OP-ED: Life lessons taught by grandkids
Most of the compliments I get about my articles come with the qualifier, “My favorite stories were about your grandkids.” Here’s the problem: all but one of the kids are pushing hard on adulthood.
While I was busy writing stories about them, they were busy growing up. Someday, if my biology cooperates, I’ll have great鈥慻randkid stories to write about, but now, all I have are memories.
Jude, our firstborn grandson, was an adorable control freak for the first three years of his life. He’d line up his toys with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker, and if one of them shifted even a millimeter, he’d have a meltdown so dramatic it deserved an orchestral backup.
One day, we were driving near a toy store when he began working me for a new toy like a trained negotiator at a hostage scene. His mother had forcefully instructed me to keep my wallet in my pocket, a cruel rule for a doting grandfather.
Reasoning with a 3鈥憏ear鈥憃ld about consumerism is like trying to explain quantum physics to a chipmunk, but I gave it a shot. “Jude,” I said, “you already have a lot of toys.”
He nodded. He knew, but he deeply believed in the sacred consumerism rule that more is better. After several explanations, I finally went full theological on him. “Buddy, when you go to heaven, you can’t take any toys with you.”
He froze. “What?”
“Not even one?” he asked.
“Not even one,” I said.
He stared out the window and then announced, “Then we’d better buy more now so I can play with ’em before I die.” Hard to argue with that logic.
Another one of my “liberal Poppa rules” was that anytime the grandkids were alone with me in my car, it was a safe zone. They could say anything, ask anything, and trust that I wouldn’t rat them out to their parents. It was a witness protection program for kids.
This freedom eventually devolved into questionable kid-language like “darn,” “stupid,” and the nuclear option: “poop鈥慼ead.” They were 6, 4, 3, and 2. But they treated my car like a confessional booth with cup holders. Part of the magic was that my cars were black with tinted windows. It was a very spy鈥憁ovie kind of cool.
But as they got older, their vocabulary expanded into territories I wasn’t prepared to defend in family court. I bought a white car and declared that bad words were no longer allowed. The 5鈥憏ear鈥憃ld looked at me coolly and said, “Poppa, your car is still black on the inside.” And it was. A kindergartner had intellectually dismantled me again.
On another day, we were driving through a shopping center parking lot when Nina spotted her bus helper, a sixth-grader. “Poppa! Poppa! There’s my bus helper!” I spun the wheel and pulled up so she could say hello to her sixth-grade idol. Naturally, she immediately dove to the floor like we were under sniper fire.
I sat there, mortified. The little girl just stared at me. I imagined her memorizing my license plate and reporting me as an elderly man cruising shopping centers looking for middle-school girls.
When I asked Nina why she had abandoned me, she shrugged and said, “I like her, but I didn’t want her to see me.” Fair enough.
But then I remembered her mother, my daughter, doing the same thing anytime I stopped at a red light near a pretty woman. She’d reach over, honk the horn, duck to the floor, and leave me to face the consequences. The apple didn’t fall far from that tree. It just rolled under the seat and hid there.
And that’s the thing about grandkids. You try to teach them only to discover they’re teaching you. No matter how old you get, there will always be a small child somewhere who is smarter than you.
Usually sitting in the back seat.