5 things I've learned having been a grandparent for one year

Me, Cal, and my daughter Chloe

Tomorrow our grandson Calvin turns a year old. I am not the first grandparent to marvel over how quickly time passes, nor will I be the last.

But I'll say it anyway: I can't believe it has been a year already.

Cal is one of the funniest human beings I know. He constantly makes me laugh. Sometimes I think this is intentional on his part, other times I think it's just his quirky personality coming through.

Either way, the kid kills me. I love him so much.

I don't promise any special insight in this post, but here are five quick things I've learned in my first year of being Grandpa Scott:

(1) Having a grandchild can make you realize things you should have done when raising your own kids: I can't speak for other grandparents, but sometimes when I'm watching Cal, I think back to when our kids were little and ways I could have been a better dad to them. Which makes me a little sad. I always wanted to be the best father I could, but I don't think you can completely avoid mistakes when you're in the thick of parenthood. You just do your best, move on, and don't beat yourself up over it. 

(2) Never undermine your own kids' approach to parenting: One time, my dad (a man who loved the role of grandpa more than anyone I've ever known) gave Elissa chips even after Terry said she couldn't have them. He just couldn't say no to his little granddaughter, but sometimes you have to. Never contradict Mom and Dad.

(3) Speaking of which, you have more leeway to be your grandchild's friend, but remember you're still a grandPARENT: I've been calling Cal my little buddy from the first time I met him in the hospital. He and I play and laugh and have a great time together. But I also see my role as supplementary to whatever learning and discipline he's getting at home. It's easier for grandparents to be "friends" with a child than it is for parents. But as with item #2 above, it can't come at the expense of what your son/daughter and their partner are trying to do as the mother and father.

(4) If you'll forgive the cliche, the greatest gift you can give grandchildren is your time: Offer to babysit as much as you can, show up at their house whenever there's a chance. Be as much a part of their lives as circumstances will allow. They'll be better for it, and so will you.

(5) Love them. That's it, just love them: This isn't groundbreaking stuff, but it's profound. You don't have to read grandparenting books or earn a degree in child psychology to have a lasting positive effect in the life of your grandchild. Just love them. Let them know they're loved. Be there for them whenever you can. Over and over, day after day, for as long as you're around. That's job #1, Grandma and Grandpa, so get to it.

My wife doesn't think my taste buds work

I have mentioned here before that I will eat anything. Or at least I'll eat anything considered to be safe and socially acceptable.

Seafood? I love it all. Kale? I'm a fan. Exotic and smelly cheeses? Bring 'em on.

I have preferences, of course, but when someone asks which foods I don't like, I tell them there are no foods I don't like.

I consider this to be a virtue, but Terry thinks it makes me somewhat of a freak.

She cannot fathom, for example, that someone can happily eat sardines straight from the tin as I do. I know they don't smell great, but they're one of those foods for which the smell and the taste seem to have little to do with each other.

At least to me.

Terry has half-convinced herself that my taste buds don't function like other people's. If they did, she reasons, there's no way I would eat some of the stuff I do.

Of course, she comes from a family of picky eaters, so I think she's just jealous.

On the other hand, I don't know any different, so maybe she's right. Maybe my chemosensory system is out of whack and has gotten more out of whack as I've aged.

I did, after all, used to dislike coffee, wine, cantaloupe and sauerkraut. Now I drink/eat all of those things without a second thought.

What changed? I don't know. But I can you tell it's wonderful, when asked to list your dietary preferences and foods to avoid, to be able to say, "No restrictions! I'll eat anything."

Pass the liver and onions, please.

My father-in-law's impenetrable fortress of security

My father-in-law Tom has been gone nearly three years. I don't think about him every day, but it's often enough that I realize how much I miss him. He was, at his core, a good and decent man. Faithful, loyal, and dryly funny.

You could always tell when he thought he had said something hilarious because he would grin and his shoulders would shake with a little laugh. I imagined him thinking to himself, "Oh Tom, that was a good one."

Tom was a product of his generation, though like my dad, he had a love for modern gadgets. Computers, in particular, were his thing.

That was partly how he became the email and newsletter guy for our church. He had the know-how and a willingness to serve, so if there was news worth sharing within our congregation, it would come electronically through Tom.

He also had his funny quirks, though who among us doesn't?

One of the things Terry and I often laugh about is Tom's garage door code.

When Tom and my mother-in-law Judy moved into their home on Green Ridge Drive 20+ years ago, the detached garage had an automatic opener with a keypad on which you could set a passcode.

