It always puts a smile on my face when someone does or says something that makes so much common sense, one wonders why no one had done or said it before. When that someone is a youngster, my smile gets even bigger.
Elijah is the grandson of my nearest neighbor. He loves green tractors, his grandpa and riding through the woods in Grandpa’s all-terrain vehicle. By all indications, the young lad is a normal first-grader, a tad quieter than most, but a bit more curious than his peers. The few times I’ve met him, it’s as if I can hear the cogs turning in his little head whenever we talk, and he seems to study my actions and mannerisms more so than the words coming out of my mouth. Smart boy.
As the first quarter of first grade came to an end, Elijah’s mother noticed something a little odd about the papers he was bringing home from school. They all had good grades and nice written compliments from his teacher, but almost every one of the papers had the word, “Bob” written on them. Assuming that he was just doodling, or one of his friends had written on them, she never mentioned anything about it. After all, the grades and comments were very good.
When time for the first parent-teacher conference rolled around, both parents were eager to sit down with the educator and assess the progress their young son was making.
The teacher’s first comment, however, came as quite a surprise for the parents.
“You do know,” the teacher began, “that your son has started going by the name of Bob, don’t you?”
They didn’t, but now, the three-letter word on class papers began to make sense. The boy’s parents assured the first-grade professor that they would find out what was going on in the mind of their son.
After the parents returned home that evening, Mom sat down with young Elijah and asked him about the name change.
“Why,” the concerned mother asked, “would you start calling yourself Bob?”
“Well, Mom, it makes perfect sense,” the pint-sized philosopher responded,
The patient mother encouraged, “I’m listening.”
“Bob is shorter. It’s much easier for me to write. And, Bob is spelled the same way, frontwards and backwards, so I never get mixed up.”
When someone as young as Elijah displays that kind of logic, it makes me wonder. In the future, when science, or medicine, or technology, or business, or agriculture, or education needs answers to some of mankind’s most pressing problems, somewhere, someone will say, “Well, what about Bob?”
