Author: susan

One day Dad gave all three of us kids a bed-making lesson.  Not about how to pull up the bedspread and neaten the bed after you’d gotten up in the morning.  We already knew that, and were supposed to do it every day.  No, the real deal — stripping the bed down to the bare mattress and then putting on fresh sheets and making the bed up anew.  

Dad told us that we were lucky that there was now such a thing as a fitted sheet, whose elastic corners slipped under the mattress corners to keep itself in place.  Before the invention of the fitted version, the bottom sheet would have been flat, just like the top sheet.  To make up a neat bed back in those old days, he told us, it was essential to know how to make really tight folds at the four corners of the bottom sheet.  Such tight folds were called “hospital corners” for reasons that Dad did not know but that can now be found on the internet.  He also told us that, when he was in the Navy, the quality of one’s hospital corners was assessed by whether a superior officer could bounce a quarter off the bottom sheet; if so, one could continue making up the bed; if not, well …

Lest we think that hospital corners were mere relics of the past, Dad also told us that the two folds of the top sheet at the foot of the bed — our beds — needed to be tight as well.   And so, he taught us what to do.

Every time I’ve changed the sheets on a bed, this lesson has come back to me as I’ve attended to those two folds.  What doesn’t come back is whether we demanded — and Dad provided — a demonstration of a bouncing quarter. 

I never set forth a five- or ten-year plan for my career.  I don’t have a bucket list.  Don’t make to-do lists either.  It’s not that I’ve never had goals, or that I’ve wandered aimlessly through a life devoid of ambition or mileposts.  It’s just that … my approach has mostly been to do what needs to be done when I see that it needs to be done.  To assess what comes to me and move ahead accordingly.  To put one foot in front of the other, foolishly or confidently or blindly assuming that each step would lead me to the next, and that all would be well. 

Is this attitude why I resist the idea of a leaving a specific legacy about myself — a summary of what my life has meant?  More precisely, what I hope it’s meant for the people coming after me?  A message for others?

Looking back on my life, I can see that things have generally worked out — almost in a way that I could claim that I planned.  For what it’s worth, I am happy.  Would I be happier if I had fulfilled a certain career plan or have a bucket full of checked-off items, or if I’d ended every day with a piece of paper showing lots of cross-outs?

I may not have made lists for myself, but — believe me — there was plenty of assessment and measurement going on, growing up and through adulthood.  There was always someone — in my family, my schooling, my peer groups, my church, my career — hinting or telling me outright — or giving me that silent lingering once-over glance.  Letting me know where I stood.  Hard not to internalize all that judging, which may be why I have avoided externalizing it, putting it down somewhere where it could be judged. 

I’m thinking now of the Celebration of Life event for a close friend who died several years ago.  Throughout, I was emotionally mute and unable to speak a word about my friend.  But listening to the eulogies — which were beautiful and loving and simple — I realized that I was hearing my friend’s legacy in those words of reminiscence.  She didn’t write her vast and unique legacy.  Others did, because of the way she had lived her life. 

That’s how I want it to be for me.