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.