By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I’m a curmudgeon on a mission. My granddaughter’s crime? She wants Dipping Dots, and I spend about a third of the walk to the ice cream store railing against them.

If you’re eating Dipping Dots, you might as well be ingesting linoleum, I tell my granddaughter. They’re chemicals; they have to be. How else does something that looks like colorful dots morph into ice cream when you touch it with a spoon? Would you eat driveway pavement if it came in primary colors? I really shouldn’t expect an answer from a three-year-old.

Dipping Dots are an affront to the wholesomeness of our biweekly ice cream parlor expedition. My rant does not faze my granddaughter. She pedals her bike with training wheels over the bumpy cement sidewalk, and when I put my hand on her back to provide some stability, she tells me she doesn’t need it. No Grandma, she says; I got this.

Apparently she knows what else she’s got: a simp for a grandmother. I’m just the grandma who can’t say no. Much as I hate Dipping Dots, we stop at the newsstand that sells ice cream in packages and gummy things made out of sugar that are terrible for her teeth. She chooses Dipping Dots in American flag colors — oh goody, patriotic tooth decay — and something green that will no doubt remain in her teeth for the duration. As usual, she tells me not to worry. Her other grandma is a dentist, and I feel a vague sense of foreboding that multiple dental visits are in my son’s future as I pay for the Dipping Dots and the olive green gummy thing whose name I do not remember. We’re saving these for later, I tell my granddaughter, and I hope by the time later comes, she will have forgotten about them.

Are you sure you don’t want real ice cream? I finally ask. It’s way better than Dipping Dots. The truth is I want real ice cream. I am just using my granddaughter as an excuse — you know how it is. I want to set a good example of what it’s like to be a woman who eats healthily and at almost 58 has no illusions about having the body of a 20-year-old. It’s not because I love ice cream and crave chocolate. Oh, the lies we tell ourselves.

Luckily, my granddaughter agrees to actual ice cream as long as I hold onto the Dipping Dots. Really? I’d like to demote this plastic-covered imposter to the garbage can — permanently. With all the plastic I’m toting, I worry that in the town I’m babysitting in, I’ll be outed as some kind of an environmental pariah.

The plastic bag goes on one of the handlebars and the bucket of chalk she insisted on carrying goes on the other. I’m not sure what we’re meant to do with the chalk other than transport it. I imagine us as sidewalk artists, a la the chimney sweeps in Mary Poppins or creators of colorful hopscotch boards. This is not to be.

The town ice cream store has become our thing — or at least that’s what I tell myself. It’s our routine, what I hope she will think about when she thinks about grandma. My granddaughter and I set out from her house every other week for this simple errand. I get a vegan scoop, so I can feel virtuous. My granddaughter always chooses a flavor called Superman and she adds sprinkles. Superman is a red, white and blue concoction that is an amalgamation of food coloring and sugar and that, I suppose, would be better eaten in a cape. It mostly makes her sticky, and we always ask the boy who sells the ice cream to wet the napkin we give him in the sink that’s behind the counter. That’s part of the adventure — the wiping of my granddaughter’s face and the end point on this ice cream eating journey, the indication that it’s time to turn home.

Going for ice cream with my granddaughter is not just about ordering kid-sized cups. Her innocence and enthusiasm are infectious. Every man of a certain age who walks in is a daddy. The little girl with a plaid skirt and pink backpack who, like my granddaughter, orders a Superman cup is a long-lost friend. The ice cream scoopers who also roll the pizza dough for the pepperoni pies the store sells are curiosities. Grandma, what are those men doing? Everything she sees is new, and being able to view it with her makes even the mundane seem exotic.

And therein lies my real objection to Dipping Dots. They’re artificial. Their fake-ness makes them an outlier on this ice cream journey. You don’t scoop them. They have no smell. No one over the age of ten even eats them.

And as if to punctuate the point about how unwelcome they are, the Dipping Dots ultimately end up in a melted mess on the sidewalk, back on the cement where they so clearly belong. They co-mingle with the chalk after the two wheeler that I’m walking for my granddaughter, who runs ahead, topples over. Kaboom. My granddaughter laughs. It’s a Dipping Dot disaster, I tell her. A point of interest: Dipping Dots don’t only turn into ice cream when they’re poked with a spoon. The same thing happens to them when they have a collision with a bucket of chalk on the sidewalk. They liquefy and become a sticky atrocity, a breeding ground for desperate Dachshunds and frenetic flies.

Adios, Dipping Dots. We hardly knew you. All I can say is thank god, we never ate you.

By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

My dad always drove — even if we were only going six miles to the grocery store. I colluded with him in the fiction that I was fifteen years old and happy to be buckled into the passenger seat — of my own car. The truth is, even at 50 I liked being driven. Dare I say chauffeured? If my dad was behind the wheel, everything felt safe.

Fortunately for him, my dad got to stay on active dad duty longer than most. When my husband died at 39, my father took up the paternal mantle as if he’d never relinquished it. He began changing lightbulbs in my house. He played with my boys in the pool. He sat on the sidelines at Little League and for my younger son’s brief sojourn in football. Eventually he taught the boys to drive.

With his paternal care came my dad’s finely curated brand of craziness. At a distance, what he does looks like simple overprotection. But it’s overprotection to the power of 10 thousand.

Into his 70s, he persisted in an especially insane behavior; if he and my mom traveled somewhere, they always flew separately (as he had done throughout my childhood). This way if the plane went down, one of them would stay alive to help serve as caretaker to my children. Obviously he considered me a useful accessory but not really a main player in this parenting thing. In retrospect, it is a little disconcerting.

Even though we are obviously related, my father’s version of parenting was, at heart, radically different from mine. I am grateful for all he did. But his help came with his foibles. Among his edicts for a safe and healthy life? Don’t put a cardboard pizza box in a warm oven.

