Share your favorite grandparent story!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

When I was about three years old, I wanted a swingset more than anything else. With that in mind, I walk up to my grandfather one day and say, “Granddaddy, I’ve been saving up all my money to buy a swingset and I need you to take me to pick it up.”

“All right,” he says, “show me how much money you have.”

I promptly place 36 cents in his hand. Grandaddy stands there for a moment, trying not to laugh. He then pats me on the head and says, “Go get in the car.”

He drives me to the store, we pick out a swingset that must have cost a couple of hundred bucks, and he brings it home and installs it for me. I was the happiest little girl in Mississippi.

Ten years ago today in 1993, he died. I still smile thinking of that incident, and in his honor, I’ve decided to open this thread to pay proper homage to the grandparents who enriched all our childhoods. So share away. :slight_smile:

.:Nichol:.

2

What a guy! Great story Nichol_storm, thanks for sharing.

My favorite grandparent story involves my dad’s dad. We were visting them (they lived in a VERY tiny town in south central South Dakota) and for whatever reason, my parents were someplace else one evening. My uncle was playing in a softball game and Grandpa & Grandma and I went to watch. I was very young and pretty bored with the game. As I sat there watching and fidgeting, I felt this nudge in my side. I glanced over to see Grandpa holding some change in his hand and grinning from ear to ear. He didn’t say a word but nodded his head towards the general direction of the concession stand. I think he didn’t want Grandma to know he was doing. I grabbed the money and sprinted down the bleachers. At the stand I just tanked up on candy (you could get A LOT of candy for a little bit of change in this town). I came back to where my grandparents were sitting and began to munch away. Pretty soon that was gone. (Oink, oink - yes, I know. For the record, I did offer some to him, but he declined.) Anyway, the candy was gone and I was still fidgeting (this time from a sugar high) when I feel another nudge. There’s Grandpa with his huge grin and another handful of change. And so I went and loaded up again. I think this happened two or three times during the course of the game. For some reason, I remember that candy tasting better than any I’ve had since.

Thank you Grandpa.

3

ROFL! This is how grandparents seek revenge on their own kids for being such brats. My grandfather used to take us on shopping “sprees” at the grocery store in which we’d buy all the things our mom wouldn’t let us have: Sugared cereal, Gatorade, candy, pop, Dukes of Hazzard posters (ok, that was just me.)

Other than that, my grandparents were sorta horrible. I distinctly remember my grandmother yelling one Thanksgiving dinner: “What’s the name of that little nigger boy on TV? Webster?!?! That little nigger just cracks me up!” Holy crap! Even when I was like 10 years old I knew that was messed up. My brother was only 7 at the time and he looked at me like “WTF?!?!” Yikes. My hair stands on end just thinking about it.

I LOVE the story about the swingset though.

4

My stepfather’s stepfather was the only grandfather I’ve ever had. He was a brilliant, hilarious man. Once when we’d gone to visit the grandfolks in Charleston, West Virginia, we all went to church on Sunday morning (over Granddad’s protests). I ended up sitting next to him. The sermon that day had something to do with the Sermon on the Mount; I don’t recall it exactly, having been an easily distracted youngster. Anyway, Granddad listened for a while, then clearly decided he’d had enough of this “meek shall inherit the Earth” stuff.

He leaned over to me, and I can still vividly recall his warm, pipe-smoke-and-mothballs smell as he said, “[young jackelope], let me tell you something: The. Meek. Get. Shit. If you want something in this world, you have to go get it.”

I guess it’s not as warm and fuzzy as the others posted here, but it’s a lesson that has never let me down.

I miss him often.

5

My granddad, tall, imposing, and rather genteel, is deathly afraid of any and all bugs. All of them.

When I was four, bugs were the coolest thing ever, especially rolly-pollies, with which I spent hours in the dirt playing.

One day at my grandparents’ house, my granddad and uncle were outside with me as I was rooting around in the dirt, gathering a rolly-polly treasure. I found one that I particularly liked and wanted to keep him, and for some reason decided to give him to my granddad for safekeeping.

