Grandparents:teachers of life

When talking about grandparents, different things may come to your mind: from repetitive stories you have listened to for more than a thousand times to the very special kindness they have toward their grandchildren. As you see, there are so many things that can be talked about related to grandparents. here, I don’t want to talk about how to treat them or advice everybody to respect them because they are older than us or stuff like that, but my purpose is to remind everybody about the very moments that pass so quickly while we don’t consider these men and women of wisdom aren’t perpetual extraterrestrial creatures; they are invaluable sources to the past and very kind friends in the present who share their experiences about life with us for free; they need our attention and their experiences and yet we don’t consider that they would-far from them-pass the way and we would no longer have access to them and blame ourselves for not paying enough attention to them. It’s always like this; when we lose something, we understand how valuable it’s been.

Anyway, what I want to mention in this piece of writing is my own experience. The fact is that it’s been about 2 months since I’ve been living with my grandfather. during these 2 months everything has almost been fine; almost everyday I wake up at 7 and eat breakfast and then leave home at about 7:30.after my tennis training session is finished, I return home when it’s almost 1 A.M or sometimes a little after that when I arrive. While I’m out, my grand father cooks lunch and waits for me to come back so that we can have lunch together. After lunch we take a nap which lasts about 1.5 hours. After we wake up, each of us busies himself with his own job: I read a book or a newspaper and he whether reads a book or seats in silence as none of us have the least tendency to watch the ridiculous IRIB. The best part of the story begins at about 9:30 when I have finished my job and we have had a light dinner; we begin to talk. That’s when he talks about the past and his experiences and tells those beautiful stories: from the time their family moved to Tehran about 65 years ago to giving a thorough picture of the city in different periods of time. for example he once recalled how the coup had happened in 28th of Mordad 1332 when he has been a 14 year old boy; he recalls a time when the whole transportation had been done by horses and donkeys and there had been no cars; he has so many stories about the 8-year Iran-Iraq war and the aerial bombardments during the war. When I asked him about the worst happening in his life, he mentioned the death of his wife-my beloved grandmother-which happened about 1.5 years ago. Since that time he hasn’t been able to completely adjust to his new life although he is a great deal better compared to those first days. Although he lives in a 3-story building where 2 of my uncles live in the two other floors, he still feels lonely for he has lost his partner with whom he had lived about 50 years.

At the end of the day, I want to say that he is just an example of our grandparents whom deserve more respect and attention from their children and grandchildren and need somebody to talk with about their experiences and about the difficulties they have faced in their life. They are live sources to the past and kind teachers of present who teach us invaluable lessons about life. Let’s be kinder to them and spend a little more time with them from which both sides can benefit; let’s value them for their experiences about life and their kindness toward us and try to use these kind teachers before losing them.