Grandparents

 

The first seventh graders I taught in 1966—and many from later years—are now grandparents. I see their pics on Facebook, and I roll into a world of disbelief. Those seventh graders I taught are now on Medicare—on Social Security—and many, as I said, are grandparents.

I won’t say “That’s not possible!” because it clearly is.

Some of those former students don’t resemble at all the kids I knew; others are dead ringers—except they’re, you know, older. I’d know them in a heartbeat if I saw them on the street.

I’ve felt the same phenomenon at my high school reunions (Class of 1962). Some of the people I’d recognize instantly, even though I haven’t seen many of them in sixty years.

Others I don’t recognize even when I look at the name tag: They don’t resemble at all the teenager I knew back in the early 60s.

(I, of course, haven’t aged at all.)

I had wonderful grandparents—though I knew only three of them. My father’s dad died before I was born.

For most of my early years we lived a couple of blocks away from my maternal grandparents in Enid, Oklahoma. He taught religion there at Phillips University (now defunct), the school where my dad and mom met. Dad eventually taught there, too, while my mother dealt with Her Three Sons—as different, one from the other, as animals on the Galapagos.

But they were so kind, supporting each of us. Grandpa went to my baseball games, encouraged my older brother’s interest in opera, helped my younger brother figure out who he was. And I still remember Grandma, holding me in her lap in the rocking chair that now sits in our living room, reading to me from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses.

My dad’s mother I saw only a few times (she lived in Oregon, not far from Dad’s birthplace, a farm near Milton-Freewater). But I really liked her, too. Funny and a wonderful storyteller.

Now I’m a grandfather (two boys: 12 and 16), and they, too, are quite different from each other. One loves books and writing and drawing; the other is great at math and loves golf and computer games.

I’m glad they’re old enough now that they will remember me and their wonderful Grandmother Dyer (whom they call “Gommy”; I’m “Silly Papa”).

But back to where all this began—with my former students. When I see their posts pop up on Facebook, I can’t help it: I remember the 12-13-year-old version of them.

Until I see a picture. Until I see their grandchildren.

Then I remember how older people used to tell me when I was a kid how fast time passes.

I didn’t think so—not at all. Not sitting in study hall on a hot May afternoon thinking the school day would never be over. Thinking that school itself would never be over. That I would forever be stuck there, frozen in time, forgotten by the future.

It hasn’t worked out that way.