I remember when Grandfather would sometimes stop by for a surprise visit with some bags of groceries during my Elementary School days.

There was plenty more good that he did while our lifetimes intersected, but this experience still lights up my soul to this day.

Grandfather was a gifted storyteller, witty and could be charming. But more often than not, he was stoic, humble, the strong silent time, and didn’t do drama.

But he had a big presence, and when he showed up, he would smile and say something like, “well, I was just in the neighborhood and I thought maybe you guys could use some groceries.” At that time in my life, my Grandparents didn’t live more than a 5 minute drive away.

Of course like we’ve all heard; growing up being raised by a single parent wasn’t easy for me, nor is it on anyone else.

But extended family played a significant role in my life, and this example of how Grandfather looked out for us has always stuck with me.

During this time period in their life cycle, my maternal grandparents were in a more comfortable position in their lives financially. By this time, they were empty nesters, expanded their social network, and had the opportunity to travel the planet and experience different cultures. I always appreciated how they would often bring me back a new t-shirt that I would proudly sport at school. Fashion has never been my bug, but I always felt like those t-shirts externally reinforced my intrinsic uniqueness.

Grandfather had been orphaned by the untimely death of both of his parents by the time he was 19. He would always say that “we were poor but didn’t know we were poor. We had food to eat, and we played and had fun as kids.” And then he would always say that Grandmother grew up a different kind of poor, as in, Appalachia like abject poverty. She never saw a dentist till she was 18, when she walked in a clinic off the street with bleeding gums and no money to pay for dental care.

These days, many people, like my own daughter, still tend to call themselves adults by 18 or so. But the truth is that we are still adolescents till our mid-20s from a developmental and psychological perspective.

College wasn’t an option for either of my grandparents or their peers from their old St. Louis neighborhoods back then. Later in life, they would tell stories about their newer peer network who went to college, how they had dreamed about their own children going to college someday, and then me by the time I came along.

Parenting back then; especially for folks that grew up like my grandparents, involved a lot of financial stress and winging it. Of course there’s still plenty of all that in parenthood today.

As I got older, I remember asking Grandfather about consciously envisioning a life plan or planned parenthood back when they were starting out as a couple. And Grandfather would chuckle and say, “naw…but sometimes we’d look around and say, what the hell are we doing with all these kids?”

These days, many folks are familiar with the term Food Insecurity to describe the anxiety that connects to the insecurity about when or where your next meal might come from, if at all.

In my case, I had the good fortune to grow up around all kinds of people from diverse racial, ethnic, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Some of my peers at school arrived from other lands with English not being their first language. At that time, the land we all lived in was called the MidWest.

And it wasn’t lost on me that I was only a fragile step away from what some of my peers were going through, who were part of the Cycle of Poverty, on the fringe or falling through the cracks.

But the difference in my case was that I was privileged to have someone like Grandfather looking out for my mom and me.

Finally, it is with a deep sense of appreciation and gratitude that I feel for the way that Grandfather chose to look after us, even though he wasn’t obligated to.