Grandparents Are More Interesting When You’re a Parent

Sometimes, when you hear stories about a grandparent when you’re young, you tune them out, and only remember parts. It’s not until you want to share family history with your own child that those stories become interesting again.

On our drive from Virginia to Colorado, we stopped in Dayton, Ohio, where my dad grew up. His dad lived across from the Wright Brothers as a boy. We went by the Wright Brothers house, and saw the house my grandfather was born in across the way. I called my dad, excited for stories that bored me in younger years.

“He invented a sprinkler that could water a square patch of grass,” I said. “Did he get rich?” Tucker asked. “He did. But guess what? A company in Japan stole his idea after the war and ended up selling them for less than his cost to make them, and he went completely bankrupt.” “That wasn’t very nice of them,” he said. “It wasn’t,” I agreed.

“But he never gave up, and ended up inventing a bunch of things during his life. When I was a girl, I thought everything had already been invented, but that was before cell phones or YouTube. Just think what the world will have when you’re my age!”

“What should my job be?” he asked. “Something that doesn’t exist yet,” I said. “But I think I want to be a singer,” he replied. “Then be a singer,” I said.

“My other great-grandpa was a miner, right?” “He was.” “Maybe I’ll do that then,” he said. “Ok.”

“Or, maybe I’ll be a Viking Warrior.”

“You can be anything, kid. Anything at all.”

***

This has been a Finish the Sentence Friday post. This week, my co-host Kenya Johnson of Sporadically Yours and I are hosting a five-minute stream-of-consciousness with the prompt “Grandparents.” I should say that it’s really hard for me to post something so short. I mean, Google and all that. But five minutes is really fast and this is probably one of the first times I didn’t stop the timer to type more.

I’ll admit though, that this was my second 5-minute writing. The first one ended with this sentence: “I know he’ll cherish those times and this is the boringest blog post ever but the timer just went off.” 

This has to be better than that, even though that one contained more facts than stories, like about the time Tucker told my dad a coat hanger looked like a bow, and my dad got out his hand drill and made the coat hanger into a bow with Tucker’s help. I’ve got it on video and have promised to upload it to his YouTube channel (which, of course, wouldn’t have been around were I his age!).