“Look, I'm tired, y'all. I can do better building with my Legos. I need the grown folks in Lofton County to get it together, or when I graduate from first grade I'm going to skip college and start fixing stuff!”
No matter how hard the Ludlow grandparents tried, there was no keeping the news of the fall of Tammany Apartments out of six-year-old Grayson Ludlow's knowledge. What they didn't expect was that he was going to borrow his sister's phone and figure out how to AirDrop information to the household computer and printer about it.
Grayson had looked at the visuals and figured out faster than the investigators would what was wrong.
“It helps to be short,” he said to his grandfather, Capt. R.E. Ludlow, last surviving son of Edwin Ludlow, Lofton County's greatest civic engineer and architect of the 20th century. “When you are short, it's OK to have little legs because the wind still is above you. But when you get tall and you have skinny legs, then you have problems.”
Sure enough: Tammany Apartments' foundations were not stout enough.
“Skinny legs and a hurricane,” Grayson said, pointing to the drawings.
Capt. Ludlow called his niece Garlene and his nephew Edwin III, who had come back to visit Lofton County and were waiting for the calls they were eventually going to get to reopen Ludlow Architecture and Engineering in Lofton County. They came and watched Grayson talk about Tammany Apartments and realized … .
“Grayson does have Grandpa's gift,” Edwin III said. “He's exactly right without knowing how to do the math, but there's a formula for how this should have been done, and he's just eyeballing it.”
“Let's try something,” Garlene said, so later, she went back to Grayson with another copy of the Tammany Apartments drawings.
“About how thick do you think it should have been, Grayson?” she said.
Grayson considered this.
“I can't tell you that for sure because I don't know where it was and what the ground was like. But, if it's just normal ground, you need something more like this here.”
And Grayson looked at the drawings and got to work with his white crayons. Cousin Garlene went back and worked out what the math would have been.
“Uncle Robert,” she said, “Grayson is six. If he had built the Tammany Apartments, they would still be up. He's within the 92nd percentile of accuracy on the math, and he knows no algebra, geometry, or trigonometry.”
Capt. Ludlow smiled.
“Let me show you something, Garlene.”
They went to quietly watch Grayson helping with the laundry, folding clothes beside his grandmother Mrs. Thalia Ludlow … and building the neatest clothes stacks ever seen while occasionally reaching over to gently correct one of his grandmother's stacks.
“Your grandfather, Garlene, sometimes folded laundry with me and your Uncle Henry. He did exactly the same thing, including correcting the stacks around him when we couldn't see anything wrong. He once was home sick and bored, and so folded all the laundry in the house because Mom was out buying medicine for him. She came back to a perfectly straight stack of folded clothes almost her height, arranged in the exact order that she and we were going to put them away. I have the photograph she took.”
So, Capt. Ludlow and his niece looked at that, and then peeked back at Grayson, whose folded clothes were now above his head, in the exact order that he and his grandmother were going to put them away.
“Yep,” Garlene said. “Edwin Ludlow Sr. has found his latest heir.”
“Yep,” Capt. Ludlow said.
