When it was time to put Gran in a home, I missed her so much, I took a volunteer job there, so I could see her more often.

I was sad to see how many people visited their parents for only a few brief minutes, shifting around in their seats as if they were itching or reading their phones; hardly listening to anything their Mother or Father had to say.

 

So, I gathered the old folk together after tea one day, when I was supposed to teach them Yoga, and asked them to come up with interesting stories with which to entertain their guests; nothing boring, never to discuss the weather or their pets. Details about their current mundane lives were taboo. My instruction was that they should make their visitors look at them, with new eyes - tell them something shocking or sexy about their past, give them some unknown facts about the world at war and then, always to end with a question, to get the conversation going. 

 

Next time my parents visited my Grandma, I was eager to hear what interesting titbits of her life she was going to weave into the conversation. She did not disappoint. After that visit, everyone looked at her with new eyes.

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“When I was twenty,” She said, with a small smile crawling around her thin lips, “I made a hole in the wall behind my cupboard, where I could hide my boyfriend.” We laughed, ready to hear the saucy details, never expecting to hear,

“So I hid him in the hole and threw the bloodied baseball bat under the bed. It’s been sixty years, I wonder if the bat was ever found?”

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We couldn't get home quick enough and there, behind the cupboard were the words:

"Made you look!"

We visited Grandma often after that.

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The end