Seedy Business

I just got a call from my friend's daughter who is here in Amsterdam visiting her grandfather. This is the most precocious 7-year-old I have ever met. She actually said to me "So I heard you had another baby. How'd that go?"

When I met her, she was 3-and-a-half, and I was single and childless. I'd been invited on a boat trip by some Americans who chartered tourists around on pot tours. About 20 of us were crammed onto an open boat along with Rage Against the Machine (the band, not the CD), and this little girl's grandpa who had a group of marijuana devotees following him along. He is big in the seed business.

So about an hour into the weed version of a "booze cruise," this tiny girl comes up to me with a bag of chips and says "Can you open this for me?" I got a little nervous, thinking that her mom might be one of the hippies aboard with grandpa who would look up in shock from her power hit and start screaming that chips weren't part of her all-vegan, organic, lacto-ovo-creepo diet, or something, so I said, very nicely "Is it ok with your mommy if you eat these?" (I seriously had a friend growing up whose mom wouldn't let ANYONE smoke cigarettes in the house. Marijuana was ok.) The little girl sneered at me and threw her shoulders back and said, like I was an idiot, "My mom's in SPAIN." Alrighty then. I opened the chips.

Her mom and I became good friends when she eventually came back to Amsterdam, bonding as fellow Americans and bemoaning Dutch ways during our almost-simultaneous pregnancies and child-rearing.

So, mom is back in Spain, and her daughter, visiting grandpa, wants to know if we'll accompany her on a boat trip tomorrow. In the meantime, I've had two kids, and my stepdaughter is the same age as she is. Is this life coming full-circle, history repeating itself, or deja vu?