Comments on: WordsDay: My grandfather’s good advice, as remembered on his birthday

By: Jim Booth

Jim Booth — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 19:55:11 +0000

Wonderful story, Chris…thanks….

By: Lex

Lex — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 11:21:28 +0000

Well done…i’ll be calling my grandfather this evening.

By: Dr. Slammy

Dr. Slammy — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 03:10:04 +0000

Maybe, but you appear to have done a pretty good job of self-educating.

By: Russ Wellen

Russ Wellen — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 02:41:21 +0000

You guys are lucky. Neither my parents nor the mediocre schools I attended impressed upon me the importance of education. My brothers either — not one of the three of us graduated from college or became professionals.

File that under “Opportunity missed.”

By: Dr. Slammy

Dr. Slammy — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:15:21 +0000

I was raised by my grandparents, and I think my story and yours have a lot in common. They wanted a better life for me than what they had, although in all honesty I’m not sure they even had a firm way of articulating what “better life” meant. But they’d have had no way of imagining that I’d earn a PhD and eventually become a college professor. Or that once I attained that lofty height that I’d leave it.

The thing they knew, though – KNEW – was that whatever hope I was to have in life hinged on education. So they pushed that, and there was never a moment as I was growing up where I didn’t have that as part of my basic assumption about life. Might as well have been encoded in the DNA.

My grandfather’s birthday is on May 24, and I hope I can remember his memory as elegantly as you have remembered Grandpa Cawley’s.