Rant #2,488: We Can Work It Out

It was a long day yesterday but yes, my father is home from the hospital.

They still do not know why he was sick--they believe that dehydration might have been the reason, but they are not sure--and we drove him home yesterday evening after waiting hours for all the proper paperwork to be filled out.

What a long day it was--it started when I took my son to work and ended with him, my mother and my father in the car with me on the long way home--but since my father is home, I have to call it a good day, even though the minutes felt like hours and the hours felt like days.

Now that that is off my head, today my wife--who has the day off--and myself will be visiting my father-in-law at the Veterans home in Stony Brook later today, after we take our son to work.

So we are covering all avenues this week.

My son is actually very lucky. He has three of his four grandparents still alive, which is a seemingly rare occurrence for someone who is 24 years old. His maternal grandmother passed away a bit more than 26 years ago, right after my wife and I were married, and it would be even better if she were still with us, of course, but he is lucky nonetheless.

My son is close with his grandparents, and even long after they are gone, since he got to know them, he will always have memories of them that he can cherish and pass on to others.

I, myself, had a similar lucky fate. Three of my four grandparents were still with us into my 30s, and the three of them became great grandparents when my daughter was born, and two of them were still with us when my son was born.

I remember that my paternal grandmother, frail as can be and suffering from what was then the earlier stages of Alzheimer's Disease, was able to get my son to sleep after a fit of crying that no one seemingly could stop. She put him in her lap, sung to him, rocked him, and he was asleep in a flick of an eye.

Anyway, it is so nice when one generation gets to know another, the older generation learning from the younger generation and the younger generation even learning from the younger generation.

I personally knew how lucky I was, because most of my friends didn't have one grandparent alive, and I had all four of them alive through my late teens. They were so well known among my friends that they almost became surrogate grandparents to my friends.

I remember one day when I must have been about 10 or 11 years old, my maternal grandparents were over. My grandmother was living with us sort of part time, because she had broken her hip and my mother was helping to care for her. My grandfather would come over on weekends, and there were times we had six people living in a two bedroom apartment.

I just remember my grandfather, who always was well dressed and topped everything off with a topcoat and dress hat, deciding that rather than watch me play stick ball with my friends, that he wanted to get in on the action.

He asked me if he could take some swings, I gave him the bat, and this old Brooklyn Dodger fan took his swings It was probably the first time in 50 years that he was in such a situation, and he missed the ball badly on all his swings.

When my grandmother saw what was happening, she started yelling at him to "act his age" and "get back here this minute" and who knows what else.

After finally realizing that he wasn't going to hit the ball, and hearing her yelling, he gave me back the bat, lit up a cigarette, and that was the end of that. I don't think he ever did anything like that ever again.

To this day, more than 20 years after my grandparents left us, I still think of them each and every day. They had a profound influence on me, and I have passed on these memories to my own kids and to my nephews, so they definitely know who Grandma Harriet and Grandma Betty and Grandpa Morris and Pop Jack were.

With all the nonsense surrounding me now, I still think back to my grandparents, often for comfort and even for wisdom. I know that my maternal grandfather would tell me something like "It will be OK," or "It will work out," and I have to believe him, even though he probably gave me this advice years ago on an entirely different matter, but I could apply it to today.

They were good people, they really were, my paternal grandparents from the old school and my maternal grandparents from the new one, but they really were great influences on me.

And I hope my son and daughter realize how fortunate they are, with grandparents still around and vital as they move on in their own lives.