The title promises a goodbye, but the poem delivers something warmer: a run of small, bright scenes. A child rolls a hula hoop across a park, throws a football in a tight spiral, and settles in for a long afternoon of Monopoly. The speaker, addressed as "Grandma" in the child's one line of dialogue, watches a grandchild outgrow one version of their closeness and finds the next version just as good. The central idea is that growing up is a kind of leaving, but love does not shrink as a result. It changes shape, and the person left behind can still count herself the winner.
The poem is free verse with no rhyme and no steady meter, and it sounds like a person talking, half to the child and half to herself. The line breaks do the shaping. In the opening image the hoop keeps rolling down the page: "It was going / and going, / like the years behind you, / away and around and away!" The repeated "and" builds momentum, and the only exclamation mark in the poem arrives with the child's whooping. The simile is clever because "around" suggests a circle, a return, while "away" is where the hoop actually goes. Time here is something you can watch roll off but cannot catch.
The word "Ready?" works as a quiet refrain. In the past the grandmother stood "ten feet apart" and said, "Put your hands out, / Ready?" before pitching the ball, so she was the one in charge. Now the child throws, and the speaker is bluntly "the target, me." The football is "a real football," and the word "real" shows how far the child has moved from the toy-sized games. It demands "garden gloves," a homely, funny detail that shows the grandmother adjusting her body and her pride to keep up. After a blank line comes the quiet sting: the child catches "every time, // without me asking, Ready?" The question she once needed is now unnecessary, so a small loss is disguised as a compliment.
The next stanza is about confiding. "You still tell / me what's going on / with friends / and enemies" is broken into short, slow lines, and the word "still" reveals her worry that this closeness might not last. "Enemies" hints that the child's world is growing more complicated. Yet the child asks, "What do you think, Grandma?" The grandmother is no longer only a pitcher of balls but someone whose opinion is wanted.
The poem turns when "the years / behind you" returns. The first time, the phrase described the hoop's vanishing; now those years "leave me joy-filled." The same image of time passing is reread as a gift. Memory becomes "pictures in my mind," and the games form a timeline: "Candyland and Old Maid, / on to Ruckus and Trash, / now long games of Monopoly." The phrases "on to" and "now" push the list forward, and the games grow more demanding as the child does. "Long" is telling, since a child who wanted to leave would not sit through a long game. Her admission that she "still" tries "not to win / every time" is both a joke and a confession of tenderness.
The ending is two plain lines: "I've already won, / because I have you." The pun on winning gathers up the games, the football and the hoop, and it answers the title. The goodbye is to a stage, not to the child. The shift into the present tense, "I have you," leaves the poem in the moment rather than in nostalgia.
The poem's significance lies in its viewpoint and its restraint. Poems about growing up usually come from the child's side or the parent's. Here a grandparent looks on from the edge of the park, wearing garden gloves, and manages to be wistful and grateful at once. There is no grand metaphor, only ordinary objects and the plain language of someone who means what she says. That plainness is the point: the poem suggests that a goodbye can contain a great deal of joy.