 This story, very frequently found in elementary school reading books, speaks about a “tiresome” truth always uptodate: this society, which especially values people capable of making a real contribution to the common good, puts the elderly to one side and denies them their proper place both in the family and in society. And as always happens, the young can only learn from what they see: including how the elderly should be treated. It is necessary to teach the children a culture of old age. It is indispensible and urgent, because we have to recognise that «the effort of growing old » is not as easy as it seems; it is a complicated and chaotic process, filled with contradictions: marked by anxiety and serenity, bitterness and joy, security and fear, activity and passivity, a closing in on oneself and great openness.

 Elderly people need others and yet often they are left to their own devices: «they are useless and cost a lot »- unless they are used as babysitters for free.

If growing old is difficult, it is equally difficult living with the elderly: they are weak, they need patience and tolerance, virtues that are almost unknown.

In a culture that is geared to super-efficiency old age seems an injury, something wrong, a fault. For too many it takes on the appearance of the waiting-room of death. The elderly need the tenderness of people who are dear to them. They feel it as a cruel wrong when they are removed from family life: an exclusion that mortifies them (in the etymological meaning of the term).

They are treasure chests of experience: everytime a elderly person dies, a library dies. The first great gift the elderly make to a family is precisely that of handing on, not so much material benefits as those things that make life better. They have paid a heavy price after all.

So the “age of the grandparent” has come. Life has given them great experience; they have learned to be better, they have slowly acquired a treasure of wisdom: a collection of memories, of disappointments, of secrets, of habits, of hopes. Grandparents can pass on to their grandchildren a collection of stories and memories, so-called "family history " that the grandchildren find extraordinarily fascinating.

Grandfather can represent for the grandchild a certain stability in family relationships of affection. He is able to talk as someone who was there of the time when mum was a little girl and dad was at school, of when in the place where the supermarket stands there were open fields, of when in place of the multistorey carpark there was a pool where mum and dad went swimming and where everyone knew them. In this way the child has the idea that his family has always existed and always will. He gets an idea of how affections continue. A child is afraid, more than anything else, of the collapse of his world of affections; the presence of grandparents is certainly a source of security and com­fort.

 Since the times of their childhood to today so much has changed: society, values, even the faith. Many of today’s grand-dads have painfully lived through this evolution. Their way of fitting in to this new world determines the place they want to occupy and the influence they have in communicating the faith to their grandchildren. Some of them, perhaps, find it frustrating and they even feel at fault that their their own children are no longer practising, and are not handing on the faith to their children. «Is it our fault?», they ask themselves. I ask myself whether this break in the chain of those handing on the faith has not something to do with the almost total exclusion of the elderly, whose experience of the faith, which helped them to face up to life especially while sorrow came knocking on the door of their homes, is ignored and has passed into oblivion. Perhaps, as a theolgian has written, “we are in the presence of one of the most antichristian aspects of our society and culture.” 