A feature article on Jim Foltz’s Things Grandpa Wanted Me to Know
What would you want your grandchildren to remember about life long after you were no longer there to give them advice?
For Jim Foltz, that question became a book.
Things Grandpa Wanted Me to Know: Simple Wisdom for Life is a heartfelt collection of quotations, sayings, reflections, and lessons assembled with a deeply personal purpose: to leave something meaningful for his grandchildren, Natalia, Nico, and Jack.
The result is more than an inspirational quote book. It is a form of legacy.
Every family passes something from one generation to the next. Sometimes it is a name, a photograph, a tradition, a piece of property, or a treasured object. Foltz’s book suggests that another inheritance may be even more valuable: the accumulated wisdom that helps a person understand how to live.
Throughout the collection, the reader encounters ideas about perseverance, happiness, gratitude, faith, forgiveness, love, family, time, purpose, and success. They are subjects that become increasingly important as life is actually lived rather than merely planned.
Foltz’s approach is especially fitting for a book written with grandchildren in mind. Grandparents cannot experience life’s challenges on behalf of the generations that follow them. They cannot prevent every disappointment or guarantee every success. What they can do is leave behind perspective.
That perspective appears repeatedly in the book’s emphasis on resilience. Life changes. Plans fail. People make mistakes. Difficult seasons arrive. The important question is not whether hardship can always be avoided, but how a person responds when it cannot.
Then comes gratitude, the reminder that a meaningful life can easily be overlooked while someone is busy searching for a bigger one. Ordinary days, music, laughter, friendship, family, beauty, health, time, and simple human connection emerge as forms of wealth that cannot always be measured in money.
The book’s reflections on faith and purpose deepen that conversation. Foltz includes thoughts on prayer, trust in God, love, service, death, eternity, and spiritual life. These passages encourage readers to consider not only what they want from life, but what kind of person they hope to become while living it.
Yet nowhere is the idea of legacy clearer than in the book’s attention to family and giving. Again and again, the collection returns to the idea that relationships matter more than possessions and that a life gains meaning through what is shared with others.
It is an especially appropriate message from a grandfather. Children and grandchildren may forget individual conversations over the years. They may not remember every piece of advice exactly as it was spoken. A book, however, gives those lessons somewhere to remain.
That makes Things Grandpa Wanted Me to Know both universal and intimate. Readers do not need to be members of Foltz’s family to recognize the questions behind the collection: What really matters? What makes a good life? How should we respond to hardship? What is success worth without happiness? What do we owe the people around us? And when our time is finished, what will we have left in the hearts of others?
The answers gathered in the book come from many voices, but together they point toward a remarkably consistent message: live with courage, appreciate what you have, keep faith, love generously, help others, and do not waste the time you have been given.
The book eventually closes with A Simple Prayer, whose themes of peace, love, forgiveness, faith, hope, understanding, giving, and service provide a fitting conclusion to everything that comes before it.
For Foltz, the project may have begun as a gift to three grandchildren. But the questions it asks, and the wisdom it preserves, belong to every generation.
For Contact:
Email: author@thingsgrandpawantedmetoknow.com
KDP: https://www.amazon.com/THINGS-GRANDPA-WANTED-ME-KNOW-ebook/dp/B0H8BMPDB2/ref=sr_1_1
Website: https://thingsgrandpawantedmetoknow.com/
