I adored my grandparents and spent every weekend with Mama and Papa Wicks. They had seven children, so they needed a big house – and it seemed only logical to them to build into their house a pipe organ in a music room with a sixteen-foot ceiling.
When I was seven my parents divorced. My father went to Dallas. My mom fled to the shelter of my grandparents in a strange central Ohio town of 22,000, Wooster. When it looked like I was growing up to be a wimp I was forced to live with my father, which I did not want to do.
From a fairly young age, Donald had a really hard time reading social cues. You know, the rules in the house, my grandparents’ house were very different from the rules in school. So, he had a difficult time adjusting to that.
I want to make people of Punjab, my parents, and grandparents proud.
I grew up in a little town between Bath and Bristol with my parents and grandparents in the same house. It was rural and idyllic.
My grandparents were always farmers.
My mother graduated from high school in 1969, and on January 3, 1971, she gave birth to me. She was married later that year, but by the time I was 10, she was a divorced single mother of two young boys. To make ends meet, we moved in with my grandparents, who were also housing two of my mother’s siblings and their kids.
I was watching a black and white television in Cairo, MI., at my grandparents’ house, and I watched Neil Armstrong step on the moon. At that point, it set the bit for me to be an astronaut, and it was kind of like a dream, but it really wasn’t reality.
When I was a kid, I resented my grandparents not speaking the perfect English I wanted to speak.
The baby boomers owe a big debt of gratitude to the parents and grandparents – who we haven’t given enough credit to anyway – for giving us another generation.
To tell you the truth, in the old Jewish shtetls, if your husband died, sometimes they’d have you marry the brother, and my grandparents were actually stepbrother and stepsister.
I guess I can be surprised I’m alive. I’m taking a little better care of myself than when I was a young person. My father died when he was 63. My mother made it to 74. My grandparents, God, they were dropping like flies.
Our old stories happen to be your new stories. The stories that you’re seeing as immigrant stories are your grandparents’ stories, are your great-grandparents’ stories. You just happen to be separated from them a little bit.
Ancestor worship, or filial piety so characteristic of Asian cultures, for example, does not really resonate with Americans who favor children, not grandparents.
There’s a lot of wisdom that my dad and my grandparents and my uncle have been able to impart on me, and what I’ve treasured the most is I’ve seen examples in my life of people embracing their creativity, not feeling insecure about their artistic inclinations.
I know very little about my great grandparents, who came through Ellis Island in the early twentieth century, settled in Baltimore, and spoke only Yiddish.
Both my grandparents were officers in World War Two, and I would be personally offended if somebody distorted their achievements.
We’re a really close family, and that was what my grandparents promoted.
For those that don’t know, my sister was born with Down Syndrome, and she was institutionalized in the very early sixties. Me, being just a small boy and being shuffled around between my mother and grandparents, I never knew her.
My grandparents left the Pale of Settlement at the border of western Russia and Eastern Europe in the early 1900s, fleeing anti-Semitism and hoping to make a better life for their children in America.
As America is growing older, there are more and more families caring for older parents and grandparents, and it’s extremely expensive.
As I got older, my pops tried to keep me involved with the culture by telling me the stories of the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, how he came to America, and about our family back home, because all that side of my family – my aunties, grandparents – is in Africa.
My dad was teaching in Kenya, and my grandparents came to visit me there. They brought me to England, and my dad continued to teach for a bit after, so I just continued to live with my grandparents, because that became home, really.
My parents aren’t crazy conservative. They’re actually pretty open-minded. But my grandparents are, and where I’m from, East Texas, is the Bible Belt.
Even though my grandparents live overseas and are so far away and we talk as much as we can, we don’t see each other that often.
My grandparents were best friends in kindergarten and never loved anyone again.
Our parents and grandparents understood this truth deeply. They believed – as we do – that to create jobs, a modern economy requires modern investments: educating, innovating and rebuilding for our children’s future. Building an economy to last, from the middle class up, not from the billionaires down.
My activism did not spring from my being gay, or, for that matter, from my being black. Rather, it is rooted fundamentally in my Quaker upbringing and the values that were instilled in me by my grandparents who reared me.
I’m half-Chinese and half-Caucasian. My grandparents came here from China. My father was born in New Jersey.
All my friends had grandparents who had accents. I thought all grandparents were supposed to have accents. My friends were all second-generation, as I was.
No, like I said, my dad was never really part of the tennis. His involvement around what I did with the tennis and with my mom and my grandparents was really not a part of my life.
My dad keeps joking about sneaking into my grandparents’ house and switching out their HBO for PBS so they think I’m on ‘Downton Abbey.’
Your grandparents came of age in the Great Depression, when everyday life was about deprivation and sacrifice, when the economic conditions of the time were so grave and so unrelenting it would have been easy enough for the American dream to fade away.
Asian-Americans, we’re not a monolithic group. There might be some Asians who are second-generation, third-generation, who may not speak the language that their parents or their grandparents spoke.
When I was a youngster my grandparents took me sightseeing and we went on the London Eye.
I don’t even have the plaques in my house – the gold and platinum-selling plaques. I gave them to my parents and grandparents. It was never about the numbers, never about the money. It was always about the music. That’s all I care about.
Personally, I’d be really glad to have a national conversation about whether to outlaw most forms of birth control. For once, the kids and their grandparents would find themselves on the same side.
Years after my parents made the United States their home, I had the joy of traveling to the Dominican Republic with my kids. They saw where it all started and how their grandparents’ values survived and thrived in America.
In the fields of southwest Iowa, my parents and grandparents worked and sacrificed. Like so many Iowans, the American Dream for them was never about wealth or fame. Their dream was to leave their children and grandchildren a better life, with greater opportunity, than their own.
The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.
