Grandfathered

by Ian Haysom

  When I made my announcement, my sons didn’t believe I’d hang in for long. That February the three of us went on a golf/baseball/hockey trip to Arizona, and they were convinced I’d crack at the first menu that had ribs on it. But I held on, to their amazement.

  There was an unfortunate moment when we went into an In-N- Out Burger after hiking up and down a mountain. The boys ordered a burger and fries, and I asked the server if they had a vegetarian option.

  “Absolutely, sir. Where are you sitting? I’ll bring it over to you.”

  The boys picked up their plump burgers and fries and started munching happily away.

  Then my order arrived. I opened the bun to look inside. There was nothing there. Except a pale piece of lettuce and a slice of tomato. No burger. Nothing. We all started laughing.

  “Wanna quick bite of mine?” offered Tim. “We won’t tell anybody.”

  I ate my sad bun anyway. With a Diet Coke and a few French fries.

  I’m sure that by now In-N-Out Burger has a more interesting veggie options, since vegetarianism is becoming more mainstream. Whenever I mention to people that I don’t eat meat they have two responses.

  “Do you feel healthier?”

  Nope. Can’t say I do.

  Or: “You don’t say. I’m eating much less meat than I used to.” And (if it’s a couple) “Aren’t we, Darling? We probably only eat meat twice a week. Or even less.”

  I’m not judgmental, or like some kind of reformed smoker, a non-meat-eating evangelist. It’s just something I choose to do. And life has become a whole lot easier now that Beyond Meat burgers have come into my life to sate my occasional meat craving.

  I also don’t do smug. Well, I try not to. Going veggie isn’t for everyone.

  Which brings us to Mayana. My eldest granddaughter went pescetarian a few months ago, at the age of nine.

  “Do you think that’s okay?” I asked my wife. “I mean, she’s awfully young.”

  My wife reminded me that we were a tad worried when our daughters went veggie when they were ten and twelve, respectively. Which meant all the females in the family were non-red-meat eaters while the three males, including me at the time, were dedicated carnivores. Yes, we were a stereotype. The girls were intelligent, caring, modern. The males were grunting cavemen.

  My wife explained that as long as the girls had a rounded diet, they’d be fine. There was, she said, too much of a focus on protein, and that you got plenty of it from other sources. We had plenty of cheese, beans, eggs, oats, and, obviously, fish.

  Mayana is fit and healthy and bouncing around like Tigger and seems to be thriving on her non-meat diet. And as there are more and more interesting veggie sources of protein and other nutritionally necessary foods available, being a non-meat eater is not going to set off any alarms.

  Emma and Linden aren’t vegetarian, nor is their father. This past Christmas, he decided to cook a prime rib roast for Christmas dinner. But because he doesn’t eat a lot of meat, he repeatedly asked me questions about how to cook it.

  I gave him advice before, during, and after the cooking process, and it turned out fine. It smelled wonderful. Better than the veggie alternative, a nut roast. But veggies and carnivores broke bread together happily. And we will for some time.

  Until meat eating is made illegal, that is. Ha! Wanna try my deep-fried tofu? It’s to die for.

  4. My Summer with Mayana [Part One]

  The summer of 2013 was something of a turning point for me as a grandad—for a couple of reasons. First, Amy was taking an intense yoga instructor’s course, and I had the opportunity to step up and watch Mayana. This meant covering for Amy three or four days a week during class time for the entire summer. This would be some heavy-duty grandadding. What could be better than that? I would often be staying up on Salt Spring Island with them to cut down on the travel both for me and Mayana. I was excited. And if that weren’t enough to make a grandad smile, my younger daughter, Jani, was also expecting. (I guess the birth control effect of the “screaming incident” had worn off by then.) I figured my grandad cred would be at an all-time high by the time grandchild number two made an appearance sometime in July.

  Mayana too was excited, and we both went into that summer with high spirits. I was now Grandad rather than Grangrad, having grangraduated to a more conventional position.

  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 from 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 would also prove a pivotal and somewhat emotional time for me for another reason. After more than forty-five years of 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 matinée 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, thank you very much—could still serve the occasional ace—and here I was already consigned to the shuffleboard of life.

  In truth, 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 was a single mother by then, so it would be tricky to have Mayana cared for. And besides, it was patently obvious that everyone else was busy, and I had nothing useful to do. Beth was kayak guiding on Quadra Island for the summer, cavorting with orcas and dolphins and sea stars and such. And San, Mayana’s father, was travelling.

  I don’t want you to get the idea that I had no idea what to do when it came to looking after small children.

  I’d always been an okay dad. Well, my four kids still hang out with me, so that’s good, right? We get on well. We get together a lot, particularly when I pay for dinner.

  I went to all their soccer and hockey games, even coached them all for a time. I once spent two days watching my eldest daughter compete in a synchronized swimming competition (greater love hath no parent), and we all went on camping trips and bike trips and on plenty of vacations together, and we played a lot and laughed a lot. Some called us the Partridge Family—though I don’t think they all meant it kindly.

  To paraphrase Mark Twain, when my kids were teenagers, they found me so ignorant they could barely stand being with me. But by the time they’d reached their twenties they were astonished at how much the old man had learned in just a few years.

  But that was then. This grandfather stuff was different.

