Over the long Blackout 2003 weekend, Melinda and I watched With Six You Get Eggroll, a silly but passable screwball comedy starring Doris Day and Brian Keith as forty-something single parents trying to merge their families. The first time Keith visits with her children, Doris Day's youngest boy says, "Are you gonna be our new daddy?"

I sat there thinking this movie was cheesy as hell.

Today I sat at a big family get-together at Chili's, in a booth across from my grandfather and the lady he brought to dinner. He joked about taking three different grandmothers to the Heritage Festival on three days. At one point he said he was qualified to advise her about eating all her vegetables because he was 5 years older. Thinking he had called her 5 years older, she said, "See this knife?"

I'm not silly enough to come out and say it, but judging my own reactions to the situation, there's obviously a part of me that's gone all infantile and wondering, "Are you gonna be our new grammaw?!"