by Ian Haysom
“Well, isn’t that convenient, just forgetting like that,” said the clerk, somewhat sarcastically.
I instantly disliked him and wanted to punch him in his Gen Z nose. Lucky for him I’m steadfastly anti-violence. And a coward.
We didn’t buy the ring. We bought a small bag of pretty stones instead so that she could give one each to everyone in the family.
“I don’t have any money, Grandad,” she said.
I paid.
As we left the store, she waved the receipt at me. “See, it’s proof we paid for it.”
I’m not sure the message got through fully. I was still ticked off at the store clerk. I thought of telling her that next time she wanted to swipe a ring, she should choose Tiffany’s.
Instead, I asked if she knew what a tomahawk was.
What I Learned That Summer
Crosby, Stills & Nash told us to teach our children well. But what do you teach your granddaughter? Whose values? Old-fashioned values formed when you were a child in the 1950s, where girls were fluffy and light and wore pretty dresses? Sixties values of peace and love and dropping out? Glitter rock values? That no good music was made after 1969, with the exception of Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Cat Stevens and Bridge over Troubled Water?
The thing is, you’re rapidly out of date the moment your grandchild is born. Your job is to be out of date, representing history rather than relevance.
So when you speak of Carnaby Street or the Summer of Love or The Beatles or Twiggy or JFK or RFK or Nixon and Watergate or, in fact, absolutely anything that happened before the year 2010, you are simply talking another language.
The fact your granddaughter sings “Yellow Submarine” in her car seat is an anachronism. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s “The Wheels on the Bus” It’s not validation. You are an artefact. An antique. That’s your job.
And don’t hum any Lady Gaga or Ed Sheeran. Remember when your parents went, “yeah, yeah, yeah” to show they knew who The Beatles were? You will be that pathetic.
Teach your grandchildren well. How to say please and thank you, how to look both ways before they cross the road. How to be kind and how to be polite and how to stay safe. How to help others. And share.
Answer their questions.
The meaning-of-life, important stuff? Leave that to Mum and Dad.
I tried to teach Mayana a few things that summer, but I learned more than I taught. I learned magical things. I learned that being a grandparent is a special relationship that’s difficult to explain. Being a parent was a whole lot of fun too, something I still enjoy, but when the kids were younger there was also the stress of daily life to go through, bills to pay (don’t start playing “Cat’s in the Cradle”), and sometimes you didn’t stop as often as you should have to enjoy those memorable moments.
When you get older, you’re forced to slow down. And because you know your life is rushing along at break-neck speed, you know every moment is precious.
Or as Mayana might have said back then, “Time to smell the chriscinnamons.”
7. You’re Going Grey and Very Hairy, Grandad
Emma is quite the artist. She’s creative and daring and will give David Hockney a run for his money soon. She just did this amazing portrait of my wife. Nani looks—how do I put this delicately?—much younger than she really is. She has dark rather than grey hair, huge friendly eyes, a cute button nose, and the biggest smile on the planet. That part is accurate. My wife’s smile would launch a thousand kayaks. That’s how Emma sees her Nani, as young and vibrant and happy.
Then Emma drew me.
“Stay still, Grandad.”
I put on my George Clooney face, that one with the ironic smile and the warm, craggy eyes, and then she said, far too early I thought, “Finished.”
And I was a skinhead. “I look like a bovver boy,” I said.
“What’s a bovver boy, Grandad?”
“Well, a bovver boy,” I explained, “was a young hoodlum in Britain in the seventies.”
“That’s just about right,” said my daughter Jani, who had been observing from the sidelines.
I tried to be encouraging. “I like the red hair, though I think my hair is more brown.”
“It’s grey, Grandad, but I couldn’t find any grey felts.”
“And the eyes are very nice but seem a little beady, and my nose looks threatening.”
“Yes,” said Emma.
“Yes what?”
“Yes, that’s just about right.”
