OCTOBER 27, 2025 – The other day in a conversation with a friend who happens to be a long-time business-banker client, I used the term “codgers” in reference to old guys, quickly adding in pre-emptive self-inoculation, that by way of my age, I myself (“I suppose”) qualified as a “codger.” This friend/client of mine is always on the ball. As our conversation progressed—about his plan to order and plant white pine seedlings—he was doing a bit of verbal research on the side.
“I have at my desk the American Heritage Dictionary,” he said in a non sequitur to a sentence (his or mine, I forget whose) about pine trees, “and the definition of ‘codger’ is, ‘A somewhat eccentric man, especially an old one.’”
“Huh,” I said. “So ‘old’ isn’t the primary element of the definition.
“No,” he agreed. “The main quality is ‘eccentric.’” The implication as it applied to me was obvious.
“Well,” I said—again in attempted self-inoculation, “I guess I qualify as a codger, but just so you know, I’ve been eccentric ever since my college days.” In all honesty, dear reader, I exhibited eccentricity long before matriculating as an undergraduate.
But (ostensibly) I digress before I even begin with the subject at hand, namely, “the grandpa touch.”
Yesterday as we prepared to ferry our son Byron and grandson Diogo to the airport, the normally smiling little scalawag broke down into a crying fit. Despite being offered his Brio train caboose and his toy monster truck as distractions, the little guy refused our attempts to calm him. My wife and I attempted to flatter ourselves by the notion that his full-throated crying was simply his expression of unhappiness about leaving his doting grandparents.
Somehow, Byron forged ahead with a diaper change, then suited up his son for the trip ahead, and secured him in his high-tech, astronautical swivel car seat. Diogo’s four-alarm wailing continued as Byron made multiple trips between house and vehicle, loading his four-day expedition gear.
I’m a softie when it comes to children crying. “Oh, so you want more candy that everyone else says you can’t have? Sure! Here you go!” Or . . . “What? You ran into that chair and it startled you? Oh, you poor kid! Let me get your mamma!” Or . . . “You’re tired, hungry and your diaper’s wet? Sh-sh-sh, now. I’ll make sure help is on the way!”
Having watched the failure of the close-at-hand distractions—the caboose; the monster truck; the grandma’s soft words; the dad’s reassuring ones—I decided to try something different. As the now strapped-into-his-seat child was bawling from the tops of his lungs, I stooped in the doorway of the back seat of the car and formed a “quadruped” with my hand, deploying three fingers and thumb as legs and a fourth finger as the creature’s long neck and head. To a young kid, it’s supposed to look like a Brontosaurus. I then “caused” the miniature dinosaur to crawl from the crying toddler’s ankle up his leg and all the way up to his neck, where the friendly Bronto-dino executed a surprise tickle. In an instant the tear-drenched face yielded to open laughter. To ensure that “happy” had defeated “mad,” I returned the dinosaur to the ankle and repeated the climb all the way to the tickle point on the neck. This routine I repeated until the kid was in sustainable laughing mode.
Even my wife acknowledged the success of the grandpa touch. Byron recalled my having done the same when he was a young kid.
He remembered too, my technique for pulling him and his brother out of a pout when they were somewhat older than two—a technique I’d used successfully with Diogo’s dear older cousin, Illiana, just the day before. When she was in a mild fuss about something and her displeasure registered across her face, I said, “Ah-ah-ah! Now don’t you dare smile! And I mean it. There’s no latitude here for smiles or laughter. None. Zippo. I don’t want to see even the hint of a smile and definitely no laugh. You got that?! No smiling, no laughter allowed!” Inevitably, she couldn’t resist responding in exactly the opposite way she intended. The smile shone through just as sunbeams burst through a break in the clouds.
The grandpa touch. It works (almost) every time. Given its efficacy, I wouldn’t be the least offended if you called it, “the codger touch.”
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
