83-year-old Morton Willbanks, heartsick and exhausted by life, waits for death in a San Francisco retirement condominium. One day his estranged granddaughter calls and begs him to baby-sit Pip, his 9-year-old great granddaughter whom he has never met. Pip is a wonderfully quirky spirit struggling with a chaotic home life and a tragic heat break. She very much needs the kind of (great) grandfatherly love and patience which Willbanks has never been emotionally equipped to provide. But his inadvertent bonding with Pip pulls Willbanks back into the world of caring, purpose and personal responsibility. It also compels him to re-examine the past seventy years of his life and to reach more optimistic conclusions on a number of issues: his horrific war experiences, his problematic marriage, his abysmal failings as a parent -- and his romantic possibilities with a seventy-year-old neighbor who still wears high heels and miniskirts.