The Slice: Perhaps you’re only as old as you feel

The Slice has always enjoyed children’s perspectives on adults’ ages.

Maybe you will, too.

Lynnette Lawrence shared this.

“I am a second-grade teacher and it is always amusing having my students guess my age. But I was thrown for a loop when one of them asked me how long I have been old.”

Been there, Lynnette. Just say “A long time.”

Here’s one from Judith Killin. “My grandson (he is 8) told me that I looked much older in the morning when I get up. I asked him how old I looked. He said about 100.”

Judith is still a ways from the century mark.

Zenita Bockstruck teaches the second grade. Here is a conversation she had with one of the kids.

Zenita: “Sally, you love to draw. I imagine some day I’ll be admiring art in a shop and find out the artist is you.”

Sally: “That will be nice if you’re not with the stars then.”

Zenita: “With the stars?”

Sally: (Eyes downcast.) “You know, in heaven.”

“To be fair,” Zenita concluded, “I am past 50.”

And, of course, that’s practically one foot in the grave.

Beth Bornhoft shared this. “My grandson Ethan, who is now 14, was born on my birthday. We were celebrating ‘our’ birthday when he turned 4, and I asked him how old he thought I was. He thought for a very long time and finally said, ‘Fourteen.’ And I agreed.”

Kathy Hansen met a neighbor’s 3-year-old son for the first time recently. She asked his age.

“ ‘Three,’ he responded with a big grin. When I asked how old he thought I was, he replied confidently, ‘Twenty-nine.’

“A good judge he is. I am 63.”

Kathy said she likes the boy.

And Bernadette Powers was taking her sister’s 6-year-old granddaughter to the park when the little girl asked Bernadette who was older, her or the child’s grandmother.

Bernadette assured the girl that her grandmother was much, much older.

The kid looked up at her and said, “Well, ya look old.”

Things that made your mother cry: “Listening to her favorite soap opera, ‘Ma Perkins,’ while she washed the dishes from lunchtime,” wrote Trudy Zaborski. “I would walk in the kitchen and find her intently listening and crying, her tears falling into the soap suds.”

Today’s Slice question: Ever nodded off while on a computer or some electronic device and accidentally entered a keystroke that caused an action you definitely had not intended?

Write The Slice at P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. Why did your book club implode?