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BACKGROUND MUSIC NOT YOUR SCENE?
YOU HAVE MY PERMISSION TO TURN IT OFF RIGHT HERE!
(It's a generation-gap thing!
 Just as parenting has changed with the times, so too has grandparenting. And, I think, for the good.
 My own children were lucky-on the maternal side, unlucky on my side. My Dad would have made a great grandfather, with his jovial round face, his lilting Scottish accent, his huge lifting arms. But he was killed in a timber accident when I was 10 and we (all five) missed out on fathering and the joy of his seeing our journey into adulthood. My mother kept the family together but closeness bred possessiveness and she never adjusted to our leaving home, let alone to our bringing in strange partners to share our lives. As a result, she saw less of her grandchildren than might have been and they identified instead with the accepting Pa and Ma on my wife's side. These were the grandparents of storyland. They lived far away, so absence made the heart grow fonder. She was the perfect cook, tins always laden with biscuits, fruitcake baked on a regular basis, chops and vegles cooked to perfection, not fried in fat as I had always seen them. She was warm but firm, an untidy house not tolerated, everyone expected to help, nothing too much trouble, the flowers always fresh. But he was the star.
 Now here we are, grandparents ourselves. We live close by and see them often. We are called Don and Tricla, not Ma or Pa, not Gramps or Grandma.
They know we work and they stay more often with their Dad's parents because they are retired. But we are much more equals with them than we or our children were with our grandparents. Adrian, four, and Luke, two, expect clear explanations of what Is going on, how things work. The computer is something they rely on us for to set up for games, but they don't want help once they get started. They enjoy helping sweep up the autumn leaves, collecting acorns we can then glue to boards and spray with gold paint. Adrian says with genuine praise, "I'm very pleased with the Peter Pan hat Tricia made for my fancy dress party."
 The modern grandparent is different. Less remote, more of a resource for practical help than mystery and awe. They are real people, not roles to play. And though our grandchildren are born much later in life than we were in comparison to our grandparents, there seems less distance in ages, less need for respect based on supposed authority or wisdom. As Margaret Mead said in the 1980s, this is the first generation In history where the children know more than their elders. They don't, of course, but she was right in a metaphorical sense. For they are brought up to be themselves, to question everything, and they judge people in their veracity, their openness to discussion and challenge. Gone is the phoniness of old, when as a child I suspected many an adult emperor had no clothes but was too intimidated to say so.
 Research shows that the extended family is alive and well in Australia. There are more three-generation families now than in the past, because we live longer. But we will probably not live to see our great-grandchildren in the way our parents did, because marriage and childbearing are much delayed. Indeed, we may be the last generation where almost everyone had children and, potentially, grandchildren What a gap that will be in the lives of the elderly of the future.
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Reactions, Comments and suggestions to: robin_knight@bigfoot.com
My own maternal grandfather was a terrifying figure, largely because he was deaf and would bellow his commands from the "throne" that sat beside the wood stove in the family kitchen. We were forbidden from trespassing in his immaculate and bounteous vegetable garden, though we could watch and learn about trenching asparagus, mounding the carrots and beans or mulching the strawberries. Years after his death I was shocked to return to his house and discover how small that garden was, how cramped the living space in which he loomed so large.
Pa the star. Witty, energetic, always playing pranks. The snake he had killed carefully placed on the path outside the kitchen so he and the grandchildren could roar with delight at the panicked warning of the women to stay back. The dead crow they wrapped-in foil and left in the fridge. The stories he told over and over to each successive youngest. The short-sheeted beds they managed when the other adults were preoccupied playing cards. His dirty old jeep, the faithful dog Bingo sitting beside him slathering as they bumped over the dusty roads to the river. Then the fishing, him baiting their lines, showing them how to cast, getting the fish off the hook. not to mention the hours spent yabbying in the farm dam; the day he boiled the yabbies in a petrol can wediscovered, just in time, he had used for arsenic to spray the vines. Pa could have wiped out the entire extended family that day, but it became the stuff of family legend and we still laugh about it now he's 95.