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Around a thousand years B.C. a Greek whose bones have long since gone to d ust inscribed the grandaddy of all graffiti on a pillar at Delphi. "Beware Old Age," he or she carved into the stone, “it does not come alone”.
It's a sentiment I can feelingly subscribe to. The knee joints click,the tinnitus rings, the bursitis bothers. Advanced well into Shakespeare's sixth Age of Man , I cannot truly fool myself that a full head of hair will permanently keep me on the nearer shore of middle age. I suspect my constant recycling of the Cary Grant line ("I like having gray hair. It allows me to worry myself to death without upsetting those around me.") is growing a little too tedious. It’s upsetting those around me. Nevertheless the bleak Greek's ancient grouse protests too much me thinks. It's from the Arthur Andersen kind of balance sheet - only this time it's skewed to accentuate the negative. It makes no mention of the greatestdelight available to advancing years. Grandchildren come by default and as a shock. (Great Zeus, there are now three generations and I'm in the oldest!) Then comes complacency. That smart-ass son/daughter so full of smug advice about the torsion bar, stocks, bonds and that chic new boutique across town have been instantly reduced to gibbering incompetents. Look! They're freaking out! Whereas wise old you - you know all this stuff. O.K., the three month old has just crammed a handful of dirt into his mouth. But you know he hasn't poisoned himself. He's just nicely toning up his immune system by stimulating a rush of antibodies. 'Panic' is not in a grandparent’s vocabulary: and the unexpected wisdom you rediscover at your finger-tip ends brings the wonderful bonus of drawing you back close to your immediate children. They see that you are really not such old farts. You see that they've become - almost - grown-up. Famously that 'grand' brings you all the benefits of straight parenthood with none of the lows. You get all the couchee-couchee-coo stuff and none of the three in the morning feeds. Changing an occasional (disposable) diaper can be fun. Baby-sitting is both change-of-pace therapy and a wander down memory lane. A unique privilege for the grandparents is clocking how like/unlike his mother/father the new boy/girl is: how different. The birth of a grandchild has us reaching back to recall and speak again about our loved late forbears. It has us unselfconsciously bonding with the 'other' side of the extended family. And, as billions have discovered over centuries, those walking-the-floor, patting-the-back sessions are beyond the price of rubies. The regurgitated gorp on your shoulder is laced with threads of gold. The exultant cry of "Grandad! From a three year-old assured it is about to be indulged is better than the 'bravo's' you garnered when you eagled the ninth. (It was a fluke, anyway, you were fixing to lay up). There is perhaps no keener, more long-lasting pleasure in life than the feel and the subsequent memory of a hand one fifth the size of yours clasping its fingers about yours as you step out into the yard or across the park to make, the two of you, some trivially profound discovery about the world you share. About yourselves. The child, you find, is father to the grandparent. Placed before 'family' the adjective 'nuclear' ceases to be a bugaboo. Suddenly it promises great riches. I cannot wait to discover the further joys of greatgrandparenthood. |
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