My grandmother, Olive Ruth Hewett, grew up in Central Illinois and would have been in her late teens/early twenties during the Great Depression. One of my most enduring memories of her (she passed away on the same day my son, Nicky, was born about six years ago) is how she never left food she had paid for at a restaurant. I witnessed this many times as a child and her explanation was “I was around during the Depression and we didn’t always know where our next meal was coming from.” If we ever needed a napkin or a sugar packet, we could usually ask Oma and she had one in her purse. The kitchen cupboard was similarly filled with cellophane-wrapped plastic spoon and fork sets and single servings of grape jelly in their little plastic rectangles. She knitted sweaters for me as Christmas and birthday presents.
In the back yard of her house in Decatur, Illinois, Oma had an enormous cherry tree. So, as you might guess, cherries made their way into many recipes, and not just pies and cobblers. Cherry raisins (which she dried in the oven), cherry preserves, cherry cookies. I still love cherries to this day.
Lately, we’ve all been getting a refresher course on the history of the Great Depression. We watch documentaries about the stock market crash of 1929, always framed in comparison to the “economic crisis” of 2008-2009. We absorb grainy black-and-white film of people standing in bread lines, or sitting on the front porches of clapboard dust bowl shacks in tattered clothes, looks of hunger on their faces. And we’ve all heard about the 25% unemployment rate during this Great Depression.
(Before I go any further, I want to assure you that this is not leading into an empty discussion about how today’s economic problems are no where near as bad as what my Oma experienced in the twenties and thirties. We’ve all heard that, and we all get it, right? In short, it stinks now, it stunk worse then, but it still stinks now.)
So moving on, one morning about a week or so before my son was born, Oma fell down in her assisted living apartment in Deland, Florida. Every morning, the staff would call each resident and they had to answer the intercom to make sure they were okay. If they didn’t answer, someone would come check on them. Oma fell only a short time after this call, and she wasn’t able to get up. She became dehydrated and weak, and by the time they placed their call the next morning, which she didn’t answer, her condition had worsened beyond the point where she could recover.
I went to visit her a few days before she died. And she told me that, as she looked back on her time on earth, she had had a happy life. She talked about how happy her children and grandchildren were. “Sometimes it wasn’t easy,” she said. “But when I look at my grandchildren, and everybody’s doing so well and you all have wonderful families, I think to myself, I did pretty good.” And then she dozed off. I said goodbye and left, and that was the last time I saw her.
In her life, my grandmother, Oma, was many things. She was a history buff who knew several foreign languages and was fascinated with the genealogy of our family. She taught high school German for years in Decatur. (In fact, “Oma” is German for “grandmother”.) And while I’m sure living through the Great Depression must have been painful for her at the time, she grew to develop a fascination with it as a part of history. I sometimes wonder if she collected all those napkins and sugar packets and jellies to maintain a connection to her experience during this fascinating time. She was proud of having been part of the generation that outlasted the Great Depression and won WWII.
I think that if Oma were still alive today, she would recognize this time as another turning point in the arc of history. Things are happening today that were unimaginable just a few years ago. Everywhere you direct your focus, you can see it. Everywhere, that is, except inward. I hope to view the world today as Oma might have: with my eyes wide open, focused on the tectonic plate shifting of history that’s all around us and the new mountain ranges that I expect to emerge.
This is an amazing time to be alive and on this planet, regardless of my individual circumstances and I don’t want to look back on this time with regret. I don’t want to wish that I had lived more in the moment. I don’t want to regret that I shielded my eyes from it.
And when I’m the old guy at the Dairy Queen taking my grandkids out for ice cream, I’ll shove a few napkins and red plastic spoons in my pocket when we leave, but only after I’ve told them the stories about how we got through this tough time. Because I will have paid close attention while it was happening.
What a beautiful story. Extremely meaningful during our time. Thank you for sharing this. The perspective is inspiring.