Words Can’t Describe Nana’s Impact
As part of my gratitude series, this is the letter I wrote to my recently turned ninety-year-old grandmother.
Dear Nana,
I can’t believe you’re ninety years old. For decades you held firm that you were thirty-nine, I never really thought of you as older than that until I got into my twenties and the math became too fuzzy to rationalize. Then I turned forty and the gig was up.
Now that you’re officially double my age it is time I express the appreciation, gratitude, and love for what you’ve meant to me, your community, and why you’re an incredibly special person.
I met you when you were forty-four years old. You had been a young mother, though in post-second world war America, an 18-year-old marrying their high school sweetheart and having their first child wasn’t atypical. It just seems that way from a 2020 lens. I was born at the perfect time; you were an established high school educator and several years into empty nest syndrome. I was fortunate to be the recipient of a ton of love and attention from you and pop pop (my grandfather Milo Wetzel). You were both at the apex, you’d raised two children, were full-time teachers, you were leading extracurricular activities during the winter and summer, and pop pop was the local fire chief. From my eyes you were the center of the community you lived in, in retrospection, you were pillars and mentors to an entire region.
Every break, winter, spring, and summer I visited for a weekend, a week, or sometimes even weeks at a time.
My memories of these trips are vivid. Every morning pop pop would make an elaborate breakfast of pancakes, melon, sausage, or bacon and orange juice. I’d join in errand runs, being quizzed on the days weather, fire station maintenance, the rhythms of agriculture, and every afternoon/evening was spent playing card and/or board games. It was in these exchanges I was forced to socialize with local visitors and gossip.
These trips gave me a foundation of love, appreciation for reading, math, games, friendship, hard work, and the value of using logic, or as silicon valley likes to call it, data-driven decision making. Our road trips to see Jim & Chris (aunt & uncle) in southern California were especially educational, as they entailed endless quizzing of road signs, license plates, distances to places, historical references to the central valley.
One summer while visiting I desperately wanted to purchase a probability-based sports dice board game called pursue the pennant. It cost $39.95. You walked me through the ways I could earn the money and we weighed the options in intricate detail. I recall spending more time evaluating this than most people I know spent on whether they should marry their significant other. After careful deliberation, I decided to collect aluminum cans and glass bottles. In the mid 1980’s California redemption value was a couple of pennies per can and up to ten cents for a bottle. Pop-pop helped me build a can crusher so that I could more efficiently collect and store cans. We researched local events in the Sacramento Bee to collect recyclables. It took me approximately ten days, multiple fairs, and a heavy dose of labor to reach my goal. While I did a lot of work, you and pop pop were right there with me…instead of taking the easy way out (and saving yourselves time), you forced me to learn the value of hard work. That sense of accomplishment has carried with me for three-plus decades.
We have never discussed my parent's divorce in detail, it was a painful experience for everybody. But I have never thanked you for planting me with Jim & Chris while the physical separation occurred in the spring of 1983. Putting many of the reasons why aside. One of the most important and fortunate events for my maturation as a human being was living with and having Jim as a loving father model at a time I lacked one. What you and pop pop did, by taking me to their house and lovingly convincing an eight-year-old to move away from his mom was hard, thank you for that resolve.
We live in a society and time where boasting about one's accomplishments oftentimes feels more important than actually having an impact. Visiting Courtland (the California River Delta town my grandparents lived for nearly 70 years) is a reminder of what true character and ethics are. Whenever I was visiting and we were on a walk, picking up mail, at the general store or out for a meal, we would run into endless folks who stopped us, with a big smile on their face, and inevitably turn to me to express how grateful they were for you, and how much you helped them become the person they are. I heard this more than a thousand times over the course of my visits, however, I never listened, and truth be told was annoyed for the constant interruptions. It wasn’t until my thirties, fatherhood when I woke up and realized how powerful of an impact you had made on multiple generations of people. This wasn’t anything you have ever said, you just lived your life, and stayed true to who you are as a person.
Your dedication to Courtland and California Delta never wavered, even in retirement you threw yourself into the importance of a local library. You willed through donations, political lobbying, and sheer perseverance the Courtland Library into existence. I was never more proud of you and in awe of what I must live up to each and every day, then the day of the ceremony when they named the library after you.
There isn’t a day that goes by where your impact on me isn’t felt. I am a better person, happier, resilient, capable, intelligent, and loyal because of you. I am biased but I know there are thousands who benefitted from your dedication to education, the Delta community, and appreciation for fellow human beings. Words will never encapsulate the impact you’ve had on me and the Delta Community, the beauty of you is that you never did it for recognition, and that’s why your legacy will live on in me, in your great-grandkids and generations of Delta families to come.
I love you with all my heart,
Your Little Roo, Chewy, Josh Wetzel
