D. Louise Brown

Warning: If you decide to have children, there’s a good chance that somewhere down the road, they’re going to do the same. Which will make you a grandparent.

Congratulations. And by the way, this happens so fast you’d swear all you did was blink. So don’t settle back thinking this is all still eons away.

Now if you think the grandparent role is a cuddly, cozy place where little ones clamor to snuggle up to you while you eat homemade cookies and read books, you are in for such a shocker. Grandparenting is complicated. The world expects certain things from grandparents.

The number and variety of 2011 Top 10 lists is epic. Everything from Top 10 Stupid Celebrity Quotes (hundreds to choose from) to the Top 10 Terrible Parents (just 10?) to the Top 10 Tragic Elevator Accidents (seriously). I figure the Top 10 Reader Responses to these Homefront Columns belongs on the list.

A January column pledging to be less tolerant of bad public behavior brought a host of approving comments from you. The best one came from a savvy reader who shared that the perfect response to profane language in a public setting is to smile, reach out my hand, and say, “Hello, my name is Louise. What’s yours?” I tried it. It works. That guy in the restaurant couldn’t apologize enough.

The pile of ads sitting in my living room is large enough to build a small couch. They offer everything a person could want, need, doesn’t have, should have, could have.

I’m not crazy about shopping and never have been. But I know a lot of people who love to shop, to search, and to drag home that deeply discounted, one-of-a-kind, last-on-the-shelf, mistakenly under-priced “find.” This holiday shopping season is their favorite time of the year. I’m just not one of them.

I made a new acquaintance, named Roy. Actually, it’s spelled Roi. And Roi is changing the way I spend my life. Literally.

I learned about Roi at a meeting my husband and I attended to figure out what we’re going to do with ourselves when we retire. That makes it sound like we’re researching rest homes and distributing heirlooms — a misconception spawned by today’s youth-obsessed society that makes us mentally reserve the “R” word for old guys who wear knee socks with their shorts, golf down south, and go to bed at 8 (which, when you think about it, has some definite advantages), or old women who spend all their time and money on grandkids, (which, when you think about it, has some definite advantages).

Recently, I was in charge of a large outdoor event at the college where I work. Part of my help came in the form of student volunteers.

From that experience I was reminded of a few basic principles of human nature: Some volunteers show up, some don’t.

Some volunteers did a slacker job of what they were asked to do. Some did exactly what they were asked to do. Some did exactly what they were asked to do and then asked if there was something more they could do.

The 10-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks is generating a lot of conversations these days, random inquiries from all angles like “Where were you when you heard the news?” and “How did it affect your life?” and “Do you think it could happen again?” and so on.

Our answers are as varied as we are. I was carpooling kids to school and heard something strange on the radio. Like millions of other American, I went home, switched on the TV and, over the course of the next few hours, didn’t leave. Couldn’t leave. The spectacle unfolded like a slow-motion horror film.

A group of ‘seasoned’ women, myself included, were bantering around the topic of how newborn babies today end up with more clothing and furniture than those of us talking about it. To be fair, the conversation took place at a baby shower where the mom-to-be had just been, well, showered with more clothing and “stuff.”

Quick to rise in the conversation was the strange fact that today’s babies are constantly surrounded by large, impenetrable chunks of plastic that have been molded into a variety of things like swings, strollers, car seats, bouncers, even cribs, and then certified by testing that includes throwing them off a cliff, running over them with a tank, and strapping them to the space shuttle.