We are the poor people

As Labor Day marks the unofficial end to summer in America, I'm going to officially end my summer silence on this blog. Like most working people, I look at the long holiday weekend as an excellent chance to catch up on, uh, labor.

But I can't help but reminisce about all the summer picnics and barbecues of Labor Days Past, with my sisters, my parents, and my grandparents. Whenever there was a family get-together or a holiday or a meal around a picnic table, my Grandma (Jeanette Hanson, pictured left) would impishly grin and ask us all, "I wonder what the poor people are doing today?" As a child, I always laughed at the question and never quite grasped how rich Grandma felt when surrounded by her family. A few years later, we were spread across the country, rarely traveling home for the holidays.

This past July, I was fortunate to spend a few days in New York City with the International Thriller Writers, getting to know the genre and some of its best authors. I also explored the midtown Manhattan setting of the conference, took some photos, went to a comedy club, and wandered through an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

Unfortunately, I had to leave NYC three days early because of the passing of Grandma Hanson, who was 91, and who, I realized, had been born before women had the right to vote. While waiting in LaGuardia Airport for my flight to the midwest for her funeral, I thought about how much Grandma loved to travel. She had visited many places in Europe, including Italy, France, and England, and she had been to parts of Canada, Mexico, and Alaska. At age 75, she and a friend drove from Iowa to Arkansas to visit me (where I worked at a small college), then traveled way out west to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, a round-trip of thousands of miles.

Growing up in a large, poor family during the Great Depression, Grandma had worked hard to help care for her many brothers, often raising money by cleaning the homes of well-to-do families in Sioux City, Iowa. She expected others to work as hard as she did and was often disappointed by people who were unwilling to improve themselves. "No one is too poor to buy soap," she would say.

At age 45 she earned a nursing degree, which was a natural step for her, in retrospect. Once, late in her career while working in a nursing home, she took a tray of poorly prepared food (intended for the elderly patients) to the manager's office, dropped it on his desk, and asked, "Would YOU eat this shit?"

You gotta love her.

These days, with our iPhones and frequent flyer miles and diasporic families, it's not easy to find a respite or a common table we all can sit around on a rare holiday, breaking bread and sharing stories about faraway places like Rome, Nome, Quebec, or Chichen-Itza.

But when we do gather, we will certainly have the legacy of Grandma's rhetorical question, "I wonder what the poor people are doing today?"

--RAC