My notebook is on the kitchen table next to a bowl of pears. It’s small and green, and it was originally for grocery lists.
I’m seventy-four years old, and what I’ve been doing in it for the past six months is writing down the small things my grandchildren say.
I haven’t told anybody I’m doing it. Not my daughter, not my son, not my friends at the Wednesday coffee. It’s a quiet thing, just for me, and I’m not entirely sure yet why I started.
What I am sure of is that nobody else is writing this stuff down. And I’m starting to wonder if that’s actually most of what being a grandmother is now.
The trigger was a story about a frog
I had been at my daughter’s house the weekend before, sitting in the kitchen while she made dinner, and my granddaughter Sophie had come in and told me a long, winding story about a frog she had seen at recess. The way she described the frog made me laugh. And then I went home, and by Monday morning, I had completely forgotten the story.
That bothered me more than I expected. I sat in my own kitchen with my coffee, and I tried to remember what she had said about the frog, but I couldn’t. I could only remember that it had made me laugh. And I thought, That particular thing she said is gone now. The actual story is gone.
So that Wednesday, I went to the drugstore and bought the notebook. It was on a shelf with the index cards and the paper clips, and it cost two dollars. I didn’t know what I was going to write in it. I just knew I wanted to have a place to put things before they disappeared.
The things they say aren’t important, which is the point
What’s in the notebook is not, by any measure, important.
Last week, Sophie told me that she thinks the moon has feelings, and that the feelings get bigger when it’s full.
The week before, my grandson Theo, who is five, asked me if it was true that all dogs go to heaven, and when I said yes, he thought about it for a long time and then said, Even mean ones?
The week before that, Sophie told me very seriously that her best friend Madeline now prefers to be called Maddie, and that this is important, and that I should remember.
It’s the way Theo pronounces spaghetti — pa-ghetti, with the p lingering.
It’s Sophie’s theory that the gray cat next door is “secretly a queen.”
It’s Theo announcing, at dinner, that his favorite color is “rainbow but not pink.”
It’s Sophie noticing that her dad has a freckle on his ear that looks like a tiny heart, and pointing it out to me as if she has solved something.
None of this is important. None of it is something anyone would remember to remember. These are the daily, ordinary, throwaway things children say that you smile at and forget by the next day.
But here’s the thing about being my age. You start to understand, in a way you don’t when you’re younger, that the people themselves are made of these small things.
Sophie at nine, the actual Sophie, the one who exists in this exact year of her life — she isn’t made of the milestones or the school photos. She is made of the moon-has-feelings theory, the queen-cat theory, and the Maddie-not-Madeline rule. Those are the things that will be gone in three years, when she’s twelve and entirely different. And nobody is keeping track of them.
I am keeping track of them.
More Bolde Stories
Their parents love them, but they’re also exhausted
I don’t want this to sound like a complaint about my daughter, because it isn’t. She is a wonderful mother. She loves her children in a way that takes my breath away sometimes when I see it from across a room.
She also has a full-time job and a husband whose own job has gotten more demanding lately, and a house that doesn’t clean itself and two children who need rides and signed forms and dental appointments. By the time she sits down at night, she has been making decisions for fourteen straight hours. She doesn’t have a notebook. She doesn’t have time for a notebook. What she has, at the end of a day, is a glass of wine and an hour of a show before she falls asleep on the couch.
When I was raising her, I didn’t have a notebook either. I was the same kind of tired she is. I remember almost nothing specific from when she was six. I remember the broad strokes — the school she went to, the friends she had, the year she got the chickenpox. I do not remember the things she said. I am sure she said wonderful things. They are all gone.
When older adults are asked about the best parts of growing old, the answer that comes up more than anything else is spending time with family, and right behind it, spending time with grandchildren. The answer comes up more often than financial security, more often than retirement, more often than the things you’d expect.
Of course it does. What older people have that nobody else has anymore is the time to actually be present for someone. We are the ones with the empty afternoons. We are the ones who don’t have to be checking our phones. We are the ones who can listen to a story about a frog and let the story take however long it takes.
I’m starting to think this is what grandparenting is now
When I was a child, my grandmother lived three blocks away, and I spent a lot of time at her house. What I remember about her is not what she did. It’s what she paid attention to. She was the one who noticed I had cut my hair. She was the one who remembered I didn’t like onions. She was the one who, when I told her something at six, brought it up again when I was eight, like it still mattered.
I don’t think I understood, when I was small, that her attention was its own kind of gift. I thought it was just how grown-ups were. I didn’t yet know that most of the grown-ups in my life were too busy to be that kind of paying-attention, and that she had room for it because she had stopped being busy, and because I was the youngest person in her life, and because she had decided, without ever announcing it, that this was what she was for now.
I think that might be what grandparenting is for now, too.
Not the cookies, not the trips to the zoo, not the Christmas mornings, though those are nice.
The actual job is being the person with enough quiet in her life to notice that Theo is going through a phase where he calls everyone buddy, and to write it down, so that someday, when he is forty-three, and his own son is calling him buddy, it will be documented.
Nobody else is going to remember this part
I haven’t told my daughter about the notebook yet. I’m not sure when I will.
Part of me thinks I should give it to her eventually, maybe when Sophie is older, maybe at a graduation, maybe in a moment when she would understand what it is. Part of me thinks it should just sit in the drawer with my own things, and that someone will find it after I’m gone and figure it out then.
I don’t know if there’s a right answer to that. What I know is that the writing-down itself is doing something for me that I didn’t expect. It’s making me pay even closer attention.
I listen harder now when Sophie talks. I sit with Theo longer. I ask more questions, the kind I would have nodded through before, because now I want to be able to write down the actual answers. The notebook has turned me into a slightly different grandmother than I was before I bought it.
Maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe being a grandparent isn’t actually about the children at all, in some quiet way. Maybe it’s about what the children let me become — the kind of person who finally has time to notice. Maybe I needed to be seventy-four before I was ready to be that person. Maybe my granddaughter telling me about the moon is doing something for me that I cannot, even now, fully name.
I just know that when I close the notebook at the end of an afternoon and put the pen back in the spiral, I feel like I’ve done something quietly important. I feel like I’ve caught something that was on its way to being lost.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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