Life in a snapshot - The Boston Globe

I had a pleasant moment on the phone today with an old friend. We were catching up, and she was telling me about her two little 2 year old grandsons. She commented that she had thought maybe she would never be a grandparent and then here are these two grandsons born three months apart. She spends her days now running Grandma's Daycare!
It reminded me of a column I had read by Ellen Goodman. Here is an excerpt:


Life in a snapshot - The Boston Globe

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"Parents - I remember well - are caught in the dailiness of child-raising. But grandparents, imbued with a different sense of time, create a narrative arc across generations. If parents are the forward momentum of a child’s life, we become the curators of traditions.

How odd, I think, as I sort the photographs, that of all the generations, mine would end up as traditionalists. Weren’t we the ones who upended the whole culture, the relationships between husbands and wives, the preconceptions about family? Aren’t we the people who were born before TV and, in a blink, got Medicare cards and iPhones at the same time? Weren’t we our country’s designated change agents?

Yet, here we are after all this time, with our children’s children. We have become, of all things, of all people, the collectors of memories and builders of family traditions. This is what we do with small people on a small island, one snapshot, one story, and one summer at a time."