“Are you crazy?” he said when I did it. “You’re going to start a fire.”Really? Because of a cardboard box in an oven set on warm?

If my dad was going to be the driver of my car, I would be the navigator of my kitchen.

I reminded him my husband was already dead. How could anything worse possibly happen? I should have just smiled and taken the damn pizza box out of the oven.

I can tell myself a lot of myths about what fatherhood meant to my dad. But I do know whatever he did was wrapped up in the need for prodigious safe keeping of those he loved. Last weekend at my 40th high school reunion, a boy — now a man — who lived in my neighborhood reminded me that my parents had a heated driveway — in 1968. Apparently my mom always turned the neighborhood kids away when they wanted to make money shoveling snow. I didn’t remember the heated driveway coils. But it was a really steep driveway, and installing coils to ward off falls and skidding — well, that sounds a lot like my dad.

In fatherhood, my dad found the role of a lifetime. Why cede authority to me or to anyone else? He never wanted to be a supporting player.

About six years ago, my father drove me to the city to see an investment advisor; he did it every year. As he got out of the car, about 5 years past brisk and purposeful, he fumbled in his coat pocket to turn over his keys to the parking attendant. The guy in the parking lot promptly ignored him. “Will you be staying long, Miss?” the attendant asked me. At 81, my father was as good as invisible.

At first I pretended it hadn’t happened. But then as we made our way onto the sidewalk, I tried to talk to my dad about how it felt to have his whole persona kind of sideswiped by the young parking attendant.

My father just shrugged his shoulders. He was never one for those “how did it make you feel” kinds of questions. God knows it’s hard to be gazing at your navel when you’re behind the wheel of a car.

I, too, would have liked to shape the world into a less dangerous place for my children. But I never quite figured out how to do it — or whether I should. Incidentally, I don’t drive for my children. Whenever my boys come to visit, I do what I always did. I step aside and buckle myself into the passenger seat of my car.

By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

Sunday, we paid for about 40 minutes too many. That’s because I told my husband that my granddaughter needed a full hour, not a half hour, of time at Skyzone, an indoor trampoline park. This is the same spirit of overkill that moves me to have two quarts of leftover chicken soup at the holidays. Truly, sometimes people are better off with less.

That was the case with my granddaughter anyway. She didn’t need an hour to decide that she should back off when pushing piranhas, aka older kids, infiltrated and wrought mayhem in the toddler trampoline area. It reminded me of the chaos that ensues when I take my 23-pound mutt to the small dog park and there’s a bull mastiff there.

My first instinct was to swoop in and save my granddaughter from the elementary school marauders. But I stood back. I’ve made my own kids anxious enough for more than 25 years; surely I don’t need to inflict my neuroses on another generation.

Skyzone, an indoor trampoline park, seems like a more raucous version of a Bounce class that I sometimes take at my gym on Thursday mornings. Raucous is right. Ultimately, there were as many as 10 non-toddler sized people in the area where my granddaughter was jumping. As best she could, she shied away from the bruisers and brutes, including 10-year-olds who moved like speeding bumper cars between mats, happy to take down an unsuspecting three-year-old.

Parents and grandparents have a defined role at Skyzone. They’re there to watch and wave, not jump– or jump in. Incidentally, another useful thing that grandparents can do at Skyzone is run after granddaughters who move with startling and unexpected efficiency between areas of the ginormous gym.

In keeping with the expedited jumping plan she’d devised, my granddaughter dashed over to the foam block pit. There, she and another under-4 engaged in the Sisyphean task of throwing Styrofoam blocks in and out of a pit, counting blocks (or throws) out loud as they went.

After about 10 intense minutes in the pit, my granddaughter wanted out, and the next logical distraction she chose was a vending machine that allowed kids to use a metal hook to grab seedy-looking toys.

Play until you win, the sign on the machine said. It sounded scarily like a lottery for toddlers.

“I want a ball,” my granddaughter told us. To be clear, Grandma and Grandpa often say yes even when they know it’d be better to say no.

Apparently with this machine, you could take as many grabs as you needed to “win” a ball as long as you were willing to fork over $5 in tokens.

This is just what I wanted to do: pay $5 for a ball that would have cost 99 cents at Target. My granddaughter stared at us with a look that communicated stark need, the same one I get when the new Nordstrom’s catalog comes in the mail. And what a grandparent does in this heartrending instant is comply, right?

My husband and I looked at each other.

“This is a good time for you to learn the value of a dollar,” my husband said to my granddaughter who didn’t look especially convinced. “We are going to continue to say no even if you choose to get upset,” my husband continued. Who was this man I barely recognized? In grandfather-hood, he’d finally grown a pair of balls.

The truth is one of the reasons we were at Skyzone to begin with is that my granddaughter usually makes our job easy. She listens to us. She can be convinced to move on from a display of glittery pocketbooks — that was last weekend in Nordstrom’s– or from this Sunday’s ball-hawking vending machine. At 11:30, at my suggestion she gave up on the ball for good and settled for a $2.37 bag of popcorn. I know, I know. It was kind of close to lunchtime. But we’re grandparents after all.

When I was a kid, I used to watch old home movies of myself at age 3 with my grandfather at a Brooklyn amusement park called Buddy’s. My dad both filmed and watched me as my grandpa sat on a bench with a cane and a cigar. As I strap my granddaughter into her car seat, it’s hard for me to believe I’m only a few years younger than my dad’s father was at Buddy’s. I smile. I wave. I give my opinion sometimes, even when it’s not wanted. Why not? Even if I don’t have my own grippy socks for Skyzone, I’m not ready to be banished to the bench.

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.