This piece was written about my granddaughter when she was three years old. She’s now ten. It’s amazing how much less I know as we both get older. Will I ever reach the age of wisdom?
My mother once told me that as a person gets older they realize their knowledge is minimal. It’s funny, but my granddaughter, Jordan, taught me the same thing.
After her birth I learned the position of grandparent has automatic privileges. One such privilege was her perception that grandparents, especially grandmothers, are all-knowing.
However, I’m not old enough to be wise yet.
Not being wise, I might be considered a know-it-all, because, like most grandmothers, I knew all the necessary things in Jordan’s life. She soon discovered I knew when she was hungry, when she was tired and when she had to use the potty. It irritated her that I was always right. That’s what made me a “know-it-all.”
It had to end. Jordan finally, and smugly, surpassed me in useful knowledge when she learned more about the ever-fascinating dinosaur than I’ll ever know.
She knew about the easily pronounceable species—longnecks, and spiketails. She also knew the more challenging names— tyrannosaurus rex, triceratops, and Brontosaurus, which rolled off the tip of her tongue as easily as the name Youghiogheny River did.
“There’s even a unicorn dinosaur,” she noted when she saw one of my books about unicorns.
She rarely had less than three dinosaur models in her possession. These toys were icebreakers with people she wouldn’t otherwise be brave enough to speak to. All they had to do is ask her if she had a triceratops.
An unfortunate woman tried to make conversation with Jordan.
“Is that a tyrannosaurus rex?” she asked.
With a glaring look Jordan retorted “No, this is a Brontosaurus!”
She told anyone who would listen that “when dinosaurs die they make a skeleton. When they die they take them to the museum and leave them there.”
Her other grandparents, who lived on a mountainside (actually, the opposite side of the mountain was owned by Mr. Rogers), had remnants of dinosaurs near their home, she informed me.
“There are bones up in the woods.” She handed me a piece of bone she found there and she claimed was a dinosaur bone. “They get huge bones.”
She gleans her information from video-tapes, library books, the few people who know more than she does, and her imagination.
My days of being all-knowing were coming to an end. If I don’t know much about dinosaurs, what else don’t I know about in life?
But Jordan left me with hope.
“Someday you’ll know all about dinosaurs too,” she informed me the other day.
Then maybe I’ll be truly “all-knowing.” Until then I will not have accrued the knowledge and experience to be wise, even when I reach old age.