My beard was scraggly and took up most of my face. Which, on reflection, is pretty accurate.
“I love it,” I told her, and I do.
It’s on the fridge now, below Nani’s, alongside pictures of all of our grandkids and calendars and assorted bric-a-brac.
Fridges have become grandparents’ art galleries. Their kids’ art used to be there, and now it’s their grandkids’ paintings and drawings. Mostly rainbows and unicorns and incomprehensible Picasso-esque pieces that we will cherish forever.
Even if Grandad is now immortalized as a skinhead.
Your ego certainly takes a beating when you have grandkids. They have no filter.
Sometimes Mayana likes to brush my hair. And like all good hairdressers, she’s not short of conversation.
“Why is your hair so grey, Grandad?”
“Because your mum made me old,” I said. “I earned every one of them.”
“Huh?”
“It’s a joke. You’ll understand when you’re older.”
“Does grey hair mean you’re old?”
“Sorta.”
“Why do you have more grey hairs in your beard than you have on your head?”
“Well, your Nani says it’s because I talk a lot and don’t think a lot. So the hair around my mouth has done a lot more work than the hair on my head. It got older quicker.”
“Is that true, Grandad?”
“Maybe. She might be right. She usually is.”
“Why do you have hair growing out of your ears?”
“I’m not sure.”
“They’re grey too.”
“Well, I guess I’ve done a lot of listening over the years. Maybe I’ve earned them.”
“But why do you have hair growing out of your ears? I don’t. Mummy doesn’t. My daddy doesn’t either.”
“It happens when you get older. Hair starts growing in all kinds of places it never grew before. And for no reason. And it stops growing where it used to grow, like on the top of your head.”
“Where else is it growing?”
“Well, all kinds of places. Like my nose. I have hair up my nose.”
“Let me look . . . oh, yes, but not too many.”
“I trim them. I have a nose-hair trimmer. I never thought I’d ever need a nose-hair trimmer, but there you go.”
“Do you trim your ears too?”
“I try.”
“You’re not very good at it, are you?”
“No. It’s easier to see up your nose in the mirror than in your ears. I use a pair of scissors. I use a beard trimmer. I even shave my ears. I never thought I’d shave my ears.”
“Do you ever cut yourself when you shave your ears?”
“I did once. I nicked my earlobe. I didn’t realize I had. Then I was at work, in a meeting, a big sort of important meeting, and someone came over to me and whispered, ‘Your ear’s bleeding.’ And it was. I had blood dripping onto my shirt collar.”
“Yeeeeuch.”
“Yeah, that’s almost exactly what everyone in the meeting said. I told them it was bleeding because I couldn’t bear to listen to all the rubbish they were speaking.”
“Ha ha.”
“Mayana, why are you combing my hair forward over my face? I can’t see anything.”
“It looks nice like this.
Do you want me to cut it for you too?”
“No, that’s okay. I’d like to live a few more years.”
“I can just cut out the grey hairs.”
“No, that’s fine. They’re part of me now. What colour are the hairs that aren’t grey?”
“Hmmmm. Kinda brown.”
“But there’s lots of hair up there, right?”
“Not as much as I have.”
“Wrong answer. Hairdressers always say, ‘You have lovely hair, sir. Very thick and healthy for someone your age.’”
“Do they really say that?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I pay them lots of money.”
“Great. Your hair looks very lovely, sir. Beautiful. Wonderful.”
“Thank you. Don’t overdo it.”
“Do you give me money now?”
“Sure. Here’s five cents.”
“Thank you.”
“Now can your brush the hair out of my eyes. I’d like to see what I look like.”
Musical and Magical
Art and music figure a lot in children’s lives. They draw pictures, sing songs and dance around with gay abandon and then, for some mysterious reason, when they get older they just stop. Not all of them, obviously, but most. They lose their inner creativity and become boring grownups, self-conscious observers rather than participants.
