Memory Maker
For the last several days I’ve been grandpa in residence, getting the kids up in the morning and off to their summer care programs. Then I pick them up in the afternoon and we scout around to find a place to eat. We’ve got a rotating list of venues we like, each of the kids gets a choice and off we go. Ordering is straight forward and there’s usually a bit of negotiating around desserts. We’re a little team. During the day I do little chores to help out my daughter. Yesterday, I cleaned the cat box.
Next week we’re all off to DC to watch her husband, the Lt. Colonel, graduate from the Eisenhower School of National Security and Resource Strategy. He’ll get a master’s degree. It’s one of the five war colleges the Army uses to educate it’s leaders. Then, over the course of the summer, the entire family will relocate to the Washington D.C area as he takes up a new job. There’s a lot of anxiety and anticipation in the air.
Of course, it puts my grandkids a long way off, but their new house has four bedrooms, and one of them is for either me or my son-in-law’s mother. The grandparent room. Good. I like the area. I was stationed at Quantico, just down the road, and lived in Bethesda, Maryland as a child, and we also lived three years in Portsmouth. You might say these are my old stomping grounds and it feels as though this might be a good point in my life to go leave a footprint or two in the memories of those little ones, taking them around, showing them the sights I saw as a child, giving them memories that they’ll share down the road.