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What everyone must learn in Grandparent School
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Published: February 12, 2009
While reading the paper several days ago, I saw an ad for an online degree-granting "university." I see those periodically, as well as ads for other schools, but it occurred to me that there could be a legitimate, yet secret, school for which I NEVER see ads.
This amazingly effective school has a student body of millions and worldwide alumni chapters with an incalculable membership. Whisperings about this school speak of the self-destructing syllabi and enigmatic, becowled faculty. This clandestine citadel of higher learning is hidden behind a veil of secrecy so deep, it makes the Illuminati jealous. It is … Grandparent School!
How else can almost all grandparents behave in almost the exact same way around their grandchildren? Why would the typical grandparent engage in many of the same acts of coddling?
There are variations based on personality, of course. Take my children's grandparents. My mother-in-law favors repeated trips to McDonald's (McDonald's figures so prominently with grandparents that I believe it must be owned by them). Aside from the fast food, my mother-in-law also engages in television over-permissiveness and showing off her grandchildren to her peers.
With my father, there is some indication of a variation in classes taken. We get regular walks down to the pond to feed the ducks, fish and turtles, worry over the wearing of warm clothes and the overlooking of naughtiness with admonitions of "Oh, don't be so hard on them." That last characteristic of Grandparent School training, I'll admit, is particularly frustrating since many of the things my wife and I are asked to let slide often are the very same behaviors for which I, as a child, would have been negatively sanctioned.
With both grandparents, we have periodic offerings of money (my father excelled in that class, fortunately) and routine surreptitious offerings of candy and cookies, despite the lack of consumption of nutritionally valid foodstuffs.
Despite the secrecy of Grandparent School, the stored wisdom of grandparents can be invaluable. My children are learning a lot from their grandparents. They get much love from both, and my dad and his brothers (also graduates of Grandparent School) are collaborating on a narrative of their childhood growing up as a preacher's kids during the Depression. I think it will come as a shock to Claire and Jenna to know that when Papa ate chicken for supper, he likely had watched his mother wring its neck a few hours earlier. Or that Papa's home was marked as a good stop for hobos along the rail line outside of Marion.
One of these days, some years from now, my wife and I will receive a mysterious coded letter in the mail inviting us to enroll. With trembling hands, we will call our own parents, receive the cipher key they've been keeping all these years, and fill out the enrollment card. We'll then take it to a dead drop, leave it there and await further instructions.
I only hope they have plenty of Ben-Gay at the intramural fields.
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