Welcome to A Granny’s View of the World!

Hi! I’m Barb, and I’m a proud grandma who has been privileged to enjoy many decades of life and to witness much of the evolution in culture that has led to where we are today. It’s been a wild ride, and I think we grannies have a lot to share about what we’ve learned on the roller coaster of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

I recently had a conversation with my 30-something daughter about the fact that the world in which we live today and in which she is living her adult life and raising her children is so different from the world into which I was born, in which I grew up and received my education, and in which I made many of the choices that have shaped my life that I may as well have been transported to another planet. Think about it. If you, too, have been lucky enough to have made it to the Upper Decades (my name for the era of life age 60 and beyond), you know things have changed, and they’re still a-changin’! And even if you haven’t yet reached middle age (that’s the highest category to which I’ll admit), you also have seen a lot of change and felt its effects.

I was born into a world of early Baby Boomers. The moon was still made of cheese, and there was a kindly man up there—whose identity was the subject of many legends—who smiled benevolently upon us each night. Obviously these things were a charming mythology, but I was an adult when people actually visited and began to map the moon and returned with rocks, not hunks of cheese. I lived in a world of screen doors and no air conditioning, of families struggling to put themselves back together after being torn apart by World War II. I participated in the Cold War drills that required us to crouch under our desks in case of attack. I was raised by a single mom before single moms were common; I can’t recall knowing another divorced woman besides my mother. Our first washing machine had a wringer. My first job in high school was at the local “five-and-dime” store where we rang up sales on cash registers which you might see in museums today. They were not even electric! I learned to type and went all the way through college and graduate school using a manual typewriter. Personal computers were mythical machines which began making their appearance just as I graduated from my Master’s program. In my early teaching years, I typed tests on carbon and mimeograph masters and duplicated them painstakingly on machines that were messy and difficult. I had three children before I owned my first microwave—much less many of the other time- and labor-saving devices that fill my kitchen today.

As for social issues, during my youth no one talked about abortion or homosexuality. We barely even mentioned divorce, adoption, or babies born to unwed mothers. Oh, those things were always there, of course. We just didn’t talk about them. When one girl in my class got pregnant, her parents sent her to live with a relative until after the baby was born. Another girl stayed in town but had to complete high school “after hours” when all other students had left the building, and she was not allowed to march with us at graduation. And these penalties were not reserved only for pregnant girls; I remember a boy who got a Mohawk haircut and was kept in isolation at school until his hair had grown out to “normal.”

There were two women in my small Ohio town who were constantly seen together, and neither was ever seen with a man; so we whispered that maybe they were a couple, but we kept our speculation among ourselves. As for children who at that time were labeled “illegitimate” (What a cruel term!), the common story was that their parents were married but their fathers had died in the war. I remember the day my mom called my sister and me into our bedroom to tell us that the two boys across the street were not really war orphans but actually had living fathers (one apiece!) neither of whom had ever been married to their mother, who was raising them with the help of her parents. What?! And I remember my complete shock the first time I met a couple who I knew was “shacking up.” I was a young adult at the time. In the house where we lived during my last year of high school, the single woman who had the upstairs apartment had a frequent male visitor, but cohabitation was not yet a common practice.

I knew people who had guns, but they didn’t brag about them or tote them down Main Street or crow about their Second Amendment right. Our doors remained unlocked during the day, as did our car doors; and we slept with the windows open on summer nights. I recall a couple of locker inspections during my last year or two of high school to ferret out possible drug possession, but pre-1960, many of us were not quite sure what exactly all of that was about. The cool kids were still the ones sneaking cigarettes, alcohol, and sex. Long before mass murders became a weekly event, the 1959 gruesome farmhouse murder of four family members (later the subject of Truman Capote’s nonfiction novel “In Cold Blood”) was as shocking as it got.

