I like to think I have each of my grown children figured out and properly categorized: The wise, contemplative oldest. The never-knew-a-stranger sales guy in the middle. The sensitive, empathic youngest.

I thought this game was a comfortable one-way street till Mr. Wise One sent a care package to entertain me after bunion surgery.

“I think you’ll like this stuff,” he said. “It’s the real you.”

I could hardly wait to find out what that was.

A smashing collection of classical jazz? A volume of Chekhov prose? A Black Belt Sudoku book?

When the box arrived, it contained three things: a novel about a widow with grown children who got bored and joined the CIA, a 550-piece travel puzzle and a little white box with a three-sided thing-a-ma-jig in it.

My granddaughter, 7 (sales guy’s daughter), gasped when she saw it. “A fidget spinner!” she cried, and grabbed it out of my hand. Seems she and all her friends have these, buy them by the fistfuls, stash them in their backpacks.

In seconds, she had it spinning between her thumb and second finger. “Watch this!” she said. And suddenly it was spinning perfectly on the tip of her thumb.

“This is a really good one,” she said. “It will help you when you’re fidgety.”

The more I read about fidget spinners, the more sobering all this became.

It’s not just that Wise One believes a toy invented to calm down children with ADHD is the perfect thing for me. It’s also the fact that I’d somehow missed a craze that has spun through the national media like a tornado for at least two months.

The calming part makes sense. The first time I spun it, I couldn’t take my eyes off the thing.

“This could be the perfect meditation tool,” I told him. And I meant it.

How could I leave the present moment when I was totally absorbed in watching a whirligig?

“Is that why you sent it?” I asked him. “So I could focus?”

“Use it as you will,” he said. Did I mention he is also superbly polite?

But the more I ponder this, I’m thinking that the real me it has outed, is someone who despite ardent post-election efforts, is still living in a bubble. I’m in my own little world, uninhabited by fidget spinners or news reports, fake and otherwise, that have warned of the dangers of these whirligigs gone airborne.

Some schools have banned them. Classroom teachers have seized them. ADHD experts have wrangled about their usefulness. All off my radar screen. All on my seven-year-old granddaughter’s.

After awhile, I was bothered less by the idea of being fidgety than the fact I had missed all of this. Was it a generational thing? Was I aging at an alarming rate?

My only comfort is that when I mentioned the fidget spinner, my Sensitive and Empathic Youngest had no idea what I was talking about.

“So he gave you a “Sit ‘n Spin?” she asked. “How is that good for your foot?”

She went on to ask if I had heard the news that Ohio farmers were producing camel milk – a topic she said everyone was talking about. In Oregon, where she lives.

At least living in a bubble is not about age. It’s apparently genetic.

Copyright 2017 Pat Snyder