ADELAIDE'S ADVICE

Some people keep journals or write daily in diaries. Adelaide Freas let others speak for her and retained their words with a snip of the scissors. 

Over decades, she stuffed newspaper columns, prayers and treasured mementos in a four-by-seven-inch three-ring black notebook. She devoured words, sayings and advice from Art Buchwald, President Dwight Eisenhower, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Dalai Lama, complete unknowns and countless notables, including Charles Schulz. After her death, when her children discovered that overflowing notebook, it became, her daughter Jean told me, the “foundation of our lives.”

Jean is a neighbor and friend here in the Wells woods, and she lent me her mother’s  notebook a few days ago. After poring through Adelaide’s uplifting, frequently humorous and occasionally poignant collections of snippets, I noticed that the sun sparkled brighter on the snow drift in my front yard. I’m positive that the red hue of the tulips on my kitchen island had intensified. Even emptying the damn dishwasher didn’t seem like a chore. 

Adelaide never complained, never explained, she just gathered pithy thoughts. Here are some of my favorites. 

President Eisenhower: “Everybody ought to be happy every day. If you don’t have some fun every day, that is a day wasted.” Truthfully, I’ve never applied the adjective “fun” to Ike.  But he’s got a point.

Nobel Prize winner Alexis Carrel noted: “Life leaps like a geyser for those who drill through the rock of inertia.”

In a yellowed ragged clipping from a 1959 WASHINGTON POST, Adelaide offered an account of the harried mother who emerges from the house to tell her impatient husband that she’ll be glad to sit out there in the warm car and blow the horn while HE bundles the kids into their snow suits. She included a humorous column by Art Buchwald who described an “etiquette class” he took with his wife so they didn’t act like yokels at Embassy Row soirees. (How I wish Buchwald were opining these days!)

A poem honoring National Secretaries Day took me back to the 1960s when I was an executive secretary at Johnson & Johnson:  “Now don’t run out and buy flowers, just be a little kind; don’t give us your best wishes, but please do keep in mind: we love to take your dictates, we love to place your calls, we don’t really mind the many times we rush papers down the halls; this is ‘our day’ and even though there’s havoc all about us, please be gentle and keep in mind — what would you do without us?”

Longfellow suggested, “The heights by great men were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the nights.”

A poem by Martin Buxbaum read:

“Have I lived each day with gladness? Lent a helping hand?

Have I paused each day for guidance and followed as He planned?

Have I labored to my full extent? Helped the weak and poor?

Have I turned away a single soul who knocked upon my door?

Have I always paid my honest debts? And never stooped to greed?

Are all men friends of mine in spite of color, race or creed?”

While Jean and i sipped caramel lattes, we also discussed her recent tough bout with pancreatic cancer and subsequent chemo. Jean spoke positively, determinedly, and never stop smiling at the new lease on life remission has given her. Where did she get that positivity? I’d bet from her mother: 

“It was not a perfect year. But has there ever been a perfect year?

We learn to make do, make better, make believe that better days

will come. And if we do continue to believe, who is to say the

perfect year will not yet be here.”

Many of us question why we get out of bed some days. When that happens, remember this tidbit that  Adelaide spotted:

LAUGH MORE     GRIPE LESS     IGNORE CRITICS

SAY YES    ORDER DESSERT     LOVE LIFE!

And above all:  “Don’t let your worries get the best of you:  Remember, Moses started out as a basket case.”