Breaking News: Jewish Grandparents “All Booked,” Too Busy for Granddaughter

Fact: I have four awesome grandparents. This is easily the luckiest thing about my life, particularly considering they are all active, healthy (phoo phoo phoo), smart, funny, generous, and engaging people.

Fact: I am easily the coolest of all of their combined grandchildren. (Sorry, brother and cousins. You know it’s true.)

Fact: All four live in Florida in the wintertime, their two houses falling within about a mile radius. I live in Brooklyn and grew up in Cleveland, OH, places people usually like to leave in favor of Florida during said wintertime.

Fact: All of the grandparents have encouraged me and other family members to visit, sometimes sponsoring our trips (thanks, retroactively).

Here’s where this gets interesting.  I work as a consultant, and when I’m in between assignments, determined by my firm, I have downtime, which is unpredictable and, paradoxically, appropriate time to take vacation, since I’m not actively working with a client.  So, in an attempt to get all "carpe diem" with my downtime, I checked with one set of grandparents to see if they were free for the next couple of weeks, should I be able to get some days off.

Their response? "Unfortunately, we are all booked up [that week]."

Damn.  I  just got rejected by my grandparents. They are too busy to fit me into their schedule. I, pathetically, cannot necessarily say the same.

Hey, I get that most people, regardless of age, maybe need more than a week’s notice to clear their calendar. And ultimately, I am thrilled that my grandparents, in their early eighties, have such full lives, rather than sitting around waiting for the kids to call (though cell phones have been a boon in that regard.)

So, lessons learned: 1) Your grandparents will school you as long as you live 2) Not everyone makes plans last minute via text message 3) Having old people be too busy for you is way better than the alternative.