Not Grandpa Joe

For as long as I can remember, I had my grandfather model all figured out.

Me with Shep at six months (2023)

The moment one of my children handed me a grandchild, I would become Grandpa Joe, Roald Dahl's irrepressible, bedridden patriarch from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, who springs to life at exactly the right magical moment. Pure delight. No discipline. No logistics. Just wonder and stories and the unearned credibility that grandfathers seem to accumulate simply by existing. I've been quietly rehearsing the role for decades.

Then it actually happened. Kailey and Matt gave me Shepherd in 2022. Then Sadie in November 2024. Then Faith and Will gave me Philip Joseph in January 2026. Kailey will bring a fourth grandchild into the world: baby Bo, due early in September. Four grandchildren in four years. The role has arrived.

There's just one problem. Grandpa Joe lives in the same house as Charlie Bucket. I live in Syracuse.

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Sadie at one year (2025)

Before I go any further, I should acknowledge what I glossed over in my romantic vision of Grandpa Joe: his actual track record isn't great. The man spent twenty years in bed while his family lived in grinding poverty. He shared a mattress with three other grandparents and apparently never once thought to get up and find work. Then the moment a golden ticket materialized, he was on his feet, tap-dancing around the bedroom, ready for adventure. By any reasonable standard, that's not a role model. That's a cautionary tale.

And yet. When Charlie needed someone to walk through those chocolate factory gates with him, Grandpa Joe showed up completely, with every ounce of joy and wonder he had. You forgive a lot in a grandfather who can do that.

I've always wanted to be the grandfather who shows up completely. The problem is that "showing up" has been my whole identity as a father, and it requires a geography that my children, sensibly and lovingly, declined to provide.

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I told them to do it, of course. I've now given four wedding toasts, which either speaks to my eloquence or my stamina. In each one, I told my children that nothing of any value or magnitude tops family. Build your home around the people you love. That's the whole instruction. Kailey and Matt built theirs in Nashville. Faith and Will have started theirs in Albuquerque. Teddy and Taylor, still early in the process, are down in NYC. These are good choices, and I am proud of them for making them.

I am also, let the record show, in Syracuse.

The distance has a particular texture when you're a grandfather. Shepherd, I know. I held him before his sister arrived, watched him develop opinions and preferences, and that specific toddler confidence that makes you wonder where on earth they get it. But Sadie has been on this earth since October 2024, and I haven't yet been in the same room with her. PJ arrived in January 2026, and same story. Some of my grandchildren don't yet know my face, the way I tell a story, or that I have very specific feelings about what they should be called.

Which brings me to the name situation.

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Kailey's family calls me Grandpa Boeke, or sometimes G'Pa. That's the name my own kids used for my father, Richard. I didn't plan it that way, but when it happened, something quietly settled in my chest. A name passed forward like a piece of furniture you didn't know you wanted until it appeared in exactly the right room.

Faith went her own direction. Faith always goes her own direction. It's a defining characteristic, well established over twenty-plus years of loving her, and I say it with complete admiration and only mild exasperation. She has decided I am Opa.

I want to be clear that I have expressed my feelings about this. I want to be equally clear that my feelings have not moved the needle whatsoever.

PJ at six months (2026)

Opa is a perfectly fine name for a grandfather. In Dutch tradition, it's warm and familiar and carries real history. My family does have Dutch roots, so Faith has done her homework. I understand all of that. I am still not thrilled. Partly because no one consulted me, and partly because the same daughter who named me Opa also decided to call her son (Philip Joseph)...Flip.

Flip.

I have a grandson named Philip Joseph Witherow. It's a good, strong name with real weight to it: Philip Joseph, which also happens to share a middle name with his grandfather, a fact I will not pretend I didn't lobby for... Faith sees this name and thinks: Flip. I see this name and think: PJ. We are currently at an impasse on two fronts. This is, I have come to understand, simply what it is to be Faith's father: you negotiate, you persist, and eventually you just call the boy PJ and wait.

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My own father was Grandpa Boeke. He taught me through presence, not lectures, not grand gestures, but the quiet accumulation of ordinary moments. The Cub Scout Jamboree at Moraine State Park. The patience he showed when I didn't recognize the lesson for decades. I wrote about him when we lost him in 2020, borrowing Kierkegaard's line: life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward. Looking back at Dad now, I see that he laid the foundation for everything I became as a father. The road trips. The scorecards at Ted's Little League games. The Thursday mornings I spent volunteering in Faith's computer lab, showing kindergartners that a mouse works better when it stays on the desk.