My granddad and my uncle were deeply engaged in conversation, so I walked over and said, “Here Granddaddy, hold this,” and put the rolly-polly in his hand, which he had put out automatically. For a minute or so, he didn’t realize he had a creepy-crawly on his hand because he was still talking to my uncle. Then he looked down.

My granddaddy let loose the most girlish scream and started flailing his arms wildly, sending my bug to Kingdom Come. I stared at him indignant and hurt, and shouted, “Granddaddy! You killed my rolly polly!”

6

My maternal grandmother was amazing. Stunningly beautiful in her day, petite with waist length hair, she brought up 5 children singlehandedly, kept chickens, ducks, cats, dogs, rabbits and a mynah bird. Juggled 2 husbands, a lover and a lodger, and still fed high tea to her family and their children most every Saturday until she was 93 years old.

The original Domestic Goddess.

7

My grand-papa on my dad’s side is a wonderful guy. He’s just… special. Everyone loves him to death, he’s well known in his community for having a heart as big as the world (as the french-canadian expression goes.)

We have a common trait that we have decided skips a generation. We bonk our heads everywhere, usually fracturing our skulls in the process. This is a known family fact, and we both get teased about it all the time.

My grand-papa and I have always been close - really close - especially with me being the oldest of the grandkids, and the one he practically raised from infancy to age 7 when we moved (my parents lived in the duplex above theirs)

Now… with that relationship and our curious family trait in mind… imagine the following.

Teenaged Elly, who is built like a piano mover and can do handy work like nobody’s business, is up on the summer cottage’s roof with her grand-papa. We were putting down shingles, commenting on how no one had gotten injured so far today! Our heads were still intact, which was a surprise to everyone.

Grand-maman called us in for lunch, and just as we stood up, my grand-papa was attacked by a falcon nesting nearby - the darn thing had been flying around us all morning, and we knew it had young in its nest. Sure enough, the thing divebombs my grand-papa and whacks its beak into his (quite bald) head! All I could say was…“You were saying?” while grand-papa was clutching his head, trying not to howl in pain, and trying not to laugh at the same time. He managed to get down from the roof safely. We took care of the wounds inside. I teased him mercilessly about it through lunch…

… then grand-maman asks me to go get something from the pantry, which I did, like the obedient child that I am.

I didn’t notice the door of the cupboard above was open… nor did I notice it was riiiight above me when I got up, triumphantly showing my grandma I’d successfully retrieved the sugar bowl… WHACK. I smacked my head into the corner of the open door, leaving a nice dent in the top of my head, which quickly grew into an egg sized bump.

Grand-papa choked on his diet coke, spewed it all over the table, and turned bright red, tears streaming down his face, laughing like a madman. I chased him around the house, then outside (with the hose). We did manage to finish the roofing job… and spent the evening sprawled on the couches comparing head injuries past and present…

I love him. I can’t imagine a world without him in it. I know he’s going to “leave” someday, and I just don’t even want to THINK about it.

8

My Mom’s dad was self employed all his life, rather successfully it turned out. He believed in getting his monies worth out of everything. He had a couple of rent houses and when they were no longer worth keeping in good repair or he wanted to sell the land he would dismantle them and salvage anything he thought could be reused or resold. He built a barn out beside our house beside the pasture his brother kept cows in to store the bits and pieces of these houses.

One day, in the fall I would guess, as the bus stopped at the house beside Grandpa’s we saw through the woods a pony in the pasture. We jumped off the bus rather than wait for it to continue around the route to our house and ran down the path in the woods between the houses to the barn. Grandpa was there and said he’d seen this sorry excuse for a pony and had saved it from the glue factory thinking us kids might want it. He said he didn’t care for the pony, didn’t even like it and it was our reponsiblility to take care of it. (He bought us a saddle for it too.) The pony seemed to have no interest in Grandpa and if asked would probably said he didn’t like him him either.