I also witnessed the Civil Rights revolution of the 60s. I’ve seen the cruel “Whites Only” signs, the signs demanding passengers of color to take the seats at the back of the bus. I’ve seen the separate water fountains, the separate entrances, the places where people of color were refused admission by any entrance. A student once told me he’d seen some of these signs in a museum (ouch!). I saw them when they were hanging and being enforced. I know what Martin Luther King is talking about in those paragraphs of his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Oh, not in the same way he knew them, to be sure; but I saw the results when the signs were defied. When I was 17 years old, I was visiting my Alabama relatives, and a black woman who did some light housework for one of my aunts needed to be driven home; being a newly licensed driver, I jumped at any chance to exercise my new privilege, so I quickly volunteered. I was shocked when she refused to sit in the front passenger’s seat because she was riding with a white girl. No amount of persuasion on my part (and believe me, I tried!) would convince her to move to the front seat. My heart still aches for that woman every time I recall the incident. To think that a capable, intelligent woman was subjected to the indignity of believing herself unworthy to sit beside a 17-year-old is heartbreaking!

My grandmothers were wonderful women—strong, loving, and wise—who lived in a world even more remote from today’s than I did. They were adults and mothers several times over before they even had the right to vote. To many, 1920 sounds like ancient history; but to put it into perspective, my mother was born in 1922, a mere two years after women were included in the electorate. Her mother, my grandmother, was 33 in 1920; and since 1920 was a presidential election year, that means my grandmother was 33 years old when she cast her first ballot to elect the President of the United States. My father’s mother was 23 in 1920, so she was among the youngest women ever to cast a vote in a presidential election. My grandmothers, the women who changed my diapers and taught me to use a spoon, were contemporaries of the women whose courage and persistence won women this precious right which we have always simply assumed.

I could go on and on: party-line telephones, rabbit-ear 13-channel TVs, poodle skirts, saddle shoes, bobby socks, Elvis, “I Love Lucy,” “Ed Sullivan Show,” “Gunsmoke,” “The Lone Ranger,” duck tails, cars with large “fins,” country roads, dresses only for girls at school, drive-in restaurants and movies. But you get the picture. My question is how does one survive in an ever-changing world? And that question applies to people of every age. Change is confusing and frustrating sometimes; but change also presents amazing opportunities for learning, expansion, self-examination, and growth. We are constantly challenged to remain relevant and productive in a world where the landscape can be altered by a single event. It’s pretty overwhelming sometimes. How do we find truth, relevance, and influence in an evolving world? And how can we pass on something of value to our children and grandchildren who’ve never known any other world or any other values than the ones they see today?

Grandmas today are in pretty much uncharted territory. We’re being told “60 is the new 40,” “70 is the new 50,” and “80 is the new 60.” And I believe it! But with the hope of 20 bonus years comes the question of what to do with that valuable gift. My grandmothers expended most of their energy simply keeping up with life’s chores. I recall my Mississippi grandma often telling me about making 60 to 100 biscuits every morning to feed her husband and twelve children. And I’m not talking about the whack-‘em and rack-‘em variety from the grocer’s cooler. These were made from scratch without so much as a food processor to speed the work. After their children were grown, they spent most of their time continuing to care for their families and help out with the grandchildren. My sister and I spent a few months living with our Ohio grandma when we were young and our parents were still trying to get on their feet after our dad’s discharge from the army. She raised three of our cousins, and her house was pretty much a summer camp for grandchildren and great grandchildren until she died. And grandmas are still invested in their children’s and grandchildren’s lives; but they also have the time, energy, and hopefully good health to pursue other dreams and to remain active influences in our society.

As grannies, we’ve reached a mountaintop of sorts, and we have a panoramic view of the world that, sadly, has been denied to many. So some of us start blogs to share ideas and start conversations about politics, religion, cooking, crafts and art, relating to grown-up kids, having a positive influence on grandkids, surviving losses. I hope you’ll take this journey with me and join the conversation!

Thanks for stopping by,

Barb Griffith