Pour some sugar on it

I don’t know why this story has stayed with me since I heard it as a fifteen year-old, but it has. My grandmother told it to me, and I asked her to retell it several times over the years until she passed away in 2013.

When my grandmother was a child, it was wonderfully safe for children to play outside all day long without much adult supervision (if any at all). One particular day, she was playing in the neighborhood with her brothers and she fell, splitting the top of her head. She immediately got up and ran to her grandmother’s house, which was nearby. She blew into the house crying, and told her grandmother that she had fallen and hit her head, and now it was bleeding.

She sat my grandmother down in a chair in the kitchen and pulled a jar of sugar out of one of the cabinets. She took out a spoon from one of the drawers, walked back over to my grandmother, and poured some sugar on the cut. Then she patted the sugar down on my grandmother’s head and said to her in a thick Sicilian accent, “There. Now go play.”

Maybe some of you will scream, “She should have taken her to the hospital!”, or, “She’s lucky nothing else happened!” Perhaps, but that isn’t the point of the story.

The point of the story in my mind is that because of my great-grandmother’s reaction to the situation, my grandmother didn’t think anything was really wrong. She didn’t see the cut as the “end of the world” or a “serious problem”, and because of that, she got on with her afternoon and went back outside to play. My grandmother had a beautifully long life, by the way, passing away at the age of 93.

One reason I love this story so much is because it defines the simplicity with which people used to live. Not everything was “newsworthy”. Life happened every single day without anyone really knowing about it. My grandmother didn’t jump onto Facebook and share with all her “friends” what happened and how she felt afterwards. Likewise, my great-grandmother didn’t run to the Internet to frantically search for the “right” way to help her granddaughter. She trusted her intuition and acted accordingly.

This isn’t a Facebook-bashing post; I actually like Facebook for certain things. I wanted to write this post more to remind myself and all of you that sometimes…all we really need to do when life happens is pour some sugar on it.

There. Now go play.