. But if I close my eyes, I can still see them as they were. For me, it would be so easy to lapse into the old lingo. “Pick up your shoes. Put on your cleats and get ready for soccer. The Hebrew School carpool is here.”– sentences I said dozens of times. Too bad I have no one to use them on.

By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

When we took my son to a play center called Imagine That in 1993, he often chose to pirouette around in a tutu. Don’t try this at home, kids. Let’s just say my then-investment banker husband was tolerant of many things, but even at Imagine That, he didn’t want to imagine this. He’d roll his eyes and wait for my son to decide he’d rather be the fire fighter than the prima ballerina.

What kids wear is obviously not always a parental prerogative. Fast forward 25 years when my stepson, who’s the only one of my four children to have reproduced thus far, ran an earnest and hard-fought campaign against the color pink. Initially my second husband and I obliged with a gender-neutral layette for our baby granddaughter. Then my granddaughter turned 3 and announced that her favorite color was purple. Ok. So much for politically correct color choices.

As a grandparent, I have learned to stay silent on many things, including clothing selection. (Incidentally, this was not the case when I was a parent and my late husband took my son to Disney after our second child was born. My husband dressed my son in a shirt with a tiger and shorts with a lion. Forget the clashing colors; this was intra-species warfare.)

I’m quiet because I feel fortunate to be a grandma at all. In a second marriage to a husband who’s ten years older than I am, I lucked into grandmother-hood when my biological sons were still debating whether to get dogs.

I try to be as helpful and affirming as I can of the choices made by my stepson and daughter- in-law. I don’t always succeed. But for the most part, I’m doing a pretty decent impersonation of a chill grandmother. I wonder if it will last.

With my own boys, I know I worried too much about things like intake of sugar and reading time. Once I remember yelling at my son because I thought he cheated at “Pin The Tail On The Donkey”. I behaved as if I were raising a future embezzler. He was four.

Right now with my granddaughter, I’m still in the category of grandmother slash celebrity. Celebrities aren’t always known for setting limits. Ice cream for breakfast anyone? Anyway I plan to milk my status as Grandma Good Time for as long as I can. It’s great coming into a room and having someone, other than a dog, run towards me making tons of noise as they move in for a kiss.

I’m not sure how it happened, but I don’t even look at my watch like I used to with my own kids when I play with my granddaughter on the floor. Maybe my first husband’s death taught me that if time passes slowly, it’s actually a good thing.

Watching my granddaughter flip on the small trampoline in the corner, painting at the craft table, having tea parties with the few stuffed animals that fit into the toy high chair — we can be busy in the basement for hours. Well, for an hour anyway.

Ironically given my experience with children in costumes, my granddaughter often gravitates to her costume rack. This is the one toy my boys never owned. I don’t remember a lot of in-home dress up time. It was hard enough to get the boys to change out of their pajamas.

“Is this Sleeping Beauty?” I ask as I look at the pin on the collar of the gown I’ve helped my granddaughter step into.

“No, Grandma,” she says. “I’m Cinderella.”

She’s Cinderella. Really? I think the character on the pin looks more like Sleeping Beauty. I don’t argue. I don’t even say what I want to, that a woman who pursues the prince is sometimes destined to be disappointed.

In fact, I say nothing. If I’ve learned anything in 28 years at this parenting gig, it’s that sometimes it’s okay to just stand and smile when someone puts on a tutu.

By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

My 3-year-old granddaughter assumes that all people are good and that all dogs are friendly. Maybe when your grandmother has agreed to allow you to have a cupcake with rainbow frosting for breakfast, you can afford to adopt this magnanimous worldview.

Anyway, this was how I found myself on Maplewood Avenue Tuesday morning at 10:30 standing just a few steps away from the face of a very large dog. My granddaughter moved in close, barely getting out the words “is your dog friendly?” before she bent down for a mouth kiss that was reciprocated thankfully not by the man with the leash but by the dog.

Let’s just say there is no walking somewhere quickly with a 3-year-old.

Before Tuesday, my relationship with the town of Maplewood had been simple; I struggled to park and I did what I had to do fast. Typically I paid no attention to what was unfolding on the sidewalks. This was not the case Tuesday when thanks to my granddaughter, I encountered a modern-day version of Richard Scarry’s Busytown. All that was missing were the chipmunks delivering mail and the squirrels wearing construction hats.

As soon as she was finished with the dog, my granddaughter turned to a man unloading boxes of arugula and quinoa from a large truck, which he then slid down a ramp into a basement. There, a second man waited and piled boxes. “What these men doing, Grandma?” my granddaughter asked. I explained that what kept these men busy was called a job. They were delivering packages of food for a restaurant called Sprout.

