Grandparenting
Grandfathered
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Excerpt from Grandfathered: Dispatches from the Trenches of Modern Grandparenthood by Ian Haysom (Heritage House Publishing). heritagehouse. ca/book/grandfathered. Ian Haysom has been a reporter, writer, film critic, correspondent, editor and columnist. He was editor-in-chief at Vancouver Province and Vancouver Sun as well as news director for BCTV, Global and CHEK. He lives with his wife, Beth, near Victoria, where he writes and works as a news consultant. 20
Grand
ver one summer, for three and sometimes four days a week, I looked after my then three-anda-half-year-old granddaughter Mayana—pronounced My-Anna—while her mom was doing a yoga teacher’s course. Mayana calls me “grandad.” She used to call me “grangrad,” which I found kind of cool, but I guess somewhere along the line I graduated to full-blown grandfather. During my summer with Mayana, I was going to teach her a lot of things. How to ride a bike. How to sing Yellow Submarine. How to say “please” and “thank you” and all that stuff we grownups find kind of important. How to write her name. How to have fun. Instead, I think I learned more than her than she learned from me. Mostly, how to slow down. And not only smell the roses—but count them. And count them again. And again. And again. How many red ones. And blue ones? And white ones? And do we prefer the white ones, or are the red ones prettier? I also learned, for instance, that washing your car can be a far more memorable experience if you let your three-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter hold the hose. The car didn’t get very wet, but we did. That summer had been a pivotal and somewhat emotional time for me. After more than 45 years working as a journalist, I was leaving the daily grind of journalism. And heading to the dreaded r-word: retirement. Some guys yearn for retirement. I had mixed feelings. Retirement meant
all the clichés to me—a lack of purpose, doddering into a life of seniors’ specials and matinee movies, a world of baggy cardigans and pinochle or euchre, whatever they are. Someone told me I was old enough now to play pickleball, a kind of tennis for old people. I could still play tennis. Could still serve the occasional ace, and here I was already consigned to the shuffleboard of life. I’m not sure how the idea of me looking after Mayana came up. I might have volunteered. Or, more likely, someone volunteered me. Amy, my eldest daughter and a single mother, said she had this intense yoga course to attend for the summer, and it would be tricky to have Mayana cared for. And suddenly, it became patently obvious that everyone else was busy, and I had nothing useful to do. … It started with a slow walk. The first day of the summer that I looked after Mayana began with what I expected would be a quick stroll to a small playground. It would normally take me five minutes at most to walk there. This day it took us almost an hour. We stopped to look at flowers. Then bees. Then butterflies. Then we blew dandelions. We picked buttercups. And looked at horses in a field. Then we patted a dog. And talked to the owner. And then we talked to the dog. Mayana, on this first day of the rest of my life, taught me on our first full morning together to slow down. Not just slow down. But also come to a full stop. And sometimes, go backwards. Until that week I had been running a turbulent, crazy TV newsroom in Vancouver. My life was organized chaos, particularly on days of big grandmag.ca
