Grandparent status underscores family magic

The boy who would grow up to be my father was a gangling 12-year-old, already more than 6 feet tall, when he enlisted in the Marines in 1919. And he got away with it. The war was over but the glamour of military service remained.

“Nothing to it,” said my father. “I just wrote the number 18 on a piece of paper, stuck it in my shoe, and said, ‘I’m over 18.’ ” That way it was true.

He described the recruiting poster that captured him. While the other services used slick placards like James Montgomery Flagg’s iconic “Uncle Sam wants you,” the Marine poster was different. It was a scrap of torn brown paper stuck on the post office wall. Eight words were scrawled across it. “You’re not good enough to be a Marine,” it said.

Miraculously, the boy made it through basic training – boot camp – before his parents tracked him down. He refused to go home with them, promised to run away again, but his folks took him back to West Virginia.

True to his word, young Joe kept running away.

He traveled to most of the 48 states, changing his name as often as his location, and after awhile his folks gave up. He worked in the Oklahoma oil fields and he spent time as a cowboy in Texas. It was nothing like a John Wayne movie. “It ain’t pretty,” he drawled.

I remember him as a tough father, setting standards impossible for a 5-year-old to meet. I was always a little afraid of him.

When I was married, he didn’t speak to me or my new husband for a year. I had taken the unpardonable step of marrying a career Army officer. If you couldn’t marry a Marine, why bother!

But something magic happens when a boy becomes a grandfather, and it happened for my Dad. Overnight, he became “Grandpappy” – endlessly patient, loving, and funny. Down on the floor on all fours, letting little ones crawl up his sides and swing from his arms, singing songs, using comic voices to tell the “real” story of the Three Little Pigs and Goldilocks. He’d sit for hours with a fretful 3-year-old, carefully popping single morsels of cereal into the tiny mouth. He became a family legend, as all good grandfathers do.

It all goes so fast. Hard to believe that the same little fellow who used to store dried worms in his pockets (you never know when you’ll need dried worms) while he played on the floor with Grandpappy, is now a grandfather himself. So it was in this sentimental mood last week that I packed a bulgy suitcase with gifts and headed to Minnesota for a visit with my youngest grandchildren. I took a talking fly swatter for my son. It came in a very nice gift box. The fly swatter says such things as “Gotcha!” or “Hasta la Vista!” as you swat the fly. I don’t know why you couldn’t say these things yourself and save money, but I saw some really big flies in Minnesota, so perhaps it’s best to conserve your energy for the actual swat.

My signature activity on these visits is making animal-shaped pancakes. We made elephants and camels and rabbits. Anything you can’t identify is either a whale or an amoeba. Or a rattlesnake. “My Daddy knows how to make real pancakes,” Matt observed. It turns out that real pancakes are frozen, and come from the supermarket in a box with big red letters.

We watched Grandson Will star as King Solomon in a church play. “Couldn’t we just do a DNA test,” the King asked plaintively when the two mothers brought their “sniffly, snuffly baby who cries all the time” to him for his wise decision. We were all proud when he decided the right way and clapped and laughed a lot, the way grandparents do at church plays.

Afterward, back at home, 4-year-old Matt basked in the afterglow of his exemplary rendition of “Twinkle, Twinkle.” He leaned comfortably back into his father’s arms and remarked to me, “Your little kid turned out to be my Daddy.” Magic isn’t it?

Dorothy Wilhelm is a professional speaker, humorist and columnist. She can be reached by e-mail at DOROWIL@aol.com or on the web at www.itsnevertoolate.com or follow her blog at www.itsnevertoolate.com/blog.html.