The Suitcase Under the Bed

Today is National Grandparents Day.

It always sneaks up on me, tucked in the quiet after Labor Day and Patriot’s Day, in September’s tumble.

I want to tell you about a suitcase.

It’s an old one. Hard-sided. The kind with metal latches that click, not zippers. It belonged to my mother, and it lived under her bed for as long as I can remember. Periodically it would be taken out for everyone to see.

Inside was never anything valuable. Not in the way the world counts valuable.

A few photographs with soft, curled edges. A recipe card in beautiful cursive handwriting that many cannot even read anymore, all loops and slants, for a biscuits that never once turned out the same way twice when I tried it myself. A church bulletin from a wedding forty years gone. A ribbon. A button jar. The kind of things you’d toss out in five minutes if you didn’t know whose hands had touched them first.

I used to think grandparents passed things down mostly in the big, dramatic moments. A wedding ring. A blessing said over a new baby. A story told once, at the right time, that changes how you see your whole life. You might hear that story more than once.

I don’t think that anymore.

I think most of what actually gets passed down slips through in the small, unremarkable minutes. The way she hummed while she worked. The particular, unhurried way that my grandfather had cornbread, raw eggs, and buttermilk in glass for breakfast because he believed that he had a tender stomach. A phrase repeated so many times you didn’t notice you’d absorbed it, until you heard it come out of your own mouth years later, aimed at somebody else you love.

Nobody sits a child down and announces, “I am now transmitting to you my values.” It just happens, quietly, while you’re watching someone fold a towel a certain way, or bow their head before a meal, or answer the phone patiently for the hundredth call that day. –“Hello, this is so and so. Who would you like to speak with?” Always the proper way.

That’s what I think that old suitcase really held. Not treasure. Evidence. Proof of a particular way of paying attention to an ordinary life, saved without anyone planning to save it, just because nobody could quite bring themselves to throw it away.

If your grandparents are still here, today’s a good day to ask them something you’ve never asked. Not the big biography questions. The small ones. What did your kitchen smell like on a Sunday? What did you carry in your pockets? What’s a habit of your mother’s you never meant to keep, and kept anyway?

If they’re not still here, today’s a good day to open your own suitcase, wherever it’s stored. The recipe box. The drawer of loose photographs. The button jar nobody’s touched in years.

You might be surprised what’s still teaching you, quietly, from in there.

I keep a cedar hope chest myself now, for exactly this reason, the way some of you keep quilts or workboxes passed down through the women in your family. Not because the objects are worth anything. Because someone’s ordinary, unhurried way of living is folded up inside them, waiting for someone else to notice it again.

Happy Grandparents Day. Go find your suitcase.