It was a birthday party that once would have been almost unimaginable.
A reserved room at a restaurant. Tables pushed together, decorated with helium balloons and lined with presents. Pizzas baking in the kitchen, kids playing games in an adjoining room, grownups catching up since the previous get-together a year earlier.
The guest of honor took it all in stride. This was his third birthday party, and for him pretty much the normal order of things.
For some of the older members of the family, however, it was a case study in how much the normal order of things has changed.
The guest list was long and diverse – little kids, big kids, parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, great grandparents. Conversation topics ranged from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to sports to politics. A striking contrast to what family birthday parties once were, and to what families once were.
Grayson, the birthday boy, is the son of single parents. They share the responsibilities of caring for him; they just didn’t get married to do it. That’s not uncommon now.
When I was their age, it was anything but common. Women who were pregnant were expected to be married or to get married as quickly as possible. Most of those who had babies without getting married gave them up for adoption. You didn’t hear much about single mothers then.
That’s changed, as have expectations of what constitutes a family. A typical family in those days was a mother, a father and one or more kids. Fathers were the breadwinners, mothers the “homemakers.” With the exception of a childless couple who lived across the street, I can’t think of a single family in my childhood neighborhood who didn’t fit that mold. It was what families were expected to be, the ideal family model.
But was it? Fathers spent most of their time working. When they were home, they tended to be the family disciplinarians. All of my childhood friends were, to one extent or another, afraid of their fathers. I was, to some extent, afraid of mine. This is not to say that they were cruel men. My father was a good man, and in his later years a gentle soul loved by all who knew him. But, like all the fathers in the old neighborhood, he was a strict disciplinarian in his younger years.
My mother, like the other mothers in the neighborhood, was in charge of running the household. She kept the house immaculate. She cooked most of the meals. She did the heavy cleaning, the laundry and changed the sheets on the beds every Saturday. She did all the decorating, from choosing the furniture and carpets to stripping the walls and hanging wallpaper.
My sister and I helped with the housework and yard work, but the lion’s share of the responsibilities fell to our parents. I’ll never forget coming home from school and finding my mother in tears because a cake she baked had fallen. Or my father walking the floor at night, worried about paying the bills. Both had separate burdens, which they shouldered pretty much on their own.
Birthdays were minor events – dinner with the immediate family, a small cake, a modest number of presents.
Fast forward to today, and a different world.
Both of Grayson’s parents are single, but they are far from raising him on their own. The kid is being raised by a village.
Both of his parents are in college; both have part-time jobs. On the days when his dad has him, his family helps out while Dad is working or in school. They take him bowling. They’ve taken him to high school games, and his grandfather on that side of the family is teaching him the finer points of hitting a baseball. They look forward to spending time with him.
On our side of the family, no less than ten family members help share the load while Mom is working or in school. My wife and I have Grayson one morning a week and occasionally overnight. We’ve taken him to basketball games and are regulars at the neighborhood playground. My former office is now a toy repository.
It’s not all fun and games, of course. We’ve all shared in the illnesses, the tears, the frustrations of potty training and trying to keep up with a kid who makes the Energizer Bunny look like a slug. Anyone who thinks raising kids is easy never had any.
But I think we’d all agree that for the most part it’s been a joy. I’ve laughed more in the three years since Grayson was born than I did in the previous ten. True, he wears us out. But it’s a weariness that gladdens the heart.
His grandfather on his dad’s side may have put it best:
“He has his life with his mom, he has his life with you and he has his life with us. And everywhere he goes, he’s marinated in love.”
The results speak for themselves. He’s a happy, well-adjusted kid. He smiles a lot, laughs a lot. He makes the people around him happy.
I’ve always thought I had a happy childhood. I grew up in Boise when it was an idyllic place to grow up. I had good parents, good friends, good teachers. But with all the societal changes since then, good and bad, I think Grayson may be a happier kid than my friends and I were in our early years.
There are things to be said for being raised by a village.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

My younger daughter went on a tear recently and purged every room in her house of unneeded items, a.k.a. junk. It inspired my wife and me to do do the same. The results were impressive, and surprising.
Out went the seldom-worn clothes, the little-used blankets and old pillows, the unwanted knick-knacks and curiosities that had been wasting space and gathering dust. Bags upon bags of things discarded, breathing room in closets, shelves with extra space for the first time in years.
And an almost giddy feeling of accomplishment.