Tom needed something memorable, but he didn't want it to be too obvious. He decided to use the date of his and Judy's wedding anniversary, BUT...being a guy who was always one step ahead of would-be criminals, he made a sneaky adjustment.

Tom and Judy were married on July 1, 1961, which translates to a six-digit passcode of 070161. Ever the tricky devil, Tom opted instead for 070262, increasing the day and the year by one. It was a stroke of CIA-level security genius that would make it impossible for anyone to gain entry to his beloved garage.

Absolutely no one was getting in there to steal his scraps of wood and yard tools.

Tom passed away in September 2023. Sunday mornings at church haven't been the same without him, nor have family and holiday get-togethers.

I'm now the church email and newsletter guy, having inherited the role largely because I felt I couldn't say no.

When it came to serving his church and his family, Tom never said no. It was one of the most important things I learned from him. 

We're working toward having minimal stuff in our house for the kids to clean out when we die

The basement storage room in question

Such a morbid headline today, and the second time in a month I've written something that makes it sound like I'm at death's door.

Thankfully, that is not the case. I'm only 56 years old and in pretty good health. Neither Terry nor I plan on going anywhere any time soon.

BUT...we are also of the age where we have lost all four of our parents. In each case, we were involved in the job of cleaning out their houses after they passed.

When you find yourself renting a dumpster and spending hours and hours combing through boxes in Mom and Dad's attic trying to figure out what to save and what to toss, you become conscious of the need to spare your own kids that same laborious task.

So Terry and I have committed to a program of getting rid of the extraneous stuff in our house over time.

When I say "over time," I admit that means we're not exactly in a rush. If we were both hit by a bus today, our children would have a heck of a time cleaning out the basement storage room, not to mention the rest of the house.

It's just that 34 years of marriage and five kids mean you accumulate a lot of possessions, some of which you want to keep.

Those boxes of baby clothes? We store them for grandkids, knowing full well they take up a whole lot of space in the meantime.

That wall of Christmas decorations? Hey, we're festive people!

High school memory bins? We've admittedly trimmed those down over time, but we still have yellowing newspaper articles and varsity jacket letters that will simply be thrown away when we've moved on from this life.

Speaking of newspaper articles, in that storage room are a few large bins of three-ring binders stuffed with copies of virtually every story I ever wrote for The News-Herald and the Plain Dealer when I was a sports journalist.

That's thanks to my dad, who meticulously cut out each one and taped them onto scrapbook pages for long-term preservation.

A year ago I came this close to throwing those binders away, but I just couldn't do it. It felt like I would be dishonoring years of Dad's work and turning a blind eye to how proud he was of his sports writer son.

So instead I vowed to digitize them all before I throw away the hard copies.

Which, of course, will take some time.

Time I assume I have.

Kids, my sincere apologies if I never actually get around to it.

Whatever happened to that old song, to all those little girls and boys?

 

I go through periods in which I'm very sentimental and nostalgic for the years when my kids were young.

They're still "young," of course, but I mean school-aged young. Back when every day brought one challenge or another, but the good always outweighed the bad by a wide margin.

What I miss, it seems, are the little things.

I miss the seven of us going to church together on Sunday mornings, even when I had to tell them over and over it was time to wake up and get dressed.

I miss family trips to the library when we would walk out with several pounds of books each.

I miss dinners when we all crammed around our little kitchen table.

I miss wrestling matches in the living room.

I miss vacations to Hershey Park or Sandusky or Philadelphia or wherever. The destination rarely mattered. It was the fact we were all together.

I miss "Clean the Whole House" weekend afternoons when we started in the basement and worked our way to the top floor, picking up misplaced garbage, half-finished food and dirty laundry along the way.

I miss school concerts and plays and programs of all types. I miss the excitement and pageantry of the first and last day of school.

I miss the chaos. I miss the sounds of a full house. I miss friends coming over and movie nights together.

I miss it all.

I'm not often asked for parenting advice, which is a good thing since I don't have much to offer. But when it does happen, I always say the same thing: Even in the hardest of times (especially in the hardest of times), try not to lose your perspective.

Don't forget to stop and appreciate what you have. Don't miss the opportunity to revel in the noise of young children you exhaust yourself taking care of every day.

You're going to miss it all in ways you can't imagine when you're 25 or 30 but know all too well when you're 50, 60, 70 and beyond.

That's all I have for you, but believe me...it's enough.

Once our cats are gone, we're taking a break from having pets...or at least that's what we tell ourselves.

We owned all of these guys at one point. Now only the two on the left remain.

We currently own three cats: Ginny (11 years old), Molly (9), and Cheddar (age unknown, but probably 8-ish?)

