Disclosure: We are proud to partner with Dove Men+Care in its #ThereToCare campaign.

City Dads Group members around the nation marked Grandparents’ Day Sunday with a lot of love and a little help from our organization’s frequent partner, Dove Men+Care.

The grooming products company generously sent a few dozen of our fathers framed photos of the dads, their kids, and one of their grandfathers along with a shaving kit filled with Dove Men+Care goodies for the father who helped conceive these last two generations. Our fathers used #ThereToCare across multiple social media platforms to talk about the gifts for their fathers and about how passing down grooming advice to their own children reminded them when they received advice from their own fathers.

Here’s some of those posts:

The gifts were part of the Dove Men+Care’s latest #ThereToCare campaign. Back in June, City Dads Group members participated in its campaign to thank influential father figures in their lives.

Grandparents Day, always the first Sunday following Labor Day, was especially poignant for our family this year. My mother is in the late stages of Alzheimer’s, and our visits to the nursing home are increasingly difficult as she struggles to remember her children and grandchildren.

Her anguish recently came to mind while my daughters and I were, of all things, ziplining through a forest. On many landings a simple warning sign reads: “Always stay attached.” The sign features a figure falling through the air, his harness belt waving aimlessly like a severed umbilical cord.

Metaphorically, the phrase “always stay attached” struck me as the ultimate mantra of a helicopter parent. Ironically, however, ziplining requires each traveler to ride the lines alone, the ultimate free-range parenting experience. Even though I was up there with my daughters, I was unable to “stay attached” to them. They needed to stay attached to each line, while I could only watch from a distance as they stepped off each platform. It was like watching their first steps again, only this time they walked on air through the trees.

Such a paradoxical combination of attachment/detachment parenting made me think of how most grandparents manage to stay close to their grandchildren but also give them plenty of space. Because they’ve already been through the parenting gauntlet, they seem able to enjoy the children more, worry less, be more detached, and take the long view of child development. Perhaps the road twice traveled makes all the difference.

If grandparenting were a song, it would be the acoustic version of an overwrought predecessor, stripped down to the basic joys of kinship. Strangely, less energy can often lead to more power. That’s what makes a grandparent-grandchild relationship so gratifying to watch (and listen to).

Julie Lythcott-Haims makes a similar point in her recent book, How to Raise an Adult, in which she quotes an admissions officer at a highly selective college. To an essay question asking about the “best gift” the applicants have received, a frequent answer was “‘time spent with grandparents.’” The students wrote “‘he took me fishing,’ ‘she taught me to bake bread from the old country,’ or ‘she showed me a locket that has been in the family for three generations.’ Simple family time spent with someone who loved them unconditionally is clearly a well-valued gift.”

Grandparents protect and slow down time for today’s kids who are often overscheduled, under pressure and stressed out. They are parents “once removed,” which provides an aerial view of what’s most important in life. Today’s parents would do well to emulate this quality of their children’s grandparents: Always stay attached, of course, but whenever possible, also stay detached, to a degree. In other words, sometimes it’s OK to “become your parents.”

Sadly, the memory loss of my mother’s Alzheimer’s is overcoming her attachment to my daughters. But my youngest recently showed me one of her journal entries. It captures the way her precious, protected times with a grandparent will always soar over the forces of detachment: “Grandma, I hope one day you will remember my name. I will remember your name forever.”

Editor’s note: This Sunday, Sept. 13, is national Grandparents Day.

The sounds that came from the basement were mesmerizing. The constant whirr and buzz of saws like a swarm of angry bees, the hammering of metal on wood upon unseen projects. The smell of fresh-cut wood and developing chemicals, the traces of sawdust from shoes when they walked up the long wooden steps. The clunk, clunk, clunk of my grandfather’s shoes up those creaky wooden stairs and me, straining, laying in the entryway trying to peek under the basement door just for glimpse of what was happening beyond my sight.

I remember this place so well. I can smell the tobacco of my Grandpa’s pipe and my Grandma cooking hamburgers in the kitchen. I am trying to drown out the sizzle so I can hear what is happening down those stairs. Just what is in store for me down there?

