Grandpa Jennings

My grandfather was an engineer.  He learned engineering in the Navy during World War II on the U.S.S. Roosevelt in New York.  After the war, he became a hydraulics engineer in Chicago.  The Boy, as you may know, is really into Lego Robotics, Rocket Club and most things mechanical.  He has taken apart old computer keyboards and such.  I was thinking the other morning about what it would be like if my grandfather and my son met.

My grandfather died in October of 1999 when I was pregnant with Claire Adele.  He never met any of his great-grandchildren.  I wondered what it would be like if my grandfather and the Boy met in some post-Einsteinian world where we can float into different points in time (see: the movie Interstellar) and didn't know they were related.  Would they get along?  Would my grandfather take an immediate liking to the Lego EV3 robot and want to work with the Boy's lego team and help them design a robot to get through the obstacle course?  I'd like to think he would, even if he didn't know one of the kids on his team was his great-grandson.

I think it is interesting that a vast majority of people develop a fondness for people they are related to.  It's remarkable, a miracle perhaps.  My friend Eleanor Owen is a major mental health advocate and she has a few close relatives with major mental illness.  She thinks sanity is a miracle, and is surprised that mental illness isn't more common than it is.*

Let's say my grandfather spent three hours with an eleven year old boy, going to the park, playing with robots, watching a soccer game.  Let's say that ofter three hours, someone told him that boy was his grandson.  Would he have instantly more affection for the boy than he did at the beginning of the three hours?  I would imagine so, even though the only thing different would be a new piece of information that they were related and the kid was the same kid.

Let's say my grandfather were able to watch the Boy grow up.  I think the two would have gotten along really well.

I am sorry the two of them never will have the chance to meet.


* Maybe there is some evolutionary effect with mental illness.  Maybe during famines centuries ago, societies only fed the sane, and thereby decreasing the frequency mental illness was passed down in the gene pool.  Maybe mentally ill people were shunned, and the effect of being alone made them unable to survive.  Or, maybe ancient societies had a greater tolerance of the varieties of mental states, and people with schizophrenia and bipolar found it easier to find their place in society.