Out for brunch with DadDad at a local diner frequented by me mum, many years ago. Â Therefore it’s a sentimental favorite. Â Pops reaches for something to sweeten up his coffee, and contemplates the various colored packets containing faux sugar.
“Let’s see: blue, pink, or yellow?” Â he asks no one in particular. Â I see the sugar jar next to him and ask the obvious question.
“Why not go for the real thing, Pops? Heck, you’re 89. Â I think you’re entitled to pull out all the stops now.”
He happily obliges, as the waitress approaches the table. Â I repeat our exchange to her.
“Eighty-nine? What’s your secret?” she asks.
He considers the question for just a moment as he stirs.
“Get up in the morning.”
Doesn’t matter the generation in your family–old or young, I think you all have the right perspective! Now just make sure that prodigy of a little girl of yours gets all of DadDad’s stories down…can’t imagine she wouldn’t be perfect for that job 🙂
You are so kind. Also, I am so sneaky, what with my witholding reportage on all the lunatic fringe nutcakery that also roams around the family — old to young — on a daily basis. Still, thanks. I do bring the son along on every trip to DadDad, so they can sop one another up. Girlie’s now in school, and it’s harder to pull off. But thanks for the reminder. Everyone needs to get every elder in their family to talk into a video camera or tape/digital audio recorder of some sort. We’ve been asking him to write his stories down for years, and it’s overdue time we bum rush him with equipment (and cub reporters) to extract them from him.
If only you had a digital audio recorder…
! Like, say, another open-ended loaner from an open-hearted chum, mebbe? 😉
My grandmother used to say when people asked her how she managed to look so young at 80-whatever (she looked like she was in her early 70’s – heh) that she “never left the house without her face on.” Coming from a woman who always had lipstick on the answer might seem obvious, but I think it was more about her choice to love each day no matter what happened.
My grandma tells lots of family stories, but clams up when you ask her specific questions or point any kind of recording device her way. What I did with her was have my laptop open when she started telling a story and then turn it around to face her with the webcam going. She sometimes wondered why it was facing her, but soon forgot it was there (and didn’t know what it was doing). I did ask a few leading questions that opened up some stories I hadn’t heard before.
It’s one of those things you just have to *do*–not make a big fuss out of it, or it will never happen. I say that b/c it took me way too may years of saying I was going to do it to actually start. Luckily she’s living long and lucid.