Think like my mother

Everybody’s freaking out.

Big parties at universities! Big gatherings off campus! No one’s wearing masks (friggin STUPID)! It’s not gonna work! You’re gonna be sent home next week! Why are we paying full tuition if you watch lectures in your dorm room?

People. Please. Relax already.

We’re in a pandemic. Things are complicated. This in-person college experiment very well may not be sustainable. In a lot of places, we’ve already SEEN that. I know. I know! We’re living it every day here too, people. But hand-wringing will get us nowhere. Let’s control what we can control, which is our own behavior, and maybe the behavior of our teammates, classmates, anyone else we come in contact with … maybe. Beyond that, what will be will be. Or, as my soon-to-be-88-year-old mother would say, “Eh, what’re you gonna do?”

We should all adopt some of her philosophy. My mother grew up on an Italian island (Stromboli) with an active volcano – fun fact, it’s still active, erupted last year, with fatalities … wait … that’s actually not a FUN fact. Anyway. Back in the late 1930s and 1940s, when my mother and her family lived on Stromboli, there was no running water, no electricity, and one big-ass volcano waiting to erupt. When I was in elementary school, I had the coolest show-and-tell: Volcanic dust from the island where my mother grew up.

My mother and her family lived every second of every day with the reality that one massive eruption and they’d all be consumed by molten lava, poof, and that’s that. Talk about growing up with perspective. I’m pretty certain that the “Eh, what’re you gonna do?” (or, if she was surrounded by Old Italians who couldn’t speak English in our house, which was often, it would be “che puo fa?”) attitude with which she lived her life comes from the perspective of her youth. It’s not like she could move to another island or another country at a moment’s notice, what with a World War raging at the time. They were kinda stuck there. Did she worry? Did she fret? Of course she did, she’s human! But she didn’t let it consume her. She grew up a scared girl, but she and her family adapted. They had no choice.

My mother has lived her entire life with the gratitude box checked. She’s old, mostly blind, needs a walker, needs help with some basic life activities, no longer lives independently, lost her husband of 60 years a few years ago … but she tends to focus on what she has rather than what she doesn’t have. I doubt, growing up as she did, she could envision living long enough to have great-grandchildren, but now she does (two babies, born in the past few months and days). And although she cannot see them in any sense of the word, she’s grateful for each day. I’d like to think some of that gratitude attitude has rubbed off on her youngest boy (that’s me). But maybe not. After all? I’m one of those guys pacing around, wondering, “is this gonna work?”

Tomorrow, we start the Fall 2020 semester at Marist. Is it going to work? Are the students going to be sent home sooner than we’d like? Will students act like knuckleheads, traipse around without masks (STUPID!), gather for large parties? Ooof, who knows! Maybe, my mother’s words should just echo in my head, each and every day, moving forward. Maybe we should all do the same. The uncertainty can be tough to deal with, mentally crippling even. But let’s control what we can control. Let’s win each day, because that’s all we’ve got in front of us, and see where this all goes.