My Granddaughter Abigail

Last Sunday, my wife and I went to a talent show at a theater in Topanga Canyon to watch my granddaughter, Abigail Crouse, belt out three songs with the vocal range and panache of Broadway headliner.

Abby is madly in love with show business.  She is currently in rehearsals for three plays with three different theater companies in Topanga.  All of her friends are theater kids -- passionately obsessed with acting, singing, and dancing.  Abigail and her crew love to sing songs from Epic -- a musical adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey.  She knows all of the characters from that ancient Greek text and can tell you their backstories and why she likes or dislikes them.

She also loves to draw and make miniature three dimensional sets out of construction paper that look strikingly similar to the ones produced by art departments on the television shows I have produced.  

She loves to write essays and short stories.  Her English teacher says Abby is writing two grade levels above her current 6th grade class.  

Of course her preoccupation with drama could be a passing phase.  And that's okay with me.  I don't know what career Abigail will end up pursuing, but I am reasonably sure it will be a creative one.  I take a great deal of pride in that because it is something I have been working on with her ever since she could walk and talk.  I have said to my daughter and son-in-law many times: "If she has a creative mind, she will thrive in any field she pursues, from astrophysics to business to biotech."

I cannot take credit for all of Abigail's creative achievements in the 11 years she has been on Planet Earth.  The lion's share of the credit belongs to Abby herself, but I think I made a contribution.

Our creative journey began with a gnarly piece of drift wood that sits in our backyard.  When Abby was two I told her this was a Troll House and that many trolls lived there and deposited their treasures within.  Then I would hide little shiny presents for her there -- figurines, Christmas ornaments, wrapped candy, etc.  And I would tell her these were presents the trolls left for her.  Soon, every time Abby came over she would say, "Grandpa, we go to the Troll House now?"  Her eyes would bulge like a pair of golf balls every time she found a new hidden gem.

Then came our hikes down a fire road in Paradise Cove in which Abigail assumed the identity of her alter ego, Jungle Girl.  I was her loyal attendant as she sat upon a tree stump throne and waved a pine branch scepter, dispensing proclamations to the squirrels and bunny rabbits that scurried past us.

There is a tennis court on that fire road with flowers planted around the chain link fence that encloses it.  One day I said, "Let's go to The Grandpa Garden to see if any new Grandpas are blooming."  Abigail gave me a quizzical look.  I explained that this was where grandpas were grown by the loyal gardeners of Paradise Cove.  In fact, I myself was grown there and ripened and was picked just before Abby was born.  Her eyes widened as she scanned the flower beds for signs of a freshly blossoming Grandpa.

After that, on every hike Abby would say, "Let's go see if any new Grandpas are growing!"

One day a man in his 60s was playing another old man on the fence-enclosed tennis court.  I cried excitedly: "There are two freshly picked grandpas!"  I explained that after Grandpas are picked they are wild at first and must be kept in a cage until they are tamed.  I myself had been kept in that cage for weeks just before Abby was born.  Abby stared in utter fascination at the freshly picked Grandpas until the men grew self conscious and began missing shots.

We also rode in a golf cart all around Paradise Cove.  One street runs beside a deep ravine filled with trees and bushes.  I stopped the cart.  "Look Abigail, it's Gremlin Gulch."  Abby immediately wanted to go down and hunt for Gremlins.  Once down there, as she peered apprehensively through the undergrowth,  I said, "There's one!  See his eyes in that bush, staring back at us!"  She shrieked and ran back up the hill at record speed.  But on a subsequent day when we drove past she urged me to stop and said excitedly, "Grandpa, can we go down into Gremlin Gulch?"  And so we would repeat the whole psychodrama again and again and again.

I believe in puns.  When I was growing up my father and I would engage in long pun riffs, each of us feeding off the other as we slung puns fast and furious.  I did the same with Abby because I believe puns help you develop a sophisticated use of language.  We would drive by a pair of deer statues on someone's lawn.  I would ask, "Hey Abby, why do you think the sculptor created that deer with the antlers?"  

She would say: "Because he wanted to make a buck."  

"And why did he carve the female deer?"  

"To make some doe."

Our golf cart also sped past a large concrete structure that's part of the septic system in Paradise Cove.  I told Abby it was Pandora's Box, the one from which Pandora released all of the deadly sins that infected humankind.  After doing this a few times I could say to her, "Abby, what's that structure?"  She would answer that it was Pandora's Box and recite the entire myth to me.  I like to think that her current passion for The Odyssey and Greek Mythology had its origins in those exchanges.

