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Grandmas and Grandpas
Last week I made an author visit to an elementary school with my books and one of the third graders cracked me up. I posted that conversation and got a bunch of smiles. So, I decided to reach back in my history of school visits as an author and share some other comments from that same genre of commentary. I hope you will have some laughs with me.
Last week a 3rd grader asked, “How old are you?” He didn’t seem impressed when I said 75, just simply asked, “Is that many?” Before I could respond, his classmate beside him, shouted, “DUDE! Lots of old people die before they get that much. She’s good, man!”
One time I made a visit to a school that was celebrating their 100th day of the school year. (Turns out lots of schools do that, but it was new to me.) After the librarian introduced me, I opened with a question. “Does anyone know why I’m here?” A scholar raised his hand. “Because you are one hundred?”
A few years ago a student asked how old I was and I told him. His eyebrows shot upward and he said, “Whoa! How’d you get to be that old?” I answered, “I have no idea.” He nodded, and pointed a finger my way. “You need to be careful, then,” he said.
Once I was at a PreK with my Little Beth Books. They were a real chatty bunch of cuties. We read books and talked about grandparents. This sweet little girl, using her very expressive hands, began to explain about grandparents. “Well, my grammaandgranpa are really two peoples, but it just looks like they’re one peoples, but they aren’t. They’re two.” I asked another child to tell about grandmas and grandpas and he said, “They’re kind of like a mom and a dad, only they don’t have any kids.” One child said, “My grandma calls to talk to me on the phone. She thinks I know how to do that! So I do.” A classmate jumped in on that and said, “Well, my grandpa thinks I know how to go fishing and I don’t even want to know, so I don’t.”
A kindergarten girl told me her grandma makes cookies and gives them away, but she keeps the Girl Scout cookies in her freezer and eats them all herself after everybody goes home!
At one elementary school when a child asked how old I was, I said “I’m probably older than your grandma.” He gave me such a startled look I asked him, “How old do you think your grandma is?” He answered, “I don’t know, but I think she’s an antique.”
I asked one youngster if she knew where her grandparents lived. She said, “I think they just drive around in their car. Maybe they just live in the car, I don’t know because sometimes they sleep on a airplane then they come to see us in a car. One time they slept on the ocean for lots of nights. They they came in a car.”
At that same conversation another student said her grandma lives in the house that her mommy lived in when she was a little girl. “I don’t know why mommy gave it to her, I guess she didn’t want to live in it anymore. It’s a pretty house, though.”
I hope this has been inspirational and all you gramas and grampas are smiling.