My granddaughter wanted to edge closer to the opening in the street that led to the basement, hoping I think, to watch the boxes reach their destination. She put her hands on her hips. “I want to do this job, too,” she said to the man on the sidewalk. I told her that would be fine as long as she stayed far away from the yawning chasm in the sidewalk.

It turns out my granddaughter is an equal opportunity sidewalk spectator. As long as I accommodated her, she was willing to do what I wanted, an admirable trait in a little girl. I told her I hoped to walk around the corner to see if a new restaurant had opened. I reached down to grab her hand. She wouldn’t take it. “Only when we cross streets, Grandma,” she said. “I’m a big girl now.” Well yes. She ran a little ahead of me and turned back a few feet before she reached the corner. “Now, Grandma,” she prompted.

Hand in hand, we made our way across the street and faced a building that looked like a construction site with paper over the windows and what looked like some drills, a horse, and other equipment on the sidewalk. Of course, in keeping with the Scarry theme, there was a man with a construction hat standing right outside. I asked him about the opening date of the restaurant.

He shared a date, two weeks hence and told me kids were welcome, gesturing at my granddaughter. She appraised him carefully. “Do you have any meatballs?” she asked. “I love meatballs.”

What I find so refreshing with my granddaughter is that we don’t set goals. Days I’m with her, I try not to work. I stop caring how many steps I’ve gotten or even if I’m eating healthily. Make room for scones and giant hot pretzels, everyone. It’s those little things that make the day. I wish I’d been this wise with my own children. But I made them much more neurotic than I should have. I cared way too much about what seem 25 years later like irrelevant details. Did you brush long enough? Am I reading to you every night? Can you count to 10? Can you spell your name? Education, I know now, doesn’t happen with lessons. It occurs in random moments.

With a 3-year-old, even when nothing really happens, it can seem like everything.

By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

In 2019 little kids and their younger siblings come with gadgets I never had as a young mother: the light that spins and projects beautiful images on the ceiling, the food processor that purées homemade veggies into baby food, the bottle warmer that makes sure formula doesn’t stay chilly, and the diaper pail that spins human waste beyond recognition. But the most confounding of all is the sound machine.

Fortunately the sound machine also comes with my 3-year-old granddaughter, who on a regular basis, interprets its intricacies for the technologically challenged.

My husband and I lie about our facility with the sound machine. Even though we always pretend we can do it, we can’t work it at all. It’s shameful to admit that we’re confounded by something tiny and sweet that plays “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”.

The device is designed as an aid for parents trying to get a young child to sleep. Apparently, there is no dispensation for incompetent grandparents.

The sound machine looks like a miniature Bose radio. It’s attractive, streamlined and compact. It should be as simple to use as it is to look at. It isn’t.

Soothing? Forget it. I have so much anxiety about getting the sound machine to work that I need a Xanax to recover from the thought of it.

It’s supposed to lull a child to sleep by playing music that no one who wants to remain sane can listen to for long. That’s why children eventually give up and go to sleep.

Did you ever realize that the tunes for Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star and Baa Baa Black Sheep are exactly the same? No, I bet not. Those are the random thoughts you have after you’ve listened to the sound machine for an excruciating 45 minutes.

Every time my granddaughter sleeps over, we plug the sound machine in, which in itself is a five-minute proposition because the thing comes with a detachable cellphone-like cord that’s perennially stuffed somewhere in the overnight bag. To compound the situation, the sound machine has so many random holes to make it aesthetically pleasing, we never can locate the one that actually connects to the cord.

Then we look at the tiny buttons that supposedly make the music play and press them haphazardly. It’s like her stroller and her car seat, which to us are an unfathomable collection of buttons and straps and plugs that only the spawn of Einstein, and my granddaughter, can figure out.

To sleep my granddaughter requires lights out, shades drawn, doors closed and every eensy weensy shred of light, like a cellphone screen flashlight, extinguished. So usually it’s totally dark by the time we have to turn on the sound machine. We end up fumbling around with the thing like idiots and by that time of night — ok, it’s 7:30 — we’re so exhausted that we can hardly see. Keep in mind that we’ve put our glasses down somewhere in the room, and because it’s pitch black, they might as well be in Timbuktu.

In spite of our efforts and sporadic pressing of buttons, the sound machine stays silent and dark. Each time, it takes a 3-year-old to decipher and turn on the device. For a near-58 year old, the sound machine is a a puzzle that’s clearly intended to be tackled only by members of Mensa and preschoolers.

Luckily my granddaughter is inordinately patient with the sound-machine challenged. She gamely offers to jump out of bed and turn it on for us, which sort of defeats its whole purpose, which is to get her to relax and drift off.

Fortunately for me, the sound machine and other assorted appliances also come with my granddaughter. Her favorite words are “let me show you, Grandma.” God, I hope she never gets tired of saying them.