There was a time when we followed these semi-annual purges with yard sales. Now we just put everything in bags and boxes, take it to the Good Will and write it off on our taxes. When you consider that yard-sale shoppers expect to get things for pennies on the dollar, and usually do, it comes out about the same.
Some things, obviously, you can’t sell or give away. Cherished books, family photographs …
And the surprise – a forgotten package of memorabilia from my Statesman years.
I was absolutely certain when preparing to retire from full-time journalism that I’d cleaned everything out of my desk and assorted boxes, nooks and crannies around the newsroom. So I couldn’t have been more surprised while in purge mode to find an unopened package of newsroom flotsam lurking on a shelf in a bedroom closet.
A former co-worker had mailed it to me (in 2013, according to the postmark) with a note explaining that the contents had been found in the newsroom. I must have put the package on the shelf intending to open it later and forgotten all about it.
The contents included letters, cards, photos … memories.
One of the cards was from Fern Graham, the longtime postmaster of Bruneau. It was a thinking-of-you card, written when our oldest daughter was recovering from cancer. Her card took me back to the day we met, in the tiny Bruneau Post Office.
I had a letter with me that day that needed to be mailed, and after debating whether to wait and mail it after returning to Boise I took a chance and pushed it through a slot in the post office wall. Immediately, someone on the other side tugged it out of my fingers, a door opened and I watched as my letter was tossed into a rolling cart and whisked away by a waiting truck.
“That was quick!” I said to the woman overseeing the process. “I almost waited to mail it from Boise.”
“It’ll get where it’s going faster from here,” she said with conviction.
That was my introduction to Bruneau’s beloved postmaster, and the beginning of an enduring friendship. I’d stop to visit when passing through Bruneau; she introduced me to half the town. I drove 150 miles to attend her wedding in Mountain City, Nev.
One of the letters in the package was from a woman named Mary. Postmarked a decade ago, it was a pitch for a story, accompanied by a photo of Mary. She asked that her picture be returned if I didn’t do the story.
I know what you’re thinking, Mary. You’re thinking that that jerk Woodward lost your picture. So you’ll be glad to know that it isn’t lost, looks every bit as good as it did ten years ago and that I’d be happy to return it. It would make me feel better about some of the family treasures readers used to send me in the misguided hope that I wouldn’t lose them.
A Thousand Springs Scenic Byway postcard had me laughing once again at the humor of the late Tom Trusky, BSU professor extraordinaire and director of the Idaho Center for the Book. Trusky, who died in 2009, was forever sending me postcards supposedly ”signed” by late Idaho author Vardis Fisher. This was one of them.
“Damned fools!” it said. “First they plug ’em up, then they sell ’em on a postcard shaped like Oregon! — Vardis.”
Most of the springs were indeed “plugged up,” to develop hydropower, and the card was in fact shaped like Oregon. But at least it wasn’t the usual mistake; the card wasn’t shaped like Iowa.
It was always a pleasure to receive one of Trusky’s “Vardis” cards, which he mailed from as far away as Albania. They never failed to make me laugh. This one, however, was bittersweet. With him gone, it was as sad as it was funny.
Some of the package’s contents were routine – a card thanking me for speaking to a class, a letter from my late sister, a note from a former publisher. Others gave pause:
Oliver Gregerson’s memorial card, for example. Ollie owned and lived at Gregerson’s Wildlife Park, near Barber. He was publicly known for his legal battles to protect his privacy, which he guarded with singular intensity. The antithesis of a public park, his property was blocked by a locked gate and dotted with no-trespassing signs. There were rumors of rude welcomes for uninvited visitors, so I was skittish about going there to do a news story when his home burned.
My fears were unfounded. Gregerson turned out to be one of the sweetest people you could meet. He was in tears over his loss, and it would have been difficult to have imagined a more gentle soul. All he’d ever wanted was be left alone to care for his animals. The picture on the funeral card was of him cradling a baby badger in his powerful hands.
An eight-year-old card from an Elvis Gallagher was equally touching. It was in response to an interview I’d done with a survivor of a Nazi POW camp. Gallagher, who helped liberate the camp, had read my story and contacted him.
He was “bowled over,” Gallagher wrote. The two went on to meet and embrace 51 years after making history.
Re-reading his card, and the other cards and letters found in the forgotten package on the shelf, made the time spent worth it. An occasional purge is good for the soul.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on http://www.woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.