A love of music, and making music, is something I wanted to pass on to both my kids and grandkids. It’s a joy for life. I am, unashamedly, a populist when it comes to music. Mainstream has usually been my mantra, though I enjoy venturing into other genres when forced to. Even these are pretty safe choices—easy classical, folk, and Celtic music, and even some random rap or hip-hop so I can pretend I’m not some boring, middle-of-the-road, cardigan-wearing old fart. In my defence, I once went to Seattle and wrote a feature story on the grunge music phenomenon and have since enjoyed Pearl Jam and Nirvana very much, if not often.
My wife and I—grandparents that we are—went to an Ed Sheeran concert in London last year and stood up and clapped and sang along with sixty thousand other fans who were mostly decades younger than us. It made me feel strangely young. And very old. That said, his music works for just about anybody. Midway through his show he brought on a special guest. The previous evening it had been Andrea Bocelli, so I expected a similar mainstream, perhaps light operatic, delight. Instead we got Stormzy, a British rapper. Stormzy’s Wikipedia profile says he “garnered attention on the UK underground music scene through his Wicked Skengman series of freestyles over classic grime beats.” Yup, I’m totally into grime beats.
Mostly, at this concert, we revelled in the fact that Sheeran was decades younger than many of the previous performers we had seen: James Taylor, Gordon Lightfoot (who began his concert saying reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated), and Leonard Cohen, who has since died but still out-hips just about everyone onstage today.
As I write this, I realize I haven’t been to many major concerts over the past few years. I guess grandfathers don’t go out so much. I used to be a rock critic and interviewed and reviewed a whole slew of acts—mostly in the seventies and eighties, so I certainly got my fill.
As a young kid I saw the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, the Kinks, and just about all of the British Invasion stars, and some fun lesser-known bands too, like the Fingers and Swinging Blue Jeans.
I got to see Elvis, the Eagles, Supertramp, Phil Collins, the older Stones, Genesis, Beach Boys, and Elton John. I even interviewed Frank Zappa (we got on famously). Some regrets: I never got to see Simon and Garfunkel, though my wife did before we met and never fails to bring it up when I start going down this kind of musical memory lane. I didn’t see Springsteen and, my biggest regret of all, never got to see Linda Ronstadt live. I’m now fanatical—the true sense of “fan” and enjoy her on YouTube. The tragedy is that because of Parkinson’s, we will never hear her sing live again. She is very philosophical about it in interviews and is still adorable.
I’ve also been immensely proud of, and enjoyed, Canadian music over the years. Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind” is still one of the most haunting folk songs ever written. Joni Mitchell is a goddess. Stan Rogers, k.d. lang, the Barenaked Ladies, Blue Rodeo, Neil Young, Bryan Adams, Michael Bublé, Drake, the McGarrigle sisters, Justin Bieber, Rufus Wainwright, Sarah McLachlan, Diana Krall, Arcade Fire, the Tragically Hip, Bruce Cockburn, Murray McLachlan, the Band, Rush, Crash Test Dummies, Stompin’ Tom Connors, April Wine, Celine Dion, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Shania Twain. I mean—that’s an unbelievable lineup. And that’s off the top of my head.
Okay—so let’s get to the point. Does any of this matter to my kids or grandkids? Does the music I love matter a damn to them? Or, like old books, is it best kept hidden in the echoes of my mind? (See what I did there?)
Well, like just about everything else, some of it will get through, some of it won’t, and that’s just fine. But to me, music is a critically important part of who I am. I like to play guitar and piano, and I love to sing, even if I can clear a room in thirty seconds.
When I grew up, my dad had a musical bent. He could play mandolin and some basic piano, and he’d sing along to old 78 rpm records, He particularly enjoyed Gilbert and Sullivan, and my enduring memory of him is when he sang his favourite song from The Gondoliers, namely “Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes.” I can still, to this day, hear his voice so clearly.
