Photo by Bill Stokes
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, joins the keeper and Phyllis with a message for all grandchildren, great and otherwise: If you insist on emerging from your cuddly, cute stage to enter a growth cycle that would shame July corn, try to give your old grandparents—great and otherwise, some warning.
This message is generated by the holiday visit of great grandsons Tayler and Trevor with their parents Becky and Beau, and it so forcefully made the point about grandchildren growing like—well, like weeds, that the keeper was moved to upgrade his storytelling from nursery rhymes to recalling fishing trips with the boy’s father Beau.
It isn’t that we grandparents love you grandchildren any less as you grow out of diapers and into thinking about borrowing grandpa’s car. It is just that as little ones you provided us with the illusion that our contribution to clan generation cycles was really something special, far beyond just helping to repopulate the wobbling planet with competent caretakers.
There was a time when grandparents and grandchildren lived next door to each other and shared their lives in meaningful, wonderful ways. There is no going back, of course, and there may be some virtue in that: what grandparent wants to be a party to waiting for a granddaughter to get home from her first date, or what grandparent would be comfortable lending his car to a teenage grandson?
But the keeper and Phyllis wish more grandkids lived in closer proximity so their growth patterns would not come in such long shocking intervals!
