Grandpa Stories

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My friend Mike Moldeven is 93+ and is an active writer with his own blog. He created writings called "Grandpa Stories" some of which were published. His grandkids loved them and it helped him be close with his kids and grand kids. The following is his blog about how / why he began these stories.

During a talk I gave to a senior citizens group a woman in the audience remarked, ‘I’m a volunteer helper in a class of first graders at (naming a nearby school.) I haven’t given it much thought until now, but I’ve come to realize that some youngsters see their grandparents regularly, others rarely, and still others see their grandparents not at all. For a few, grandparents live too far away, and other youngsters don’t know where their grandparents live or even if they have grandparents, but saddest of all are the kids who don’t know what grandparents are.’

Grandparents and grandchildren are natural allies, but when their homes are too far apart, or other barriers intervene, their alliance weakens. Everybody loses, including the youngsters’ parents - the generation in the middle.

I live in one city, my grandchildren in another almost a thousand miles distant. During one of my visits I took my, then, three-year-old granddaughter for a stroll. We paused to examine a spider’s web spanning a space between two shrubs. A rain shower had passed shortly before and droplets festooned the web’s strands and rainbow-sparkled in the morning sunlight. Standing there, both of us bent forward peering into the web, I wove a story that transformed the sparkling strands into a carnival and the spider into an acrobat. Granddaughter’s eyes widened with wonder.

We continued on and stopped at a house to observe a cat on the porch playing with a yellow ball. I wove another tale, this time of a cat and a strange ball that bounced too high and disappeared into a cloud. Again, my granddaughter’s expression showed her pleasure in hearing grandpa’s story. For the remainder of my visit, and during subsequent visits, I told her, and when he was old enough, my grandson, of the world around us and how we hoped to, some day, live all together peacefully on Planet Earth.


Visits, in either direction were infrequent. Adult-oriented telephone calls usually left only brief moments for talking to grandchildren. Long distance calls just didn’t generate the right ambiance and enough time for the relaxed talking and easy listening that goes naturally with a grandpa story. Then, too, at the close of an adult telephone conversation the youngsters are usually busy at other things, and sometimes grandpas just don’t do well as talkers.


In my situation, I filled the gap with hand-scribed and, later on, typed stories. The letter-stories lengthened our telephone chats to devising plots for new stories, flesh-out characters, settings, and scenes. There are no better aids to a grandparent-grandchild telephone or email story conference than our faithful friends Who, What, Where, When, Why and How.

In my situation, one letter-story followed another, often illustrated with pictures from discarded magazines. When I couldn’t find a just-right illustration, I laboriously sketched an all-thumbs grandpa original. It was an enjoyable experience for me, and feedback from the family showed it was enjoyable for my grandchildren as well.