Listen to your Grandma

I don’t write much about my Grandparents and my Great Grandparents but I think of them often.  They have in many ways shaped who I am and shown me what it is to live a full life.  My Mom’s Mom was intensely alive.  She was never old, full of mischief and happy until her last breath.  My Grandfather was deeply in love with her.  She was the beautiful girl on the War Bond poster he had been going on about for ages.  He ended up seeing her one night during WWII in the Panama Canal Zone.  In the midst of big bands, dancing, drinking, smoke and the sweaty tropics one of his pals said “Jack, there is the girl you have been pining over.”   I think from that moment on he was the happiest most grateful man on the planet.  Four kids and a lifetime later, I watched him kiss her goodbye and it was the most intensely loving moment I have ever witnessed.

My other Grandparents were just as wonderful but very different.  It never dawned on me as unusual that I grew up calling them Edison and Margaret.  Or that they did not own a couch but instead had modern white vinyl swivel chairs with chrome legs in the living room.  They were pretty modern for Bowie TX, but they were old school as well with tractors and ponies and one of those old black rotary phones upstairs.  Edison had lots of contraptions he designed and built himself.  He was always the one to put me to bed at night.  He would scratch my back until he fell asleep and started to snore.  Edison disrupted the airstream with his snoring.  Seven year old me would say “Edison, Edison, you’re snoring.”  He would apologize and give me a whiskery peck on the check and thud off to go snore in his vinyl avocado green recliner downstairs in front of the tv.  Edison was quirky in a wonderful way and he made the BEST coke floats ever.  His birthday is coming up so March is Coke Float month at my house.

All of this brings me to Margaret, who is actually the person I was thinking about this morning and last night.  I have a cookbook addiction.  I am pretty sure I inherited this from Margaret.  I think she actually made a lot of the recipes and was a fantastic baker.  I tend to just read the cookbooks and make a big mess with about twenty of them scattered everywhere.  It is great fun thinking about what I could cook outside my ten staple recipes.  Several of my cookbooks are from Margaret.  When Edison passed away we went through the ritual of going through photos and finding keepsakes throughout the house.  I wanted the cookbooks and Edison’s air compressor. 

So yesterday while planning our weekly menu I grabbed a large cookbook called Bayou Cuisine.  It is fabulous.  It is divided into an Indian, Spanish, English, and of course French section.  The recipes are involved and indicative of the way people cooked and ate 50 years ago.  In fact, they were so different from how we eat today that I had to look at the copyright date, which was 1970.  1970, it dawned on me that I was two and Margaret and Edison had come to Luling, La. where Mom and Dad and I were living for a visit.  Margaret had gone to a new and different place that she enjoyed and she was taking a bit of it home with her via this very cool cookbook.  I would have bought the exact same book on such a trip.  Margaret died when I was 19 so connecting with her now that I am firmly settled into adult life is a unique gift. I could imagine her trip to see us, and how much she would have enjoyed it.  While Grandma Sandefur was full of life, Margaret filled everyone around her with life.  She did this by listening.  Margaret was the single most engaged listener I have ever met and as a result, people blossomed around her.  When you talked to Margaret, she wasn’t thinking about what she was going to say next, she was experiencing what you were saying right there with you, feeling it, enjoying it.  I always felt so happy in the warmth of her attention.  I feel sad now that I did not listen more and talk less, although I am not sure she would have said much.  Margaret had chronic pain from rheumatoid arthritis and focusing on herself might have amplified that misery.  As it was, I never remember her complaining.  Now that I am bumping up to 50 and have an assortment of minor aches and pains that I complain about, I find this even more amazing.  She loved the people in her life enough to set her own issues aside and listen.

My word for 2015 is listen.  I didn’t even associate it with Margaret when I selected the word and made my manifesto back in November.  But now, I realize I am figuring out something she knew all along.  Listening connects us.  My kids are in heaven when my parents listen to their horrible knock knock jokes.  My husband’s clients are assured when he honestly listens to their complaints.  My friends are comforted when I stop trying to fix what is going on with them and actually listen to their frustrations and fears.  It seems like such a small thing but it is huge and hard to do.  This year, I am going to try.

Listen.

Listen to your heart.  Hear the love.  

Listen to your mind.  Hear the conflict, the worry, the doubt and address it.  

Listen to your body.  Hear what it needs, feed it.

Listen to the quiet.  Embrace it.  Let it unfill you of the clutter.

Listen to your soul.  Give it comfort.

Listen to your husband.  Enjoy the person he is.  Do not put words in his mouth.

Listen to your children.  Enjoy the people they are.  Do not speak for them.

Listen to your friends.  Enjoy who they are by listening closely to their hearts.

Listen to the world.  Hear the birds, the thirsty trees, the swooshy grass, the traffic, the wind, the sun, the night.  Here all of it and rejoice in being part of it.

Listen to your dreams and make them part of your life.

Listen to joy.  Let it drown out the anger.

Listen to possibility.  It is so quiet it is often missed.

Listen to the universe.  It knows a lot more than you do.