Happy Birthday, Granny and GD
"You'd better call your parents," the middle-aged American woman instructed me, obviously herself a mom, evident by, if nothing else, tone of voice.

She was right, of course. I was across the street from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, halfway through a three-week trip to Ireland, France and Italy and trying to determine why the police had ordered me to depart the Metro one stop before the historic site and why a crowd and photographers had gathered. Cool, maybe some American studio is shooting a few scenes there, I thought. So when I overheard this lady speaking English, I asked what had happened.

A bomb had detonated, she said, only 30 minutes earlier in a garbage can.

Immediately resounding in my head were my reassurances to my grandmother, who my family and I didn't tell about the trip until the day before I departed. I promise you we would all live in her house and never venture off her property, if she had her way. She gets nervous when any of us travels to the grocery store, let alone overseas to countries where the locals speak a different language -- and where a bomb had killed several people in the Notre Dame cathedral only a month or so earlier.

"Granny," I had sighed -- the authority on the psychology of terrorism that all 25-year-olds are -- "They don't set these things off one right after the other. It will probably be at least another year before the Algerians decide they should attack again."

So I scrambled to find a pay phone.

No one was at my parents' house. No one was at Uncle Billy and Aunt Rhonda's house. No one was at Uncle Charles and Aunt Debi's house. And I didn't know my dad's number or my brother's number at work.

Please, Granddaddy, I thought, for once in your life, be the one to answer the phone.

"Hello?"

"Hey, Granny, it's Steve. First off, I'm OK," I said.

"Ohhh, God, Steve, what's happened?" she pleaded in what verged on a wail.

As I blurted out, "A-bomb-went-off-but-I'm-OK," some sort of mournful sound escaped from her again, accompanied by another exclamation to our Maker and, to my grandfather, "Russell, a bomb has gone off!"

That's when I heard my grandfather, apparently sitting nearby, murmur demandingly, "Gimme the phone!"

"Hey, Steve, how you doin'?" he said, as if he didn't know there was possibly reason for alarm.

"I'm good, GD. A bomb just went off in Paris about 45 minutes ago, and I wasn't certain if y'all had gotten wind of it yet on CNN. I couldn't find Mom or Dad, and I wanted to call as quickly as I could to let you know I'm totally fine," I explained.

"No, we haven't seen it yet, but I'll keep an eye on Headline News and see when they report it," he said without the slightest hint of fear, as if I were calling him from an Auburn ballgame at halftime.

"The bomb went off at the Arc," I said, "and I only knew about it so quickly because, believe it or not, I happened to be on my way to see the Arc and was rerouted to another subway stop by the police."

"Well! Hard to believe!" he said, sounding amazed at the close call but not frightened by it.

"I'd better quit running up my calling card bill, Granddaddy," I said.

"I'll let your mom and dad know what happened," he said.

That was eight years ago last month.

This Sunday, I'm driving home to visit with Granny and Granddaddy, as the family celebrates their 82nd and 85th birthdays, respectively.

Sometime last month when I was in Publix, pushing a shopping cart to the fresh fruits and vegetables section, I did a double-take when I saw that a Brach's Pick-a-Mix station had been installed.

In one of those strange moments of vivid memory I seem to encounter more frequently the older I become, I was suddenly alongside Granny's shopping cart, my brother on the other, in the regional grocery chain just up the road from their old house. I saw the two of us stretching to each of the bins, loading one of those pink-and-purple-striped bags with as much candy as Granny would allow. The soft, white candies with gelatin-like fruit-flavored pieces were her favorites. My brother's were the orange slices. Mine were the butter-rum-flavored, Tootsie-Roll-shaped logs of caramel.

That would've been the mid to late 1970s.

Back in the Atlanta Publix, between the fresh flowers Southerners don't buy and the stacks of bananas, I thought I was going to break down like a 4-year-old, and I have a pretty good idea why. The time has come when the gradual transition from old age to elderly has begun for my grandparents, and I hate it. They're not supposed to finally start looking their age and finally start being slightly less mobile.

I want to forever eat my grandmother's green beans, yeast rolls, cornmeal-breaded fried okra, pecan pies and bread-and-butter pickles, the last of which friends of mine and former co-workers have begged me to mass-market, convinced we could all gain our fortune from them.

I want to always be able to sit outside under the pecan trees with my grandfather and talk about Auburn athletics, conservative politics and stories from his days as a foreman for construction sites, as the tenor in a Southern Gospel group that performed from Texas to Colorado and as a young man growing up in rural Alabama.

Suddenly, living under their roof and never leaving the property doesn't sound like such a bad idea.