“My grandma had a cherry tree grove at her house. When the cherries were ripe, she started calling her extended family to come over and pick cherries. When not enough of them could come, she started calling neighbors, and anyone else she could think of. She could not let a single cherry touch the ground. ‘Can’t let good cherries go to waste’ she’d say. You just don’t see people doing that nowadays.”
He goes on to discuss the conservative mindset that his grandparents have held so firmly for as long as they can remember. At last, he expressed regret that he had not interacted with his grandfather more, as the man is starting to succumb to early stage dementia.
As I am sensitive to my friend’s situation, and as I also hold Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation dear, what I want to express to the reader today is that “wisdom” is not a fossil fuel, and once passed down, can renew itself in a new host. I have a friend, a mechanical engineer like myself, who got a lucrative job recently at a large firm based here in Kansas City. His salary was…fantastic, fresh out of college he started at 75k. His profit sharing is also lucrative, and he’ll probably earn 10-20k this Christmas via that. In this economy. And combine that with his wife’s salary as a paralegal, you get a family of two living in a low cost city making six figures.
I talked to this friend a few months ago when he was preparing to buy a house. He said the bank had qualified him for a $255,000 loan. He and his wife had looked around at the homes at that price, and were awestruck by how much house they could “afford.” Mind you, this is after the housing bubble popped. Three years ago he’d probably have qualified for a $400,000 loan. Anyway, I asked him “what does a young, childless couple need with a 5 bedroom, 4 bath with walkout basement?” and he said this to me “my friend, no family on earth needs that much house. Not even if we had 5 kids would we need that much house. My grandpa and grandma lived in a 2 bedroom 1 bath (with no garage) for 41 years, raised three kids there, and never once did they complain or believe they needed more house.” My friend and his wife eventually bought a 3 bedroom, 1.5 bath, gorgeous ranch with a huge yard, and TAE tips his hat to the modest.
The point here is this: our grandparents lived lives in an era that required them to not only get by with less, but to rationalize the “less” they had as “enough” and go on living. Our grandparents planted Victory Gardens. Our grandparents canned their own food. Our grandparents attended church…well…religiously, for most of their lives. I challenge the reader to name 3 people over the age of 70 that don’t attend church. I suggest you will be hard pressed to name them.
This post is not meant to be grandparent hero-worship, although I know it seems like it. What I am trying to impress upon the reader is that living like your grandparents is extremely difficult in a world where not only are we taught to not content ourselves with what we have, but we have been ingrained with the a priori philosophy that “more wealth = more good.” To live like your grandparents, you first need to open the New Testament, as they have done countless times over the last century and read the words of Jesus to the young king: “give away all your belongings, and follow me.” Deep down, I know that I am very much like my paternal grandfather. I know he was an intrepid, enterprising, humorous, ambitious young man. These are the qualities I pride in myself. But when I wonder what separates me from him, I know deep down it is not losing the farm in the Great Depression. It is not the bombing runs he flew in WWII. It is not being witness to 85 years of history against my paltry 27. What separates me (and my generation) from his is the indomitable faith in Jesus Christ and his teachings, and how weakly I follow them and how strongly they guide his life. I once again challenge the reader to name three people. But in this case, name three people under 35 who read a daily devotional.
The little angel on my shoulder suggested to me that I be less Christ-centric in this post. That is fine. Take Christ and Christianity out of the above post, and insert any other faith, and the generalities still hold. My generation has not found its faith, whatever that faith may be. We, it would seem, worship ourselves instead.
To Adam, and to anyone else who acknowledges that The Greatest Generation has a lot to teach and show us about living a satisfying, full life (without living a life full of stuff), I suggest you remember that your church probably has a cadre of different aged persons. Although awkward and difficult (and bizarre in the eyes of your less forward thinking peers), taking the time to establish relationships and dialogues with the elderly in your church can teach you more about lving life, and about loving yourself, than you could possibly imagine. As I was writing this, I stopped on a whim and called my grandmother in Iowa. She explained that her new wallpaper border in the kitchen was a crock pattern. Amused, I asked what a “crock” was. “For pickling cucumbers, of course,” she replied. “We’d fill the 5 gallon crock with cucumbers and brine and let it all pickle.” I didn’t even know you could do that.
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