Fortitude

One day, my mom's brother, Chuck, called his siblings aside and told them to only take one helping of dinner.

"Dad and Mother won't eat until we're done," he explained. 

It was the Great Depression. My grandfather dug ditches and baked and decorated cakes to make ends meet. 

There were many days when the ends didn't come together.

My grandmother kept a ration book she once showed me. She kept meticulous notes about whose turn it was to get a new pair of shoes, for example. I marveled at her sense of fair play, particularly given that of the six children she was raising at the time, only one was hers. (She was my grandfather's second wife. Two more mouths to feed would arrive during the 1930s.) 

The two of them managed to persevere, and then thrive in the following decades, until my grandfather was felled by a stroke in the 1960s. And my grandmother, with her usual take-it-all-in-stride attitude, looked after him for the next nine years without complaint.

In this, the year of the rat (the Chinese certainly called that one), I try to remind myself that my forebears survived much worse than I have thus far. 

And I try not to boo-hoo about finding a permanent job. Or wearing a mask. Or having to curtail seeing loved ones in person.

I have discovered something about myself.

I'm a big wuss.

I wonder if, given the same circumstances as my grandparents, would I have been up to the challenge?

I hope I never have to find out.