Best granddad. Or the worst

The best Granddad in the world opens the door
for Elliott to make all sorts of new acquaintances

‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’, wrote the American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson. To him, it didn’t matter whether you always held the same beliefs, only that whatever you believed, you endorsed it forcefully and upheld it energetically at the time you believed it. ‘Speak what you think now in hard words,’ he urged, ‘and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day’.

Well, it seems that at the tender age of three, our grandson Elliott, who has just spent four days with us without his parents or sister, is a convinced Emersonian. Indeed, I suppose a purist among logicians might go so far as to claim that he falls into a fallacy, the excluded middle. 

It seems that I am either the best granddad in the world, or the worst, but never any of the little dull things in between.

The visit started well. There was the ice cream in the centre of the village of La Cañada, to which our street belongs (I like to think of the shops in the centre as ‘downtown’ and, since the pocket handkerchief of a square with the ice cream shop has the same name as Madrid’s great Puerta del Sol, clearly the village authorities feel the same).

Joy is an ice cream

Later there was the opportunity to make the most of the cherry season.

Or a bowl of cherries

We also went several times to the swimming pool. It’s not ours alone. We share it with fifteen other households, but that’s not many and we often have it to ourselves. 

It took a little while for Elliott to get his confidence back, after a year without swimming. We spent our time mostly in the kids’ area, which is reassuringly shallow. But we were able to get some good games going, when the best granddad in the world (definitely!) swung him around in circles with his feet in the water or supported him while he doggy-paddled around. The best was when he came and sat on my lap while I sat on the bottom of the pool. That meant I could move around with him in that safe position, to the delight of us both.

Enjoying the kids’ pool with Granddad

But, sadly, things turned much less satisfying that evening. He and I went to Burger King, usually a moment of supreme pleasure for him. But, maybe because he’d been to the swimming pool twice that day, he was tired. He barely touched his food, announcing that he no longer liked nuggets, an astonishing declaration from someone who had always previously been a great fan of them. Then, while waiting for his dessert, he headed back to the play area, something he loves taking advantage of while at Burger King. This time, however, though he dutifully removed his shoes, as specified in the instructions, instead of climbing up to the top of the construction in order to slide back down from floor to floor as he usually does, he just lay on the ground without moving.

Eventually, his dessert was ready. It was ice cream with caramel sauce on it, which should have been received with enthusiasm. Sadly, it had been served with a spoon stuck upright in it. 

‘You’ve tasted it!’ Elliott challenged me and started to cry.

‘I haven’t,’ I assured him, with perfect truth.

‘You have, you have,’ he repeated, tears now running freely, ‘I don’t want it.’

He pushed it away.

No amount of reasoning on my part could convince him to eat it, so I started preparing everything to leave. But, rather than throw out his ice cream, now melting away, I quickly ate it myself. After all, he clearly wasn’t going to. On the other hand, with hindsight, it occurred to me that it wasn’t a move liable to make my protestations of innocence – true though they were – any more believable.

I’d undoubtedly become the world’s worst granddad.

Just before things turned dismal:
this playground, as well as rides, has rocks, water, fish and turtles

Nor was what I think of as the Burger King Incident the low point of the visit. That came the following day. We went to a favourite playground of his, by bike, him in the kid seat behind me. Everything went fine until we were a couple of minutes from home. There’s a downhill stretch there so I was going fairly quickly. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but I think I hit a bit of a shallow pothole, causing the front wheel to rise off the ground and, when it came down on loose stones, to slide away from me, bringing us both crashing down.

Poor Elliott. He had a terrible shock and wailed to show it. Fortunately, and this was confirmed by a paediatrician later, he had no worse injury than a nasty graze on his arm. With the help of several people who came rushing over to our assistance and assured him he had nothing seriously wrong, it was easy, courageous boy that he is, to calm him down quickly. He stopped crying though I don’t think his view of his granddad improved at all.

Meanwhile, my left leg and arm were covered in blood. I took a look at the knee and thought, ‘oh Lord! That could need stitches’. A neighbour tried to patch me up with steri-strips but she was convinced, and convinced me, that I needed to go and see a nurse. The nurse re-did the patching but told me I just had to go to hospital. As I feared, that meant spending five hours in an emergency department waiting for treatment which, in the end, involved six stiches.

The only good side to all this is that we had, I felt, reached rock bottom. The only way forward now was up. Or so I hoped. And it turned out my hope was justified.

I took Elliott out for another bike ride the next day, but of a very different kind. He was on his own bike and, since it’s a little big for him, I trotted along behind him holding his shoulder so he didn’t fall. That was a far more satisfactory experience.

I asked that afternoon who the best granddad in the world was.

‘You,’ he said.

One way of looking at that is to see it as Emersonian non-consistency. However, I like to think it’s more a matter of not holding a grudge. And in my view, that’s a really good character trait.

By then, I wasn’t feeling too well, so I retreated to bed. But Danielle tells me that when she dropped him off with his dad at the station in Valencia, Elliott told him, ‘I wish I hadn’t gone on that bike ride’. 

That’s amazingly mature for a three-year-old. It’s also entirely legitimate. I share the sentiment and also wish we hadn’t gone on that bike ride.

All I can say is, ‘don’t worry Elliott, or Matilda, that’s the last time granddad goes out on a bike with a child behind him. I can live with the chance of injuring myself, but never again want to put either grandchild at risk.’

Something I’m sure Sheena and Nicky, their parents, will be relieved to know.