There is no Grandpa Maltby.  Well, there was, but he’s been gone for a long time.  I’m resurrecting him as my crotchety alter ego.

Grandpa Maltby is the name I’m giving to the nostalgic, reactionary, absolutist, grumpy part of me that’s been growing in strength as I’ve gotten older.  While I still think of myself as a young man (27.  28 tops.), there are times when I find myself thinking things that are more appropriate to my parents or their parents or just random old people I’ve known in my life.

Grandpa Maltby is the guy who’s so irritated by the grinding, clattering sounds of skate boarders that he wants to punch someone.  He’s the guy who screams “This is a sideWALK,” when I’m almost knocked over by a cyclist who’s inexplicably racing down the pedestrian space when the whole street is available to them and every other vehicle.  If I had a lawn, he’d be the one yelling at kids to keep off it.

Grandpa Maltby is also the heart of the Grammar Nazi that I’ve become.  He’s the one who has an aneurysm when educated people say “I could care less” when they mean “I couldn’t care less” or who don’t know the difference between “there”, “their”, and “they’re” or who insist on using an apostrophe to make a plural.  (It’s “chairs,” not “chair’s.”)

Grandpa Maltby is also the guy who more and more wants me to start conversations with, “When I was your age . . .”  I don’t know why it comes so naturally even as I remember my own reactions when my elders used to say things like that to me.  The first time I noticed it was several years ago I was in a bank buying a cashier’s check (yes, a cashier’s check) from the twelve-year-old teller.  After he had input all my information and his computer had spit out the check, I found I was nanoseconds from saying, “You know, when I was a teller we had to type our cashier’s checks.  And if we made even one mistake, we had to start all over.”

Luckily I had a vision of both the eye roll I’d get from junior and could almost hear him telling his friends that we probably had to cut down the trees to mulch into paper so we could print the checks with ink we’d pressed from local berries.  I stopped myself, but it was a close call.  And in that moment, Grandpa Maltby made his first appearance.

So I’ve decided to embrace the old guy and let him express himself once in a while.  In the future, when Grandpa Maltby needs to vent, I’ll let him do it here.  I’m sure it’ll help keep me sane, if not young.