"Go to graduate school. You are going to need a secretary and a housekeeper your whole life."
My grandmother used to say something very similar,
"God gave you an extra dose of brains to make up for the common sense you don't have."
I am not sure that it is lack of common sense that keeps me from remembering that I have a very important meeting at 2 p.m. on May 25th. Years ago, one of my daughters explained,
"You forget stuff because your brain is filled up with things like knowing where everyone's shoes are."
Oddly, there is some truth to that. When she was home at Christmas, my oldest daughter came into my office and said,
"Do you know where my shoes are with the gold strappy thing?"
Strangely enough, not only did I know what she was talking about, but I did know where the shoes were.
What I also know is that if you get enough degrees you can buy a Palm Treo in which to record your appointments that sets off an alarm 30 minutes before you have to leave and pay an assistant with common sense who comes into your office and says,
"Don't you think you ought to be going to that meeting now?"
You can also pay a housekeeper, but she will only put your mess in nice piles, not throw it out, which is how it eventually became inevitable that I clean up the office as the piles were getting higher than me. My husband (who really is a rocket scientist) is no better at cleaning up than me, and I was getting to the bottom of piles with bills and notes from our daughter's school dated September, 2006 (I wish I was kidding!) In all of this, I found a bunch of awards to me for one thing or another. I received awards from judo clubs, from state organizations, national organizations, and they were all just piled in with the rest of the forgotten stuff. It is not that I don't appreciate the thought, because I really, really do. Some of them even had very touching poems or long letters people had written to me. It was just that I don't feel that I did all that much. I gave some of my time and some money to one cause or another. I helped out where I could because that is what my grandmother taught me,
"You give what you can because you can."
What strikes me as very strange is that there are people I know who don't give anything unless they are assured they can get something back for it. Every action, gift or relationship in their lives is based on an assessment of what they are going to get in return. I am not giving myself any particular credit for being different. I was very, very fortunate to have strong, good women as role models. My grandmother had two daughters, my aunts, Winnie and Sylvia. I was not a particularly good kid (that is the understatement of the century, and people who knew me in my early years are probably falling out of their chairs laughing). When I would be told to give money to the church, shovel snow for a neighbor, run an errand to the grocery store, and I would ask,
"What do I get for it?"
One or the other of my aunts would look at me over the top of her glasses and say,
"Don't be a jerk. Just do it because you can and other people can't and be grateful for that."
I hung a couple of awards in the hallway and I put the rest away, because people gave them to me, I am grateful although I don't really feel like I did much to deserve them, I gave what I could because I could. In the end, it seems that I got awards for not being a jerk. Life is very strange sometimes.
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