"It's a fool who plays it cool" and the advice we carry with us

Why is it still cold and snowy? I know, people don't use the Farmer's Almanac here to forecast the weather. They measure it by the state high school hockey tournament --"Always snows during the tournament"--and that becomes the local wisdom.

And you feel like you'll never make it to spring. Then a little voice in your head calls out something like:

"Keep your chin up. It's not the end of the world."

Maybe your grandmother said it. Maybe your favorite aunt. My grandmother would probably say, "Never liked this place anyway." She was not keen on passing along memorable nuggets of wisdom. You had to learn the moral of the story only after you actually sat through one of her stories.

I've been soliciting a lot of advice from people recently. My friend Klecko quoted me the line above from the Beatles' "Hey Jude." It totally convinced me. It went with the other one from a local dean,

"Be patient and persistent."

Klecko's also the one who said he goes by the un-PC wisdom gleaned from an earlier boss:

"Think like a fat man."

He explained: if one is going to think about how to go about one's job it doesn't hurt to think "how can I get this done well with the least amount of physical effort?" Ha!

But that conflicts with the advice I got back as a teenager, "Work like a banshee," as in,

"Hard work pays off."

There are all kinds of books of quotations and one, The (Girl) Power of Quotations, lists this:

"A lady only chews gum in the privacy of her boudoir." We learned this as kids and at 45 and 46 years old, my sister and I still do not chew gum in public.

My mom wouldn't have told me that one but she would say, "You gotta have a comeback." When my brother and I started to knock up against the mean people of the world, she'd always say, "You need to have some comebacks." One of the things that drew me to my husband, which I didn't realize until some years after we married, is that he is the King of Comebacks. He's got the perfect ones for parenting or for when he's sympathizing with someone having a tough time. Once our daughter came running into the house after a day care teacher had revealed the facts on Santa, and my husband responded, "Good. That's over. I never liked that guy getting all the credit anyway." It stopped her right in her tracks, no tears, just a quizzical look in her eyes and a cocked head. Sort of like, "Well, that was a pretty cool trick you guys just pulled off for the last five years. Huh." I have never really mastered the art of that but I always think about it when someone tears at me pretty hard. (Bud Light designed a whole ad campaign on the art of the comeback: dude! Dude! DUDE!)

Seems I must have put stock in some of those nuggets of wisdom by the looks of my daughter's writing. See her "Advice to a daughter" here.

See that picture above? That's me at 21, about to launch out into the world. My parents and I had spent the summer at Big Wolf Lake while my dad and I took classes at Bemidji State. This is one of those typical weekend mornings spent drinking coffee and waking up to the sights on the lake. My aunt loves this picture because we're all so relaxed.

It never went like this: "Mom, Dad, can I talk to you about something?" Nope. Dad would sense something was wrong and then he'd talk to mom and during this summer at the lake I slept in the front room of this tiny cabin with only a floral chintz curtain for a door and I could hear them talking about me. And then in the morning as we sat around drinking coffee, thinking about starting our day, mom would say something like, "Let me tell you a story . . ." and then she'd pair up her own coming-of-age story with whatever she thought I was feeling and when she was done Dad might say, "Nothing we can do about it now, let's go make breakfast." Funny thing is, they often never got around to asking me what the matter was.

Once, I had this powerful dream. I had just learned of my great great-grandmother, a Native American woman of the Wisconsin Winnebago tribe, a single mother, an independent landowner. In my own life, I had been struggling through a lot for months and I felt alone in the world, kind of drowning. I was torn at work and torn among my many other roles in life. I'm not normally a dream-watcher and I tend to run on the Margaret Thatcher-side of mystical. But in my dream this great great-grandmother with the dark long hair spoke to me and said, simply, only these words: "You belong here."

Wisdom can be passed along and it doesn't have to rhyme and it doesn't have to be witty. Sometimes all it has to be is spoken at the right time, with love, plain and simple.