Say “No, thank you”
When good manners matter too much
When I was little, my best friend was a girl who lived in another city and spent holidays with her grandparents in mine. Every year, I could hardly wait for the summer to come so that we could spend days playing and making up stories. One summer, we started a band and wrote a love song “Raindrops and Broken Hearts”.
I still remember the smell of my friend’s grandparents’ apartment and the heavy floral curtains that made me feel like we were cut off from the world in a pleasant and comforting way. In that apartment, which smelt like tobacco and vanilla, the time went slowly, and it seemed that, if we chose, we could stay children forever.
My friend’s grandparents were usually quiet. They never interrupted our games. Her grandmother was always reading, her feet on a cherry-red corduroy footstool, and her grandfather was either playing chess with his neighbors in front of the building or sitting in the kitchen, listening to a transistor radio. They looked rather old, but when I think about it now, they couldn’t have been over sixty.
One evening, my friend’s grandfather decided to make us fried hotdogs for dinner. My mother had already come to pick me up, so we were all sitting in the kitchen, waiting for dinner. The hotdogs turned out pretty nasty — almost black, and they smelt…
