Chips and Goop and Nietzsche
by Laurie Woolever
About once a month when I was a kid, we’d all get in the car on a Sunday morning, having attended Mass the evening before, and drive an hour to visit my grandparents in Herkimer, New York. My grandmother would cook lunch for at least twelve people (though we were only ever six), typically a ham or a whole turkey, with a loaf of bread, mashed potatoes, gravy and a vegetable, two pies and homemade whipped cream; the beverage for everyone was always a glass of whole milk. After lunch, the adults would talk in the kitchen, and my sister and I would play outside or read my grandmother’s magazines. It was during one of these visits, when I was an anxious ten-year-old, that I read a short essay in which the writer, a woman, explained that the phrase It doesn’t matter was the key to living a happy life. I don’t recall whether she credited Nietzsche or Kierkegaard with the sentiment; this was the mid-1980s and my grandmother only subscribed to Good Housekeeping and Reader’s Digest, so the philosophical North Star of the piece is far more likely to have been Erma Bombeck, or maybe Peg Bracken.
One need not despair if the outcome of a situation didn’t align with one’s rigid expectations, the author hastened to explain; she didn’t mean to suggest that a person shouldn’t care about anything. It was more akin to “don’t sweat the small stuff,” which is something my mother liked to say, despite having expended gallons of her own perspiration over the most minute stuff.
Keep us breathing fire!
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