My grandfather had a knack for making the ordinary seem so extraordinary. Just the chance to ride the lawn tractor while on his lap still seems better than any roller coaster I have ever been on. Venturing into his basement was the only exception. Nothing could outdo the mystery behind the basement. My grandfather was a do-it-yourself Willy Wonka. He was the Picasso of jigsaws, my own personal Ansel Adams and the Aristotle of teachers all rolled into one.

You had to be a certain age to explore the basement and being old enough to go down there was a rite of passage. You became a different level of boy in my Gramps’ eyes. His basement was a wondrous place for me as a child. It was a place where I was first introduced to a band saw, the first place I held a BB gun, and it was the first place I ever developed a photograph.

Well, technically, it was a color photogram, a photograph created by light travelling through a colored object forever burning itself to the chemistry of color paper. I was very young when I made it. I still have it sitting on our mantle, the oranges and yellows autumn from fallen maple leaves fresh from Grandma’s front yard garden forever imprisoned in the Kodak Cibachrome paper my Gramps kept in supply. I remember gathering them with her while she encouraged me to hurry and scooted me up the gravel driveway headed for my first time through the basement door.

He let me learn by doing. He was always patient even when I made a critical mistake. I think it almost delighted him when I did mess up because it meant I could learn something new, and then he would make me do it all over again. He never brushed me aside and did it himself. The last time I usually did something, he just stood back and watched.

My grandfather was a chemist by profession but he was an amazing artist. He created pictures out of different kinds of wood grain, called marquetry, to create realistic representations of people like Abraham Lincoln and Jesus. On the side, as a hobby initially, he took photographs. When he retired he became a professional photographer in Madison, Wisc., and traveled all over selling his photos. He used to take us with him sometimes, in the giant black Dodge van, lugging chests of framed photos he all did himself and setting up his wire displays one section at a time well into his late seventies. Traveling with my grandparents was always an adventure as Gramps couldn’t hear and Grandma couldn’t see. “Vernon, you aren’t going the right way” she would say. I’m not sure if he pretended not to hear her or really couldn’t, but often responded with a “Huh?”

He often took us fishing but sometimes we just drove with Grandma, listening to her tell us every fact about Wisconsin she could hold in that amazing brain of hers while Grandpa just nodded and interjected with a “Yup.” They found roadside ice cream shops and quiet fishing holes where we could just be together. That is was what was important to them.

He kept every letter that my brother and I wrote to him, proudly displaying it on his wall in his photo lab in the basement. I used to walk past this one letter he kept up there since I was eight. I had written it with one of those pens that has every color as an option to change inks. And had sent a photo of a boy and his grandpa fishing that I had cut out of a magazine that I sent to him captioning it: “This is you and me”

He could talk to anyone and everyone and had the greatest smile and laugh. When you looked into his eyes, they just twinkled with a boyish excitement. He could tell you stories and you would hang on his every word. At night when the house was still, sometimes I couldn’t sleep because of the anticipation of spending another day with him wound me up.

He wasn’t about what you had but what you could make of a situation. He was about people and getting to know them and being genuine. Sometimes, when we would be in the basement together we would talk about everything I was doing. He always had a words of encouragement, never judged, and only listened. Then, in his own quiet way, would teach me a lesson without me ever knowing it.

I try to apply what I have learned from grandpa down there in the basement as I am raising my own kids, hoping that the patience, skills and wisdom he taught me are passed on to them. The basement where he helped shape me from a boy to my own man still resides in my memory though Vernon is long since left this Earth.

He was the perfect example of what I think a father should be; gentle but strong, wise but with a boyish curiosity, modest but giving. I want to say thank you Gramps for helping to teach me how to be a man through encouragement and support and not by doing it for me, but letting me discover that on my own that anything is possible. You and the basement revealed those doors for me and because of you, I learned to walk right through them when they opened.

A version of this first appeared on DadNCharge.