Wisdom & Nostalgia
My grandmother kept a small green notebook in the drawer next to the stove. It wasn't a diary — she was too practical for sentimentality of that sort. It was more of a running inventory of things she had figured out, written in a slanted cursive that took some decoding, sometimes with dates and sometimes without. When she passed, my mother passed it to me. I've been thinking about it ever since.
What's remarkable isn't that any single thing in it is new. Most of these are things people have been saying in one form or another for centuries, and she would have been the first to tell you that. What's remarkable is how she got to them: through a Depression, a war, forty years of marriage to a man who was occasionally frustrating, six children, and a level of practical daily competence I've never come close to matching. She didn't read them in a book. She earned them.
Here are ten of the ones I keep coming back to.
She applied this to plumbing and marriages with equal conviction. The maintenance principle — that small attentions prevent large catastrophes — runs through almost everything she wrote. Fix the screen door. Write the thank-you note. Have the conversation while it's still small.
She watched this play out more than once in her own family and was unwavering about it. Not that you shouldn't help family — only that a loan is almost never just a loan, and everyone involved should know what they're really exchanging before they sign anything, even in their heads.
She raised six children on one income and could not have entertained them all day if she'd wanted to. But she also genuinely believed that the empty afternoon — the one where you have to figure out what to do with yourself — produces something essential. Patience. Imagination. The knowledge that you can tolerate discomfort without needing it immediately solved.
She had a particular skepticism for the kind of busyness that's performed rather than necessary. She got enormous amounts done every day, but she could tell you at the end of each day exactly what she'd accomplished. If she couldn't name it, she considered the day wasted regardless of how tired she was.
This wasn't about reputation in any vain sense. It was practical. In an emergency, your neighbors are the first people who can actually help you. The relationship you've cultivated — or neglected — determines whether you can ask. She brought soup when people were sick, attended funerals even for people she didn't know well, and waved at everyone by name.
She was ruthless about sleep. Not as a self-care practice in any contemporary sense, but as a purely functional matter. Problems that seemed catastrophic at eleven o'clock at night were almost always manageable at dawn. She treated staying up as a form of self-indulgent suffering and had no patience for it in herself or her children.
She was a quiet person in groups. Not shy — she had opinions and expressed them — but she waited. She once told me that she learned more from watching a room for ten minutes than from talking for an hour, and that the people worth listening to were usually the ones you had to draw out.
She literally kept inventory — of the pantry, of what she owned, of what needed replacing. But she also kept a kind of mental accounting of what was working in her life. She wasn't romantic about it. It was practical: if you know what you have, you don't spend energy wanting things you already possess, and you don't overlook what's working while mourning what isn't.
She wrote notes for everything: thank-yous, condolences, congratulations, the occasional apology, and sometimes just a brief hello to people she'd been thinking about. She kept stamps in the kitchen drawer beside the notebook. I still have some of the notes she sent me, and I can tell you from experience that she was right: I have no memory of most of the emails I've received in my adult life, but I remember exactly what she wrote when I got my first job.
She was a good cook, but she wasn't precious about it. If the roast was dry, you put gravy on it and moved on. If someone showed up unexpectedly, you added another potato to the pot and set another place. The table was the point. The food was the occasion for gathering. Worrying too much about the former, she believed, was how you ruined the latter.
I've been thinking about that green notebook for going on twenty years now. What strikes me most, reading these back, is how little any of them have to do with ambition or achievement in any conventional sense — and how much they have to do with the daily practice of being a decent human being in a reasonably complicated world.
The Atlantic's guide to preserving family wisdom across generations has some thoughtful methods for capturing this kind of knowledge before it's lost. And the StoryCorps project at NPR has been recording ordinary people's wisdom for twenty years now, with the explicit belief that these unrecorded lives contain something irreplaceable.
She would have been embarrassed by any of this attention. She would have said she was just writing things down so she wouldn't forget them. But I'm glad she did.