Anyway, one day we walked out to the barn and Grandpa didn’t hear us come up, we saw him petting the pony and feeding it treats, talking to it as it leaned against him almost pinning him to the side of the barn. One of us made a noise and they heard us and they pony walked away and Grandpa made some comment to the pony about how he should have let it go to the glue factory. It always gave us a giggle to watch Grandpa and the pony when they didn’t know we were there.

Grandpa was a great old man. He made us kids work and taught us an appreciation of hard work and a job well done that I think a lot of people miss. He loved his grandkids and nothing made him happier than holidays when we ALL showed up. I wish he’d live a few more years to have seen some of his great-grandkids. Of course I also wish that my husband and everyone could have met him.

9

I didn’t know my dad’s parents very well. They never really learned to speak English and they were lots older than my mother’s parents. It wasn’t until I was lots older and they were both long dead that I wished I knew more about their lives.

My other grandparents were around until the mid 1990s. They were the perfect indulgent grandparents - spoiling us just enough but not letting us get away with anything really bad. I’ll always remember when I was about 5 or 6 asking my grandmother how old she was. She told me she was 22, which, of course, sounded so very very old. (she was actually 46 or 47 at the time)

These grandparents owned some property on the Magothy River, and they built a little cabin there. We’d go down just about every Sunday afternoon in the summer to swim and play in the sand and just relax. They only went down once a week, too, so my grandfater spent part of the day of leisure mowing the grass. He always wore these raggedy old shorts with a length of rope in place of a belt. Inevitably while mowing, his shorts would slip off his hips and he’d be standing there in his underwear. He’d stop, hitch up his shorts, tighten the rope, and resume mowing. As kids, we thought this was hilarious. Good thing he didn’t go commando - I might have been traumatized for life!

10

My grandaddy smelled like Right Guard deodorant and peppermints (the big sugar/peppermint pillows that melt in your mouth). He was a Baptist preacher, but he’d get bourbon from my dad to use as “cough syrup”.

My granny was a rough woman, she called all us grandkids “shithead”. She had long long hair that she wore back in a bun, with little finger waves on the sides of her face. I remember her letting me take out the pins and comb her long salt-n-pepper hair. One of my favorite memories.

11

My grandmother told me, “I’ve learned two things in life: Never get married, and never have children.”

Thus far, I have followed her advice to the letter.

12

I love my mother’s father to bits; he’s such a gruff old man, but his voice immediately softens when he talks to me. I’m the youngest grandkid, and the only grandkid he’s got, too - all the other grandkids come from his wife’s kids. I do consider them to be my cousins, not step-cousins or anything, and I’m close to Grandma (my mother’s stepmom), but Pa and I have a special connection.

Pa has always spoiled me rotten, and still does to this day - when I told him I was saving my graduation money to buy a computer, he wrote me a $1200 check with “We love you” in the memo. When I told him I was looking for one of those flashlights that slides and converts into a lantern, he went and found one that he had and gave it to me. When I told him I had to go to the mechanic the next day to get a new battery in my car (no man around and I don’t know how), he showed up from an hour away with one that very day - and put it in himself.

The best memory, though, was when I was little and he’d have little refund checks sent to me. He often bought things that had some sort of rebate - anything from power tools to tobacco - and when filling out the rebate information, he’d put my name and address instead. I’d get these little seven-dollars-or-so rebate checks in the mail for things we had never bought, and his name was nowhere on the things. My mom would always call and make sure it was from him. Now he usually doesn’t buy things with rebates, but once every couple of years, I’ll get some random rebate check and I know it’s from him. (Ahhh, warm fuzzies.)

13

My paternal grandmother was a cool lady. She died right before my only child was born; in fact, I was in labor at her funeral, but I went anyway.

My dad was her only child and they adored each other. 4 years later, he still can’t believe she’s gone. Although she was 86 and hadn’t lived a very healthy life, he thinks she died too young.

