The Least You Can Do & My Nana's Tears
I have written about this a lot.
That’s because it’s important. And I hope you’ll forgive me for writing about it again—another year—another important time in this country (which is the U.S.).
Every year my ancient nana would call me up to make sure that I’d voted.
“It’s the least you can do, Carrie. The least you can do,” she’d say. “It’s our civic duty to protect the enchanted.”
Who are the enchanted? According to my nana? Women. Children. The disenfranchised.
My nana, Rena Philbrick Morse, was not a least-you-can-do sort of person, but voting was her bar for the ‘least you can do.’
She had high expectations of her family and of women.
Voting was tremendously important to her because women’s right to vote happened on her tenth birthday. She always heard from men that she knew were less intelligent than her disparage women’s brains. She was the valedictorian of her little class. Did the yearbook all herself. Did a million things all herself.
A farm girl, she heard a lot of men say that women were too delicate to do physical labor. That farm girl lived to be 100 and spent 99 years of it working her garden.
When women were give the right to vote, her little ten-year-old self celebrated with her mom knowing that she would have a voice.
A voice.
The Horror
My nana was a tall woman, rail-thin, brought up three kids of her own when her jazz drummer husband left her. She was involved in New Hampshire for an extremely long time. Her eldest son ended up desegregating the UNH fraternity system back in the 1950s. Like I said, she was the valedictorian of her high school and her mind? Her mind was brilliant and so sharp. She was a woman who was stoic. She didn’t emote. She was a plank of barn board that refused to bend no matter what beat against her.
So when she called me crying one November, I couldn’t understand. I thought someone had died.
“No,” she gasped. “No! Not that.”
It was worse than that.
One of my other relatives didn’t vote. She had claimed she had ‘no head for politics.’ She’d been lying about voting for years.
I’m not sure how my nana survived that.
But she did. She survived because someone needed to drive that relative to the polls. She survived because she knew she had work to do. We all have work to do.
The Purpose
The purpose of motivation and engagement or protecting ourselves and others through words, through action, through voting? It’s your purpose. It’s our purpose.
In the local politics of our town, a lot of people don’t agree about things and they argue like their souls depend on it, like the world will collapse if their point of view doesn’t become policy, but they still manage to jump each other’s cars (mostly), make casseroles when someone is sick or dies, applaud each other’s kids when they score at a game. They mourn when someone suffers a devastating loss and celebrate when there is a win.
And hopefully they will vote in November.
I told someone about what my nana said and they responded, “The least you can do? It’s one of the most important things you can true.”
That’s how so much of this life works, isn’t it? Sometimes the things that are the least you can do are also some of the most important? That might be voting. That might be talking to a neighbor. That might be apologizing when you’ve done or said something mean. That might be making connections and giving someone praise. But it’s something. We all can do something. And keep doing it. Until our world gets better.
Thank you for sharing this story with the world. I would have liked to meet your Nana.