What Grandma Said

The night before Niamh left Ireland for Boston, her grandmother sat her down at the kitchen table in Galway, poured two cups of very strong tea and said that she had a few things to tell her. Niamh was twenty-two, and she was sure she already knew everything worth knowing. She nearly made an excuse to leave. Twenty years later, she is glad she stayed.

First, her grandmother advised her to save a little money every week, however small her wages were. "Put something aside before you spend a penny," she said. "A jar under the bed is better than a promise from a bank." Niamh laughed and accused her of living in the last century, but her grandmother simply insisted that she try it for one year.

Then she warned her not to trust charm. "Charm is cheap," she said. "Watch what people do, not what they say." She told Niamh about a young man who had once persuaded her to lend him all her savings so that he could open a dance hall. He had promised to pay her back within a month. She never saw him or the money again. "I blamed myself for years," she admitted, "but I learned more from that than from any school."

Finally, she made Niamh promise to write. Not emails, not quick messages, but real letters on paper. "You can phone me whenever you like," she said, "but I want something I can hold." Niamh agreed, mostly to please her, and she remembers that her grandmother reminded her about it three more times before she went to bed.

Boston was harder than Niamh had expected. She shared a tiny apartment with two girls from Cork and worked long shifts in a restaurant near the harbor. At first she ignored the advice about saving, telling herself she would start once she earned more. Then, one winter, the restaurant closed without warning, and she suddenly had no job and no savings. A friend offered to lend her some money, and Niamh, feeling ashamed, thanked her and accepted.

That spring she found a glass jar, wrote SAVE on the lid and kept it under her bed. Every Friday she put ten dollars in it, sometimes twenty. By the end of the year there was enough to pay her friend back and to sign up for an evening course in accounting. Eventually she qualified, and today she runs her own small firm in the city.

The advice about charm was tested too. In her late twenties, a man she had met through work suggested that they open an office together and congratulated her on being so ambitious. He was funny and generous with compliments, and everyone liked him. But Niamh noticed that he always avoided answering direct questions about money. She thought of the dance hall, refused to sign anything, and a few months later read in the newspaper that he had been arrested for fraud.

And she kept her promise. For eleven years she wrote a letter every month. Her grandmother answered every single one in neat blue handwriting, scolding her for working too hard and reminding her to eat properly. When her grandmother died, Niamh's mother sent her a shoebox that had been found at the back of the wardrobe. Inside were all of Niamh's letters, tied with a ribbon, in the order they had arrived.

Now Niamh's own daughter, Clare, is nineteen and about to leave for college in California. Last night Niamh made two cups of very strong tea and asked her to sit down. Clare rolled her eyes and complained that she had heard it all before. Niamh only smiled. She advised her to save a little every week, warned her not to trust charm and then, putting a packet of envelopes on the table, made her promise to write.

"Letters?" Clare said. "Nobody writes letters anymore, Mom." "I know," Niamh replied. "That's exactly why they're worth keeping."