Growing up I spent a great deal of time with my grandparents. My mother and I lived with them for extended periods of time. In addition, they kept me over summer holidays and vacations, and I had great spend-the-night weekends with them. In my mind they were neither old nor young ---- they were just my grandparents.
I look back now from the perspective of eight decades and I see my childhood in a different light. Their children were grown and gone --- or so they thought. Then my mother was widowed during World War II and there we were, a daughter and a brand-new baby in their home. I loved living with them and never gave two thoughts to what it meant for them to be wrenched back into babyhood, tricycles, toys, schedules, kindergarten and elementary school.
One of my fondest memories is a nightly game of croquet on the front lawn with my maternal grandfather, a Marine general who had just returned from leading a combat division in the Korean War for a year. As I happily picked out his mallet and ball at seven, there was no indication that he might instead be wishing for his pipe and a book. In my mind’s eye can I see my paternal grandmother, who took me on a trip with her after my high school graduation to visit her two children living overseas. She is striding under the summer-hot Egyptian sun across a sandy dry desert to examine Queen Hatshepsut’s tomb. She was eighty at the time and I never gave it a thought. She was just my beloved grandmother.
Now that I am their age and know what that means, all I can do is send my gratitude and thanks back over the years to that long-ago time and place, and try, in turn, to be as eternal and caring to the next generation as they were to me.