The Grandparents Party

I wonder whether you would garner any praise if you walked into your next important meeting, say a board of governors meeting, and showed everyone your perfectly tied shoelace. Unless your product pitch requires a nifty lace to be tied. I don’t see the b.o.g-s typing themselves up in knots because you put on your own shoes.

Even better, I wonder what they would think if you walked up to them and showed them how you put your right shoe on your left foot and your left shoe in your right foot. Depending on how well liked you are, I suspect some sympathetic mumbling and secret plans to find the next person to succeed you.

Anyway, I digress.

Every day for a month, the son would get up, wish us a brisk good morning, run and pick up a pen and then circle the day off in the calendar. When I noticed this sense of urgency and purpose I chalked it down to one of the many useless things the daughter makes him do. And it was. There is a look of reverence associated with any task entrusted to him by his older sister. She told him to circle off every day in the calendar, telling him to count down to the number of days left for his grandparents to arrive.

The result of all this hard work is that the days passed and the grandparents arrived. Between the excited grandchildren and the excited grandparents, the roof is developing cracks in the plaster and all is well.

The son has never been one of those children who mumble and fumble causing you to stop mid-stride and ask, “What did you say? Speak up boy!” He addresses you with a voice meant to carry a school assembly without a mike even if you are only a few feet away. A fact that gives his like-throated maternal grandfather no end of joy. The old father has in fact carried school assemblies without a mike.

Anyway, what struck me observing grandparents and grandchildren is that we would all have excellent grades and reviews if our grandparents were our professors, managers and board of governors. I mean study the facts:

I caught them the other day absolutely beaming with pride and throwing loving glances at their grandson because he put on his shoes and socks by himself.

Then another day, they chuckled fondly at the fact that the son puts his left shoe on his right foot and vice-versa.

Not what the b-o-g-s in Paragraph 2 would do in other words.

I read somewhere that if we lived the other way around, i.e. started out as jaded old folk, then grew into the adult working life, and wound up as children, life would be happier and I cannot but agree. I would like to be congratulated for wearing the right pair of shoes on the wrong feet.