“Listen, I already know they haven't got a plan because their stuff keeps falling in – I just need to know if people are actually smarter than a six year old in this county.”
“Well, that is why you haven't met your cousins Edwin III and Garlene and their families – they figured out the answer was no and left, but, now that the people who don't want to plan are being moved out of the way, they are coming back to hold it down until you are ready to start building.”
“Listen, Papa, I was born ready. Tell my cousins I need an internship. Let's do this.”
Mrs. Thalia Ludlow videoed this interaction between her husband, Capt. R.E. Ludlow, and their grandson, and sent it to cousins Edwin III and also Garlene Ludlow as they were landing in the airport in Richmond, VA. They were delighted to thus be introduced to their little fellow builder, six-year-old Grayson Ludlow.
“And we almost got thrown out of the airport, laughing!” Garlene said when she called. “This little son of Grandfather, three times removed – he should just be Edwin IV, but the name was already taken by Edwin III's son!”
“No, you are going to find out that Grayson is definitely Grayson,” Thalia said. “All of Robert's children are very much themselves, right down to Lil' Robert at five – yes, he is Robert III, and yes, he is his grandfather's twin, but he is still very much himself already.”
“Yeah, we almost missed our planes on him and Edwina's videos!” Edwin III said.
“And then Eleanor and Glendella and Andrew are so mature – such ladies and a gentleman, and Amanda is such a heart-melting sweetheart, and George is not trying to do anything but be a happy little boy in his world – all of them are just adorable,” Garlene said, “but also very much fully developed personalities to the limit of their capacity.”
“I would say that Lil' Robert is ignoring his limits!” Edwin III said. “That boy is going to be doing calculus, next week, though!”
“Watching Lil' Robert and Grayson in the Lego pile together is like watching two sides of the same mind,” Thalia said. “Lil' Robert can take the physical and go abstract – like he does understand how different operations in math allow us to skip steps in lower-order operations. Grayson can take the abstract and go physical … he was building out triangles and squares using the Pythagorean Theorem, Lego block by Lego block. And then there's Glendella, who can keep up with both of them.”
“Well, the thing is, we know Edwin Ludlow was a quant, and could go either way,” Garlene said, “but Glendella being out of Tarquin Ludlow I's line wouldn't put her out of the way, because we know that Lord Tristan Ludlow was a quant, meaning it runs through both Tarquin I and Tancred's lines.”
“The crazy thing is,” Edwin III said, “I've watched all of them in the Lego pile on these videos. They all may be!”
“Yep,” Thalia said. “Robert and I were talking about that. Amanda and Edwina and George just won't buckle down and concentrate on their math most of the time, but they are all really good at it. Eleanor and Andrew enjoy their reading so much that they also don't spend as much time on their math, but they are in low-high-school math to go with their upper-high-school reading. Glendella, even coming from the neglect she was in, had great tutors and nothing but time on her hands: that child is ten and may leap frog Andrew in math before the year is out. Meanwhile, Lil' Robert fears no number and is now subtracting and dividing after he talked with one of the little quant friends of our neighbors and expanding his quasi-algebraic thinking, and Grayson is just doing operations in his head to figure out how to scale stuff down so he can build it in Legos.
“Hey, Grandma, I just thought of something,” Grayson said as he walked into the next room. “I know you gotta use pi to build things like circles and ovals, but how are we going to keep it around, the way we all eat?”
“Pi with no e stays around – it doesn't have edible ingredients,” Thalia said.
“Whew – thanks, Grandma,” Grayson said, “because, see, I think people are using the wrong one and that's why – they eat the pie before using it, and then everything goes splat because they don't have priorities.”
“It is as good an explanation as any other,” Thalia said. “You can't have your cake and eat it, too, so I suppose you can't eat your pie and measure the circumference of a circle with it too – that's why we use the pi with no e. Saves trouble.”
“Right – thanks, Grandma!”
“Now,” Thalia said into the phone when Grayson had run off, and Edwin III and Garlene fell out laughing.
“You know why the the eight little Ludlows are such highly developed people?” Garlene said to Thalia before they hung up. “That has a lot to do with you and Robert, treating them like they are just who they are.”
“We can't wait to see y'all!” Edwin III said.