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Things Gram Said
from eleven cassette tapes and forty-six years of listening

Her Century  ♦  Things Gram Said  ♦  Write to Cindy

Gram had a saying for everything, and most of them she made up herself. Some of these she said so often that all fourteen of us grandchildren can finish them for you. Mom and Aunt Elsie helped me remember the rest. Her Rules for a Long Life As she gave them to me on tape in 1992, at 94. I've left them in her order. 1. Get up at the same time every day, even when there's no reason to. 2. Eat oatmeal for breakfast. Eat a little of everything for dinner and not too much of anything. 3. Walk somewhere every day. To the mailbox counts. To the car does not. 4. Keep a garden, even if it's two tomato plants in a bucket. A person ought to have something waiting on them. 5. Write letters. People keep letters. Nobody keeps a telephone call. 6. Go to church on Sunday and play cards on Saturday night, and don't mix the two up. 7. Don't carry a grudge to bed with you. It takes up too much room. 8. Sleep with the window open a crack, winter and summer. 9. Learn one new thing every year. (In 1992 it was the microwave. In 1997, at 99, it was the VCR, and she taped her programs from then on.) 10. Don't think about your age. "I never decided to be old," she said. "It just kept happening while I was busy." Things She Said All the Time "If you're bored, there's a floor somewhere that wants scrubbing." Said to every grandchild who ever complained about being bored at her house. We learned not to. "Coffee is for after you've done something." She never drank a cup before the chickens were fed, and later, in town, before the beds were made. "Write it down. You think you'll remember, and you won't." This is the reason I bought the tape recorder. "A sod house is cool in the summer and warm in the winter and full of snakes the rest of the time." Her whole opinion of the good old days, in one sentence. "Vote, and keep it to yourself." She did both for 79 years. "Dinner is at noon and supper is at six, and lunch is something you take to the field." She never accepted the word lunch for a meal eaten at a table. "Don't go to bed with dishes in the sink. You might die in the night, and then the neighbors will see." She said this with a perfectly straight face until she was 100. "Plant potatoes on Good Friday, and don't argue with me about it." My Uncle Patrick tried to argue with her about it for forty years. She outlived the argument. "Busy hands, quiet mind." Said while shelling peas, snapping beans, crocheting, darning, or cutting quilt pieces, which is to say always. "That's a three-hanky movie." Her highest praise for anything on television. She did not approve of movies with less than three hankies. "Well, get to it." What she said when anybody told her they were going to do something someday. She said it to me in July. I did. Old Words She Used I've caught myself saying some of these at the hospital, and the young girls look at me like I've lost my mind. davenport the couch icebox the refrigerator, even after fifty years of owning a refrigerator the wireless the radio, but only when she was teasing soddy a sod house a lick and a promise a quick cleaning, not a real one going to town a trip of any length to anywhere with a store. She lived in town for 38 years and still said it. the Christmas cactus not an old word, just her plant, which came from her mother and is now on my kitchen windowsill in Omaha, blooming more or less on schedule The Last Thing At her 100th birthday party somebody asked her what had changed the most in her century. Everybody waited for her to say the automobile, or the Moon, or the electric lights. She thought about it a long time and then said: "People used to visit." Then she went back to her cake. So, if you've read this far, Gram would want you to go visit somebody. I'm going to go see Mom. << Back to Her Century Cindy Morrison · [email protected] Last updated Saturday, September 18, 1999