It was probably about twenty years ago. I was in college, and home for some holiday in the winter - Thanksgiving, Christmas, something like that. For some reason, it was just me and my grandmother in the car, driving from my sister's apartment downtown to my mom's house in West Memphis.
I think we were talking relationships, and maybe about my sister and her boyfriend, and would they get married or not. I hadn't been married that long then, and my grandmother had been married to my grandfather for fifty years before he died in 1984. I thought of my grandmother as a pretty good source of relationship advice in general, and marriage advice in particular.
So we gossiped and talked and kept coming back to the fact that you have to care about someone a great deal to put up with the things they do that drive you crazy. And no matter how good the relationship is, there will be some things that drive you crazy.
Now, my grandmother was not a woman to use strong language, except for a muttered "shit!" when something didn't go quite right - burned cake, bad hand of cards, things like that.
But she looked out the car window that day, shook her head, and sighed.
"You have to love someone an awful lot," she concluded, "to put up with their shit." That sounded like wisdom gained from hard-earned experience to me. I've never forgotten it.
She would have been 95 today. Not a day goes by I don't think about her.
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