Holidays are a reminder that grandparents provide us with life perspective

For the Thanksgiving holiday, my wife and I went home to visit family. As always, it was an absolute joy to see loved ones and catch up. Spending time with family is good for the soul.

What I most enjoyed about our trip this year wasn’t the food. It was spending time with my grandma. Funny enough, I didn’t really enjoy spending time with her growing up. Not because she was mean or anything, but simply because I couldn’t understand a word that she said.

My grandma was born in 1937 in a small town in southern Alabama. And when I say small town, I mean a small town. The latest census data shows a population of 67 people. High school bands are larger than the population of my grandma’s hometown.

Anyways, if you know anyone from the Deep South, you may have noticed that many of them have accents. Well, not only does my grandma have an accent, but she also talks really fast. I mean almost auctioneer fast. If you’re not paying attention, you can easily find yourself lost and looking for context clues to catch back up.

This made things awkward for me when my mother would take my sister and I to go visit Grandma. As all grandmas do, she wanted to pinch my cheeks and stand in awe at how much I had grown since the last time I saw her.

That was the easy part.

What made it hard was that she also wanted to talk, to see how I’m doing. Her attempts at checking-in inevitably resulted in me freezing like a deer in headlights when I lost track of the words coming out of her mouth at rapid speed.

Juvenile me had no idea how to handle talking with this woman. She seemed friendly, but she might as well have been speaking Spanish. I’m fairly certain that my grandma wondered if I was slow at some point. My mom, or some other relative in the vicinity, would chuckle before offering translation assistance.

As I have gotten older, understanding Grandma has gotten much easier. Spending more time with her helped, of course. Going to college in Atlanta helped too.

My grandma just turned 86 years old. Thankfully, she’s still in her right mind and in relatively good health. There are good days and bad days, but there are more good days than bad.

Last week, we spent a good amount of time talking about how my grandma grew up.

Again, small town in Alabama. Everyone knew each other. Everyone was dirt poor. Clothes were made, not bought. Everyone, including children, worked in the fields.

My grandma and her brothers walked to and from school each day. My grandma didn’t remember how far it was exactly, but she recalled that it was far enough that they would try to hitch a ride on the back of someone’s wagon if they could.

All the Black kids went to school together in a small building. The white kids had their own school. The teacher at the Black school — also Black — didn’t know much more than the children about much of anything, but as my grandma recalled, the teacher’s main qualification was that she was one of the few grownups who knew how to read.

Girls were taught to find a good man and settle down. Boys were taught to either work in the fields or, if they could get in, join the military. For a time, Black men in the area could not get into the military because the local doctor who was responsible for conducting the requisite physical examinations — a white doctor — refused to find Black men fit for service.

Luckily, that doctor was eventually replaced, and my grandma’s brothers both joined the Army.

My grandma and her husband, my grandpa, were part of the Great Migration. They moved to Ohio in the 1950s after my grandpa heard from his brother that they were hiring Black people for good jobs in the north. My grandpa found a job at a steel mill. They raised seven kids in a three-bedroom house on a steel worker’s salary.

Sitting there, at the dining room table in her daughter’s (my mom’s) home, amongst her grandchildren, my grandma expressed amazement at what her children and grandchildren have accomplished. “I see ya’ll nice houses. … We never had nothing nice like that. You’re a lawyer, right? They wouldn’t let us be lawyers ...”

As she spoke, I experienced my own sense of amazement. I marveled at what my grandma had seen in her lifetime. Born into a world where her race and gender meant that she was good for little more than childbearing, she now resides in a home owned by her daughter, who possesses both undergraduate and graduate degrees.

Born into a world where Black men had only two options, field work or military service, her grandson is a lawyer. She witnessed the inauguration of a Black man as the president of the United States of America. To a Black person in the Deep South in the ’40s and ’50s, our current world is science fiction.

I also experienced a wave of gratefulness, eminently appropriate as it was the Thanksgiving holiday. Grateful that I could sit and listen to my grandma share her story. Grateful that she survived the trials and dangers of growing up in the Deep South. Grateful that I was born when I was born, in a time when my mother could achieve her own goals, and thereby provide me the opportunity to achieve mine.

The conversation with my grandma was a reminder. A necessary one.

It reminded me that we are not as far as we think we are from a very different time in our country. We are now in a time where the U.S. Supreme Court declared that affirmative action to remedy past racial discrimination is unnecessary (and unconstitutional), nearly half of Americans are unconvinced that systemic racism exists, and roughly two-thirds of Americans say that racism by individual people is a bigger problem than racism in our laws.

However, it was not that long ago that the Supreme Court found affirmative action to be necessary, and the existence of systemic racism was indisputable due to both the bevy of laws that crystallized racism and the lack of any federal laws which prohibited it. These changes occurred during the lifetime of many who are still living, including the lifetimes of both the likely candidates for the U.S. presidency next year.

It’s been said that a family with an old person has a living treasure of gold. After spending time with my grandma recently, I could not agree with that statement more. Our elders, by their very presence, give us perspective. They remind us of what is important. And perhaps more importantly, they remind us of what is not important.

My grandma, whether she knows it or not, did just that for me.

If you take nothing else from this rambling column, please take this: If you are lucky enough to still have them, go see your grandparents.