Ketchup on Everything
What my grandma taught met about living exactly as you are
Somewhere on Highway 14 west of Pierre, South Dakota, the radio always gave up.
A few summers in a row, my family would drive down from Montana for a fishing trip along the Missouri River. It’s the kind of empty that’s easy to underestimate on a map and only too real once you’re inside it. Hours of two-lane road with nothing on either side but fields.
About five hours in, the fields turned to sunflowers, and they didn’t let up for the rest of the drive. Miles of them, all facing the same direction, all staring you down at seventy miles an hour. There was nothing wrong with them. I’d just been looking at them for two hours straight, and they were still out there, turning their faces toward whatever the sun was doing that they found so interesting. By the time we hit Pierre, I’d announced, more than once, that I never wanted to see a sunflower again in my life.
My grandma thought this was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. Sunflowers are supposed to be happy flowers that always turn toward the light, and here I was, ready to fight one. That contradiction delighted her, and she never let me live it down.
That’s who she was. She noticed the specific, odd thing about a person, and instead of smoothing it over, she made you feel like it was the best part of you.
Make Sure You Show Her
Years after that fishing trip, my mom got a birthday card in the mail. Sunflowers all over the front. Inside, past the usual note, my grandma had added one more line: make sure you show this to her.
She meant me. She’d turned my long-time grudge against sunflowers into a bit she kept alive for years. That was the kind of attention she paid. It didn’t fade once the car ride ended. It remembered exactly what made you, specifically you, and found it funny or lovely instead of trying to fix it.
My grandma died peacefully last week. She was 95.
I keep coming back to two things: the pocket dictionary she carried despite a sixth-grade education and the ketchup she loved to put on everything. She never smoothed herself into someone easier to explain. And she gave that same permission to everyone around her, including a granddaughter who was, apparently, ready to fight a sunflower on a South Dakota highway.
Where the Compass Points
In the ENOUGH Principle, Honor What’s Yours means navigating by your own compass instead of someone else’s map. My grandma didn’t need the language for it. She just lived it, plainly, in a hundred small, unbothered ways.
The dictionary wasn’t about proving anything. She just wanted her own words right, on her own terms, for herself. The ketchup wasn’t a lapse in an otherwise adventurous palate. It was just what she liked, and liking things other people considered unsophisticated never once registered to her as a problem to solve.
What I carry from her isn’t a lesson she sat me down and taught. It’s simpler than that, and harder to explain to anyone who didn’t know her. She gave me permission, just by being so unmistakably herself, to live my life out loud in my own way.
A Small Practice
This week, find the thing about yourself that doesn’t obviously fit. The odd pairing, the specific taste, the thing you’d normally downplay. Don’t smooth it over. Let it stand next to the rest of you exactly as it is.
If you’re used to editing yourself into something more consistent, this might feel strange at first. That’s fine. My grandma never once tried to make her contradictions make sense to anyone else, and it made her one of the most memorable people I’ve ever known.
See you next week.
P.S. Who gave you permission to be exactly who you are? I’d love to hear about them.