How to Get Over Things
Stormy learned young that life throws you curve balls - hurricanes, influenza epidemics, indoor plumbing. If you can't adapt, you'll get left behind.
Although she didn't believe in evolution (not until you show me the missing link!) she clearly understood that the ability to adapt to a new set of circumstances separates the quitters from the survivors, and those who just survive from those who thrive.
Over the course of her 95 years, Stormy had to adapt many times - to losing her mother when she was only 6, to a stepmother and new siblings, to electricity inside the house, to new schools, to life as a military wife, to life as a single mother of four, to living all alone, to helping care for her great-grandson, to life in another city, to life in a nursing home, to failing eyesight...
That's a lot of adapting. So how did Stormy do it so successfully? She had a vigorous two-step approach.
Step One: Don't talk about it.
Why dredge up bad feelings? What are you, selfish? Don't you know everyone's got problems? What makes you so special?
When I was little, I used to wonder why she told the same stories over and over and over. The aunt who won a drawing contest, the uncle who went to the national spelling bee, the day she walked to the sidewalk to pick up the paper and suddenly realized her middle-aged need for reading glasses had cured her nearsightedness.
"The hand is the hardest part of the human body to draw? No, Grandma, I didn't catch that the 42,000 times you've said it before."
When I got older and learned about all the much more interesting, tragic, scandalous and downright absurd family stories from other relatives, I realized Stormy had a vast catalog of stories. It was just that most of them were filed away in a drawer that read "Maybe this didn't happen."
Step Two: If you can't pretend it didn't happen, pretend it doesn't matter.
Remember how Aunt Leona had that baby before she got married, and she told her husband that it was her sister's child? And remember how, when he was just a little boy, Leona would keep him at home with her all day, until she heard Uncle Leo's car in the drive, and then Little Ajax would run out the back door, across the backyard, back to his mama/aunt's house? And remember that time, long after Ajax was a grown man and Leona was long dead, when Ajax was sitting in the living room on Christmas eve at Granddaddy's house, and someone said, "Uncle Leo's here!" And poor, old Ajax jumped up out of instinct and ran toward the back door?
Oh, that was funny.
So Stormy learned her methods from some sophisticated masters. And she passed on her lessons with equal mastery.
Witness the time when she left her cane sitting in an unexpected place, and her daughter (then in her 50s) tripped over it and fell with a hard thunk on the wood floor and laid there for several minutes.
Stormy lifted her hands over her head. "Oh no!" she exclaimed. "I've killed Janie Mae!" (short pause) "Oh, well. There's nothing I can do about it now."
That, my friends, is the essence of adaptation.
