Reminders of the “Good Old Days”
Tuesday, April 9th, 2013[Updated June 30 2013]
Soon after their move to San Luis Obispo in 1989, my parents, Lise and Henry Marx, presented Jan and me with a gift they’d been working on for several years: a collection of German proverbs they had learned from their parents and grandparents.
I remember continually hearing these sayings from my earliest childhood until their final days. Each time one was uttered there was a moment of satisfaction”the speaker pleased to have found a way to make familiar sense out of some new experience and the hearer gratified to grasp the connection. Growing up as a first generation American, I reacted to these old-world pieties with boredom and embarrassment.