Late-night telephone calls don’t ring, they shriek. When our children entered their teens more than fifty years ago, it wasn’t guns we feared, it was cars made as lethal as bullets by the teen-age boys driving them.
We lived in a leafy Long Island suburb noted for its schools, parks and gracious homes. Some of the boys living in those gracious homes drove to school in cars given to them by their parents.
Too many proms ended not with a last dance, but with the squeal of brakes and the explosion of metal. We had a family rule—one of the few our children honored—no late-night calls from strangers telling us they had terrible news.
Our children are now grandparents, but continue to honor the rule and have told their children to spare us calls after 9 pm.
Why then was my granddaughter calling on FaceTime at 10 p.m.? She had given birth to her second child just six weeks earlier and fear began to sharpen the ring into a shriek.
Before the phone in my trembling hand reached my ear, I could hear my granddaughter call out, “PopPop, No worries! This is happy news!” She then explained her three-year-old son, my first great-grandchild, told her “Playing with PopPop is fun and I want to speak to him.”
To Amari, I was as close as the phone in his hand, not three time zones away. His smile showered light into the darkened room as he exclaimed, “PopPop, I love you and I want to hug you!” He then embraced the phone before taking his father’s hand and going to bed.
The phone call illuminated one of the differences between being a grandfather and being a great-grandfather. As a grandfather, I would have been deeply moved by the call, but would have offered a message about late-night calls. As a great-grandfather, I know joy is too precious to dull with a message.
I told my granddaughter her voice and Amari’s would sweeten my dreams. I wouldn’t close my eyes until I had expressed gratitude for their love. When I said good night, I added nothing more than “I love you.”
I had just returned from visiting my granddaughter and her family in San Francisco where I held my month-old great-granddaughter for the first time. I now had held three generations of newborn girls I was holding memories too precious to relinquish, but Amari was waiting and I handed Anaya to her mother and hurried to him.
Playing with a little boy usually means rolling around on the floor. I had happily done that with my three grandsons. But, I’m 96 now and Amari could be ready for his afternoon nap by the time I managed to rise from the floor. Even before he walked, I began to plan how I would play with him when he was older.
I’m a runner and had introduced my children and their children to running. I would race with Amari when he was older and I was not too old to run. I try to jog two miles five mornings a week. I run those two miles in one hour, twice the time it took me not long ago. But, I’m still running and would run with my great-grandson.
While in San Francisco, I measured a stretch of one-hundred yards outside my granddaughter’s house and chalked Start and Finish on the sidewalk. I explained to Amari we would race against each other, the 96-year-old former marathoner and his three-year-old competitor. The audience—Amari’s parents and baby sister—said they would cheer us both.
I learned from my children and grandchildren that they didn’t want me to deliberately run more slowly than they did when we entered local races. They wanted to call on the best of themselves and expected the best of me. As they moved into their mid-teens, it was they who looked back to see how far behind I was.
In that first race with Amari and those we ran before I left for the airport, I did try my best to win. Amari, laughing the entire hundred yards, beat me.
I lost the race, but when your great-grandson calls to tell you he loves you—even late at night—you’ve won. Bob’s articles have appeared in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and in Next Avenue, the publication of the Public Broadcasting Service. His book, “What’s Stopping Me From Getting Ahead?” was published by McGraw Hill and is in five languages.
