Lessons From My Grandmother

My paternal grandmother was a wise, self-assured, independent woman who was certainly ahead of her time. From the moment I could understand language she was filling my freshly-minted little brain with nuggets of wisdom: I never learned anything I didn’t have to pay for… You never know when it’s opportunity’s knocking, so you always have to answer the door… I never learned anything while I was talking… and the one that’s made the greatest impact on me to this day, Trust no living man and walk carefully around the dead ones. She taught me that when I was seven years old.

She also taught me many other things during my life. Things that have stayed with me, haunted me and held sway over me into adulthood.

Here then are eight Lessons From My Grandmother…

Lesson One: Self-Reliance

My grandmother’s husband, my grandfather, a Police Detective, died at the ripe old age of 46, mere months after his early retirement, leaving my grandmother widowed at 44. Rather than playing the part of the grieving widow dependent on the charity and goodwill of those around her to live out the rest of her life in solitary bereavement, my grandmother immediately went out and got her real estate license — and this was back in 1958 when women had not yet ascended to the level of complete and total equality that they so enviously enjoy today. In the following decade, she proceeded to amass an estate of over two million dollars (in today’s money) in cash, stocks, bonds, two homes and an apartment building.

She never remarried. I can tell you that the loss of her beloved husband broke her heart forever and the void his absence left in her life could never have been filled by the love of another man. I can tell you that, but it would be total bullshit. The reason she never remarried was that as long as she remained a single police widow, she continued to collect, until her death, my grandfather’s police pension — a hefty $5,800 a month (in today’s dollars) plus full medical coverage, full dental coverage, tickets to the annual policeman’s ball and all the ammo she could shoot. How do I know for sure this was the reason? Because she told me. I was 10 years old at the time.

Lesson Two: Waste Not, Want Not

My grandmother was the combined product of Great Depression poverty and W.W. II sacrifice. Growing up with ration books and victory gardens made her aware of the limited nature of resources.

“Big G,” as my brothers and I came to call her, trained me well and I quickly adapted to her idiosyncrasies. When clearing the dinner table, I was to NEVER stack the plates; the food on the plate below dirtied the bottom of the plate on top, requiring more water to wash the food off both sides of the dishes. “When you leave the water faucet running,” Big G would tell me, “those are pennies pouring down the drain.”

I was also instructed to never waste water by running the faucet until it became hot. Instead, I filled a kettle with the cold water, heated it on the stove, and used it to wash the dishes. It took far more energy and money to warm the entire water heater tank than to boil that tiny kettle. I was seven years old.

Having lived life ruled by the scarcity principle, Big G taught me the subtle but important difference between recycling and reusing. She used the same piece of “tin foil” since 1953. “Recycling” the foil meant having to buy more. But washing it meant you could use it again. And again… and again… and again…

My grandmother did not purchase things anew, she repaired the old ones. She awoke every morning to the same wind-up alarm clock she bought in the 1940s. She made breakfast using the same toaster from the 1930s. Her home was like an appliance museum. For her entire life, she peddled a deep state-like conspiracy by “Big Appliance” that forced consumers to purchase new versions of the same “gadget” every year by flooding the market with self-destructing products of inferior quality, a concept she termed as built-in obsolescence. I used to think she was nuts. Now, I’m thinking she may have been ahead of the curve. Like some sort of paranoid off-the-grid Nostradamus.

Lesson Three: Compounded Interest

Beginning on my first birthday, Big G deposited $100 annually into a college fund for me. She used it to teach me the concept of compounded interest — interest made on the initial principal and the accumulated interest. “Think of it as interest on interest,” she said. It’s free money!” After another hour or two of drilling, I finally began to grasp the concept. I was nine years old at the time.

Eighteen years later, when I began my first semester at San Francisco State University, what would’ve been $1,800 was now $5,300 thanks to compounded interest (and the high interest rates throughout the 1970s and early 80s). I paid $600 tuition plus another hundred for books, leaving $4,600 — and now that amount would continue to compound interest! Free money!

