Grandfathered: Dispatches from the Trenches of Modern Grandparenthood

Grandfathered

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. Over one summer, for three and sometimes four days a week, I looked aft er 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 fi nd 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. Aft er 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 shuffl eboard of life.

I’m not sure how the idea of me looking aft er 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 fi rst day of the summer that I looked aft er Mayana began with what I expected would be a quick stroll to a small playground. It would normally take me fi ve minutes at most to walk there.

This day it took us almost an hour.

We stopped to look at fl owers. Then bees. Then butterfl ies. Then we blew dandelions. We picked buttercups. And looked at horses in a fi eld. Then we patted a dog. And talked to the owner. And then we talked to the dog.

Mayana, on this fi rst day of the rest of my life, taught me on our fi rst 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

breaking news, when nobody had time to blink, let alone think.

One of my last jobs was to oversee our coverage of an election. I’d commissioned polling, argued with party officials about the format of the TV debates, pushed for us to get to the heart of the issues, gone through graphics and results systems and online coverage—and now here I was staring at a crack in the road.

“Why is the road broken?”

“It’s not broken, it’s just cracked a bit.”

“Will we fall in?”

“Well, no, it’s just a small crack.”

“Will it get bigger and bigger and then we’ll fall in?”

“I don’t think so.”

Stopping to smell the roses was out of the question. Today, I wasn’t only smelling them—in the neighbours’ front yards—I was also counting them, testing Mayana on the various colours (her favourite is purple) and spotting as many bees as we could.

“They won’t hurt us, grandad. The bees are friendly if you don’t hurt them.” She’d learned that much. Do you know why they’re buzzing around the flowers? I asked her. She didn’t, and frankly, I didn’t know much more since I was never a gardener nor paid much attention in biology classes, but I kind of stumbled through a hazy description of what bees do with pollen and how they make honey and also that, in this particular society, the Queen Bee rules. Kind of like at our house, I said.

You’d have thought running newsrooms—newspaper and broadcast— would have been perfect training for looking after a grandchild. I always likened my job to that of a kindergarten teacher. There were certainly tantrums and tears. And bruised egos rather than bruised knees.

I joked, when I was in the news world, that I learned more from Robert Fulghum than all the management courses I went on over the years. Fulghum wrote the delightful book All I Really Know I Learned from Kindergarten. Fulghum, the essayist and former Unitarian minister, had a huge bestseller in the 1980s. It should be republished for a new generation.

Some of the advice?

Share everything.

Don’t hit people.

Live a balanced life.

Learn some and think some

Hold hands and stick together.

Be aware of wonder.

“Grandad, what’s that pink flower called?”

I had absolutely no idea.

“A geranium,” I said. “Or a chrysanthemum, maybe?”

“A chriscinnamon?”

“Something like that. Or maybe a daisy.”

We counted more than 50 butterflies on our walk, most of them white, a couple of them more colourful. We watched them land on the flowers and then flutter off in search of more adventure. I honestly hadn’t realized there were so many butterflies in our street. I guess I had failed to look properly. My head was usually full of other stuff.

Mayana decided she’d prefer to be a butterfly than a bee. She didn’t want people to be scared of her. “Everyone loves butterflies. And they can fly so high. Look, grandad, that one’s higher than that big tree.”

Then she held my hand. “What do you want to be, Grandad?”

It was a good question. Until that moment I’d been somewhat confused

about who I was after leaving the newsroom. It defined me. I loved being in the middle of all the noise, in the middle of a vital, relevant world, and I was trying to come to terms with what and who I now was. I never really wanted to be “retired” and snapped at anyone who even suggested I was now in retirement.

But right then, right at that very moment, while the world slowed to a perfect stop, while my granddaughter clung onto my hand and looked up at me with large, brown innocent eyes, I knew one of the things that I what I wanted to be.

A grandfather might be a cool thing after all.