My Grandfather's Wisdom

A Father’s Day Reflection 

By Fr. Frederick Edlefsen

When I was a boy, we often rode to “the country” – to a place called Belle Rose – after Sunday Mass to visit “Mimi” and “Pawpaw.”  Belle Rose had a tiny Post Office, a Big-B grocery store, and St. Jules Catholic Church.  Otherwise, no landmarks set it off from anything else among the sugarcane fields of Assumption Parish, Louisiana, aside from a faded green sign along LA 1 that said, “Belle Rose.”   

On those lazy Sunday evenings, we sat with Mimi and Pawpaw by their pond, behind a cane field, beneath a setting sun.  We were entertained by horizontal lightning flashes between 25,000-foot thunderheads on the horizon, as my parents and grandparents sipped Old Fashioneds and nibbled on “doo-dads”, a Nabisco snack sold at Big-B.  Three generations were together, gazing upon high-voltage ice-cream castles coming in from the Gulf of Mexico.  Pawpaw, a sugar famer and factory engineer, was not a man of many words.  But I recall him saying, “Electricity!  We don’t know what it is.  We just know how to use it.”   

Pawpaw masterfully cleaned fish.  He’d slice around the head and gills at precise angles and then along the spine and around the tail with the artful handicraft.  He’d triangularly cut off a little hole at the fish’s bottom near the tail.   I asked, “Why did you do that?”   He replied, “You wanna’ eat that part of the fish?”  

Pawpaw had a philosophy about eating.   When I was a hungry teen, dining at a local restaurant with Mimi and Pawpaw, my appetite met its match: a gigantic crab-stuffed flounder.   When my stomach registered “EXPLODE,” I pondered surrender.  I said, “Don’t know if I can eat it all!”  Pawpaw said, “Then don’t.”  I replied, “It’s a sin to waste it.”  He replied, “It’s a worse sin to eat it.”  Check mate.  For youth, “appetite” and “pride” are serious Capital Sins.  “Eat until you’re comfortable, not until you’re full,” Pawpaw would say.  O blessed Common Sense!  Where art Thou!

If you’re looking for high theology here, you’re looking too hard.  Grace flows like water through the rivulets of ordinary wisdom.  The Holy Spirit purifies simple things and often works in the common sense of people like grandparents.  Their gentle oracles are gifts from Heaven.