I am"granpére" let's see, 8 times, great-grand once, step-grand twice, foster grand oh, who knows? Six, seven, eight maybe; I can't be sure. But let that pass. Being grandparent in the abstract isn't difficult. As a strictly mental exercise, it is warmly pleasurable, evoking wooly visions of Quality Time spent with sharp young sprouts who revere one's mature Advice for Living, and Grateful Progeny who look forward to passing on those timeless gems of ours uttered in soulful seriousness, to be remembered into the forward generations as Things My Papa Always Told Me. All "real" grandparents will recognize that blue-sky malarkey for what it truly is:"Bull!"

For instance: Last month, at my invitation, one of the grandsons was transported to Dodson from the family residence at Norfolk, Virginia, where his papa is a Navy man. He (the grandson) is 11, going on 12, and I have only met him once a couple of years ago during a family visit to our home. I thought, It's summer, school's out; it'd be a nice time to get to know the boy and let him know he's got a Grandpa. Of course, I envisioned Tom Sawyerish companionship, scenes from my own boyhood relived vicariously. You know, the usual bull. I even handed him a copy of the book - Tom Sawyer, what else? - during a visit to the PWJ office one day. He riffled the pages for about three seconds, grimaced momentarily, laid it down and returned to a computer game at an empty desk where I had parked him while I attended to business.

We made it through the week. Down and back to Winnfield for photo processing. Trip with Miriam to Monroe for her monthly doctor visit. Plenty of computer/GameBoy/TV/couch time. Some crayon sketching he did while sitting with Miriam painting in her converted bedroom studio. And then, more genuine gleeful animation than I had observed in him before, when his papa arrived on Monday night to rescue him from his brief time served as grandson-in-residence.

Lessons duly learned all around. And oh, yes: On Tuesday, during the process of getting this edition ready for public presentation, I went to that empty desk aforementioned to do a small chore on the computer at which he had amused himself. I punched the start button, the monitor lit up, came to the opening screen asking for the password. I quickly punched in the one universal PW used on all our systems. Got the error message. Did it again. Same error message: "The Password You Have Entered is Incorrect. Please Try Again." Then I read the screen. It said "User: Phil. Password: ******." And then I quietly said words to the Almighty which you would have used also, if you had been in my position. The Almighty, alas, did not provide any inspiration revealing the missing password, and so until a miracle occurs, I'm minus the use of one computer. Luckily it's one which is not, as they say, Mission Critical.

Philosophically speaking I suppose I could consider the momentary loss of one redundant computer as payback for some of my own childish devastation. Such as, for instance, the time back in the middle Thirties when I was three or four years old on the Old Place out at Gaar's Mill.

It was a sunny Spring day, and Uncle Shelby and Aunt Lucille Dark had motored over from their place just up the road from the Harmony Grove Baptist Church for a visit. Aunt Lucille and my mother were sisters. Shelby and Lucille had a daughter, Thelma Jane, just three months older than myself. They also owned one of the few automobiles in the countryside, a new Ford A-Model two-seater. While our parents visited on the front porch of our house, Thelma and I, toddlers, played in the grassless bed of clean, fine white sand at the outer edge of our front yard. Our minds took flight, and we became engrossed in parting out grooves in the sand, which became fields, rivers, highways, with cars of course. We provided the road noises with our hums and grunts, using sticks as stand-ins for various vehicles. And so on. But then, there was the real car. The A-Model Ford. Right there. Well then, since we had a filling station in place, and roads, and what-not, why, we parked that A-Model Ford, opened the gas tank, and filled 'er up. With handsful of that fine, white gasoline. Er, sand. A real life gas tank. Stuffed with real life sand.

Some time later that day, upon starting to crank the A-Model Ford, Uncle Shelby quietly said a few words to the Almighty. I do not know how he got the sand out; I do not recall any miracle. Now all the players in that little drama are safely dead except myself, and you'll just have to take my word for it.

And Phil, it you're reading this, please send Grandpa the password if you remember it. I'll need that computer to work again soon.

"Now the Rest of the Story:" With Phil on the road for another week and out of touch to ask, I got a night's sleep and took another shot at the password-blocked computer. When I tried the simple approach, it recognized its real master and opened up like the obedient machine it's supposed to be. Moral: Even computer-whiz 12-year-old grandkids can't always stop an old fool who's pulled a few tricks himself. After all, Uncle Shelby didn't set fire to that A-Model Ford, nor do anything permanently damaging to either of the innocently mischievous toddlers. He drove the car home, probably that same day. He did, like myself all these years later however, communicate earnestly with the Almighty quite a few times during the process.

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