As someone who considers herself an eternal 35, I was stunned the other day when my 8-year-old grandson let me know I am the oldest person he knows.

“Really?” I asked.

“Yep,” he said, adding that he used to know some others but they had already died.

As I felt myself aging by the minute, I realized he was talking about a great grandmother who had died when he was four.

“She was amazing,” I said, remembering how she had stayed up playing cards long after I’d folded my hand for the night on a family vacation. Doing the math could have been unsettling.

But fortunately, before I had time to remember she was more than 25 years my senior, he was off and running with nonstop inquiries, each preceded by “I have a question for you.”

Did people wear shoes when you were growing up?

Did you know Martin Luther King?

I assured him I’d always worn shoes.  Was he possibly confusing me with a dinosaur?  We had just covered that territory, looking at his favorite inhabitants of Jurassic Park as he let their names roll off his tongue easy as water: Dilophosaurus, Spinosaurua, Brachiosaurus.

For a moment, I tried to imagine what he was imagining.  Leaves strapped to the bottoms of my feet maybe, running through some primordial forest? Or swinging vine to vine, shoeless?

But then there was Martin Luther King to account for.

“I wish I had known him,” I said. “He was a great man. But I only saw him on TV.”

If this was a missed teaching opportunity, it at least forestalled the question “Was there TV when you were growing up?” My answer would have inevitably included black-and-white images, picture tubes and test patterns.

It is possible that I had triggered all this curiosity by innocently cracking open something called “Chat Pack for Kids” a few days earlier when his 12-year-old sister had visited.

We’d each pulled questions from the little deck of 156 “creative questions to ignite the Imagination” and happily chatted away – that is, until she’d asked me what three rules every classroom teacher should impose.

“Easy,” I said. “Number One:  Collect all the cell phones in a basket at the beginning of class and return them at the end.”

“Grandma!” she said, horrified. Horrified. Wondering if this would be a very short visit, I listened to a compelling argument about the importance of cell phones in emergencies and my wanna-be-35 self could see her point of view. At least she hadn’t asked about shoes.

By the time her brother came and spotted the little box of cards on the coffee table, I was prepared to be flexible and creative and wonder why I, too, had not thought of designing a miniature golf course like the inside of an aquarium. Why hadn’t it occurred to me to sell tickets to people who would be “lined up outside the door” to see his own aquarium, which featured not only a transparent lobster the size of a cockroach but a blind fish he’d taught to find her way through the sword plants?

I do think I did well on the question about what musical instrument I’d like to sound like. A flute!  Maybe that was even better than his idea of sounding like any instrument that would go “RRRRRR.” (Back to dinosaurs).

But he definitely bested me on the perfect thing to teach a parrot to say.  I could only think “Polly wants a cracker” while he quickly said “FBI. Open up” – an answer he cracked up over at least seven times before it was time to haul his orange suitcase back out to the car.

We have at least 115 questions to go, and maybe I should take a sneak peek and start practicing. A friend in her 80s was just invited to be the flower girl in her granddaughter’s wedding, and I obviously have a long way to go.

Copyright 2022 Pat Snyder