Granny D. (aka Doris Haddock) is a woman who, in her ninetieth year, walked 3200 miles across the US to get a bill (on election finance reform) passed. In November 2008, during a speech in Philadelphia, Granny D. shared more of her crone wisdom. When asked about the faltering economy, she simply smiled then shared her personal memories of the Great Depression. Explaining that life is ALL about perspective, Granny D. urged us to stop viewing that learning period, known as the Great Depression, as a time of horror. Here are some selected excerpts from Granny D.’s talk on that remarkable autumn day:

“Maybe we were hungry sometimes, but did we starve? No, because we had our friends and family and the earth to sustain us. Our memories of that time are more round and golden than sharp-edged. My husband Jim made an ice rink from a little meadow, and he made a few dollars extra those winters of the Depression. I learned to put on one-woman plays and performed in women’s clubs here and there, making the rest of what we needed. We were fountains of creativity. We were fountains of friendship to our neighbors. As a nation, we were a mighty river of mutual support . . .

. . . Imagination! Let me suggest that a generation raised on books and storytelling, where one’s own imagination had to fill in the colors and details, made us a generation quite able to imagine marvelous ways to fill our family dinner table in those years. Let me suggest that the power of imagination was essential to the rise of all the grand improvements we achieved for each other and called our New Deal. Imagination allows the citizen and the politician to connect with people of every situation and condition . . . If you cannot imagine what people need until it happens to you, then I suggest you have never read a mystery book under your covers by flashlight . . .

. . . I want to tell you – especially if you are young and have not experienced true hard times – that there is nothing much to it, if you will insist on creatively and ferociously loving the friends and neighbors around you. And fifty or seventy years from now, if you are blessed with a long life, you will count those years as being some of your best, as indeed I do . . .

. . . Fear for the loss of material things is but the jitters of an addict, and the jitters go away once we relax into whatever new world we find ourselves come into . . . And I want you to understand that you must see beyond the distraction of these present headlines to the true challenges ahead, which have little to do with Wall Street and everything to do with changing the very ways we live, so that intelligent life on earth might prosper and survive.”

And Now: Give yourself a smile today as you listen to “The Singing Brain”