Advice to grandparents

Advice to grandparents (especially grandfathers): Don’t play board or card games with your grandkids. I tried it here in Tustin, California, while visiting our son and his wife and four children, and was ignominiously skunked. We played a card game called “Thirteen”—at which my 17-year-old grandson consistently won, another game called “Junior Scrabble”—which my 7-year-old granddaughter won, and a board game called “Don’t Wake Daddy”—which my 5-year-old-grandson won. To make it a total win for the younger generation, my son consistently beat me at “Scrabble.”

So, to save some shred of my dignity, I decided to ward off any further challenges as follows, “Granddad, do you want to play ___ with me?” “Sweetheart, I would love to, but I hung up my medals a long time ago. Let's wait until you're a little older."

And then, I will hope that they will forget that “…when you’re older” stuff. If they don’t, when they’re older, I’ll say, “I would love to play with you, but my eyesight is really not good enough.”—although it will really be good enough to see a flyspeck on a piece of `paper.