The doting grandparent

I’ll tell you a story.

I’ll tell you of how through thick and thin my boys have grown up, of how they found love, of how in the midst of their innocuous lovestruck joy I felt genuine happiness for them. No reason. Sure, greenish envy aside, sometimes I feel like a doting grandparent standing by the sidelines watching these kids grow up through heartache and love, through teases and lies, through laughters and cries.

I am a doting grandparent whom they confide to, and I fended advice like fortune cookies who sometimes seem to know what they really refer to. I’m like the wise old geezer who talked as if I know what I’m talking about, and most of the time they thought I really know my stuff. Maybe I really do. Maybe I don’t. It all boils down to the core of the human heart, where surely our capacities to love are the same, even if we do it differently, even if we do it in our own ways.

And by the by some of my girls have grown up too. It’s a little odd and perhaps awkward even to catch a fleeting sly grin, a knowing eye-to-eye interlock, a passing smile. Can’t wait till the day I attend all of their weddings.

Someday, I hope I could deliver my own wedding invitations. Private. Nothing lavish. That is if I found love in someone different.

I don’t know if I’d like to have kids, I don’t know if I’d like my defected little genes being passed down and someday they’ll blame me for it. Cute little devils could turn into nasty hot-blooded acnes on your face in a matter of years. But then only by having kids would you be able to tell them, and their children, “I’ll tell you a story.”