I love them all. They're affectionate – each in their own way – and they cause minimal damage to our house.

Actually, they cause zero damage as long as Ginny is on her meds. A year or so ago she started peeing in places she wasn't supposed to, so the vet prescribed some Happy Cream. Every night we rub a small dab of the cream inside her ear, which keeps her both content and continent, if somewhat zoned out.

Apart from that, all three are pretty healthy felines, at least for the moment. We've been down this path several times before, so we know in a few years they'll start declining.

It will be sad, and we will love them until the very end, but Terry and I came to the decision a while ago that these are the last three in a long line of Tennant cats.

We've owned cats together since before we were married. For the three months leading up to our wedding in 1992, I lived alone in the house we had bought with a little kitten named Alex. He was the first of our many four-legged, fuzzy friends.

Over the subsequent 34 years, we've owned as few as one or two cats at a time and as many as five. Our current three feels like a good number, especially to me as the person who daily feeds them and cleans their litter boxes.

When we lost our boys Fred, George, and Charlie in a 15-month span in 2022 and 2023, we were down to just Ginny and Molly. And that seemed fine.

Then Cheddar unexpectedly joined the team in the spring of 2024. You can read about that here, if you're interested.

Now I truly think we're playing out the string. I don't mean that to sound heartless. As I said, we love our three kitties and will continue loving them until it's their time to go.

But I've been doing the litter box/cat feeding thing almost every morning for 3+ decades. I wouldn't mind hanging up my scooper. And Terry and I would both be OK not having to worry about aging cats using our basement armchairs as scratching posts or surrogate bathrooms.

I say this as someone who has had at least one pet in the house consistently since birth. I grew up with dogs and fish, while our kids have owned cats, hamsters, guinea pigs, rats, chinchillas, mice, and fish of their own.

I've taken care of more than my share of furry and non-furry creatures. As sad as I'll be to lose Ginny, Molly, and Cheddar, I'm ready to take a break. A permanent break.

And this time, I mean it.

It says here I'm older than three-quarters of the people I meet

There is a website called oldfart.io that exists solely to let you know what percentage of the population is younger than you.

You just enter your birthdate and the specific group to which you want to compare yourself (the entire world or an individual country), and the site will instantly crush your hopes and dreams.

Actually, it only crushes your hopes and dreams if you're of a certain age. I'm not sure what that age is, but I feel like I'm coming up on it awfully quickly.

According to the oldfart.io calculator, as someone who is roughly 56.7 years of age, I am older than 82% of people in the world and 72% of people in the United States.

The difference, I suppose, is that the world's population includes many countries with relatively low life expectancies compared with the U.S.

And let me just say, for as much as we Americans act like we have the best of everything, we do not rank highly in the life expectancy department. Depending on the source you consult, we have something like the 60th-highest life expectancy out of 230-odd sovereign nations in the world.

The top-ranked country, according to worldometers.info? Monaco, with a life expectancy of 86.7 years for both sexes combined and 88.8 years for women specifically.

At the bottom of the list is Nigeria, at just shy of 55 years overall.

Worldometers.info has the U.S. coming in at 79.76 (82.2 for women, 77.3 for men).

You only have to be a person of somewhat advanced middle age like me to find yourself more chronologically gifted than three of every four people you meet. This is somewhat disconcerting.

Still, I can't deny it's true. I'm thrilled at work when I'm not the oldest person in a meeting. Most of my colleagues were born sometime after I graduated from college.

There are positive and negative ways of looking at this situation:

• POSITIVE: I am a person with many years' experience in the full-time workforce, giving me wisdom and insight I can share freely with my younger co-workers.
  
  
• NEGATIVE: I am going to die soon.
  
  

I'm kidding about the dying thing, of course...I think...at least as far as I know.

I've only become aware of my impending senior citizenhood over the last year or so. Before that, it never really occurred to me.

That's mostly because I don't feel especially old. I have no chronic pain, I still move well, and I still heal up pretty quickly (if not as quickly as I used to). I'm winning the battle against aging in my mind, at least.

But eventually, we all lose the battle against math, by which I mean not the school subject but the inevitability of time.

The numbers are what they are, and they say I am older than 75-80% (or more) of anyone I'm likely to meet on this planet.

On the other hand, I don't feel so bad showing up at a restaurant at 4:45pm for dinner. Call me an old fogey, but I'm opting to beat the crowds every day of the week.

(NOTE: Not to emphasize the age thing, but happy birthday over the next week to my older siblings Mark and Debbie. Mark's birthday is this Friday, while Debbie's is next Monday. They both make aging look easy.)