WHAT IT’S ABOUT
This blog isn’t about me. It’s about us. All of us.
You don’t need to be a grandparent to relate to what will be kicked around here. You just need to be someone, anyone, who has a grandparent, a parent, a sibling, a daughter, a son, a daughter or son-in-law, a mother or father-in-law, and so on.
You can just be you.
After all, I’m just me and I’m enjoying putting this out.
Okay, so it certainly comes out of the Grandparent Experience. That’s where the idea came from, but I quickly realized how far the reach of that goes.
To everyone.
Most of us had a grandparent or four, and a family unit made up of some combination of pretty quirky characters. We are all the aggregate of those people that we came from.
THE IDEA
I cannot really express how thoroughly I am loving my time as a grandfather. I began mulling over creating or writing something to celebrate that.
But what? And how?
Then when I reminded myself that I am not alone in grandparentdom, boom, out popped The Grandpaw Chronicles. I went from there to find a way to reach out.
Consider this to be a recurring column, like any you find in a newspaper (remember those?).
The idea is for each post to grab your interest, or maybe make you smile, or make you go “Oh yeah”, surely give you something to think about, and maybe get you to offer some idea or comment of your own.
We are a community. Grandparents, and anyone who will be one, has or had some, is or was part of a family – we’re talking anybody who wants in.
WHO IS GRANDPAW?
It’s only fair to let you know who you are reading.
By name I am Marc S. Axelrod, formerly Ah Ah to my now five-year-old grandson, Blake, who now calls me Grandpaw. (Right. That’s where the blog name came from.)
To my two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, Alana, I am currently Ba Ba. I love being Ba Ba, but that probably won’t last too much longer as her language skills are rapidly maturing.
My cousin Rob still calls me Cousin Soup once in a while, which is a long story.
My son-in-law Eddie loves to call me The Grease Man, which he got from the story of how when I was a teenager, I had the nickname Grease. From axle grease due to my last name, and from what we used to slop onto our hair in those days. (I still have most of mine, which is a good thing.)
The point being, I’m just like you. A person who is different things to different people.
But I’m also different from you. My road to here is as unique as yours is to wherever you are.
I am a New York City public education product who also went to Queens College, a CUNY school, for both my BA in English and MA in Creative Writing (Aha, you say, sort of a writer guy).
I used those writing skills throughout my thirty-seven years working at the ABC Television Network in NYC, starting as a Technical Writer and morphing into doing all kinds of cool stuff in the Training end of our Broadcast Division.
I worked with News, Sports, Magazine Shows, GMA, the Soap Operas, The View, Content Prep and all the technical aspects of Distribution. I became an expert in video editing for all our platforms and taught almost all of our working editors and others on most of our systems through the years as technology continued its relentless march forward.
Television was a wonderful place to work. It mattered. Millions of people saw the fruits of what I and my colleagues did day to day, from important News to the silly Soaps. I retired in 2016.
It was a lot of fun. I never went to work dreading it. I feel sorry for those who find work to be, you know, work.
And I was good at what I did. I know that because people still tell me that. I take their word for it.
In the interest of full disclosure, I was also doing other writing that didn’t go so well. I tried hard to break into being a screenwriter. I had two agents over time, wrote screenplays, television scripts, and treatments for stories, none of which ever got bought. Still bothers me.
Overall, I did great in my working life.
I am also doing great in my personal life.
I met my wife, Leslie, while sitting on a rock at a lake in Vermont. Forty-two years later, our son, Daryl, and his wife, Erica, our daughter, Samantha, and her husband, Eddie, and their two kids Blake and Alana, and many good friends make up my world.
I couldn’t be luckier. Some say you make your own luck. If that’s true, I did a good job.
LET’S GO FROM HERE
One reason why I am doing this solo is that I no longer have the desire to ask someone else to please like my stuff and publish it for me. I’ll send this out to the world and if you find it and like it, great. If you don’t, that’s okay.
I invite all of you who find this blog in the least bit interesting to come along for the ride. I suppose it won’t work if you don’t. But I’m not sure what it working will even look like.
It’s kind of like throwing a message in a bottle into the ocean. Who knows if anyone will read it?
I will continue this anyway because it feels good doing it and it’s kind of cool to go online and see something that I built.
I’ll see you along the way…
Grandpaw