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A philosophy of life summed up in proverbs
By Carl Heintze
"Work for the night is coming!" This is one of several well-worn proverbs my grandmother used to recite to me on regular occasions.
"Idle hands are the devil's workshop" was another. Or, "Many hands make light work."
I sort of took them to be part of the Bible. She could and did quote large measures of that volume for my sister, and me too, on appropriate occasions. I can't remember the appropriate occasions now, but I guess they must have made an impression on me, as she intended. Some 70 years later I still hear them in my mind's ear now and then.
I'm not sure if this is because she said them over and over again as I was growing up in her house or simply because she was a remarkable woman and I tended to heed whatever she said.
But, although I remember them still, I'm am no longer sure what they all meant. Or what they were supposed to have meant.
"Little pitchers have big ears."
Someone else explained to me that this meant children shouldn't know some things. What things? Well, never you mind, you'll find out soon enough. But I never did.
And I'm still waiting to find out what I was not supposed to have discovered. That doesn't mean I'm not trying still, however. And that is chiefly because my grandmother was a very determined woman.
She had to have been. She came to California from Norway when she was 2, sailing first to New York with her parents from Bergen, and from there to the Isthmus of Panama, where a railroad had recently been built.
From Panama City she and her parents traveled up the Pacific Coast to shelter with a group of Norwegians, most of them like my great-grandfather, sailors, in San Francisco on Telegraph Hill.
In due course my grandmother became the oldest of 10 children. (Great-grandpa was no longer away at sea.) When she got married, at age 19 or so, she had seven children of her own.
This collection of children and brothers and sisters all survived into their adulthood except two. In fact they all survived into their 80s and 90s, except for the two who died.
Great-grandpa, who like many sailors had what was called a drinking problem, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound when he was in his 40s. The boat he had purchased to ply the Napa River between Napa and San Francisco burned to the waterline, leaving him with 10 children and no apparent way to feed and clothe them. He couldn't face up to it.
But his widow could.
With the aid of my grandmother, Great-grandma shrugged her husband's loss off and raised the clan by herself.
In time my grandmother married an orphan, a grocery clerk from Connecticut, who eventually came to own his own grocery store and four houses, three of which he rented for income. He and my grandmother sent all but two of their children to college, an unusual effort in those days.
They memorialized the one who died for a year, leaving her room intact and setting a place for her at the table, as if she had made a temporary journey somewhere and would be back shortly. It was the Victorian way.
So I suppose the sayings my grandmother learned somewhere, that thrift, hard work and perseverance and a certain sentimentality paid off, were virtues she believed she had proven. Her life wasn't easy, and she didn't think life in general was, or as she would have said, "It's not a bowl of cherries."
Why cherries? I can only guess. I suppose it was because it was a rare fruit in those days. Whatever it was, she believed you earned the rewards and penalties you received in life and each of them could be summarized in a saying, proverbs not always clear to children, but memorable enough to be remembered.
While this tended to give her fixed opinions about things--she never would eat olives, for instance, because she was sure she wouldn't like them if she did--she believed sticking to fixed principles had merit.
Besides olives, and, of course, booze--she was a lifelong member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union--she hated progress in any form and revered lack of change. When one of her sons gave her the family's first radio, she didn't want to listen to it because it brought the rest of the world too close. (She may have had something there.)
She thought airplanes flew too fast and weren't necessary; that family ties were more important than anything; and that the virtues her husband brought from New England to California over the same route she had followed were worth saving and observing.
Today I am less sure. I don't know if "little pitchers really do have big ears" or that "Many hands make light work"--more often they bring confusion--or that there is no such thing as human progress.
And yet I can hear her voice in my ear, and I am listening, Grandma, I am listening.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Campbell Reporter. A collection of his essays can be found at http://www.doitright.com/Carl/essays. He can be reached by email at feodorh@juno.com.
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Campbell, California
