Personal Dudes Who Made a Difference in Our Lives

[Masked Dude]

Though I never called her a "dude," one of mine was my grandmother. She lived in a coastal town in Nova Scotia and I remember as a kid sitting at her house watching the fishing schooners going toward the horizon with the breezes.

Why was she an epitome of dudely? She was unable to have kids of her own, and when my mother's mom died, my grandmother took my mother and her brother in, adopting them without a second thought. She never had a bad thing to say about anyone (except her late husband, but no one really had anything good to say about him anyway). She didn't let anything bother her; she figured if you let it bother you, it owned you.

Even when she was terminally ill with a few diseases, she still helped others every day. She'd help feed the hungry and clothe the poor. She wasn't rich, but she only wanted what she had, not what she didn't. Some psychologists would have called her "self-actualized" but she was an awesome grandmother. My mother looks exactly like her, which is not unheard of in adoptions. When I visit Nova Scotia, people take one look and know I'm her grandson.

I feel like you can inherit things not from blood but sometimes from spirit. I hope one day I can be half as awesome as Grandma was. Even if I don't, it's still a goal I'll always have.

Vous me manquez, Grandma. Je vous aime très beaucoup.

[cckeiser]

Thank you for that dude...my grandmother was very dude as well. Yeah dude your grandmother spoke true....if you let it bother you...it owns you.
Abide dude....abide.

[Stever]

Aww,man..my grandmother was a dude as well!
The woman was a saint,and would give her last dollar to you,despite.. the fact that she was dirt-poor.
The woman would watch the nightly news,and cry,wishing she could help the people she was hearing about..yeah...a wonderful woman,still dearly missed.
If I can be 1/8 as cool as she was,I will be pretty damn happy.
Oh,did I mention she could bake you a cake that would send you right to heaven,after the first bite,too? lol...And yeah...if you went o grandmas house,she would ask you if you would like some cake..if so,she would set to work,baking you one,right then and there! Fuckin-A!

[RighteousDude]

My "personal dude" was a latter-day hippie chick named Janet. I met her in 1976, after the Vietnam War was over and most of the original hippies who'd demonstrated on college campuses and so on were "not sold out, man, but bought in". Fucking hypocrites.

I don't know if Janet is alive or dead; I haven't seen her since 1979 but man, the chick is still significant.

Janet and I went to high school together. We actually went to elementary and junior high school together, too, but she was a year ahead and I don't recall ever even seeing her until that day in my sophomore year when she walked up to me and asked if she could bum a ride home with me. For that place and time this was not an uncommon thing.

I'd already developed the nascent abiding ways that I've got to this day, but Janet turned me on to a whole different way of viewing the world. The most important thing was her manner of coping: She was Zen-like in her ability to stay in the present moment, while I'd always carried around my shit like it was a pack on my back. We both came from unfortunate circumstances, but her method of coping was new to me. She accepted that we were at the mercy of our people (parents, that is, in the vernacular of that time) and of the system, teachers and school administrators and pigs and so on, but she didn't think about them all the time. If they were not present they did not matter and if they were present they were just obstacles to be overcome.

I adopted her circle as my own, and they adopted me as one of their own, too. The rule was simple: We do not burden you with our shit, you do not burden us with yours. I truly have no idea what anyone's beef was with their people or The Man, and they still have no idea what my beefs were. What was important was that each day there would be a patch of lawn, a circle of friends, a joint or two being passed, and in those moments you were accepted at face value as long as all other moments were kept somewhere outside of the circle. No matter what might have happened the day before or what might happen later that day, that day and the next day we'd all meet in the same place at the same time, and for a short time the world would make sense.

We talked about what was going on in the world, but not what was going on in our lives. We protested some about bigger issues, we sat around doing nothing about smaller issues, but we did not talk about our own shit. Our own shit was ours, individually, to deal with.

One bit of Janet's shit was that her brother, the middle child of three, went to Vietnam whole and came back a collection of pieces, none of which were certainly his, in a box. The only thing that was certainly his were his dog tags. I was the only one of our circle who knew this, and I have not spoken of it again until just now.

I can still see those faces in the circle as clear as if I'd just stood up, but I have no idea precisely what everyone's shit might have been and they don't know what my shit was. I don't know what became of those people, and I'm not so sure that where I am today can be called what became of me. Maybe it is what's become of me. If it is, I hope they're as proud of me as I am. I hope they're as proud of themselves as I am to have known them.

Janet, without intending to, taught me how to navigate this hostile world without becoming hostile myself. She taught me that the shit of my life is no more important than the shit of your life, and that those who've had no real shit at all are just very lucky -- and their shit is likely coming. But it's okay. Into every life some quantity of shit must fall.

She taught me that we're all full of shit and our only salvation lies in knowing just host full of shit we are. She taught me that life itself is very cool but only if you'll let it be cool, because there are a multitude of reasons to let it get you down if you're foolish enough to let them. She taught me that anything that doesn't make sense when you're loaded doesn't make sense when you're straight but the converse does not always hold true. She taught me that the more strongly you hold an opinion the more likely that it is false. And she didn't set out to do any teaching at all. Her only goal was to be my friend.

We should all be so lucky.

[Boston Rockbury]

Though I never called her a "dude," one of mine was my grandmother. She lived in a coastal town in Nova Scotia and I remember as a kid sitting at her house watching the fishing schooners going toward the horizon with the breezes.

Why was she an epitome of dudely? She was unable to have kids of her own, and when my mother's mom died, my grandmother took my mother and her brother in, adopting them without a second thought. She never had a bad thing to say about anyone (except her late husband, but no one really had anything good to say about him anyway). She didn't let anything bother her; she figured if you let it bother you, it owned you.

Even when she was terminally ill with a few diseases, she still helped others every day. She'd help feed the hungry and clothe the poor. She wasn't rich, but she only wanted what she had, not what she didn't. Some psychologists would have called her "self-actualized" but she was an awesome grandmother. My mother looks exactly like her, which is not unheard of in adoptions. When I visit Nova Scotia, people take one look and know I'm her grandson.

I feel like you can inherit things not from blood but sometimes from spirit. I hope one day I can be half as awesome as Grandma was. Even if I don't, it's still a goal I'll always have.

Vous me manquez, Grandma. Je vous aime très beaucoup.

Enfin, quelqu'un qui parle la langue

Post impec' dude - je suis tout a fait d'accord