Grandfathered Read online

  Perhaps the maniacal look on my face scared them off.

  I tried to comfort Mayana. I felt terrible for her. She needed her mom and was so distraught my heart ached for her. I picked up stones on the beach, pointed at dogs, threw stones in the water, and for a moment she would sniffle and gulp and tear my heart out of my body, and then start screaming again.

  And then, finally, I saw boats on the horizon.

  “Look,” I said. “It’s Mommy. Here comes Mommy.”

  Please, God, let it be Mommy.

  The kayaks took an excruciatingly long time to make it to shore. There were about fifteen of them, and Amy was right at the back. I waded into the water with my granddaughter. Up to my waist. Almost up to our necks.

  Mayana stopped screaming.

  Then she started smiling.

  Then she started laughing.

  It was a miracle.

  A mommy miracle.

  “How has she been?” asked my daughter. “Looks like she’s hungry for some momma milk.”

  And suddenly, Mayana was plugged in and feeding happily.

  “Have you given poor grandad a hard time?” said Amy.

  I was still shaking.

  Mayana looked across at me. Reached her hand out to touch mine, and then—unplugging briefly—gave me a big smile.

  “I forgive you,” I said.

  I’m not sure if she forgave me.

  Child of the Century

  Mayana is half-Indo-Canadian, half-Caucasian. A mixed-race child.

  Her paternal grandparents are, like me and Beth, originally from England, but their families are from India’s Punjab. We have become and stayed friends even though their son and our daughter Amy are no longer together.

  Mayana is growing up in four households. Her mother’s, her father’s, and both sets of grandparents’.

  She is a modern kid. Pulled between differing cultures and parenting approaches. But she seems incredibly resilient and enjoys the variety that her young life gives her. I guess she knows no different. The nuclear family is a thing of history.

  Her mom and dad live in separate homes on Salt Spring Island, a thirty-minute ferry ride from Swartz Bay, north of Victoria. Her other grandparents live in a suburb near Vancouver, and we live in the countryside north of Victoria.

  Mayana has toys, books, and clothes in four different places.

  She has a sari—and other traditional Indian outfits—in Vancouver that she wears at family weddings and other celebrations. She eats peanut butter on toast with me, and samosas with her Indian grandma. And she eats tofu and beans on Salt Spring, where being alternative is the norm.

  A Canadian kid in the twenty-first century. Impossible to pigeonhole. A regular kid. With the most beautiful smile on the planet.

  When we were at the park, one day, Mayana asked me to towel off the slide because there were some droplets of water on it, left over from a rainfall earlier in the day.

  “It’s too wet, Grandad.”

  “No, it’s not . . . just zoom down it.”

  “No,” she said. “Not until it’s perfectly dry.”

  So I used my sweater and dried it off, and made a big, hammy, show of being put out.

  “What’s your middle name?” I huffed theatrically. “Princess?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  And it is. Kaur is one of her middle names, a mandatory name for baptized female Sikhs. Kaur means “always pure.” It also means “princess.”

  Princess. It figures. I like it. My granddaughter is one of a kind. A princess, indeed.

  3. Fun at the Fair

  Every year I take Mayana to a fall fair. I started when she was less than a year old, pushing her around in her stroller to see the animals and the rides and the sights and sounds of multicoloured midway mayhem.

  That first year was the PNE (Pacific National Exhibition) the biggest fair in Western Canada. She fell asleep during the horse show, and when she awoke, I pledged to her that I would take her to a fall fair every year. Then she cried when I took her on a ride in which cars moved around a circular track at a snail’s pace.

  Even so, the tradition had begun.

  The second year we went, she stayed awake during the horse show, had her first taste of cotton candy (“Don’t tell your mother!”), and went on a giant slide. That last slide thing didn’t work out so well.

  The giant slide wasn’t that big, but to a kid under the age of two, I suppose it looked pretty intimidating. I talked her into it.

