Memories of My Grandpa

Grandpa Blair was my mom’s dad. He lived with us when my brothers and I were children growing up in Sunnyside, Washington. Grandpa didn’t have any real teeth. He had false teeth. I remember he was always old. He had always been in his 80’s in my memory, but continued to run a Richfield gasoline station in the outskirts of town. Grandpa’s wallet was his cash register. It always bulged with paper money.

Grandpa sold his gas cheaper than anyone else in town so he was always busy with customers. He let my little brothers and me wash the windshields of those who frequented his station. We were too small to reach the glass from the ground so we crawled up on the hood of the farm vehicles to provide our window-washing “service.” Sometimes our work actually made the mud smears worse on the automobiles and trucks that rolled in for gas. But no one ever complained (to us).

Thinking about my grandpa and his place in my life in my growing-up years caused me to think about the fifth commandment. My parents made room for grandpa in our house rather than allow him to live alone. He didn’t talk much to my brothers and me but we learned the importance of showing him respect. The times we didn’t proved costly at the hands of dad.

The Ten Commandments are recorded in Exodus 20 and in verse 12, we are instructed to, “Honor your father and your mother” … Both Carolyn and I had the same experience of growing up with grandparents in the house. Our parents showed honor to their parents. Commenting on this fifth commandment John MacArthur explains what honor means:

“The Old Testament law of honoring one’s parents meant that as long as a person lived, he was to respect and support his parents. During the first half of a person’s life, the parents give everything they have to supply the needs of their children. When they get to the point in life where they’re no longer able to meet their own needs, it becomes the responsibility of their children to take care of them. That is God’s way of making families stick together. The parents raise the children, and when the children are grown, they take care of their parents while also raising their own children, who are going to take care of them while they are raising their children” (The Fulfilled Family, John MacArthur (Chicago: Moody Press, 1981), p. 4).