Grandma’s Place
At this time of the year in 1999, my grandmother, at the age of eighty-five, went to the United States to stay at my cousin’s place, and she welcomed in the millennium there, making everyone in the family jealous. After she came back a few months later, we were having a chat about the importance of having a good command of a foreign language and she said: ‘you better learn English very well. In America, even little boys can speak English!’ Then she realized her mistake, but it was too late! On the same day, just to have fun, I asked: ‘How much is one dollar in America?’ No matter how ridiculous the question might have been, my grandmother insisted that a ‘dollar is cheaper in America!’ And her argument was ‘because everyone is richer there!’ We tried to explain the situation in macroeconomic terms, but she was the one who met the new millennium in America, who were we anyway?
My sister is a very active reader. She reads all types of books in very short periods of time. My grandmother, after seeing on TV one day that book prices were increasing, was furious with my sister and yelled at her: ‘Don’t you know how expensive books are? Don’t read them all at once, read one page everyday!’ Well, in fact this is an interesting approach. Do you think the same argument could work with regard to our lecturers, I mean for lessening the reading material? Maybe we should use this as a sample case.
Years before that, when my sister and I were kids, and my grandmother was physically healthy enough to move without a walker, she used to perform namaz everyday. As we all know, namaz times are signified by prayers. My sister, one day, plugged the microphone into the stereo, moved to the other room in the house, and began to imitate the prayers just like a mosque hoca. Hearing the prayers at unusual hours of the day, my grandmother was astonished, but figured that she could have been wrong about the prayer hours. She performed namaz at least seven times that day, and since we were not old enough to know what we were doing would religiously- be a sin, we thought extra worship would not do any harm!
Thank God she is still alive. Every time I visit my grandmother, I witness interesting declarations and reactions from her about numerous topics, which are inspirational! If you have a grandparent who is still alive, I say, try to understand them, instead of fitting the modern teenage profile. You’ll see that they’ll teach you to have a different perspective on issues; in addition to all the things they’ve taught you in the past…