GRAND Spring 2021 Vol. IV Ed. I

Relationships
A Grandmother’s Guide to
Bonding with Grandsons
Jacqui Graham has six grown kids and
eight delightful grandkids. If she had
known how much fun grandkids would
be, she would have had them first!
It’s easy to bond with granddaughters.
You bake cookies together, and then
you have a tea party. You read Harry
Potter or Alice, I Think. You let them
style your hair until it’s dripping with
barrettes and scrunchies. You make
crafts with beads and sequins and
smelly felts and the glitter glue that
will NEVER come out of the carpet. On
a sunny day, you might play hopscotch
in the driveway. On a rainy day, you
might explore the contents of your
jewel box.
Bonding with grandsons can be a
harder proposition for a grandma.
Raising four boys, however, has given
me useful insights into the psyche of
the young human male. They like food.
They need to move. They love showing
off to an appreciative audience. (Did I
mention food?)
One rainy afternoon my 11-yearold
grandson Levi came to my house
for a couple of hours while his dad
attended a meeting. Rainy weather
ruled out yard chores or a visit to the
playground, so we decided to watch a
movie.
Popcorn was duly popped and soft
drinks selected. We were browsing
through Netflix offerings when Levi
cried: “Wait! I watched this movie at
my friend Zach’s house and it’s sooooo
good but I didn’t get to see the ending.
Can we watch it, Grandma? Please?
Please? Please?”
What had caught his eye was “Journey
2: The Mysterious Island,” a 2012
followup to the 2008 film version of
Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Centre of
the Earth.” The more recent movie is
based loosely on another Verne classic,
“The Mysterious Island.” It soon
became apparent that the only resemblance
to the original story was the title
and the fact that it did, indeed, take
place on an island.
The mysterious aspect was how this
stinker ever got made.
But who cares? It had everything an
11-year-old boy could possibly want:
the lost island of Atlantis and huge
lizards and Dwayne Johnson (aka “The
Rock”) and miniature elephants and
Vanessa Hudgens and the mummified
body of Captain Nemo and generational
angst and a volcano that spit
out boulders of solid gold. (And, for
Grandma, an aging but still foxy Michael
Caine, camping it up in his final
movie role.)
Our brave adventurers got lost in
the jungle, were swept over waterfalls,
rode on giant bees, discovered ancient
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