Grandpa Telling Me Stories From When He Was Little

The Grandfather Gift That Happens After the Popcorn Hits the Floor and the Cat Falls Asleep

“Do you want to hear a story?” is the grandfather gift that never shows up on a list and outweighs everything that does. It happens in a green chair in our living room, sometime after eight, when a four-year-old in yellow pajamas sits on the carpet with a red bowl of popcorn and an orange cat who has already given up on the evening and closed his eyes.

She stops eating the popcorn when the story gets to the good part. She does not start again until it is over.

The Telling You Stories From When I Was Your Age Tee from the Little Hands Collection is that after-eight hour in crayon. Grandpa is in the big green chair, leaning forward, both hands in the air because the story has reached the part that needs arm movement. A dark red shirt. Blue jeans. Brown slippers that have not left the living room in years. The kid is on the floor in front of him, cross-legged, yellow pajamas with pink flowers, dark hair everywhere, eyes wide, mouth open. She is locked in. Popcorn is scattered across the carpet because somebody stopped paying attention to the bowl four minutes ago. And the orange cat is curled up beside her, asleep, because the cat heard this story last Tuesday and decided somewhere around the second telling that sleep was the better option.

Dark blue crayon runs across the bottom in one steady color. “grandpa telling me stories from when he was little.” That last word is how a four-year-old understands the past. Grandpa was not young. He was not a kid. He was little. Like her.

What Does Every Grandparent Need?

Every grandparent needs a story to tell and a person small enough to believe every word of it. Not a book. Not a script. A story pulled from a green chair at eight-fifteen on a Tuesday, built from things that happened and things that should have happened, told with both hands and the kind of volume that makes the cat leave the room. This tee is that story hour. A child drew it from the floor looking up, which is why grandpa’s chair looks enormous and his hands look like they are conducting an orchestra and the popcorn is everywhere and nobody in the drawing seems to mind.

My stories are never accurate. They are not supposed to be. I was chased by a dog in 1974 and the dog has grown six inches every time I tell it. The hill I rode my bike down when I was nine gets steeper by the year. The fish I caught with my father at the lake, a fish I have described to her eleven times, went from a bass to something that needed two hands and a net and a stranger in a rowboat who happened to be passing by. She does not fact-check me. She leans forward. The popcorn gets cold.

I asked her once, after a story about a rainstorm that may or may not have flooded the basement, if she wanted another one. She said, “The one with the bike.” She has a filing system in her head for my childhood that is more organized than my own memory. She knows which stories she has heard and which ones she wants again and she will request a rerun the way some kids request a favorite book, except the answer is always yes and the hill gets steeper every time I tell it.

Every Story Starts With Both of Us in It

The best ones do. I learned this on a Tuesday when she was three and I told her about getting lost in the woods when I was seven, and her face went tight and she said, “Was I there?” I understood something right then that I had not understood before. She does not want to hear about my childhood. She wants to hear about an adventure that she and I went on together, one where grandpa was little and she was there and something happened that was scary for exactly the right number of seconds before it turned wonderful. The bear showed up. The bike went too fast. The wave was bigger than both of us. And we were fine. We were always fine, because we were together in the story the same way we are together in the chair.

After the story ends she stays on the carpet and asks questions about the parts I skipped. She wants to know what happened to the bike after the hill. She wants to know if the fish was still in the lake the next summer. My wife reads to her from books with words and pictures on every page. I tell her stories from a chair with my hands for props and whatever I remember for a script. Both happen on the same night in the same house, and my wife’s version has its own shirt in this collection, because a night at our house was never about one moment.

Some nights the story runs long and she climbs up into the chair with me because the floor is far away when you are tired. Her head finds the spot between my arm and my chest. The cat stays on the carpet. The story gets quieter and quieter until it is not a story anymore, it is a hum, and she is out, and the recliner holds both of us without making a sound.

This tee is $39.99, free shipping. The stories cost nothing and they are the most valuable thing I own.

Printed on a Comfort Colors 1717 garment-dyed heavyweight tee with water-based DTG ink — sizing and care details here.