By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

At 3 and a half, my granddaughter has the surgical skills of Christian Barnard. Yesterday, my husband and I took her to Color Me Mine, a place I haven’t thought about, let alone set foot in, for about ten years.

Following the extremely prohibitive rules, we each picked our measly five paints — even the Cinderella figurine warrants no more than that unless you pay extra. The power broker, aka the distributor of the paint, then walked over with a bottle the size of an eye dropper. “This is for the really hard-to-get spots like the eyes,” she said. I sized up the thing. It was kept closed by a pin tiny enough for Thumbelina who, in a cruel twist of fate, was not represented anywhere in the store.

My granddaughter grabbed the minute bottle, negotiated the tiny pin, and promptly squeezed out the paint. Then she put the Tiny Toons-sized dropper back in. Did I mention she is 3 and a half years old? This was something that I would have had trouble with and, incidentally, eventually did. “Did you just see that?” I asked my husband who was busy putting the required three coats of paint on the monkey figure he’d chosen; he was so transported by it, he might as well have been painting in Arles, not Menlo Park. He looked up. “Hmm?” was all he said. Ok. Our granddaughter was clearly some kind of incredibly gifted magician, or at the very least a genius, and my husband was so busy painting his monkey that he hadn’t even noticed. “Look what she’s able to do,” I said.

Maybe this wasn’t as big a deal as I assumed. When we picked her up to go to the mall, my granddaughter had been sitting on the floor of her family room competently painting her sliver-sized toenails. I have four sons, and I had never seen anything quite like it. Ok. I admit it. I’m 57 and like a lumberjack with a bottle of nail polish. If you want to know the truth, I don’t even like cutting my own food. Maybe that’s why I never expected this tiny little child to have the motor skills of Albrecht Durer, whose etchings hang in the Met.

Thinking about what this might mean, I couldn’t even move forward with my lion figurine. Would she be a famous artist? An engineer? A dentist like both her grandparents on the other side?

When my oldest son was a baby and my uncle observed him putting together Donald Duck puzzles, he said, “Maybe he’ll be the first Jewish president.” Yeah right. That didn’t happen.

I know, I know. Everybody thinks the next generation is going to be wonderful: with futures unwritten, there are limitless possibilities. I love how I get little glimpses of the person my granddaughter may become. She loves her science picture books? She’s surely a future bio major. She can recite Chick A Boom, Chick A Boom by heart? That’s good for an orator. As I sat in awe with my lion, which was still full of unpainted white spots, my granddaughter turned to me.

“Need me to help you, Grandma?” Yes, darling. What I didn’t say is she already had.