It all came from watching him show up. All of it assumed I would be close enough to show up the same way.

What nobody told me is that the children you raise to build their own lives will, with some regularity, build them somewhere else. You were right to encourage them. You meant every word of it. And now Kailey is in Nashville, and Faith is in Albuquerque, and I am in Syracuse, counting the days until a September due date and wondering when I can get on a plane.

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So I've been rethinking what it means to show up.

This blog started in 2008, when Kailey was in high school. I wrote then that she and Ted and Faith were the reason I write: that these pages were a record of where we'd been, what I'd learned, the laughter and heartbreak and hope we'd accumulated as a family. I meant it as a letter to them. What I'm realizing now is that it was also always a letter to whoever comes after.

Shepherd and Sadie and PJ and future Bo, and to those whose names we don't yet know, will grow up hearing stories about people they never met, places they'll have to imagine, a family history that stretches back through Dutch grandparents and Chicago Cubs loyalty and Christmas elf traditions and a man named Richard who showed up without making a speech about it. These posts are part of that record. They'll be here long after I'm gone, waiting for a grandchild, or a great-grandchild, who's finally old enough to be curious.

But lately I've been thinking about doing something more. I want to record some of our traditional Christmas stories, not just my own, but the ones we've read together for years. The Polar Express. A Christmas Tree in the White House. The classics that found their way into our family's rotation and never left. I want Shepherd and Sadie and PJ and Bo to hear them the way their parents heard them, with exactly the pauses I mean and the voices I can't help making. And yes, I also want to record the story about the year Santa couldn't find Flipper. That's the dolphin, not the grandson, and it belongs to our family in a way no published book ever could. Text on a screen is one kind of presence. A voice reading a beloved story to a child who isn't in the room yet is something else entirely. A voice can travel to Nashville and Albuquerque and wherever they end up building their own lives years from now, and it will still sound like G'Pa Boeke at Christmas.

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Grandpa Joe waited twenty years for his golden ticket. I'm not built for waiting. Anybody who has met me knows this. But I am learning what patience looks like when you don't have another option. And in the meantime, I'm writing, recording, planning visits, booking flights, and calling PJ by his proper name, knowing full well Faith may never stop calling him Flip.

The golden ticket, it turns out, comes in different shapes. Sometimes it's a visit to Nashville when Sadie is old enough to know my face. Sometimes it's a FaceTime call where Shepherd holds up a drawing and waits for my reaction. Sometimes it's a September due date circled on a calendar and a plane reservation I haven't made yet but absolutely will.

In 2008, I wrote that Kailey, Ted, and Faith were the reason I write. They still are. But now there are four more reasons, and counting. And whether they call me G'Pa, Grandpa Boeke, or, God help me, Opa, they are going to know exactly who I am.

I'm going to make absolutely sure.

Keeping Score: A Legacy Written in Box Scores

July 2016 Cubs Scorecard

I found it while packing up my office, preparing for my move to Boise, a dusty file folder tucked behind a stack of old software manuals and holiday cards. Inside was a scorecard from July 20, 2016, featuring the Cubs versus the Mets at Wrigley Field. Five years to the day from when I'm writing this, and the pencil marks have faded some, but I can still make out the neat columns and careful notations that chronicle nine innings of Cubs baseball for my daughter Kailey and me during our cross-country road trip. It's more than just a souvenir; it's a thread that connects three generations of my family, linking back to a lesson my father taught me on a cool early fall evening in Pittsburgh more than forty years ago.

I was nine years old in 1974 when my family moved to Pittsburgh. My father, a Yankees fan from New York who had married into a Cubs family from Chicago, knew how much I loved my mother's team. Despite his own allegiances, he promised to take me to see the Cubs play the Pirates at Three Rivers Stadium that fall. It would become the first professional baseball game that I really remember.

That day stuck with me not just because it was my first, but because I kept score. And now, decades later, I can revisit it with uncanny clarity, thanks to a relic preserved for the internet age: the game's box score, sitting there online like some sacred archaeological tablet.