I also taught her another myth on those golf cart rides.  Not a Greek or Roman or Egyptian myth, but a very specific myth that had been passed along through three generations of my family. 

My father's father, William "Doc" Weddle, had been a dentist in McKeesport, Pennsylvania in the early 20th Century.  I never met him because Doc died when my father was 12 and lay in an unmarked grave for 40 years until my father put a headstone on it.   

Before Doc died, my Dad used to ride around the greater Pittsburgh area with him on the streetcars.  Those streetcar rides were much like my golf cart rides with Abby.  Doc passed along all kinds of folk lore and tall tales to his youngest son, Jimmy, and my dad lapped it up, his imagination blossoming with wonder.  One of the tales Doc Weddle told his son was about The Birds That Fly Backwards.  "Look up in the sky, Jimmy, keep your eyes peeled, and you will see whole flocks of them flying backwards, heading North in the winter.  Do you know why they fly backwards, Jimmy?  Because in order to know where they're going, they need to see where they've been."

This simple yet profound metaphor for how the past affects our trajectory into the future was then passed down to me by my father.

And years later I passed it on to Abigail.  Every time I heard the squawks from the flock of green parrots that thrive here in Malibu I would point to them and tell Abby they were The Birds That Fly Backwards.  And then I would explain why they fly backwards.  Soon she could recite the myth herself.

When I wrote the memoir about my family, I asked Abby if she would draw a picture of The Birds That Fly Backwards for the last page of the book.  It took her almost a month because she agonized on how best to portray them didn't want to let me down.  She did not.  Her picture is luminous and magical and triumphant.  She drew it 100 years after my grandfather, Doc Weddle, first told the story to my father, who later told it to me.

That is the power of story telling.  And a testament to its value.

Since the time she could talk, I have been showing Abigail classic films -- the silent masterpieces by Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, and clips from early sound movies by the Marx Brothers and dancers and singers like Cyd Charisse, Ginger Rogers, and Eleanor Powell.  

One time when I was at work I got a message on my cell phone from Abby: "Grandpa, I'm here at your house.  I was going to watch Buster Keaton with you, but you're not here."

I showed her Groucho Marx singing, "Whatever it is, I'm against  it," in Horsefeathers.  And I showed her Donald O'Connor singing, "Make 'Em Laugh!" in Singing in the Rain.  She watched silently but attentively.  I was not sure if these musical numbers had any impact on her.

Until that Thanksgiving when Abby and her best friend, Sheila, announced they wanted to perform songs for all of us.  To my astonishment, they sang "Whatever it is, I'm Against it!"  and "Make 'Em Laugh!" without so much as fumbling one line of the lyrics.

Last year I was able to take Abby and her friends to see Singing In the Rain at the Aero theater.  They came out of the screening singing the songs and proclaiming that Donald O'Connor's character -- Cosmo -- was their favorite.  "Cosmo rules!"  They yelled to passing cars.

I brought Abby to Sony Studios to visit the inner workings of my Apple television series, For All Mankind.  She toured the wardrobe department, hair and makeup, but it was the production design department with its miniature scale models of the sets made out of construction paper that most fascinated her because they were so similar to the miniature doll houses Abby built at home out of the same materials.

We took her on set while scenes were being shot and the crew was generous enough to allow Abby to climb onto a camera dolly to feel what it would be like to be a camera operator.

I also created a scene for Abby in the very first episode of For All Mankind that my partner, Bradley Thompson, and I wrote.  In it, Molly Cobb becomes the first woman astronaut to fly to the moon.  Molly is unprepared for how much this will mean to young women and is startled and moved when thousands of letters pour into the Johnson Space Center from girls who now see her as a role model.  One of the letters is from a fictional character named Abigail Crouse.  I wrote Abby's letter and Molly's response to it.  There is a message buried in it for the real Abby: she can do anything she is bold enough to dream of in this life.  Then I framed those script pages and hung them on the wall of Abby's bedroom.

She read the pages once and probably has not looked at them since.  But they hang over her head as she lies in bed fantasizing about all of the things she wants to be when she grows up.  

I think Abigail Crouse is an incredible young woman with a creative mind that seethes with ideas and plans and aspirations.  She and others like her are the hope for our future.