ILLUSTRATION BY JOEL KIMMEL
When you live to the age of 90, you become popular in the advice-giving department.
I was recently reminded of this while in Chicago to celebrate the 90th birthday of my wife’s paternal grandfather, who only recently retired from his job as a deputy sheriff in Cook County. As we were gathered at a quaint Italian restaurant, with him at the head of a long table, someone asked, “So, do you have any advice?”
“Marry a younger wife,” he quipped, smiling at his bride. “It keeps you young.”
And on the other side of my wife’s family, her widowed grandmother, 97, is even younger in spirit. Born in Chicago in 1918, she grew up during the Great Depression, raised eight children, buried two husbands, and still had the energy to push-mow her lawn by day and go dancing at night until her late eighties.
In 2012, when my wife and I visited her Florida home, the little one with the white siding and bright-green awning, she insisted on cooking corned beef for dinner and homemade apple pie for dessert. We then sat in her living room and talked into the wee hours. Around us, dozens of colorful greeting cards stood on tables and countertops, marking life’s many milestones. The next morning, as we walked her dog around the block, she stopped to visit with the mailman. Afterward, as we sat and talked on the porch, she held a bottle of Yuengling in one hand and a shot glass in the other. She would slowly sip and refill, sip and refill, as she whispered stories about the neighbors’ recent shenanigans. The whole time, she grinned, relishing life’s small joys.
So this past March, when my wife called to congratulate her grandmother on yet another year, she asked, “What’s your secret, Grandma?”
She answered immediately, in her sweet, quiet voice: “Walk everywhere. Eat chocolate. Talk to everyone. And have a beer every day at 3 p.m.”
Words to live by.
