Feats of Great Strength

Feats of Great Strength
(at WWU Grandparents U 2009)



Along with other grandparents I wearily sat down, sweating and panting on the low circular concrete wall that marked the Point of Interest we had been assigned to find using our GPS devices. Of course the granddaughters and grandsons who had been using their greater familiarity with such digital devices to lead us to it still had vast resources of energy to climb on the sculptures nearby. Well, they were carrying around sixty-odd years fewer than any of us.

Too tired to lift my eyes towards the magnificent blue sky, the towering trees and fine buildings on this Western Washington University campus, I noticed there was an inscription in the concrete on which I sat:

FEATS OF GREAT STRENGTH


So, that, after all, was the official name of this Point of Interest, which the kids all referred to as “The little green men”! One could understand their terminology since this was indeed a group of sculptures of small, green, leprechaun-like figures, and kids are usually so literal. It didn’t matter much that those little green men were all supporting huge rocks: Feats of great strength and cooperation.

As I sat there my mind, much more functional at this point than my body, suggested to me that what this 2009 session of Grandparents U and the previous one in 2008 accomplished were also “Feats of Great Strength” and cooperation on several levels.

It wasn’t just that some or most of us had to labor mightily to keep up with our much younger grandchildren as they happily and energetically went about our projects on the hilly campus unhampered by age, and perhaps triple or quadruple bypasses, heart valve replacements, implanted pacemakers and defibrillators, heavy knee braces or other prosthetics or beer bellies.

The greater feat of strength was the bonding that was taking place across three generations.

The grandkids and grandparents were reaching across sometimes huge experiential differences, such as those of us in the GPS course who were more familiar with compasses than mapmaking with these wonderful technological tools that were second nature to our grandchildren, who in turn might never have handled a compass or who are comfortable with Google Earth but never used an atlas.



Drawing on the supreme self-confidence of our youthful colleagues, we stifled embarassment to display as nonchalantly as our grandchildren our works of art made in the course on Painting with Watercolors before the assembly of the entire student body and staff at the closing ceremony.





In “Earthquakes and Volcanos” we shed precious energy and perhaps some dignity to jump up and down with our grandchildren to generate “earthquakes” which were duly registered on a seismograph.

Kids may love to deal with what they consider “yucky”, but as adults we might have had to suppress a degree of revulsion to reach into a tidepool or a bucket to retrieve slimy sea creatures like the sea cucumber as we collected specimens for the Marine Biology class.






At the end of Grandparents U 2009 we grandparents could kick back, we could relate to this little green man, satisfied and contented that we had successfully fulfilled our parental responsibilities: we had satisfactorily raised the parents of these happy, self-assured, knowledgeable, capable, caring youngsters so confidently preparing to accomplish feats of great strength in coming generations.



*** WWU GRANDPARENTS U in Pictures(Click on each picture to enlarge)


Registration and Orientation























Mapping with GPS

























Painting with Watercolors