“Hi, Grandpa!”

“Hi, Grandpa, how are you?” the young, male voice on the telephone asked. “I’m fine. Who’s this?” I replied. “It’s your grandson.” “Which one?” I inquired. “Your favorite one,” the young man responded, somewhere between a laugh and a sound of being misunderstood. “And I need your help,” he went on. “Oh, what is it?” I asked.

“Well, there’s been an auto-accident. I’m ok, but my throat hurts. That’s why I sound different.” “What happened?” I inquired, more neutrally than I might have sounded at another time. “I’m out-of-town,” he went on, “and I ran into a problem.”

“Oh, I thought you were back,” I said, remembering a recent Facebook report my grandson, Jordan, had posted about his going out-of-town to buy plumbing supplies. He’s a plumber in College Station and had reported that he and a friend had just returned from such a trip.

“Yeh,” he agreed, “but I had to leave again to attend a friend’s funeral. She died of cancer. And on the way, I had a car accident. That’s why I’m calling. I didn’t want Dad to know I was in trouble, but I do need some financial help to pay the fine and get the car repaired.”

“Who’s on the line?” Karen interjected, having heard my side of a puzzling conversation. “Oh I’m on the phone with some young guy who’s pretending to be my grandson and wants some money,” I responded to her in a normal voice.

The telephone line suddenly went dead. “Oh, I guess he hung up. Just when I was having some fun talking with him,” I said reluctantly. Yes, if I have the time and am not involved in a more important project, I do enjoy talking with someone who is trying so hard to get funds out of the “grandparent scam.”

I had known almost immediately the young caller was not one of my six grandsons. They all have the same father and, quite remarkably, sound exactly like him. Their voices have the same rhythms and vocal inflections. I find it almost impossible to determine who is the one calling. Sometimes the content helps, but I always need to confirm who it is, before I continue too far into a potentially “wrong” conversation.

This similarity is a weird phenomenon. In other ways, each of the boys differs from our son, Ken, but somehow, over the years, his speech pattern has become replicated by each one of his own sons. On the other hand, I don’t think that either Ken or his younger brother, Chris, sound anything like I do. Perhaps, over the years, Ken’s sons listened more closely to their dad than he did to me.

However, I am fortunate that the older grandsons do initiate telephone calls from time to time. And they are usually not about needing money, although we have sometimes discussed their need for an allotment from the educational trust fund I established for each one when they were born. I began setting aside these funds long before I realized I would have eleven grandchildren!

Their calls are their telephone greetings for Christmas or birthdays and, occasionally, for no reason at all. These communications differ greatly from the ones I never had with my own grandparents.

As I have written elsewhere, the telephone, introduced late in my teenage life, was not a regular means of communication in my family. A further complication arose from the fact that my father’s mother refused to speak English. She understood it quite well, but spoke only Italian to everyone, including me. Although my grandfather could speak English, and enjoyed browsing through the local newspaper, there was minimal communication between the two of us, even in person. At the same time, I do not recall his speaking very much in either English or Italian to my father, except when they argued while playing Pinochle.

My mother’s father died when I was very young, and I do not recall that we ever spoke with one another. As for her mother, our conversations were somewhat of a business nature during the time I lived on her farm in Mineral Ridge, when I was in the eighth and ninth grade.

She was the cook in a local factory, one of several steel mills in the Mahoning Valley of northeastern Ohio. Although her spoken English was very acceptable, she was, otherwise, illiterate in the language. Nevertheless, as a cook, she needed to be reminded what the ingredients and process would be for the daily menu. Every evening, I would read to her the recipes she would use for her work in the factory-kitchen the following day. I don’t recall we ever talked about anything at other times while we lived with her or visited the farm for holidays.

It would appear I had little “training” in being a “grandparent.” My interactions with my own were extremely limited, almost nonexistent. My own three children also had limited relationships with their grandparents. They never lived anywhere near one another. My parents and Karen’s remained in Ohio while we moved from New Hampshire to Oregon, to the Washington, D.C. area, to Massachusetts, and finally to Texas. We met only for major holidays and brief vacations in Ohio. Our parents were of the generation that seldom spent any time away from their homes.

These conditions were the major reasons why Karen and I have chosen to remain in Houston, where all but two of our extended family reside, at least for the moment. We wanted to be able to see our grandchildren more often than either we or our own kids were able to have done. Perhaps this lack in my own history is why I have found it difficult, at times, to be a “real grandparent” like those found in books, movies and television accounts making up modern fiction.

Time passed following my brief conversation with our unknown grandson. Following an early morning phone call a few months afterwards, I asked Karen who had called us so early in the day. She replied it was one of our grandsons, the one who did not sound anything like our own son. Her succinct response to him had been: “You’re not my grandson. Good-bye.” She finds no entertainment value in talking with scammers.

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