Word: grandchildrens
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...Ollie Duggan still has a vision of what grandparenting is supposed to be. In that fantasy, her two grandchildren, Joey and Lorrie, arrive to spend the night at her home in the mountains of Clyde, N.C. She cooks their favorite foods and spoils them with gifts. When they act up, she looks away, knowing her job is to dote, not to discipline. When the children leave, she returns to a life of leisure and travel, earned after raising four children of her own. The dream, says Duggan, 68, is of "a time in my life when I can come...
...mother; within the year, they also dropped off their three-year-old son. The moves were only temporary -- at first. But the children's mother announced that she wanted to live her own life. In 1986 Terry died of a heart attack. With that, Duggan resolved to raise her grandchildren as if they were her own offspring. Now her travel plans have been supplanted by worries about how she will save enough money for her grandson's medical-school education. "Of course, I love the children," she says. "But I've been deprived of my golden years. Why wouldn...
...love their grandkids. And yes, they stand ready to serve as the family National Guard when a crisis arises. But a host of social ills -- from drug abuse and divorce to financial hardship and teenage pregnancy -- have turned many graying citizens into full- or part-time custodians of their grandchildren precisely when they were preparing to ease into retirement and a new independence. Unexpectedly robbed of the "grand" part of grandparenting, many feel angry and resentful. They are also bewildered by their children's choices, which they find in profound violation of their own values...
These shocks generate most of the novel's plot. But what happens to Rabbit pales before what his jumpy, unpredictable consciousness makes of the experiences. His mind understandably roams as he tours a Florida theme park with his wife and two grandchildren: "Rabbit wonders how the Dalai Lama is doing, after all that exile. Do you still believe in God, if people keep telling you you are God?" The Dalai Lama has been in the news, and Rabbit, force-feeding himself at the tube, has become through sheer couch-potatodom a current-events buff. But the Tibetan religious leader continues...
George Bush knows how to talk about children. With a sure sense of childhood's mythology, of skinned knees and candy apples and first bicycles, he campaigned for office in a swarm of jolly grandchildren and promised justice for all. In this year's State of the Union address, he mentioned families and "kids" more than 30 times -- the electronic equivalent of kissing babies on the village green. "To the children out there tonight," he declared as he built to his finale, "with you rests our hope, all that America will mean in the years ahead. Fix your vision...