“Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
My Grandmother’s birthday recently passed, and if she were alive today, she would have made it past a hundred years old—and since many other women of my family lived to be past a hundred, I was certain she would have been one of them. Unfortunately, her fate forced her to transcend earth earlier than expected, and I wish she was still alive for me to ask a waterfall of questions. I do, however, remember asking her as a kid what “things were like in the olden days,” and she chuckled to herself, answering me with, “What do you want to know that for?”
I didn’t know it at the time (I was pretty young), but now that I am much older, I realized I had asked a loaded question through rose tinted spectacles. For all my obsession of history, traditional arts, crafts, and everyday folk life, here was a lady who had lived through the Great Depression, racial terrorism and lynchings, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, World War II, McCarthyism, the Korean War, the Civil Rights Movement, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcom X, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the laundry list of personal crucibles that would send many into a mental death spiral. No wonder she wanted to spend her final years traveling and enjoying herself. Opening up her memories was akin to wrenching open a can of rancid worms.
In all of her struggles and refusal to let the past haunt her (because it did enough haunting), she silently taught me a form of steadfastness that was forced onto her as a child and bled through her from generation to generation. One could complain about their hardships, but a hard life will also teach you to survive it. I cannot say my life was as difficult as hers (I’m certain it wasn’t), but as living conditions deteriorate globally, her spirit has helped me find an equilibrium between unfairness and autonomy so that I can function and not let every outside force dictate my life.
She had once told me of times when she felt threatened, so she kept a knife under a pillow. She went to nursing school while also running a neighborhood luncheonette. She buried two children and a husband within the same decade. Yet, she always said to me and my brother, “Don’t watch the idiot box and let the world pass you by.” Life terrorizes people in different ways, but letting the terror win is the worst feeling.
Folkcrafts, Art, and Thoughts 
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