It’s funny how “Not Much About Anything” turned out to be a “A lot About Absolutely Everything.” As a family that is always caught without a camera, without film, or as technology catches up with us, without batteries or a memory card, our past would have been left a distant blur, lost in the fog of the present. However, our memories go beyond non-existent albums. Our lives are recorded in letters, essays, and sometimes even a poem, leaving us with a memory card of our own.
Each piece of writing is a story in itself, weaved from beginning to end with a golden thread of intellect, sarcasm, wit and humor. More than that, it bursts with the laughter that echoes from our house. The endless love and support that embraced us all our lives linger between each sentence and hover over every paragraph. It turns out that it takes more to raising children than just “putting food on the table”. Raising children means molding human matter into an individual with morals, ethics, and opinions.
By now your dream of having your children hand your slippers to you when you get home probably seems like a distant fantasy, and you’ve gathered scientific proof that we’ll never feed the dog. We can attempt to deny it, but the entirety of our upbringing is documented in the following pages, and any claims we make will be proved wrong soon enough. You put the slippers on our feet and took care of the dog we begged to bring home. And yet… somehow our upbringing wasn’t a complete catastrophe, and we’ve managed to absorb quite a few life lessons.
Though we do not hold our pinkies out whilst we sip our tea, we do not slurp
or chew with mouths open. We always say thank you and we always say please; the antithesis to “The Thingamajig Book of Manners.”You can rest assured that we will never pick flowers, litter, set the table with the fork on the right, or let any car- push driver drive off un-thanked.
You have always provided us with the comfort of a support system which allows us to choose our own paths. You have given us the luxury to make mistakes. Surrounded by creativity, you have instilled in us the thirst for knowledge. But while you preach that one can never know enough, we still believe that you know everything. We have learned the value of hard work and self-fulfillment, but never at the expense of others because morality is not relative. There is nothing more important than being a good human being. As this compilation shows, among all the life lessons, we learned how to laugh until our sides hurt or the milk spurts from our mouths. It is best to think twice before taking a sip at our dinner table.
Please keep writing…
With love,
Imma, Fakuto, Suma,Osmo, and Tintin