The best arguments are the ones I have with myself.

The work version of these started some years ago when I wrote, edited and designed pages for the old Community News section.

Before taking on that job, I’d just been a reporter, a position that made me an expert in the faults and shortcomings of copy editors and editors, who lived on the two steps above me in the newspaper food chain.

They didn’t care about the quality of a story, I told myself. They only cared whether it fit. And every change they made in a story changed it for the worse.

When I started copy editing and laying out pages in addition to writing, that changed.

The copy editor in me started finding the faults in the writer in me.

The layout person in me started arguing that my words might not be as precious as the photos our greatly talented photographers took to illustrate the story.

For a brief, disorienting time, I felt like I was yelling at myself inside a circus fun-house, surrounded by the distorted images of some tall, ugly irate guy who looked strangely like me.

Well, after a cooling off period, I realized I was going to have to calm down and have a face-to-face talk with my various selves. For each of the mes, I had to take in to consideration how the other two mes would react.

With our first grandchild on the way, and in the midst of reporting on various health matters affecting a range of people, I’ve found myself in the same kind of conversation.

Sure, I’m concerned about my wife and I — how we’re going to afford retirement and medical care, how we’re going to take care of ourselves, what our future looks like.

But as my daughter and her husband have been getting the nursery together, I’ve begun to wonder about how the grandchild is going to get along, too.

Knowing the struggles of two working parents with child-care expenses, we’re already worried about how the new mother and father will fare in the challenging financial times and the extent to which we’ll be able to help them ensure a good future for their son.

Just as when we helped our own son with some expenses when he moved to Minneapolis, we’ll want to help the new parents to the extent we can. And we have, cleaning and painting and chipping in on materials along the way.

Figuring how that will play out over the years will be important, of course, because, while my wife and I want to help our children and grandchild, we don’t want to do it to the extent that we depend on them.

Perhaps it’s too much to expect that, as a nation, we can approach our problems in this kind of way. Maybe there are too many competing interests.

But maybe the stake each of our own families has in the future will make it possible for us work things out for the better.

I, for instance, am not interested in running up ungodly medical bills knowing that the expense involved may take money away from my grandson’s prospects for going to college.

Similarly, I’m sure my children will want to see my wife and I comfortable in our retirement. But both they and we are hoping we can leave something to them so they can carry on better and help their children in the same way.

For my part, I’m hoping to begin thinking about these larger issues as arguments with myself — arguments about how to manage my interests not in a vacuum, but in the context of the mutual obligation family members have for one another.

And to keep in mind that not everybody is lucky enough to have a family looking after them.

I know it may be pie-in-the-sky thinking.

But that’s what you’d expect from a soon-to-be first time grandfather whose grandson will, of course, grow up to be President of the United States.