Lesson Four: Spend the Interest, Save the Principal

I remember the day I was summoned to Big G’s home office and sat across her large desk covered with perfectly aligned rows of overlapping file folders upon the tabs of which were affixed labels with typed surnames. It was like I was aboard the Freewinds and about to be shown the Operating Thetan VIII course! I had made it to the inner sanctum. This was her financial operation and I was about to receive “The Truth.” I was 12 years old.

In addition to her mini real estate empire, Big G had a side hustle loaning out money at rates competitive with the local banks. The loans were in the $3,000 to $10,000 range with one exception tipping $20k.

Big G told me this was all in service to the #1 financial principle that ruled her life — and was to now rule mine. The holiest of fiscal dictums passed down from her father to her, and now from her to me. I was to be the third generation of Jacksons who would spend the interest and save the principal.

Using loan documents in the folders, Big G illustrated how her money was working harder for her collecting the higher interest rates from her loans rather than the insultingly low rates on all those bogus savings accounts the banks offered (“strictly for suckers”). She just sat on her ass and raked in all that free money to supplement her frugal lifestyle. “You’ll always have money in the bank,” she told me, “by spending the interest and saving the principal.”

BONUS LESSON: Although the majority of loans were to family and friends, that did not prevent the occasional deadbeat from skipping a payment or defaulting on their loan altogether — which is why Big G employed air-tight contracts along with mandatory collateral requirements over someone’s empty “word.” Trust no living man and walk carefully around the dead ones. Everyone signed on the dotted line, NO EXCEPTIONS; that way Big G always got her money — one way or another.

Lesson Five: He Who Holds the Gold Makes the Rules

This one I learned personally, the hard way. When Big G bestowed upon me my collegiate scholarship, what I didn’t realize was that there were strings attached. And since I was never told what they were, I got all tangled up in them.

I was about to begin my second semester at S.F.S.U. when I was ordered by Big G to surrender the bank book. My funds were being revoked—penalty for my ingratitude which I flagrantly displayed by taking both the money and Big G for granted (not visiting her, not calling her, not reporting to her). I had moved off to the big city, enrolled in university and got all wrapped up in myself, taking classes, studying and “socializing.”

Now, without the financing, my college career came to a screeching halt. Big G held the gold and she was making the rules. If I wanted the money back, I’d have to capitulate to her conditions. That’s when I realized there would always be another violation of terms looming around the corner waiting to surprise me with another revocation of funds. Trust no living man and walk carefully around the dead ones. The only option I had was to turn the tables…

Lesson Six: You Value More That Which You Earn

I decided groveling and circumnavigating Big G’s moving target rules for the money would be far more difficult than just going out and getting a waiter job. Within a week I was working at Village Pizzeria, raking in the tips and paying for my own college education. But best of all, now I had the gold and I was making the goddamned rules.

Looking back on the debacle, I have to tell you Big G expropriating my college fund was the best thing that could’ve happened to me. Paying for it myself empowered me. Made me believe I could accomplish anything I set my mind to. And to this day I value my education so much more because I earned it. (Thank God it was only $600 a semester. I mean, that was beer money back then.)

Lesson Seven: Laughter is the Best Medicine

Lest you think it was all business and autocracy with Big G, you should know she also had a sense of humor. As far back as I can remember she would tell me this story/joke:

Big Bill and Little Bill were gathered around a campfire. Little Bill said to Big Bill: “Big Bill, tell me a story…” So Big Bill said to Little Bill: “Big Bill and Little Bill were gathered around a campfire. Little Bill said to Big Bill: Big Bill, tell me a story… So Big Bill said to Little Bill: Big Bill and Little Bill were gathered around a campfire. Little Bill said to Big Bill: Big Bill, tell me a story…”

And she’d continue like that, droning on and on, laughing maniacally within this continuous loop of insanity, intensifying each new stanza like she was nonplussed that I wasn’t getting “it.”

I didn’t understand it back then and I still don’t get it now. Yet, I can’t help thinking maybe it’s like a riddle of the Sphinx, the answer of which contains some forbidden knowledge paving the way toward my enlightenment. Then again, maybe the old lady was just, to use her words, “all screwy.”

