Grandchildren

Q: Why do grandparents and their grandchildren get along so well?

A: Because they have a common enemy.

Summertime on the Suncoast and it's time to bring the grandkids to town to visit gramps and grammy. School's out, and the parents are gagging to be rid of the fruit of their loins, despite doubts about the bad habits they'll learn from overindulgent oldsters.

The trips are always some variation of the grandkids traveling here accompanied by the grandparents, with the parents then arriving a week or two later to retrieve their progeny. If the g-kids travel alone, the g-parents often want to be picked up by the limousine first and then go to the airport to collect the young ones so they can be there to help with bags and suchlike. This will happen even if the grandkids are thirty.

Attitudes change when the 'grands' are together. My old opening joke is truer than you would believe, as a recent Fort Myers Airport pickup demonstrates. The g-parents started off on a cruise of the eastern Mediterranean, flew to a northern US city for a few days, and brought the g-kids back to Florida with them. When I met them in the terminal, they were all smiles, chatting away, laughing at shared jokes. Now these are nice customers anyway, but the genuine pleasure the two young ones took in their older relatives was heart-warming.

The hour-long trip home even featured some trumpet-playing from the young man, and although he turned 'In the Mood' into 'Smells like Teen Spirit' it was just another slice of fun.

By contrast, when kids are in the limo with their parents, there is a universal shut-down of communication. If there isn't mock sleeping with iPod-induced privacy, they retreat into the depths of their Blackberries or iPhones, no doubt searching for answers to the world's problems in that small screen.

What do they find there, I wonder. Or maybe they're texting gramps.