While riding the bus to Tillamook I passed near where my maternal grandmother spent her early years. She dropped out of school after fourth grade because her parents couldn't afford the books for fifth grade. Plus, like many impoverished African parents today, they needed her to go out and earn money. While working as a domestic servant in a house in Netarts she met a young man who grew up on the land shown in the photograph, above. His parents rented the poor farmland, and his father, too, had a drinking and an income problem that drove him out of school at a young age. So they fell in love, got married, and worked and worked and worked to give their children (and therefore their grandchildren, like me, and all those who came after) a better life than what they had.
In Ghana I meet a lot of people who probably would have gotten along well with my grandparents, students and adults who are very earnest and serious and hard working, who are fighting steep odds to create a better life not just for themselves, but for the generations who come after--and their neighbors and their nation. Of course there's always the danger that those who come later, with much easier lives, take the prosperity that they won for us lightly. Easy come, easy go.
That would be a travesty. A very small proportion of the world enjoys the sort of choices and advantages that my grandparents passed along to me. Most or even all of the people reading this are probably in the same boat. So, then, the question becomes: what are we going to do with those choices and advantages?
Some 80 years after my grandmother's death, I am grateful to her. Will anyone be grateful to me, to us, 80 years after we are gone? Will we give them a reason to remember us, and to remember us with gratitude?
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