  “Look, we walk to the top, I sit on that mat and then you sit on my lap, and I’ll hold you really close and we’ll slide to the bottom,” I said. “Look at the kids at the bottom, they’re all smiling. They all had fun.”

  Mayana didn’t seem convinced. Perhaps the screams of those sliding down the giant slide influenced her. But after about three minutes she said okay.

  We climbed to the top of the slide, hand-in-hand. It took a few moments to get the mat sorted when Mayana, who had by this time had a good look around, and a long look down, had come to a decision.

  “No, Grandad. I don’t want to go.”

  There were about ten kids lined up behind us on the steps, all significantly older than Mayana.

  “It’ll be fine,” I said, adding somewhat pathetically. “Grandad wouldn’t do anything to hurt you, would he?” Resorting to the third person is always a suspect approach. But she fell for it.

  “Okay.”

  So we went down the slide. Now, I must confess I had no idea it would go that fast. We zoomed down the slide at breakneck speed. Neither of us spoke or screamed. Perhaps we were in shock.

  We reached the end of the slide. Mayana stood up and put her hands on her hips in indignation. I wondered where she’d learned that pose.

  “Grandad, that was scary,” she said in capital letters. Then she began to cry.

  I picked her up and held her close. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I guess that was faster than we expected. Now, would you like to go on the roller coaster?” I was joking. Grandfathers are allowed to say stupid things like that.

  The cotton candy was the inevitable next move. It worked very well. Then we went off to pat some pigs and sheep in the animal barns.

  When she was two years old, I took her to a smaller fall fair near our home close to Victoria. By this time, she wanted to go on a few kiddie rides, go fishing for prizes at the sideshows, and pat the Shetland ponies in the barns. She had an ice cream and a cotton candy on the same day, something she pronounced super-awesome.

  I look forward to going to the fair with Mayana. It’s our thing. When she was three, at the end of our summer together, we went to the smaller fair again. We went on a few rides, patted some animals, clucked at the chickens, and laughed at the ice-cream-eating contest.

  And the best thing. They had a giant slide.

  “Want to go on it?” I asked her.

  “Sure,” she said. This one was twice as high as the one that scared us to bits a couple of years earlier. Small kids have short memories.

  This slide had a huge lineup. But we stood there for a few minutes when I realized there would be a height limit. They had one of those you must be this tall to ride cut-outs at the entrance, so I asked a mom to hold my place while Mayana and I went to the front of the line to see if she’d make the height.

  She did. By a centimetre. I went back in line. We waited another five minutes and were close to the front when Mayana said, “I need to go to the washroom.”

  “Now? Right this second?”

  “Yes,” and she started joggling up and down. “Right now.”

  I asked the mom to hold my place again, picked up Mayana, and we went careening around the fun fair. Finally, we found washrooms in the arts and crafts building. There was a lineup at the women’s washroom. The men’s was empty.

 
I took her in, put her in one of the stalls, closed the door, stood on guard. “Now hurry or we’ll have to wait ages to get on the slide again.”

  After about thirty seconds a father came in with his young son and started washing his face, which was covered with cotton candy. We were losing valuable seconds.

  “Mayana,” I said theatrically, also because I felt I looked a little weird hanging around inside a washroom, “are you done yet?”

  “No yet?”

  “What’s taking so long.”

  “I needed a poo.”

  The father looked across at me and smiled. “Congratulations,” he said. “You win first prize.”

  A minute or so later, we zoomed back to the giant slide, and there was the mom and her son. I was exhausted, but we’d made it. “Thank you,” I said.

  “No problem,” said the mom. “I wonder if you could do me a favour. My son’s not big enough to go up on his own. Could you take him.”

  Which is why I struggled to the top of the giant mega slide with two preschoolers, put them both on sacks alongside me, struggled somewhat stiffly onto my own sack, and then slid at something like a thousand miles an hour down a slide that took my breath and most of my stomach away.

  We got to the bottom. I was drained.