September 30, 1974. The Cubs' right-handed pitcher Bill Bonham pitched a complete game, but the Cubs could only muster one run, with Billy Williams scoring on a bases-loaded walk to Pete LaCock in the first inning. That was it offensively for the Cubs. Bruce Kison and the Pirates held on for a 2–1 win.

I had every play neatly recorded in pencil on that crisp scorecard in my lap. That quiet thrill of charting a real ballgame, pitch by pitch, was something new entirely. It transformed the experience from one of a spectator to that of a storyteller. But I was still heartbroken at the loss.

Dad showed me the symbols, the elegant shorthand of baseball. He drew a miniature version of the field and jotted down the numbers for each position. He explained how a strikeout was a backward ꓘ if the batter was looking, how a 5-4-3 double play told a complete story in three numbers, and how a home run was simply 'HR,' but somehow contained all the joy of watching a ball disappear into the stands. His patient explanations transformed what I thought was just watching into something deeper, active participation in preserving the game's narrative.

Then came the moment that would define not just that game, but our family's sports allegiances for decades to come. A Pirates fan sitting behind us struck up a conversation with my younger brother and me. When he offered to give us a foul ball if he caught one in exchange for switching our loyalty from the Cubs to the Pirates, my response was immediate: "No way." But my brother, perhaps seduced by the promise of an actual baseball, said "okay".

That single word changed everything. What started as a Cubs family suddenly became divided. My brother's newfound love for Pittsburgh sports, the Pirates, the Steelers, and the Penguins created a rivalry that continues to this day. While he embraced his adopted city's teams, I remained stubbornly loyal to Chicago, setting up decades of semi-good-natured family warfare that adds spice to every sports conversation. That moment taught me something about loyalty and choice that I'd carry forward: that the traditions we embrace are chosen deliberately, and they become part of who we are.

But the real gift my father gave me that day wasn't about team loyalty; in fact, he was quietly rooting for neither team, content to watch his Cubs-loving son discover the game's deeper rhythms. It was about attention and presence. Keeping score forced me to watch every pitch, every swing, every defensive play with intention. It taught me that baseball, like life, is composed of small moments that accumulate into something larger, and that paying attention to details creates memories that last. Looking back now, through the lens that only comes with time and distance, I understand that this wasn't just a baseball lesson; it was a masterclass in being present, in showing up, in the quiet ways that love is demonstrated through shared experience.

Decades passed. I married, had children, and found myself facing the same choice my father had made: whether to pass along this beautiful burden of Cubs fandom. Even as I embraced this ritual with my own children, I couldn't escape Mike Royko's famous warning Sins of the Fathers and the generations-long suffering we Cubs fans inflict upon our children. In his 1989 column, Royko pleaded with fathers not to pass along the disease of Cubs fandom, calling it worse than drug addiction. He warned against hooking innocent children on a lifetime of disappointment and heartbreak. Royko was kidding, but not really...

Despite his wisdom, despite knowing the pain that comes with loving a team that specializes in creative ways to break your heart, I couldn't help myself. Still, I carried that lesson forward. When I wasn't coaching my son's Little League teams, I was in the stands with my scorecard, chronicling his journey from tee-ball through high school and into college. Those scorecards became the record of his baseball career, not just the statistics, but the story. The strikeout that led to tears but also to determination. The diving catch in the gap at the Little League Western Region Complex. The clutch HR with two outs in Arcadia.

As I wrote back in 2009, during another year of Cubs disappointment, I knew I was passing along the same "optimistic pessimism" that had been inflicted upon me. I was the dad telling my children that tomorrow is a new day, that there's always next year, that this season surely this season would be different. Despite the decades of evidence to the contrary, despite the mathematical reality of Cubs history, I continued to believe. And worse, I taught my children to believe too.

Every box filled in was a moment preserved, a way of saying this mattered, you mattered, this game we shared mattered. The habit became so ingrained that I've purchased a program or scorecard and kept score at nearly every Cubs game I've attended since that first one in Pittsburgh. My children learned not just the symbols and abbreviations, but the ritual itself, the careful attention, the patient recording, and the way that keeping score transforms you from a passive observer to an active participant in the game's unfolding story.