So yes, my father’s music rubbed off on me, and I know my music rubbed off on my kids because I inflicted it on them at every turn. I sang them into submission. I became a poor man’s Raffi and Fred Penner at campfire singalongs, and sometimes sang at their kindergartens and playschools, and encouraged them to sing wherever and whenever.
They found their own music, which was mostly rubbish—and still is, if my younger son’s car playlist is anything to go by. He even likes country music, which I kind of get because he lived in Alberta for two years and that’s all they play on radio there. I like Keith Urban and Shania Twain, and I did like Willie Nelson a lot but—well, that’s about it. It’s like jazz. If you love it, you’re a sociopathic addict. If you can take it or leave it, aficionados look upon you as a music cretin.
Since, at the time of writing, my grandkids are ten, six and four, their tastes vary wildly ... and by the week. In their very early years, Emma and Linden loved the Wiggles, the Australian children’s group who do highly entertaining shows—on screen and live. The Wiggles, on iPad, helped us keep both of them amused on long trips and in restaurants where the service was slower than the kids’ patience.
For a long time, Emma—aged about two—loved “All About That Bass,” by Meghan Trainor. She sang it repeatedly and danced around, and I kind of liked it. I’m not so sure Emma ever understood the lyrics, which celebrate plus-size women, but I guess my granddaughter was ahead of her time, socially speaking.
More recently, Emma was addicted to JoJo Siwa, a YouTube sensation who sings, dances, and acts in videos that go instantly viral and earn her bazillions. She tells kids to be their true selves and be proud of who they are. Which sounded to me like an updated Mr. Rogers. I liked the message but found her a little irritating. So did Emma, apparently. After two weeks or so she moved on to the Next Big Thing.
Linden is a little less selective. He had me play “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” on piano about ten thousand times while he bounced around the living room.
“What do you want this time, Linden?”
“Black Sheep, Grandad. Black Sheep.”
“How about ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star?” (Same tune.)
“Black Sheep, Grandad.” I hate that song.
Mayana isn’t shy about singing, and at age ten seems to know who’s hot this week and can sing most songs out loud. She, Emma, and I do “Castle on a Cloud” from Les Misérables, with me on piano and the girls singi
ng the sad little song together.
When my kids were very young, they all enjoyed Raffi. I played guitar and learned most of his songs, and we’d sing them often.
The kids hated folk music, mostly because we did a family house clean every Saturday morning, and I’d put this folk music show on the radio. I loved it, but they equated cleaning with Celtic music, and “Dust in the Wind” became a cruel metaphor for their Saturday morning despair.
Tim was into Metallica, and still is. Paul liked Korn and then Smash Mouth. He also played the local hard-rock Fox channel, recorded the songs, and then did his own DJing. Now he’s a broadcaster. Figures. In high school Jani was into Blind Melon, Counting Crows, Pearl Jam, and Our Lady Peace. Eldest daughter Amy now sings in public from time to time. She remembers dancing to Mike Oldfield’s “Moonlight Shadow,” one of my favourite songs, repeatedly in the living room.
My memory of both girls is them singing “Tomorrow” from the musical Annie so often on a road trip through Ontario and the Maritimes that I wanted to jump out of the car. It was wonderful the first time. But that’s the thing with young children . . . they just never let go. They discover a song, it becomes an earworm, and then they sing it until they—and you—are blue in the face. To their credit, they also knew just about every song from Les Misérables. We had been to see it together and they regaled us with the French revolution for three full weeks.
They also sing for me, on many birthdays, “Song for a Winter’s Night,” by Gordon Lightfoot. They sing in perfect harmony.
On my last landmark birthday, as a surprise, my family booked a party bus and we went on a musical mystery tour. The bus was festooned with balloons and banners, and the sound system, for four hours, belted out Beatles and such—and the odd Ed Sheeran—while we all sang along at the top of our voices.
And when we got to “Yellow Submarine” they could hear us a mile away. Musical and magical. But not so much a mystery. Music, thank God, is in our bones. Even if sometimes we get a little out of tune.