I can’t wait to have grandchildren. I’m going to love telling them how I walked to school, nine days every week, in thirteen feet of snow, during our eight-month winters, uphill both there and back, and this was after we spent four hours collecting cow eggs and milking chickens. How do you milk a chicken? They’ll ask. I’ll answer in total seriousness, “By using a very low stool.”

Since you have learned to trust Mr. Ohh! and look to these posts as the truth and light of the world, allow me to apologize to your delicate sensibilities. You may not believe this, but the first bit is all lies. Sorry!

That’s a funny thing about grandparents. They are beautiful, and generous people, but they love to tell impossible stories. Not cruel, devastating, and hurtful lies like; “There aren’t any cookies in the house”. Just tales to make children wide-eyed and really confused. My Pappy was so committed to, and stubborn about, his stories that he would change his mind about as often as Uncle Wayne changed his underwear. If you knew Wayne, you’d know that wasn’t very often. Also, he believed the bigger the lie the easier it was to remember. So, we got some whoppers when we were kids. I mean if you could believe his war stories, he died six times before he had children.

The thing he loved to tell stories about the most was school. Although, according to my mother, he was a back woods kid who never went there. We didn’t care if he was good student, the tales were great. I think the best one was when the twenty-foot alligator got into the classroom and swallowed the class pet hamster, named Roger. They all loved that hamster, so the kids all sat on that gator to keep it from getting away. The teacher called the janitor who brought in his car jack and used it to jack open the gator’s mouth, and then Tony, the small kid with glasses, crawled down the beast’s throat and retrieved Roger.

This is an amazing story until you grow up and learn that a small kid can’t crawl down an alligator’s throat, and the fact that gramps grew up in Pennsylvania, where there are exactly zero wild alligators turn this story into a very tall tale indeed, but at the time no one cared. To us Pap said it, and it was true.

I, on the hand, am still a father. My job is to debunk the things the grandpa tells the children, and while my dad’s stories could never touch Pap’s, I still had my share of deprograming to do with my three kids. They’re teenagers, and they still believe dad’s lies over my truth. Grandfather is so much better.

Another issue is that by the time I get there it won’t be any fun anymore. Children are getting smarter and believing less. If it tried one of Pap’s stories on my kids, they’d lecture me on weather patterns which prohibit large amounts of snow and the fact that the records are a matter of public record. Then they would grab a computer look up the weather when I grew up and prove me wrong over and over again.

Of course, I course try some of this new stuff. My daughter started back into high school this past week and was frustrated because several students had trouble getting into their biology text books. I thought she was telling me a grandfather lie. But NO! I stupidly looked at her and said, “What, did somebody glue the pages together? We just put text books in front of us and opened the cover.”

She looked at me as if I erupted in clown makeup and a large wooden sign sprung from the top of my head that read, “This Is What an Idiot Looks Like” in neon red and green letters. Apparently. Their text book is online and for most of the class the log in codes didn’t work. I can’t wait to have a child on my knee and tell them that one. Yup, when I was a kid, we had big paper and cardboard things called books for biology. They weighed five pounds and we had to carry them around. To use them we opened them up and instead of putting new words on the screen we actually read different pages. Of course, someone will probably interrupt me saying, “Stop It Dad!! You’re scaring the children.” The thing is it won’t be a Good Old-Fashioned Lie like Pappy told me.

Then there the horrors of school lunch. My daughter came home with a Band-Aid on her finger yesterday. I asked and she told me it was nothing, just a small cut from doing something dumb. What happened was her plastic juice cup had a foil seal and she was trying to peal it off and got a small scratch. She went to the nurse because it bled a little, the nurse had to write up an accident report. Apparently, if this happens often enough the company will be forced to change the cup style for safety reasons.

I thought, What??? When I was in school, we had glass cups, and the juice was poured from gallon containers. Here comes gramps again: Our cups weren’t sealed against germs or nuthin’. With every sip of juice, we were taking our lives into our own hands. I remember Jimmy Knox, one day here next day gone. But we never cut ourselves on foil seals, that’s fer sure. Our cups were wide open and made of glass. Of course, when we broke one, we might have bled for a day or so, but it was no big deal. There was always a nearby janitor to clean up the drips while you walked to class. See I could make it as a grandpa. Although real grandfathers would really do some much bigger lying than I just did if there was a little blood involved. So, I’ll have to keep practicing.

Dangerous disposable cups and computer books aren’t the only differences my children have to deal with. Of course, Pap’s walked to school for miles, and dad only had to walk across the neighborhood. I on the other hand took a bus. My children have always gotten a ride to school. Heck, now that they’re in high school, they drive themselves. Forgetting my senior years for a minute, I’m wondering what my kids will say to the little ones on their knees.

“Robotic Vehicles? “My bionic butt crack! We never studied for our trig tests on the way to school. We weren’t lazy like you young whippersnappers, we had to drive. I remember using leg muscles for twenty minutes, press the gas, push the brake, then press the gas pedal again, and you couldn’t text anybody for that whole time neither. You kids won’t never know the troubles of looking through a frosted windshield as the car was still warming up. Sometimes the plow didn’t come by early enough and there were three inches of snow we had to get through. Don’t even get me started about steering, and the turn signal.”

The thing is, those kids won’t believe their grandfather either.