Pay respect to what came before.

This weekend the topic of grandparents came up, and we started talking about my grandmother, Ahbu. My son wanted to hear the story again. So I told him how she sacrificed so much and worked several jobs to keep her family clothed and fed, and how she married my grandfather, who was in the merchant marines, in order to smuggle her family out of China and flee the Communists. How she raised her family in Taiwan in the middle of a war, and supported her daughter’s love of English literature and culture and I Love Lucy until a tall, scrawny foreign Rotary Scholar arrived, and the door to America opened.

“Wow,” my son said. “She sacrificed a lot. I wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t done what she did…”

“Neither would I.”

We smiled, and took a moment to pay respect to what came before, the tides that keep on pushing.