Some thoughts on being a grandpa

We were at Disneyworld when we heard that we were grandparents. Our first grandchild was born March 10, 2016. Suddenly, the charm of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Magic Kingdom no longer had their grip on me. All I wanted to do was board an airplane and fly back to North Dakota and see Henry.

That’s how I’ll remember becoming a grandpa. Something so fantastic happens that you want to be as close as you can.

In the ensuing seven to eight months we’ve seen this little baby grow. He’s gone from drinking milk to eating food. He’s learned to crawl and pull himself up. He has also flown to Brazil and back…when he was three months old! I don’t think I boarded an airplane until I was in my mid-20s.

When people ask me how many times I played golf this summer, I tell them, “barely at all. Most Saturdays were spent driving to Minot to see Henry.” And every time we see Henry, he is just that much nicer. In fact, leaving him to drive back home is getting tougher and tougher. My consolation, however, is that I live 100 miles away, so I generally know when I will see him again.

His other set of grandparents live in Brazil. His maternal grandma will see Henry when she comes back to the United States for a six-month visit in January 2017. Henry’s maternal grandfather won’t see him until July 2017.

We are lucky to live so close.

It’s different being a grandparent. I won’t say its better, but it’s different. There’s definitely less stress and yet a grandfather wants the grandchild to know that everything will be all right. Even though we aren’t involved in every decision, nor are we around every day, we nevertheless keep a watchful eye on everything. And when it looks like everything is under control and the baby is healthy and happy, then being a grandparent is a blessing. It means that our children grew up and now have the responsibility of raising their children to be productive partners in society. The torch has been passed.

I didn’t have grandpas living when I was child. My dad’s father died 10 years before I was born and my mom’s dad died the year I was born.

I had grandmas and they were wonderful. I miss them always.

My own parents were superb grandparents to my children and the rest of their grandchildren. They lived 400 miles away, but they still kept track of how everything was going. And mom often had a few coaching tips that today seem invaluable to me. Mostly, she told me to “cool it.” Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill. Children are going to go through stages. Sometimes they are fighting to become more independent, and that’s okay, because your child will want to stand alone someday, just as you did.

That’s good advice, but it’s hard to swallow when your child is a toddler and wants to walk into things with square corners and sharp edges.

And we loved to spend time with my folks and my wife’s folks when the kids were little. I’m sure that our children knew that if they were with their grandparents, the day or the occasion was extra special.

So as I look ahead to being a grandfather for the rest of my life, my prayer is this, “that the little ones know how much I love them and that a grandparent’s love is forever.”

Boyhood memories

I work in an office in Bismarck, North Dakota, so when the weather is nice enough; I try to go for a 10-to-15 minute walk during my coffee breaks. Yesterday was the first day in a couple of months that I had tried to walk outside as I’m afraid of falling on the ice. But the ice has now mostly turned to slush and the sidewalks are generally dry, so it seemed like a good day for a walk.

That is…until I came upon a section of street where there was no sidewalk. Instead, it was just packed snow where hundreds of walkers had been before me…and some dogs. I had to sidestep the doggie do-do and the yellow snow. I kept on walking until I reached dry sidewalk again. For whatever reason, that spot of dirty snow reminded me of walking in Roundup, Montana, when I was growing up.

And then I got to thinking about being a kid in the 1960s versus being a kid today. We not only knew our neighbors, they were our best friends…or in my case…some were also my cousins, my aunts and uncles.

When we learned to ride bicycles, we rode them all over town…and never once wore a helmet. Depending upon the age of our bikes, we would put a chain and a padlock on them when we rode them to school, but if we were at the city park, a grocery store or a baseball diamond, the bikes were perfectly fine without a lock.

We didn’t have car seats for kids. I stood in the front seat between my parents when we drove to Billings or Deadman’s Basin. My older siblings were in the back seat. None of us were wearing a seat belt.

If you were an adult, it was almost a certainty that you smoked. My mom and dad didn’t but my uncles and several of my aunts did. I had a neighbor who ran a grocery store and smoked cigars. My mom had two uncles, who were our neighbors, that smoked pipes and nearly everyone else smoked cigarettes. To be honest, I haven’t smelled tobacco smoke from a pipe in probably two decades, but I remember I used to like it.

Right before I got out of the car to go to Grandma’s house, mom would make sure my face was clean. If it wasn’t, you could bet she would lick her thumb and then scrub the grime off me with spit. I wasn’t the brightest boy in the world, but I knew that wasn’t sanitary. So I tried to keep my face clean…at all costs.

When I was in second grade, I had the honor of having to attend summer school. I think it was a week or two in the summer and it was either in the morning or the afternoon – but not all day. The extra schooling was to help my reading skills and comprehension. Anyway, I would walk to Central School from our home north of the hospital and my dog Lady would walk beside me. Then she would stay at school until I was done for the day and walk home with me. I loved that dog. I was away at college when she died and I was still crying.

Our dog wouldn’t hurt a flea…or so I thought, but she did bite a meter reader and maybe someone else that she considered an intruder. I don’t think we ever chained Lady. We lived by the hills so Lady was free to go and chase rabbits. If she caught one, she’d drag the carcass back to the yard and snack on it…for days. We always had bones in the yard that she had found and was snacking on.

We had a light pole on a small grassy island in the middle of an unpaved avenue. One of my mom’s two uncles would take turns walking to the light pole and turning on the light. I guess there was no electronic eye in those days that would automatically turn the street lamps on. In the summer time, we would play “Hide and Seek” and the pole was “home.” You could hide almost anywhere in the neighborhood, so once you were found; it was always a race back to the pole to see who could touch it first.

Dad changed the oil in the family car on that avenue and since it wasn’t paved, he never bothered to collect the used oil. It just ran down the avenue and sunk into the ground. That avenue is now covered with asphalt, but I wonder if all the used oil would now be considered a hazardous waste by the EPA. I’m sure somebody would make you stop that if you tried it today.

The world has changed plenty in the last 40 years, I’m sure it will continue changing. But I wouldn’t give up my childhood memories for anything. I think the 1960s were the best decade for being a kid and Roundup was a great town to grow up in.