  Mayana was standing. “That was fun, Grandad. Can we do it again?”

  We did.

  Next year, she says she wants us to go on the roller coaster. I don’t think she’s joking.

  I Won’t

  It is understood that grandchildren are wondrous little beings with cherubic faces and Nobel prize–winning intelligence, and the creative skills of a Picasso or Pisarro.

  But there’s the other side. The dark side.

  “Finish your dinner, sweetheart.”

  “No.”

  “Come on, just one bite.”

  “No. Don’t want to.”

  And these are the teenagers. Okay, kidding. But small children do have a facility to use one word, quite often.

  “Won’t.”

  Won’t eat that pasta, won’t come down to the beach, won’t pick up that toy, won’t tidy up that sock, won’t put on that boot, won’t hold Grandad’s hand, won’t do up that button.

  They’re testing us, of course. Seeing how long they can push our buttons.

  My wife handles all this well. No such word as “won’t,” she says, and tells them to get on with it and they do. Grandmothers have this facility to engender instant respect and obedience. They cajole, encourage, look stern while still having lovely smiles on their faces, and the kids and grandkids do what they’re told.

  Grandfathers? Well, mostly, we’re useless at getting any small child to do what we want them to do if they’re not in the mood. We don’t want to get angry with them, so we try other techniques. Bribery. Or being sad—which is, in and of itself, really sad.

  Here’s how it works. Let’s say there are two carrots, a piece of lettuce, some macaroni and cheese, and a slice of bread on the plate. Your grandchild stops eating and refuses to eat any more.

  Here’s how a grandmother does it.

  “Okay, let’s see you eat that up. You don’t have to eat all of it. But I want to see you trying. Let’s try this carrot. Okay.”

  Okay is not a question. It’s a statement. Now, this doesn’t always work, but often it does, and within a few seconds the child is munching on a carrot, then reaches for a piece of lettuce, and then is eating up the mac and cheese.

  The grandfather has a different approach.

  “Eat that up, please.”

  Nothing.

  “Come on. Did you hear me? I want this all eaten up.”

  Silence.

  “Come on. You’re not going to leave the table until you’ve eaten every bit.”

  Louder silence.

  “Did you hear me? Eat it up. Come on, I’ll let you have some ice cream if you eat that carrot. And some candy. And you can watch The Wiggles. And I’ll read you three stories. Look, let me make this spoon of mac and cheese into a plane and fly it into your mouth.”

  And then, slowly, they nibble at the edge of a carrot.

  “Can I have my ice cream now, Grandad?”

  See, not so bad. We got there in the end.

  Food, Glorious Food

  When we were kids, we ate mac and cheese, wieners, pizza, egg sandwiches (on white bread, naturally), fish fingers, and any meat or cheese or other foodstuff that had been thoroughly processed.

  Mayana loves avocado. And papaya. And smoked salmon. Three things I’d never heard of when I was her age. Her mom doesn’t like her to eat too much bread or sugar because she thinks it might affect her brain. I try not to take that as a personal insult.

  The food available in the modern world is stunning. Whatever we want to eat from anywhere on the planet is available. Dragon fruit? Easy. Moroccan spices? No problem. Did you know what sushi was when you were three years old? Unlikely. My grandkids love sushi. And quesadillas. At their age I couldn’t pronounce quesadillas.

  We who grew up after the Second World War in England, in particular, were pretty much starved of exotic foodstuff. Rationing was over, but there weren’t any supermarkets, and many of us lived hand-to-mouth.

  My father loved to eat bread and dripping. Even today I find that stunning, in an artery-clogging kind of way. White bread smeared with the fat, or drippings, left over in the pan from the Sunday roast—pork or lamb or beef fat. Then he would liberally cover it with plenty of salt. My dad lived until the age of ninety. So it didn’t seem to do him much harm.

