Our Honolulu
Grandkids, grand time in Florida

By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

Grandchildren are much smarter than they used to be. This came to my attention on vacation in Florida while visiting two of my 40-something kids and their offspring.

After Dillon, age 9, had gone to bed, I picked up his Gameboy to see what this Pokeman rage is all about. I got the machine started, but the game technology was way over my head. It was designed for rocket scientists, not grandfathers.

This time I planned ahead to think of ways to get reacquainted. Dillon and I had talked over the telephone about the Headless Horseman so I brought a copy of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."

Reading it together went pretty well. However, the best competition for his Gameboy was my battered boyhood photo album. I showed him a picture of me at age 5 at the knee my grandfather in a frock coat and white beard, and he was riveted.

"There's MY grandfather," I said. "He's your great-great-grandfather."

"Cool," said Dillon.

As a boy, I fabricated costumes out of odds and ends for my imaginary games. I could be a cowboy, a pirate, an Indian, Tarzan and a big-game hunter in Africa. Dillon surveyed my costume collection, unimpressed, because he has one of his own.

I no longer worry that kids don't make their own toys the way I did. You see, he introduced me to his collection of plastic monsters and graciously permitted me to play with the smallest, weakest one for battles.

Tired of losing, I began making up weapons, like, "Dillon, there's a Whippledapper Ray Gun in my monster's nose that is shooting out the eyeballs of your monster." He went and got a better monster. So I invented a new weapon for my monster.

Soon he was making up weapons and didn't want to stop playing the game.

But I can tell you from experience that home-made toys haven't lost their appeal. Adam, age 12, was just as absorbed by the photo album as Dillon. Some of the photos are of Adam's father and uncle as boys.

In one photo, his uncle Buck at age 12 is walking on stilts I made him for Christmas. "It would be cool to make stilts," said Adam wistfully. "Let's make some tomorrow," I said.

So while his father, a glass sculptor, got ready for a cross-country trip, Adam and I drove to Home Depot for lumber and bolts, brought them back to the glass studio and made stilts. We got the bolts for the foot rests in a little crooked but they worked.

I don't know which of us was more proud when he stepped up and walked on them.

I sat for 12 hours in a Delta Airlines airplane on my return flight because they wouldn't let us get off to stretch our legs during an hour and a half in Los Angeles. What made it bearable was Dillon's remark, "I wish you didn't have to go home, Grampa."

Bob Krauss can be reached at 525-8073.