Mike's needs versus Jim's silences.

[dreadedcandiru2]

You might have noticed over the years that Jim and Michael never actually got along all that well. Jim seemed to see the boy as a television-obsessed clod who had no real time for his granddad and Mike seemed to see just another old person wanting to keep him down. The reason that I mention this is that I remember a failed attemopt at bonding in which Mike wanted to learn cool stuff about the war only to be disappointed and feel like Gramps failed him somehow. This points to the following three facts:

1) Mike spent his life counting on his grandfather to provide him cool stories of battle to boast about to his pals.

2) Jim hated talking about the damned war.

3) This means that Mike thinks that his granddad let him down; eventually, he called a sick man crazy because he's stupid.

as to why they never really connected. While April was smart enough to figure out Fact 2, Mike never was.

Comments

[howtheduck.livejournal.com]

April does seem like the designated child to get along with Grandpa Jim and is in fact the only Patterson child to show some affection for a grandparent. This may have been an issue for Lynn personally because it's obvious to me that the favored grandparents would have been Ruth and Tom Johnston who lived next to her children the entire time they were growing up. Ironically the Patterson kids of Mike and Elizabeth who have almost no relationship with their grandparents are modeled from kids who would have seen their grandparents on a daily basis.

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

Classic Lynn, isn't it? She wants her children to have a warm relationship with distant non-entities who live very far away and are also sick instead of people they see every day because she wants them to love her enabler man-child daddy (and hate her mommy for bossing her and telling her what to do) as much as she does.