The Way You Wear Your Hat... The Way Your Smile Just Beams: Remembering the Importance of Relationships on This Thanksgiving Day

“Stories are painted in the lines of your face.”
Magne Furuholmen, White Canvas

Wow! I love the idea that stories are painted in the lines of our faces. This is so true. Picture the face of a grandparent: There are magnificent stories assigned to each line, each wrinkle, each cell. Some of these stories are joy-filled and some are tear-filled. Yet they are all essential to the life of the person who lived them. Every facial line helps to construct the character and the integrity of each individual and, collectively as a people, every line helps to tell the historical story of a generation.

I often wish I had asked my grandparents about their youth. It must have been fascinating growing up in the early 20th Century when technology was first beginning to boom: Motion pictures (first silent then talking); radio; international telephone service; phonograph records; the evolution of automobiles, trains and airplanes; and the birth of television, just to name a few.

In 1939, it must have been amazing to see The Wizard of Oz in vibrant color on the “big screen;“  and it must have been equally as thrilling to experience a big screen Carmen Miranda as she sang and sambaed beneath her tooty-fruity hats in the 1940s. That generation also experienced history’s greatest evolution in music. From the folk, spiritual or classical music of the previous centuries came jazz, torch songs, swing, pop vocals, lounge and rock ‘n roll. From Brahms to Benny Goodman, from Dizzy Gillespie to Elvis Presley: Double wow!

Of course the 20th Century also produced history’s greatest mass-destruction of human life with its two World Wars. People who lived through these tragedies experienced fear like no humans ever had before. Nuclear bombs and jet-fighters ensured that mass destruction could take place easily and at any moment. Across the world, humans also learned that life could be as fragile as paper money. The Great Depression pulled the rug of abundance out from under the heels of Americans and then did likewise to peoples worldwide. But there was even an upside to these tragedies.

In the 1930s and 1940s, people learned the true value of life isn’t in things, it’s in relationships. Movies and music from the period beautifully portray a lesson well learned. A great example is George and Ira Gershwin’s “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” with its wonderful lyric: “The way you wear your hat, the way you sip your tea, the memory of all that, no they can‘t take that away from me. The way your smile just beams, the way you sing off-key, the way you haunt my dreams, no they can‘t take that away from me,,, no they can’t take that away from me.”

During the Depression, people learned that almost any “thing” could be taken away from them: jobs, cars, furniture, homes, savings, even the shirts on their backs. But the one thing that couldn’t be taken away was the experience of a loved one. No one could take away the beam of a special someone’s smile, or the unique way he laughed, or the twinkle in her eyes. Seems we need to learn these lessons today. Maybe we need to learn to love the lines in our faces, instead of wanting desperately to erase them. Maybe we need to read some of the history in the faces of our senior citizens. And maybe we need to take time to ask them about their life stories. We’ll no doubt learn something important ourselves: to better appreciate that today’s trends and social concerns are rooted in yesterday’s, and to better appreciate the value of relationships-- of people-- over objects. 

On this Thanksgiving Day, let's think about how really important our relationships are to our well-being; to our connection to God. And let's cherish the many lessons learned during the Great Depression; all those lessons concerning what's really important in life. These are lessons that will allow our souls to shine!