BY HARNOOR GILL
Grade 11 student
Christ The King Catholic Secondary
Georgetown, Ontario
OUR grandparents are probably some of the wisest people around as they have explored what the world has to offer for a long time. Their wisdom can be taught to youngsters and their experience can be shared with their grandchildren this Grandparent’s Day. On September 7, celebrate this day along with your grandparents to take advantage of the wisdom and guidance they can provide. However, the main reason this event is really celebrated is to raise the issue of the constantly increasing number of lonely elderly people that reside in seniors’ homes.
If you don’t have time to spend with your grandparents on this day, don’t worry! You can go to the local senior’s home in your area and spend time there with seniors. It’s a great way to volunteer your time to the community as well as receive the satisfaction of helping someone in need. By helping someone who is a senior, you are not only volunteering but you are also receiving wisdom and experience of things you couldn’t have learned from someone better. I can’t wait to celebrate this day with both my grandparents, as I’ll have a blast learning about things that I never knew or gaining experience to give me an extra edge over things with my friends.
You might be thinking at this point that there really isn’t a point to just go out of your way once every 365 days for an elder and you’re right. This day attempts to raise awareness that everyone should spend more time with their grandparents rather than go once a year to visit them at a seniors’ home. I want this to be a norm for everyone to go out of their way to visit their grandparents at least once a month because you can get a lot of knowledge from just casually talking with them. As a grandson, I get to see my grandfather every day but that’s just the way I was raised.
With the age of the computer and Internet, my grandfather sometimes gets frustrated that no one from the family is able to spend some quality time with him. So, I decided to teach him how to use my Mac. At first, it was quite frustrating as the smallest mistakes he made would get on my nerves, but then I would realize that he had never done something like this before. Now, my grandfather can open Word and write, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” four pages straight. I also taught him to log in to his Gmail account and compose an email to me on a subject he liked. I’m about to teach him how to use Facebook. It’s really interesting to see that something as small as teaching my grandfather to use a computer has created this learning curve for him.