The Final Lesson

In the year 2000, Big G shuffled off this mortal coil and joined her husband in eternity. After her passing, while cleaning out her house, I discovered two things that would have a profound effect on my future life.

First, in the garage rafters, I found dozens and dozens of supermarket Styrofoam meat trays. Collected over the decades, they were all meticulously cleaned and perfectly stacked in their color-coded, meat-indigenous groups: yellow for pork, blue for fish, pink for beef. I had no idea why she held onto these seemingly useless and noxious items or what, if any, purpose they were to serve. I figured it was just another secret she took to her grave with her. But I must say that the innumerable amount of them with such anal organization and hermetic storage made me wonder if she knew something the rest of us didn’t.

The second thing I found was the passbook to my seized college savings account. Figuring Big G forgot all about it, I checked the balance. I was floored by what I saw. Big G had not forgotten about it. She had, in fact, maintained it. Benefiting from the higher rates in the 1980s and enduring the lower rates of the 90s, the $4,600 balance left after my first-semester tuition and books had mushroomed into $11,500. Over the previous 16 years, compounded interest worked just like Big G taught me it would. And to my bigger surprise, she kept the account in my name.

I decided to take Big G’s financial lessons for a test drive and see just how much more money the account could earn. Earmarking the funds for a down payment on a home I hoped to purchase one day, I began with six-month CDs (higher interest rates than bogus savings accounts), adding $50-$100 each month to juice the compounding.

By 2018, when I was ready to purchase my townhouse, that $100 from 1964 had blossomed into $30,000. It was only by adding this money to the “Home Owning Fund” I’d been building over the past few decades that I had enough for a 20% down payment. From beyond the grave, Big G had made it possible for me to buy my first home! And it all started with that initial $100 on my first birthday. It was like she planned for this to happen this all along!

Wait a second…What if she did?

My Grandmother’s Legacy

If Big G hadn’t opened that savings account for me way back in ’64 I wouldn’t have my house today! I mean, everything came together as if it was… preordained. All her platitudes… Spend the interest, save the principal… Opportunity’s knocking, answer the door…Everything she ever taught me helped me buy my house because…Big G was a realtor! That can’t be a coincidence!

It all fits together like some master plan — just like Big Appliance’s built-in obsolescence. She told me that cockamamie theory so I’d think bigger!

That’s is why she stopped paying my college tuition — she knew the money would one day be my down payment!

Her “Big Bill Little Bill” story — the repetitiveness… a metaphor referring to compounded interest. Its hidden message to repeatedly add contributions to my CD accounts month after month after month after month after month after month…

That’s why Big G taught me to save money — she knew I’d need that 50–100 bucks extra every month to have enough for the down payment. I kept my water bill low by not stacking dishes. I reused rather than recycled. I used that 1953 piece of tin foil. I used Big G’s old appliances instead of buying new ones. It all fits!

Big G was an off-the-grid Nostradamus — and she predicted all this with those Styrofoam meat trays. Yellow for pork, blue for fish, pink for beef. She meant for me to find them after she died. I just couldn’t see it at the time. Yellow, blue pink. She did know something I didn’t. Yellow, blue, pink. THIS was the riddle of the Sphinx, the forbidden knowledge! Yellow and blue combined are green. Green is the color of money. Pink is femininity and love. Big G was a woman and she loved money. Psychologically and spiritually, pink symbolizes compassion and nurturing. Big G was telling me she would be by my side, helping me save money like she saved those trays! She had paved the way to my enlightenment!

My Legacy

Big G entrusted me with all her secrets — the theories, the formulas, the concepts. She warned me trust no living man and walk carefully around the dead ones because she knew one day I’d have to guard this knowledge. Trust no living man and walk carefully around the dead ones. Generations of wisdom passed down to me to protect. Trust no living man, walk carefully around the dead ones. It all fits! Trust no living man, walk carefully around the dead ones. Yellow, blue, pink! Trust no living man, walk carefully around the dead ones! It all fits. Trust no living man, walk carefully around the dead ones!…

It all fits!

© 2021 M. K. Jackson