Highlights

“What are you reading this week?” my grandma asked me. I told her I had yet to start a new book and she told me that I then needed to read her Grandmother Hawthorne’s book. It was a compilation of her telling of the “highlights” of her life and of her short stories and poems. “You would have gotten along so well with her.” She told me this because my Great-Great-Grandmother Hawthorne was a writer and I am a writer and that would have made us good friends. She told me I needed to read all of the family stories, but this was the one I should start with.

She gave me this book, which is the size of a children’s book, tall and wide, and is bound with a light brown hardback cover. On the front, in gold lettering, is engraved Blanche Campbell Saylor Hawthorne. The pages are a faded white and, on the first page, a picture has been pasted. It is in yellowing black and white and a woman with a soft face, round glasses, distant, smiling eyes, and peaceful, thinly set lips stares at a point just beyond the camera. Her hair is combed in neat, thin waves and one curl is draped sweepingly across her forehead. There are lines around her eyes and mouth and one can see in her very face that she has lived a full life. Her glasses and high, laced collar on a dark, matronly dress hint at her grandmotherhood.

The next two pages, are dedications from her grandchildren, who preserved the book for future generations. The fourth page has quotes from the story that follows, describing the most important parts of her. The first tells of the various inventions she used when they were introduced for the first time, such as the airplane, automobile, phonograph, radio, television, and the telephone. What I found most fascinating on this page, however, were quotes that reminded me so much of my own grandmother.

My grandmother will be 81 years old in August and she is involved in everything and with everyone. She is in incredibly good health and has so much fire and life in her that one could never picture her anywhere near death, as she is always so alive. She holds our family together and looks after every child and grandchild. And even besides this, she looks after every member of her community and church congregation. Northminster Presybterian Church will be crippled when she leaves. She was, for so long, the pastor’s wife and she has devotes so much of her time to continually doing God’s work, even though her husband is not around to preach His word by her side. This brings me to another remarkable trait about my grandmother. At every possible moment, she is thankful to God for the life she has been given and for all of her many blessings. When she sees a lovely day, she thanks God. When she’s with her family, she thanks God. When she has a good meal, she thanks God. She appreciates everything with such undying gratitude and it’s something I’ve always admired. We don’t always take the time to do that.

So, looking at her grandmother’s book, I was caught by quotes from her story. At the age of 84, she writes “I am going to Disneyland tomorrow, and when anyone says go, I go. I really enjoy life and am so very grateful for it all.” She also says “I keep up with my church work, teach a Bible class, attend all meetings, help with luncheons and dinners. Also do babysitting with my great grandchildren.” And all of this at the age of 84. And the last quote which really struck me made me realize how similar this strange, long-ago woman was to the grandmother I admire today. “If I should say ‘THANK YOU GOD’ every minute of every hour of every day, it would not be enough to express how grateful I am.” To me, my grandmother has always just been my grandmother. But now I begin to realize that, perhaps, all of these amazing traits I admire so in her now were not purely natural to her character, but learned from the amazing women who came before her. And I wonder if, after this fashion, I will someday have learned enough from my grandmother to become the next generation of fully alive, active, faithful, grateful women who so influences those who come after me.

I began to read this story without considering how many generations ago Blanche Hawthorne was born and was immediately embarrassed when my jaw involuntarily dropped after reading her birthdate of December 31st, 1882. It hadn’t occurred to me that she would have been born so long ago, but then I considered that this was, in fact, four generations ago. I then also began to realize how many important events this woman had lived through. In her early life, she talks about her father, who was a captain for the Union Army during the Civil War and who was bitter enemies with his “rebel” brother. She doesn’t much describe World War I, but does describe the Spanish Influenza in detail, a subject I researched during the eighth grade for a paper for History Day. She also talks about her business endeavors during World War II and about caring for mental patients in a hospital during the war. She talks about earthquakes and hurricanes and traveling on old trains. Her story is like an interesting version of a history textbook and is chock full of the most interesting things there are to read about.

While reading this, I begin to think of what the “highlights” of my life would be. She can talk about all of these amazing inventions and back in the days when there were no cars or phones or planes or internet etc. But what can I talk about? When computers went from black and white to color? When television went from antennae to entirely cable? Honestly, how important are these things, really? I know I have many years left before my highlights will be full enough to write, but, so far, my story is fairly bland in comparison to hers. Sure, I’ve had plenty of drama, but what is a divorce and a few remarriages in comparison to moving from farm to farm, losing your father, having to live in separate places from your mother and siblings because you can’t afford to live together? What is being in the hospital for pneumonia in comparison to being quarantined for weeks because of scarlet fever or smallpox or diptheria? As life has gotten easier and safer, it seems to have become more boring. We still have our tragedies, but they are minor in comparison to those of the past.

So, do we then simply rely on the hope that life will have become even more boring by the time our highlights come to pass? Will my great-children be cemented into electric lawn chairs by the time they read my highlights from an electronic reader, while drinking lemonade through an invisible tube attached to their arm? Will pneumonia be a thing of the past and my minor, unimportant dance with it a thrilling, crazy story of the old days? Will divorces be unheard of by then because people simply don’t marry anymore due to the financial impartibility of it all? Will suicide be an unimportant event by then because the amount of actual living being done will have become so minimal that the only people who ever cared for life will have killed themselves by then and the suicide rate will have made it the norm? Will my story be outdated and a look into history? Or will it be as bland as it now seems, as normal as it is now?

Or perhaps, as time changes, the events that count as “highlights” of our lives change as well. Perhaps I’m not meant to write about finances and farms and wars and inventions. They were the primary flavors in Blanche Hawthorne’s life. But, as life has gotten easier, though we live a little less strenuously than people once did, we have more aspects of our life to enjoy and absorb. Perhaps the idea of writing our highlights now is the act of making new things important that once were not. In my highlights, I will write about playing in youth symphony and singing in choir and going on trips and playing/singing in exciting places. Instead of describing the invention of Disneyland, I will describe playing my viola in Disneyland. In Grandmother Hawthorne’s day, women didn’t even play in symphonies. I will describe the election of our first African-American president. Grandmother Hawthorne, at one point, describes having to look for a new house because “colored people moved into their neighborhood.”

But, most importantly, I will write about hiking and camping and walking and swimming and WRITING and singing and of traditions from my childhood and traditions I begin with my own children and I will write of all of the wonderful things that this “easy life” has given me the opportunity to appreciate, so that my great-grandchildren and their children shan’t forget to be thankful. For, even if I’m not a clucking hen at the age of 84, I am similar to my grandmother and my great-great-grandmother in that I never cease to be thankful for all of the blessings and beauties of the world I was given as a gift at birth. And I am so thankful that, because I am not worrying about a farm or a World War or an influenza and because I have all of these easy things, like the internet and the telephone and the automobile, I can, instead, stop and smell the flowers, enjoy a lovely blue sky, or sit and watch a sunset without worrying about the day it marks the end of. So, I suppose that the most important goal of the highlights of my life, if I should decide to write them someday, would be to ensure that my future generations should realize how much they have to be thankful for and never cease to recognize that we are all blessed.