  While my kids were growing up, being a dad was a juggling act. I did pretty time-intensive jobs. I was editor-in-chief of two of Canada’s biggest newspapers, the Vancouver Province and then the Vancouver Sun, and news director of one of the country’s bigger TV stations, BCTV News (which became Global). For a couple of years, I was West Coast correspondent for the country’s largest newspaper chain, Southam News, which meant I was on the road a lot. I flitted between work and home, and—thanks mostly to Beth, who was supermom incarnate—raising four kids went well.

  But this nearly full-time grandfather thing—th
is was something new. My wife, now nailing grandmother, or Nani, as she likes to be called, wasn’t around to help.

  Most grandmothers seem to be naturals at this grandmothering thing. For grandpas, it doesn’t always come naturally. Babies are foreign beings, devoid of anything you can hold onto with any degree of confidence. They cry, they sleep, they eat. And don’t do much more.

  As soon as Mayana was born, Beth knew what to do. She cuddled her close, cooed in her ear, brushed her hair with loving hands, sang her gentle songs, rocked her to sleep.

  She knew how to comfort her.

  As Mayana grew older, Beth had a special bond with her. I thought I was pretty close to my granddaughter, but Beth knew instinctively how to be with her.

  And it’s always been that way. Grandmothers seem to have this capacity for endless patience. They’ll play silly games on the floor, or paint pictures, or do puzzles, or sing nursery rhymes for hours, while I’m already showing signs of fatigue.

  Grandfathers typically join in when the grandchild is about three years old, somewhere after toilet training and before kindergarten.

  We’re good with balls—soccer balls, tennis balls, baseballs, footballs—but we are not naturals at grandfathering.

  I think men are getting better than they ever did at parenting. My generation started to get into it big time, but my daughters’ generation is amazing. The dads do more cooking and washing and cleaning and parenting than any of their forbears. With most moms working full time, that’s as it should be. It’s a shared experience. And this is the twenty-first century.

  But grandparenting? Our role models are now gone, so we kind of make it up as we go along.

  So, for much of the summer, it was just me and Mayana.

  I didn’t get it all right. But we both survived. And she still talks to me too. And gives me big hugs.

  A Slow Walk with Mayana

  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 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 as a hard-nosed newsman 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.

  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 in Kindergarten. An essayist and former Unitarian minister, Fulghum wrote his huge bestseller in 1986. 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 fifty 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 on our street. I guess I had failed to look properly. My head was usually full of other stuff.

  Mayana decided she’d rather 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.

  Underducks

  The playground is magical. And a minefield—albeit a magical minefield. We spent a lot of time in playgrounds that summer.

  There was stuff to climb on—and fall off of. There were slides to slide down, but some way too slippery and way too fast. There were swings to swing on, but I told Mayana to hold on for dear life and warned her not to get too dizzy on those roundabouts.

  One of the things you realize as you get older is that you have a lower threshold for swings and roundabouts than when you were three years old. I am still reeling after going on Disneyland’s Space Mountain three times in a row when my own kids were younger.

  I’d happily lift Mayana onto the climbing frames. But then she’d get stuck at the top. Beyond my reach.

  “Come and jump into my arms.”

  “It’s too far, Grandad.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  But it was, so I’d climb up tiny steps or pull myself up onto dangling chains and ropes, and rescue her, and then the two of us would clamber down together.

  “Why are you holding your back, Grandad?”

  “Nothing, just a slight twinge is all.”

  Backache, I discovered that summer, is one of the hazards of being a grandparent. Your grandchild wants to be carried, lifted, pushed, and pulled. I could do it a lot more efficiently when I was a father. A gran
dfather life hack: Always carry ibuprofen with you on an outing with the grandkids.

  In the playground, your grandkids want you to go the other end of the teeter-totter. Or, more dangerously, give them an underduck.

  “Underduck, Grandad. Underduck!”

  If you don’t know what an underduck is, you haven’t spent enough time playing with your kids. You push the swing right above your head, then run forward and under the swing before it returns at high speed.

  There are three things to know about underducks for smaller children:

  First, don’t push too hard, or you’ll send them into orbit.

  Second, push hard enough, or the swing will come back and hit you on your head.

  Third, there’s no such thing as only one underduck. Like everything else with your grandchild, it has to be repeated until you’re bored out of your mind or your back goes into spasms.

  I Wanna Hold Your Hand

  There was this moment, as magical as any I can think of, a few days into our summer together when my granddaughter’s tiny hand snaked gently into mine. We were walking towards a park, an unfamiliar park, and this small gesture signified . . . what? Reassurance? Belonging? I found it comforting. Us against the world. This wasn’t me reaching out for her hand as we crossed a busy street, but Mayana needing my hand for help. I was her safety. I loved it.

  Holding hands. It sounds simple, but it’s one of life’s wonders. It’s one of the things I love most.

  As adults we remember holding hands with the ones we love or loved. That first girlfriend, when our hands clasped, and our palms were sweaty and probably shaking too.

  Wives and husbands. Holding hands in public. That sense of belonging, of partnership, of togetherness. We touch . . . our fingers touch.

  Even in old age, with arthritic fingers and liver spots on the backs of our hands, we feel a thrill when we hold hands with the ones we love. Some older people don’t hold hands anymore. I find that very sad.