The grandest parents of all

Labor Day is history, but is summer over? I mean, really? Whatever the case, September is shaping up to be a good month with lots to do, but whatever you do, don’t forget your abuela and/or abuelo this Sunday. It’s National Grandparent’s Day.

When growing up, I think everyone gets used to calling their grandparents by nicknames. I used to call mine Granny and Papa and thought it odd when my friends at school called theirs Mam-Maw and Pap-Paw or something equally peculiar to my ears. As a granddaddy-o myself, I wanted my grandchildren to refer to me as Granddude, but that went nowhere.

One thing’s for sure, being at this grandparenting game for a few years, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Sometimes, when I get to feeling like the bentwood rocker’s calling me, hanging around those two teenagers for any length of time inspires me to no end.

I’ve got to say that my image of a grandparent has changed a lot since I was a kid. My grandmother, Dillie Mae, was a robust white-haired lady I remember as being good-humored but tough (think Ma Joad from The Grapes of Wrath), and my grandfather as showing me how to whittle.

My other grandmother, I don’t remember much at all, other than she spoke English, Swedish and Polish all in one go. And my other grandfather died from pneumonia when my dad was only 10 years old, and the family leaves it at that. But later I got wind of the story that his early demise had something to do with the bathtub gin he was cooking up during Prohibition.

Unlike that rumored ne’er-do-well grandfather, some grandparents make their mark and are so well known they’ve gone down in history, like Grandma Moses. But for some reason, we’ve never heard of Grandpa Moses, unless we’re talking about Moses himself who, as far as I can tell had only one grandson, the ill-fated Jonathan.

It’s the Baby Boomers who are now grandparents, and I’m trying to picture the current crop of grandchildren whose grandparents have tattoos and purple hair and sing Bohemian Rhapsody along with the radio while driving down the road. Frankly, I can’t imagine having a Mick Jagger or Freddie Mercury type as a grandfather.

This kind of talk ultimately brings me to another soiree into the “OK, boomer” world. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve heard that the expression “OK, boomer” is a Generation Z or Millennial’s blasé response to talk of “back in the day.”

If I may, us boomers love, and I mean, really love (italicized, underlined, quotated and bolded) pointing out the way things used to be. All the comparing the “now” to the “then” is contagious to a boomer, especially when around another boomer.

Of course, there’s always been a generation gap, at least since the 1930s. That’s when the term “teenager” was added to our lexicon, delineating a marketable age group in the formative years of mass media and Madison Avenue. By the time yours truly was entering that category the rallying cry for youth was “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.”

But I digress.

As for role models, movie grandparents raise the bar for the rest of us, like the one in Eat Drink Man Woman, where the grandfather was a retired chef - one of the greatest in Taiwan. He would send his granddaughter off to school every morning with a five-star gourmet lunch which was the envy of her classmates who were eating riceballs and cold fish and such.

My next best movie grandparent is Grandpa Joe from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, who didn’t get out of bed for 20 years until his grandson invited him to go with him on a tour of the chocolate factory. Honorable mentions are Wilford Brimley from Cocoon and Ray Bradbury’s android grandmother in I Sing the Body Electric, but that’s just me.

We have songs about mothers and fathers but I can’t think of any about grandparents unless it’s the one about a reindeer running over somebody’s grandmother. Come to think about it, there are Grandma’s Hands by Bill Withers and John Denver’s Grandma’s Feather Bed.

I don’t know if you’ve heard this before, but Mark Twain once postulated that it would be possible to be one’s own grandparent. The whole jumbled matrix of births and marriages became a song recorded by Willie Nelson in 1982 called I’m My Own Grandpa.

All in all, I’ve learned one of the best things about being a grandparent is being able to observe how well you raised your own kids, and if you think you could’ve done better - well, you can, with your grandchildren.

On the other hand, to quote Ogden Nash: “When grandparents enter the door, discipline flies out the window.”

And that goes triple for great-grandparents.