Almost every day I get a phone call from the grandson. It goes something like this:
"Grandma coming home soon?"
"Not today"
"After night-night? After one sleep?"
"Nope, not for lots of sleeps."
"Youse come home after lots of sleeps?"
"Yup, I'll come to your house after lots of sleeps."
"OK. Love you. Bye."
Even though it doesn't seem to upset him much, it breaks my heart every time I have to say "lots of sleeps", so a couple of days ago when he called I was happy to change my reply to "After 3 sleeps."
"Youse coming to my house after 3 sleeps?" he asked for clarification and the daughter piped in "You're coming to my house after 3 sleeps?"
Apparently the e-mail informing her that her dad and I were coming to visit got lost in transit. But she is very accommodating and decided we could still come.
At the hubby's work the culture department sends out a daily e-mail with a Pima (Piipaash) and Maricopa (O'odham) word of the day. Recently they have been focusing on words related to time. Today, when we only have one more sleep before we leave for San Diego, he forwarded the info to me. We both thought it was rather interesting.
Prior to European arrival, the O’odham and Piipaash did not organize time into seven-day weeks. There was no concept of a week at all. Therefore, there was no specific name given to any particular day. If one wanted to plan attendance at a future event, others were told to, “Come after four night’s sleep,” or something similar.
His comment was "See, it's just the Pima coming out in our grandson."
Only 1 more sleep!
3 comments:
We were glad to have you here. Unfortunately, now we have to start the countdown all over again...
i rather enjoy that shad is bringing out his inner native. good on him! haha, every now and again i'll catch myself saying, "those _____" it's a great tradition i think. :) i wish you would come and visit me after 3 sleeps! <3.
Glad that you got to go visit and that you got to answer yes to him. Of course I hope it made you all happy to "come home". I'm excited to see ya in about 25 sleeps.
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