Gracie's a hit in Batavia and elsewhere

Bridging the generation gap apparently is pretty simple for my granddaughter, Gracie. All it requires is kindness and cookies.

Gracie visits us periodically at the Batavia retirement community where we live, often staying for two or three days. The other residents love to see her. When we're eating in the dining room they'll make a special effort to stop by our table and say "hello." They share their skill and knowledge with her in the craft room. Her presence brightens their day, and she appreciates the attention.

So, it wasn't a huge surprise when at the age of 10 she decided to do something nice for another group of senior adults. Gracie spends much of the summer with her other grandparents, in Topeka, Kansas. Just a couple of blocks away is Manor Care, a skilled nursing home.

Gracie and "Mimi" (the name she uses when referring to her Kansas grandmother) were out for a walk when Gracie spotted the building. Finding out it was a nursing home, she recalled that a service club in her school had provided cookies for a similar facility in north suburban Chicago.

Could she bring cookies to the Manor Care residents, she asked. The Activities Director thought it was a wonderful idea, so Gracie and "Mimi" shopped for the ingredients, spent a day baking, and made over six dozen cookies: chocolate chip, sugar, and peanut butter. They bought some sugar-free cookies for those on restricted diets.

Enlisting the help of her next-door friend, Morgan, Gracie and "Mimi" went to Manor Care and had a wonderful time sharing cookies with the residents, who thoroughly enjoyed the treats and the girls who brought them. Some 20 residents helped consume the treats and the punch that went along with them.

Only a handful of the nearly 100 cookies were left over when the girls cleaned up and headed home. A local pastor who saw the event while visiting Manor Care that afternoon wrote Gracie a very nice thank you note and suggested that maybe they could do it again next year. Right now it's too early to know what Gracie's summer plans will be, but it just might happen again.

Ten-year-old girls have a lot of interests that nursing home residents don't share. Gracie loves Hannah Montana, swimming, and playing with her computer, to name a few.

Nursing home residents have interests that Gracie doesn't share. They don't like all the noise of contemporary popular music, they like things orderly and in place, and they prefer that everybody-kids included-walk and not run.

I've seen many places where older people really consider the presence of children an intrusion in their lives. They can be obviously unwelcoming and even unkind.

But Gracie knows from her experiences in Batavia that many elderly people aren't like that. When the Manor Care residents shared their kindness with Gracie and she shared her cookies with them all of these other things faded to the background, at least for a while. There is no question that a gap exists between the generations, but Gracie knows that it is possible to build bridges that enable us to cross over.

Two of those bridges are kindness and cookies.