In a corner of our dining room (only rarely used for dining) sits a small pile of children’s toys. Most of them date back to the time when our own children were small — little metal cars and trucks, a wooden train set, some toy soldiers, blocks, easy puzzles. They have been there since I retrieved them for our first grandchild, and the toys, too, are now only rarely used. But when our younger grandkids arrive for their summer visit, after a long plane ride, they always start by building a set of ramps for the cars and trucks and creating a scenario with the toy soldiers. They are now 11 and 13. We’ll see if it happens again this summer.
Maybe it’s because we had children early and often that I never longed to have grandchildren, never thought much about it. I know people with such longings, and I respect their point of view, but it never occurred to me to urge any pair of people to bring new life into the world until they were ready, and certainly not for my sake. And so I never pictured grandmotherhood for myself. Perhaps it speaks to something missing in my character, or perhaps it has to do with the fact that I never had a grandparent— all of them were gone before I had a chance to know them — and, as it happened, my own parents were not too interested in that role.
So imagine my surprise when it has turned out that the grandparental condition suits me just fine. One example was a recent trip to Washington, D.C., with my 14-year-old grandson, the firstborn of our firstborn. Young David — his father’s namesake — is a charming, handsome, talented kid. (No, really, other people think so, too.) We had traveled before together, to Portland, Oregon, where my youngest son and his family live, and David and I had done smaller excursions locally. I’ve found him to be an excellent companion, getting along well with younger relatives yet able also to take an interest in things that might interest adults, experienced in the ways of airports, and a thoughtful and sociable house guest. None of this goes without saying, since, as everyone knows, it’s not easy to find good traveling companions. As my youngest son said, traveling is a real test of a relationship. So I feel lucky.
When the younger David was born, I wrote a column for this paper about my thoughts at the time. I found my mind “leaping ahead,” to ask questions about his future, feeling, as I said, “newly alerted, wary, curious.” Where will he find education and eventually, work that brings him satisfaction? Where will he travel on his own? What sort of world will he inherit? I put myself into that future picture, too: Will I dance at his wedding? Get to read his first published book? Get to know his first child?
As he has grown up and been joined by the other two, I have also done some looking backward as I try to recreate a sense of my own self at various ages — they are now 14, 13 and 11. What were my successes and failures? My pleasures and pains? The technologies of those times make the picture rather different, even if some of the sensations must be similar. I liked school — as my grandchildren seem to; my friends were crucially important, as theirs are; and we kept in touch by phone and by spending time on playgrounds and at each other’s houses. (Well, some serious differences in the means of keeping in touch there.)
But surely this is one of the gifts our grandchildren bring with them — a sharpened sense of both the past and the future. Grandchildren help us measure time — forward and backward. It is now impossible to imagine life, past, present or future without them.
Marietta Pritchard can be reached at
mppritchard@comcast.net.