  Vegetarians were essentially invisible. I’m sure they were around, but I never saw them. My wife and daughters are vegetarian and have been for a while (I am a more recent convert), and though Mayana eats fish, she sure eats a lot more vegetables than I did when I was her age. Then again, in my defence, vegetables in England in the fifties were almost inedible. Mothers (as fathers rarely cooked) boiled the vegetables for so long it was almost impossible to tell what you were eating. Much of it tasted like a green sludge, especially the cabbage. Raw veggies? Mayana eats them all the time for snacks, but I can’t honestly remember ever eating vegetables uncooked. Just overcooked.

  But there are similarities. Mayana loves me to make her a boiled egg with little soldiers—cut-up pieces of toast—on the side for dipping into the runny yolk. I used to love those too. Still do, in fact.

  Cereal or porridge are also breakfast staples, as they were back then, and we prefer anything that has chocolate or sugar in the title.

  Mayana gets plenty of fresh fruit. When I was a kid, we’d get tinned pineapple chunks or peaches with Carnation cream.

  I also got plenty of home baking. My mother made meat and potato pies, apple pies, blackberry crumbles, rice puddings, bread and butter puddings, often accompanied by thick, yellow Bird’s Custard. We’d have English trifles, full of jelly and custard and leftover cake.

  The biggest treat my mother gave us as a snack was a chocolate sandwich. Fry’s sold a wafer-thin bar of chocolate that she’d place between white bread and butter. It was unbelievably decadent and, even then, very wrong on all kinds of nutritional levels. We also had chocolate spread, an English version of Nutella. English children always had bad teeth.

  I asked Mayana what she’d like for lunch the other day.

  “Guacamole, please, Grandad,” she said. “With a few corn chips. And a little salsa, but not too, too hot.”

  We’ve come a long way from bread and dripping and Spam, that pink, processed kind of indeterminate meat, a cheaper ham, which was a staple of my childhood. It’s big in Hawaii too—where American soldiers ate it during the Second World War—and is still sold in supermarkets and served in restaurants. Go figure.

  When I was a kid, I loved to don an apron and bake with my mum. She’d give me some leftover pastry to make ja
m tarts or lemon-curd tarts.

  Mayana loves that too. We make cinnamon buns and pancakes and crepes, and the other week we made some banana bread. She declared it “dohlicious.”

  The kitchen is always a disaster afterwards, with flour and eggshells and dollops of this or that covering the counters.

  “Here,” I’ll say, channelling my own mother, “take this piece of pastry, fill it with jam and roll it up, and it can be your special jam roly-poly.”

  She laughs at the word.

  “You’re roly-poly, Grandad. Did they name this after you?”

  A friend of mine has a bumper sticker he’s quite proud of: i love animals. i could eat them all day.

  That still tickles my funny bone even if, at the time of writing, I haven’t eaten meat for two years. Okay, I still eat seafood, so I’m not a full-blown veggie; I’m what they call a pescatarian.

  I stopped eating meat around Christmas 2017. I’d started to see the animals, rather than the cuts of meat. I didn’t eat rabbit because I’d read Watership Down or venison because of Bambi. I liked my meat heavily disguised, preferably as hamburger or sausages, though I made an exception with rack of lamb, which still makes my mouth water when I write those words on the page. Rack of lamb—so I won’t be mentioning that again. Or prime rib. Or, disturbingly, Kentucky Fried Chicken, which was one of my guiltiest pleasures, even when the fat was dripping down my chin and my digits were finger-licking bad.

  I went cold turkey. I guess that should be cold tofu. And turkey was to blame. While some have this Norman Rockwell image of a family huddled around a plump turkey at the Christmas table, all I began to see was an unfortunate animal on its back with its head chopped off and its legs stuck in the air. And I never did rhapsodize about sticking my hand up its butt and stuffing it with breadcrumbs and chestnuts.

  But, yes, for most of my life, I enjoyed the taste and the cooking of it for Christmas. I even enjoyed eating cold turkey and cranberry sandwiches for a week after Christmas Day.