Anyway, the most touching grandma story I can think of happened more than 4 years after she died. She was a big woman with a big huge voice and she loved to yell to the little ones “Sweeeeeeeeeeeteeeeeeee! I love you, I love you, I love you!” She was famous for it. Recently, after some secret coaching, my son said to his grandpa/my dad, “Sweeeeeeeeeeeteeeeeeee! I love you, I love you, I love you!”

My dad cried, but I didn’t feel bad that my son was behind his tears. I think it was a great gift.

14

One of my favorite grandparent stories is also one of my saddest.

Two years ago, my grandpa was diagnosed with cancer. It was in January that we got the news, and it was on Mother’s Day that he died.

Over the course of those five months, my family and I watched him go from being a very rotund man, to under just 90 pounds. I live across the state from the rest of my family, but I made the drive up every weekend that spring to visit him. His weight loss was probably most evident to me because I would go a week without seeing him, then on the weekends I would just think, “Wow, how could he have lost that much weight this week?”

For the final 3 weeks, my mom would call me on Thursday night and tell me to get on the road to Grand Rapids right after work, because she didn’t know how much longer he’d be with us.

Then on Mother’s Day weekend, I got there late Friday night, and could not believe how emaciated he was. I absolutely did not even recognize his face. He was also comatose. My mother, my aunt and I spent the entire day and night Saturday sitting by his bed in shifts of 4-8 hours, giving him water with a dropper every so often, wetting his lips with wax, and just holding his hand.

It was about 3 a.m. Sunday, my mom was taking her bedside shift, when she woke me up because she thought he had died and asked me to go make sure. So I went in and checked, and sure enough, he was gone.

After we called my aunt and cousins, and they arrived, we woke my grandma up and told her.

Admist all the tears, my grandma touched his cheek and said, “He looks just like the slim, handsome young man that I married.”

And it really hit me because I had never seen the two of them very love-dovey toward each other. They bickered a lot, kind of like Jerry’s parents on Seinfeld. They even almost got a divorce about 15 years ago because of all the bickering.

Whereas I couldn’t get over how bad he looked, my grandma only saw how handsome he was. And I’ll never forget that little expression of love.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m a little verklempt.

Happy

15

My maternal grandfather was a great man. There was nothing he couldn’t fix. He built the house my grandmother still lives in. He only spoke a few words of English but he would never miss a John Wayne movie. And I found it funny that he would watch a show called Wow Wow Wes. He would chase the grandkids around the yard with his riding lawn mower. He helped build the railroad that came through town, and about 50 years later the train stopped running. His youngest son got a job tearing up the rails. Grandpa often questioned why he worked so hard if his son was only going to tear up his work. I’ll always remember him as a great towering man, when in fact he was only about 5’8". In the back yard he built a small room, the room contained a bed, a fan and a larger dresser. In the top drawer he kept his accordion. I would sit on the steps outside the room and listen to him play. Sweeter music has never graced this world.

I remember hearing my mother cry when she got the phone call that he had passed. I was 11y/o, my brother was 7. My little brother started crying when she told us. I can still hear him say “I don’t like it when people I love die.” It rained the day we buried him.

I named my first born in honor of my grandfather.

16

My grandma is 89. My grandfather, (her husband) died in 1988. She’s been living by herself ever since, and has certain “ways” about her. She keeps herself busy with charity work, the KOC, thrift shop duties, crafts, etc… A few weeks ago my mom and I went to see her. We wound up spending most of the day helping her put up a chicken wire fence around her garden (she insists that the chicken wire is invisible and therefore not unsightly to the neighbors unless the sun shines directly on it). We staked the fence around rusted bed posts that she must have found in the garbage or somewhere, and we tied these ‘stakes’ to the chicken wire with cut up nylon stockings. (She has millions of old stockings. I refer to them as ‘dead ladies’. She volunteers at a thrift store and I suspect that most of the things that get donated are from the deceased.) So there we are, in the garden: my 89 yr old gramma pounding bedposts into the ground and my mom and I cutting up stockings and tying them to chicken wire. My grandfather would have said, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Marie!” (Her name is Marie). She’s great. I love her.

