B1029-1 Grampa

My mother's great-grandfather was always called Grandpère, reflecting his French heritage. Her maternal grandfathers were said to be of staid English stock. My brother, an amateur genealogist, traced their history back to the shores of Normandy, however, where a remote ancestor embarked with William the Conqueror in 1066 A.D. to trouble King Harold in old Albion. This so-called English ancestor might more properly be called a Viking, since he was a field commander with wild Bill and his marauding Normand raiders.

My father's great-grandfather was always called Grossvater, reflecting his German heritage. His maternal grandfathers hardly knew what to call themselves because they came from the Alsace-Lorraine region, and they might be called Grandpère in one era and Grossvater in another era, depending on whether Parisians or Prussians were more influential at the time.

Today, all my brothers (and my wife's brothers as well) who have grandchildren are simply called "grampa." There is nothing grand about any of us. Instead of calling me Grandpère, people are more likely to call me Grand Pear, reflecting my shape. I think that the anglicizing of those sonorous French surnames had something to do with it. Gresham’s Law, when applied to family names, always results in a relative impoverishment. You cannot be a Grandpère if you possess a squat, toady surname. Trust me on this. Monsieur Pierre de LaFountaine IV, for example, can always be called Grandpère. Pete Fountain, on the other hand, will always be called “grampa.”

I never heard any grandfather referred to as “Papa” or “Pepe” until I moved to Ohio. That may reflect the fact that I come from prosaic origins, having spent years steeped in indifference and ignorance. Even to this day, though, those names strike me as really strange things to call a grandfather. They seem more appropriate to a father than to grandfather. But then, the names people use for grandparents can really be strange.

My grandniece received an assignment in her elementary school class one day to write on a piece of paper the name she used to refer to her grandmother. Everyone else in the class was told to do the same thing. I'm not exactly sure why, but somehow those slips of paper came into my hands, and I was absolutely amazed at the variety of ways those youngsters referred to their grandmothers. To be sure, every conventional name could be found in that collection of names. More troubling, however, were those names that hardly seemed to go beyond inchoate monosyllabic murmurs: moo-moo, mau-mau, bik-bik, ti-ti, etc. Some of the names struck me as patently offensive, and I found it difficult to believe that any kindly old grandmother could sit with implacable equanimity while some wretched grandchild called her something that horrid - and without Grandmère running immediately for the switch.

My grandmother, an austere Grossmutter, would have slapped the lips right off my face if I had said something like that to her. I could call her gramma. I could call her grandmother. But if I had called her bik-bik, she would have clobbered me. She retained many of those stern Prussian characteristics from the past, the milder Alsatian influences having by then diminished to nothingness by the ravages of time. Calling her bik-bik would have been the verbal equivalent of jumping up and down on her parlor furniture: either one would get any grandchild of her’s the top spot on her Dead Guy Pile out in the back yard.

Whatever you call it, it’s great to be a grampa.

C3001-43 Thanksgiving: Wind Chimes

I am thankful for the way that You ran Your fingers across the wind chime tubes even though the trees sat still and watched in awe. She noticed how the sounds had filtered into the kitchen without the stirring of the wind. And she laughed when I said that You were playing with our chimes again only because You knew how much I loved the sound of Your voice speaking through the tubes.

B1006-2 The Words We Use

I stood next to that rack of gift cards in the supermarket and pondered the many choices I had before me. When a woman came by and stood next to me, I showed her a gift card from Ruby Tuesday restaurant. I asked her if you could use that card on a Wednesday. She looked genuinely puzzled and muttered a tentative “I guess so” in response. Later, when I went to the check-out counter, I asked that chirpy check-out girl the same question. She, too, looked pensive and unsure when I asked her that question. She did seem a bit more certain that I could use a Ruby Tuesday gift card on a Wednesday, however. She told me that she had gone to T.G.I. Friday’s restaurant recently with her boyfriend. As they sat in the booth waiting for their order to arrive, she looked around the restaurant and then she told her boyfriend that it was funny that “this place is only open on Fridays.” Indeed it was! But then funny things always seem to happen to chirpy blondes. Meanwhile, the woman standing next to the gift card rack couldn’t take her eyes off the Ruby Tuesday cards as she stood there frowning.

I had thought to ask her: If two planes flying side by side is called a formation, what do you call four planes flying side by side? An eight-mation? But that might have been unfair. I suspect that she would be the sort of woman who would be surprised to learn that she had calculus on her teeth when she never took any math courses beyond Algebra One. Ah, sweet, imponderable mysteries.