My father-in-law was visiting one summer when my kids were little, and he came across one of those parenting magazines that were always hanging around the coffee table.

He laughed, and I got the feeling he thought it was ludicrous, someone trying to tell someone else how to be a parent. I think the idea of a child-rearing expert seemed as useful to him as an expert in chewing.

We were happy for the help. My wife and I had been exposed to a few babies before, and we liked them fine, but we always handed them back to their parents. This time, someone would be handing one to us.

So we had good books and some excellent classes before my daughter was born. Her grandparents were amused and appeared a little confused. Parents and children have been doing this thing together for a long time. Why would you need a book?

Then there were bike helmets. My parents thought it was funny when I sent them a video of my daughter riding her bike, helmet securely in place. It must have felt to them like a foolish, maybe faddish thing, and it’s hard to blame them. No one fell off a bike when they were kids and got serious head injuries.

Of course they did, though. It was just off their radar, or else felt like one of life’s unavoidable if rare eventualities. There was nothing to be done, and so on.

Seatbelts were the same. My dad refused to buckle up for a long time, and I recall my mother-in-law mentioning that in her day, you carried the newborn babies home from the hospital in your lap. Car seats were a mystery to her, and, again, probably felt over-protective.

This isn’t a knock on anyone, other than those who persist in claiming that the old days were golden eras of healthy children, hours of wholesome fun on their bikes without helmets, hours without adult supervision, no screens, and happily drinking out of the garden hose (this seems to be a pleasant memory for a lot of older people; I’m not sure I’d trust them around toilets).

First, there were plenty of screens. They were just all on television sets, and Americans watched them upwards of seven hours every day. Head injuries weren’t invented in the 1980s, as I noted, and Giardia is still alive and well, although I guess I’d drink out of a hose if I were really thirsty. It just seems an odd thing to have fond memories of.

My point, though, is that we don’t know. It seems bizarre to assume that life keeps moving and changing, but childhood remains the same. There are surely dangers now that didn’t exist when I was a child, but no one’s worried about polio, and bike helmets don’t seem to be difficult to wear. I’ll take the future compared to the past in most things. It’s just that the past is sometimes all I’ve got.

My grandson turned 7 last week, as they do. Seven years is a blip in adult life, a blink. It’s easy to turn your head away for a moment, and a baby becomes a boy just like that. You know what I mean.

It’s just that a book would have helped. I would have taken a pamphlet.

I mentioned to an editor a few weeks ago that I was slipping into dangerous territory, becoming a columnist who wrote of nothing but the joys of being a grandparent. There’s certainly a readership for that, although I’ve never been fond of niches and I have a lot of interests.

But the pandemic has changed everything, and now I find myself interacting virtually with this boy on a near-daily basis. We spend an hour together most days, and I realize now that I just wish I had some instructions.

Because becoming a grandparent is the final stage, and we’re on our own. We assume it’s nothing but blissful irresponsibility, time to indulge and spoil, but there are plenty of pitfalls and no one left to share their wisdom.

And their wisdom wouldn’t include Zoom calls anyway.

I’m a grandparent in a time of no touching, of no visiting, of no sleeping in the top bunk and waking up with this kid in the morning. He attends the first grade through his laptop screen, and his parents finally figured it out.

“You’re his recess,” my daughter said the other day.

So here I sit, clueless about a 7-year-old’s world view in 2020. It would be nice to have a cheat sheet. Improvising is for the young; I always prefer a script.

But it turns out imagination stays pretty much the same, so we do that. He shoves his face close to the iPad so the old man can hear, he describes exactly what kind of dragons we’ll be, what our special powers are and when we can employ them. We fly to volcanoes on distant planets and battle robots, and he always has to save me.

“Hang on, grandpa!” he yells from across the room, extending a virtual wing for me to grasp, and when the mission is completed I thank him. “I could have died,” I announce, as dramatically as I can, trying to stay in the moment.

He snorts, then, dismissive of my theatrical side. “I would have resurrected you,” he says solemnly, and now I think I might just write that pamphlet myself.

Originally published 10/20/2020