17

I have lots of grandparents… My mom’s dad and her stepdad, my dad’s mom and dad, and theres another pair that I haven’t met yet(I should probably meet my biological father first, huh?) and then my mom puts my her husbands parents into that group too(Although I kinda loathe them) and then theres a great gramma or 3 in there too…

But my FAVORITE, all time best granpa is My grampa grant. My mom’s stepdad. I’m his special granddaughter and he’s my special grampa. He was the only one who could make me shutup when I was crying when I was a baby, and he’s always been there for me.

I don’t know if its true or not, but his wife, my grama shelly, said that he was kind of a violentish grumpyguts before I was born, and wasn’t pleasent to be around. Then apparently when I was bron he started to change and turn into the wonderful person that he is today.
He’s a carpenter, and I can remember drywalling with him when I was 2ish, wearing nothign but a pair of cowboy boots. I can remember him taking me for rides in his truck, and giving me ice cream when mom said no, and countless other things. He moved away last year, and while I saw them last summer, and in march, I still really miss him.

18

Same grandmother:

Me: “Have you ever read the Bible?”
Grandmom: “Of course I’ve read the Bible.”
Me: What did you think of it?"
Grandmom: [pause] " . . . It’s cute."

19

These are some great stories. I don’t know that this one will stack up, but it means something to me.

My grandparents (on my father’s side) lived in a little nothing town in West Texas. One summer (I think I was about 10), my mother was at a summer job in New York, and my father had gone up to see her, leaving my sister (about 6) and I at my grandparents’. Now that was a neat enough time in itself, but this is about the trip home.

My parents returned straight to where they lived (El Paso), and my grandparents were driving us kids there - a trip of about 4 hours, normally. My sister and I, who didn’t want the fun to be over, pestered and pestered them to take us to Carlsbad Caverns. Now, I can no longer remember where we conceived of this idea, or what possessed us to ask, but I do know we had no idea what it entailed. I look back and I realize a few things. Like, the route home going by way of Carlsbad was about 2 hours longer. Like the fact that there were entrance fees, and my grandparents did not have a lot of money. Like the fact that my grandparents weren’t necessarily in any condition for the kind of walk that the Caverns involve. Like the fact that they had not planned that delay in their schedule.

But they did it anyway - one of my best memories of my grandparents was them taking us to Carlsbad Caverns on this trip, where they stoically endured the energy the young kids had. (Granted, we took the elevator). Only a few years after that (I was 13), my grandfather died of a stroke; and now, many years later, my sister and my grandmother are no longer with us either.

But I still remember the 4 of us on that trip.

20

I visited my grandparents the day after I saw Saving Private Ryan in the theaters for the first time. My grandfather landed on D-Day +2, but I imagined the fighting had been no less savage than it was depicted in the first 30 or so minutes of the film. He’d never been shy about answering our questions about his time in the service, but my brother and I usually limited it to things like “Were you in Paris?” and other “Were you there?” type questions. We just never thought to ask him about any actual combat he saw.

It was going to be a short visit, I just had to pick something up, I guess. In passing, I mentioned that I had just seen the film. My grandfather asked how I liked it, and I said, after a thought, “You lived through that. How did you not lose your mind?” I had never seen him in a more brave light than I did right then. He smiled, went into another room, and returned with an armful of maps which he laid out on the dining room table. After nearly 3 and a half hours, he had retraced his route from Normandy to Berlin, sharing thoughts, experiences, and even a few stories I’m sure my grandmother never knew about. I never felt closer to him or appreciated him for being something other than my grandfather more than I did then. For those 3 or so hours, he was just a 24 year old, scared as hell, Cajun boy, trying to do his job and get back to his family and the woman he would love for another 55 years.

I’m glad my boy gets to know him.