Being Grandfathered In Is a Great Feeling

John Dean is banging pots and pans on the kitchen floor. BLAM! SLAM! CRASH!

He’s laughing uproariously. So am I.

Suddenly, I’m down banging pots and pans with him. I grab some vacuum cleaner wands and we both bang on a big 5-gallon plastic water container. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

It’s shortly after dawn.

James Dean Philip Parnau is my first grandchild. He’s 1 1/2 years old. He can say “Ball!” and something close to “Mama!” but basically he’s more interested in action than words. You put him on the floor and he just goes, and keeps going, from one thing to the next, with astonishing vigor and curiosity until, several hours later, it’s nap time.

He’s adorable.

I’m seized by an impulse to sneak candy to him, to indulge his plunges into the joy of living and, essentially, go wild on all fronts. The sweet little way he greets me in the morning, in his cozy red bunny suit, his sheer delight in everything, his dear little sleeping head in the port-a-crib at night--James Dean is a total winner.

So is Skyler Adelaide Newman, my almost 1-year-old granddaughter in Michigan, who I haven’t yet seen as much of as James Dean. But I’ve got a spring trip planned for some quality Skyler time.

“This week she’s standing on her own, starting to eat more solid food,” reports Willow, her mom, my second daughter. “She’s getting into the recycled paper pile. It’s pretty cute.” Over the phone, I can hear Skyler squealing and chirping. “Da Da!” she says. “Mama!”

“Females develop faster,” Willow explains.

Whatever. Heather, James Dean’s mom and my first daughter, hands the lad a colander. Instantly and unhesitatingly, he flings it across the kitchen.

“Ball!” he shouts gleefully.

“No, honey, it’s not a ball,” Heather counsels, keeping a wary eye.

Me, I don’t have to counsel. I don’t have to keep a wary eye. As my friend Marko Zlatich puts it: “I instinctively know how to have fun with my grandchild. I’m not training that child; I don’t expect anything.”

Zlatich’s step-grandson, Calum, is almost 1 1/2--”just a little charmer guy. He’s fun to be with. We were playing chase this morning. You play with them as a playmate, unreservedly. As a parent you’re always worried about this and that, but as a grandfather I can devote myself fully to that child.

“He loves to have me there, he has no resentments. I’m not going to tell him to do his homework or say no to giving him a snack because he’s going to have dinner in an hour. I’m not there as a mentor; that’s somebody else’s job,” Zlatich says.

Grandfathers are just special.

“I remember when my grandpa took me for my first haircut,” recalls my pal Bill. “I was sitting up on a board across the arms of the barber chair. I was only 2 or 3, but it was all right as long as I could see my grandfather there. The room was full of big men, talking about hunting and fishing, and there I was, right up among ‘em!”

I’ll never forget my own gramp, Arthur T. Whalen, and that week-long fishing trip we took to Canada. We hiked through the wilderness to a remote chain of lakes where the trout were as big as Metro buses and the guide cooked them for us for breakfast, lunch and dinner and read girlie magazines in his off time and, one morning, killed a bear out back of the cabin.

I remember how we came back with several hundred lake trout on dry ice in the trunk of the car and how Gram and my mother seemed thrilled by this--though in retrospect I realize they must have been faking it.

Other times, Gramp and I would fish for perch in a little inlet of the nearby St. Lawrence. Once we did this at dawn, in a canoe, with mist rising from the water.

He used to call me “Bucky.”

We’d sit on the front porch and he’d read to me from “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” Sometimes he’d take me golfing with his buddies, and I remember the crunching sound of his cleats on the locker room’s wooden floor and how he’d buy me a soft drink from an old Coca-Cola ice cooler nestled in the trees just beyond the ninth green.

I’d always have an orange soda.

“Life has become grand again, and much of the pleasure is wrapped up in those little ones who invade your home every so often,” says Ken Canfield of the National Center for Fathering. “They put a spring in your step, a smile on your face and youthful feelings in your heart. You grandfathers become more affectionate and nurturant than men at any other stage of the life cycle.”

Male benevolence, affection, unconditional love--these are the gifts a grandfather can give a child, and there’s nothing else like it. My father was a good man, but our relationship was conflicted and unsatisfactory in many ways. He was beset by the cares and difficulties of life--problems I have a better understanding of now.

He never took me on a trip the way Gramp did.

I know more about Gramp now, too. He was flawed in many ways. It’s just that--well, by the grace of God, he didn’t show me that side of himself. Instead, he left me with a treasure trove of wonderful memories that remain a constant source of joy and hope.

My dream is that, flawed as I am, I can manage to pass that joy and hope on to James Dean and Skyler and whoever else comes down the pike.

* The Web page of the National Center for Fathering is at https://www.fathers.com.