84 COLIN HOGG
HIS SEVEN GRANDCHILDREN ARE DUE VISITS, COLIN REALISES
Not wanting to sound pathetic here, but I’m sometimes not sure I’m a very good grandfather. Which isn’t to say I’m a bad granddad, just that I feel I’m not that hot at the fine art of grandfathering. I mainly know this because some of my friends are so outstandingly good at it.
Others not so. But I’ve found it’s hard to get a handle on the business of being grand, not helped at all by the fact that I don’t live in the same town as any of my grandkids, so the opportunities for practice are extremely limited.
I’m planning to go on tour to visit them all in the next month or so, once I get a small mountain of work out of the way, but that’s not really what grandfathering’s supposed to be about. It seems like it’s mainly about being handy. Which is to say nearby.
Which I’m not. And I’m also not sure popping in for the brief and overheated encounters that visits tend to be is quite good enough. Though it’s usually a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to my tour, which will take me to Auckland, Sydney and Melbourne, all going well.
I can’t leave anyone out and, as of right now, there are seven grandchildren – two of whom I haven’t even met yet. One of them, little Maia in Sydney, is almost six months old. It’s a wonder I haven’t been arrested for neglect as a grandparent.
I wonder if I’ve been unconsciously waiting till they’re old enough to talk with about music, books and the secrets of the universe. Well, just the secrets I’ve uncovered. But I’m not sure that will do. I suspect the kids would rather go to the zoo or a movie or their favourite fast-food outlet. Or jump with me on the trampoline, which I’d rather not do for too long, not quite having the bounce
I used to have.
It might be that one of the key parts of grandparenting is spoiling. I seem to recall getting quite a lot of that from my sole set of grandparents, though they too lived in another town from the one I was in. But the times I did spend with them must have been extra special because I recall them to this day.
My grandfather’s garden full of currant bushes and giant veges, the homemade cordial my grandmother kept badly hidden in a kitchen cupboard under the sink. Granddad, a skinny little guy, dressing up as an unconvincing Santa Claus for family Christmases and the money they’d always slip me when I left to go home.
“Get yourself something,” my grandmother would whisper.
Several of my own grandchildren are too young to be slipping cash to. The youngest, Tiaho in Auckland, was born just last Christmas Day. If I slipped him five bucks, he’d probably try to eat it.
“All care and no responsibility” is a phrase popularly used to describe the place of us grandparents in the scheme of things, but I don’t think that gets to it either. It must be more to do with time spent together, not quantity so much as quality. You know, the bits you’ll remember.