My husband, Ron, grew up in Pasadena, and both sets of grandparents lived in Fresno. It’s not the same as growing up next door, but it’s not across country either. He has faded memories of his grandmothers, but his Grandpa Hollenbeck is etched sharp in his mind, buffed to a high sheen, time rubbing off all the rough spots. They played cribbage together, and fished in the high mountain lakes of northern California. He knew his grandpa was a sailor in the Great War, a roofer who raised five children of his own, only to lose the oldest in the war that wasn’t supposed to come, but did; a man who lived to his mid-90s, and who died mainly because he missed his wife who had died a couple of years earlier. “No one fries a pork chop like Blanche!” he said, and meant it, the year she died.

It’s inevitable, I suppose, for those of us who are grandparents to compare ourselves to our own grandparents. Are we as patient as they were? Are our laps always ready for a squirmy body or two? But one thing we know we can never match, if we’re honest, is how tough they were. If they didn’t die young of some now-obliterated illness, or a farm accident, they lived to be old. We fumble toward history, but our grandparents strode into it, trusting God in the good times and the bad ones. They lived through The Depression, but weren’t depressed – or if they were, no one knew it, and they got over it. They fought in wars, then offered their sons to other wars, and sometimes lost them. Being able to work hard was a gift to them, and they embraced it, mowing their own lawns and cleaning their own houses into their ninth decades, not because they had to, but because they could.

I started thinking about this today because Ella, our granddaughter, doesn’t feel well. Liz, in the way of mothers of youngsters who can’t yet communicate clearly, doesn’t know why. She thinks it may be her teeth, or the changes she’s undergone in the last couple of months, or maybe she has an unknown pain somewhere. She gives her sparing drops of Infant Tylenol, which seem to help but don’t solve the mystery. And I remembered a conversation I had with Momo, at least fifty years ago.

People learn to live with pain, and in my grandmother’s case, become defined by it. The broken hip suffered at age 50 had resulted, by age 91, in no hip joint at all. An orthopedist said she was a “medical miracle.” She walked every day of her life, because she knew if she didn’t use it, she’d lose it. Yet when she died she had a 30-year-old bottle of 48 Bayer Aspirin, still half full. And so, once when I was complaining about a bruise I got on the school playground, she said, “If you think about it, really concentrate on it, you will notice that some part of your body hurts, all the time. Just forget it and go on. What are you going to do? Live on aspirin?”

I didn’t get it then, but I do now. Right now my back hurts. Also the knuckle on my right hand that I think might be, although I whisper it, “arthritis.” I watch Liz, and I know she hesitates to medicate. I like to think it’s because she remembers that conversation with Momo that I shared with all of our kids, and now our grandchildren.

When Hannah, 7, complained last week about a scrape on her knee, you know which story I told her.