Psychologists tell us that parents are the major influence in a young child’s life, but for my money they underestimate the importance of grandparents. Mine were born in Europe, and while they all spoke perfect English their lightly accented voices still carried within them the echo of another time and place, another way of life. For a child growing up in a brand-new suburb where all the houses looked alike and nothing suggested the existence of a world much older than I was myself, the presence of these stately older folks opened a magical window onto another world.
My paternal grandparents had emigrated from Russia as young adults just before the Russian Revolution. One or the other (though officially still married they had separated years earlier) came to our house every Friday night to babysit for me and my siblings. I always thought that everyone had grandparents like that – people who were part of your extended nuclear family, who helped take care of you when you were small, and who woke up with you early on Saturday mornings to make tea and tell you stories about the exotic places where they’d grown up. Only later did I find out that some of my friends barely even knew their grandparents. You don’t know what you’re missing, I thought.
My grandfather, in what I always took to be a holdover from his early life in Russia, loved to take long, meandering walks in the woods behind our housing development, with some wild berry picking along the way if we got lucky. One favorite route followed an abandoned highway from the 1920s, called the old Motor Parkway, that had been built by one of the Vanderbilt descendants to help wealthy Jazz Age car owners get to their estates on Long Island. At one point, the roadbed crossed a trestle above the tracks of the Long Island Railroad. When we got to the trestle’s edge, our grandfather would lead us down the embankment to stand alongside the tracks and wait for the next approaching train. As soon as we heard the whistle and saw the locomotive slowly come into view around a far-off curve down the tracks, he would pull out his white handkerchief to give to one of us to wave at the oncoming engineer. The engineer always waved back.
The unconditional love that grandparents bestow and the limitless sense of responsibility they exude for their grandchildren add a special dimension to a child’s life. As big and authoritative as one’s parents are, when the grandparents are around even a small child can sense that the parents were actually once little children themselves.