Which brings me back to that scorecard from July 20, 2016, when Kailey and I sat in the sweltering heat at Wrigley Field, watching Bartolo Colon face off against Kyle Hendricks during what would become the Cubs' championship season. Our seats were next to two Mets fans who had flown into Chicago that very day just to see Colon pitch. A friendly rivalry bloomed between us, scorecards in hand, each of us tracking every pitch, every run, every substitution. As the Cubs pulled ahead, our scorekeeping turned competitive, complete with light trash talk and shared laughs. Two Anthony Rizzo homeruns later, we left the ballpark grinning, ready to continue our trip westward, while our new Mets friends flew home to New York, slightly sunburned and disappointed. It was the kind of fleeting, scorecard-fueled camaraderie only baseball can conjure.

As I filled in each box that afternoon, I was struck by the perfect symmetry of the moment. Here I was, passing along my father's gift to my daughter, just as he had done with me four decades earlier.

But there was something different about that day, something that only became clear in retrospect. For the first time in my adult life, that eternal Cubs refrain of "wait 'til next year" actually came to pass. That 2016 season, the one chronicled in part on that faded scorecard, ended not in heartbreak but in celebration. The curse was broken. The suffering, at least that particular strain of it, was over.

I think about my father often, especially now that he's gone. I understand Kierkegaard's point about how we live life forward, but also understand it backward; those moments that seemed simple at the time were, in fact, profound acts of love. He was teaching me not just about baseball, but about presence and the importance of being fully engaged in the moments we share with the people we care about most.

The scorecard in my office now represents more than just that Cubs-Mets game or even our cross-country adventure. It's a tangible reminder of a chain of connection that runs from my father to me to my children, each of us learning that some things are worth preserving, that attention is a form of respect, and that the stories we keep are the ones that make us who we are.

My children are now young adults, and they've inherited more than just a Cubs fandom from me. They've learned that baseball is a language of connection, that keeping score is really about preserving memories, and that sometimes the most profound gifts are the ones that appear to be simple pastimes. When they have children of their own, I suspect they'll find themselves at ballparks with scorecards and pencils, continuing a tradition that started with a patient father in Pittsburgh all those years ago.

The game ends, the crowd goes home, but the scorecard remains. A humble piece of paper transformed into family history, one box score at a time.

And for all of Mike Royko's warnings about the sins we visit upon our children, I can't help but think some sins are worth inheriting, especially when they come wrapped in the language of love, attention, and the enduring hope that this year might finally be the year.

Richard Fredrick Boeke, October 19, 1932 - May 23, 2020

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

                                                    ~ Søren Kierkegaard

It’s only now, looking back, that I begin to truly understand the depth and meaning behind the moments we shared, Dad. When I was younger, they felt simple, like when you took our Cub Scout den to the 1977 BSA Jamboree at Moraine State Park. At the time, it just seemed like a fun adventure, making rope with David and our friends, learning new skills, and laughing as we discovered a few "new" words you might not have planned on teaching us that day. As we grew older, the moments became more challenging. But now, with time and distance, I see them all differently. That particular memory wasn’t just a fun outing; it was a lesson in patience, leadership, resilience, and love, the kind of lessons that you taught not through lectures, but through living example.

Kierkegaard was right. We move forward through life, not always knowing the value of each experience, not always understanding the meaning behind the choices we make or the words we speak. But when I look back now, so much becomes clearer. I see how the way you led, the way you showed up, the way you handled both joy and difficulty, each of them shaped who I am today.

I am so grateful for every lesson you tried to teach me, both the ones I took to heart and the ones I only came to understand later. I know I didn’t always recognize your wisdom in the moment, but looking back, it’s everywhere. Your presence, your guidance, your values, they’re in the way I try to raise my own children, in the way I try to treat people, in the way I live.

I hope you saw that in me. I hope you recognized that the kind of father I strive to be is, in large part, because of the kind of father you were. Our relationship wasn’t perfect, whose is? But your love was always there, steady and strong, and mine never wavered either.

Thank you for everything, Dad. For the memories, the lessons, and the love. I am so thankful I got to spend those last hours with you to simply be near you, to say goodbye, and to let you know how deeply I care.

I promise I will keep living forward with the understanding I carry from looking back. I will continue to strive to be the best person I can be, because that’s what you taught me, and that’s how I will honor you.

Love you forever.