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[li]Parents includes anyone in a custodial relationship to you during your childhood. In other words, foster & adoptive parents count. So do aunts, uncles, grandparents, elder siblings, and so forth. The point is that I’d like to talk about things you learned outside of a formal schooling environment that nevertheless have always stuck with you.[/li][li]I’m interested in talking about lessons taught deliberately.[/li][li]I’m also interested in talking about positive lessons: things intended to make your life better or more moral. Anything from understanding the phases of the moon to changing the oil in your car to baking a lemon meringue pie to never kissing a new boyfriend until you’ve broken up with the current one.[/li][/ol]
Anybody?
The banker always seemed to win at Monopoly when I was a kid. Granny liked to be the banker. When I was allowed to be the banker I did not win. I started to observe Granny closely and caught her stealing from the bank. It took a few games to be sure and to build up the courage to confront her. Cries from the rest of the family - how could I accuse Granny of cheating and stealing?
Granny was delighted to have been rumbled and explained that no one is above scrutiny - even Grannies - so don’t be afraid to challenge authority and anyone handling your money.
When I was in my teens, I spent a couple of years living with my maternal grandparents, because of various problems with my parents and where they’d moved to.
My grandparents grew up during the Depression, and I learned a lot about how to repurpose things, and how to shop, and how to save money. This was very, very helpful when I got married.
My father explained to me how retail stores will buy something specifically so they can mark it up at an extreme rate, and then later mark it down. For instance, if the normal markup is 100%, then if a store gets a special buy on something, they might mark it up 500%, sell it at the inflated markup for a while, and then mark it down to the regular markup. So, if something cost $100 wholesale, the store would normally mark it up to $200, but in this instance would mark it up to $600, and then mark it down to $200…and claim that it had been marked down by 2/3. Which it had been, but it had been marked UP into the stratosphere first. I was young and naive and I couldn’t believe that regular stores could be that greedy, or that consumers could be that dumb. I am no longer young, and I’m no longer quite that naive.
Dad: always examine any contract with the utmost care, whether you’re the person who’s written it or it’s been written by the other part. Make sure any possible misunderstandings get cleared before the signatures are on it.
Your word is your contract. Be as precise in your speech as you possibly can.
A bet is a contract; so’s a law.
Both Dad and me had bets we won thanks to having been more careful than the other party about the exact wording And one of the times I wasn’t careful enough, I ended up Pitted and offending people that I like a lot :o
Also Dad: when two people meet at a doorway, who opens the door for the other one is not a matter of respect or social standing, but of logistics and practicality. The one who is least encumbered opens the door for the other one. “Least encumbered” means less packages, less little kids, or simply that (s)he’s the one who will be pulling on the door.
The last hidalgo, yeah, but for any rule he had a logical explanation: if no logical explanation could be found, the rule got tossed.
Abuelita (Dad’s Mom) was a Parchís fiend. The board’s squares are numbered. She taught us to play when we were still learning to count; later she taught us how to play faster by adding the rolled number to the number of the square we were in and then moving, rather than counting (we’re at this stage with the Kidlet now). And, as soon as we knew how to play, she started treating us kids exactly as she treated adult players: if she thought we were making a bad move because we hadn’t seen something, she’d say “look again” - but she never pointed out specific moves (and we learned to extend the same courtesy to others); if you were making that move because you chose to (you had, indeed, seen all possibilities), then that was your right and privilege. If we beat her, we knew that we had beaten her for real, she didn’t “give” us games. We learned about respect, courtesy, planning ahead, calculating probabilities both intuitively and explicitly, considering all possibilities… we learned risk management and planning on a colored board.
My grandmother taught me to do fine hand work. I can do french point coupe, a couple of sorts of lace making, more common embroidery, petitt and gros point canvas work, and hand sewing in general. I still find it almost as easy to make medieval and renaissance clothing by hand as it is to use a sewing machine. I will frequently only do the really long seams by machine and to all the fine work by hand. Sometimes the fine had work is slower and more complex to do on a machine, and some stuff literally can not be done with a machine.
I could probably be dropped back a couple hundred years in the past and make a living making lingerie for the european royal courts.
This is knowledge rather than wisdom, but still: My mother deliberately taught me math. She started by gluing pinto beans to popsicle sticks and a little later, at her small business, she had me balancing the registers each morning (starting at age 5). That taught me how to count quickly by ones, fives, tens, twenties, and twenty-fives as well as giving me a practical application for multiplication. She kept up occasional lessons throughout elementary school and looking back she did a much better job than the college-educated professionals.
My father said, “do what you love and the money will follow.” It is fortunate for his reputation that he did not add “…in truckloads,” but it’s good advice.
Both parents advised me to have sex before marriage.
I used to spend summer days with my Grandma, she taught me the basic knit stitch. A few weeks later I asked my Mom how to purl. I’ve been knitting ever since.
Both my Mom and Grandma used to make their own clothes until sometime in the 1950s, they used to show me pictures of what they made, and they did really nice work. One Christmas I asked for and got a sewing machine, and my Mom showed me how to pin a pattern, cut it out and sew it.
When I got my first car my Dad showed me how to check the oil and water in the radiator, use a tire pressure gauge and how to clean and gap spark plugs.
And one of the times I wasn’t careful enough, I ended up Pitted and offending people that I like a lot :o