Spin...

"Our grandmother would be spinning in her grave!"

"What a wasted opportunity."

"What?"

"I mean, if we had known, we could have hooked her up to a turbine sort of thing and generated some energy. Spin, Granny, spin!"

"I cannot believe you said that! You are so disrespectful!"

"I'm disrespectful? You are assuming that our grandmother, the one who was born two years before the women's right to vote was recognized and yet voted in every single election and told us we had to; the woman who was born in a house that had neither indoor plumbing nor electricity but flew to Ireland before she died to see her parent's childhood home, that woman would be incapable of seeing the world changes?"

"That's different."

"How is that different?"

"She was traditional. She had traditional values. She would be horrified by..."

"She wasn't traditional. She was a rule breaker. A path forger. She left home and went to college at a time when most women around her didn't even finish high school before they were married and helping keep the farms. She lived in a city in another state when her sisters all lived within a mile of their childhood home."

"She still went to church on Sunday and was a God fearing woman."

"She went to an Episcopalian church and the rest of the family was Catholic."

"She still would never have approved."

"Maybe. Maybe not. But should we be living our lives based on what someone who was born over 100 years ago thought was right?"

"Those are good solid core values!"

"Are they? For whom? I mean the racism and sexism aside...though you can't really put that aside can you? I mean it was woven into the fabric of those good solid core values."

"You can't judge them for the time they lived in. That's not fair."

"Wait, we can't judge them for the racism and sexism because that was the time they lived in, but we are supposed to still think that somehow what they believed should affect what we do now? How do you hold both of those in your head?"

"It's different. The basics are good. But some of the things they thought were just not what we think today."

"Right. That's what I'm saying. What they used to think isn't what we think. We shouldn't be living our lives based on what they thought."

"You are twisting my words! You know what I mean."

"I do. Sadly. You are pushing your own beliefs off on to our dead grandmother and trying to say that you only believe this because she did. Even though we don't have any idea what she would believe now."

"We do. I do."

"Do you? Really? How?"

"What do you mean how? She was our grandmother that's how!"

"So if I called up Lily and asked her what her grandmother thought about book banning in Florida she'd be able to give me a detailed and nuanced version on your thoughts?"

"She's 5."

"Right. And how old were you when Grandma died?"

"I was 12."

"So by the time she's 12 you'll be talking politics with her? Have you already started with your other grandchildren?"

"No. Some of us don't think that is appropriate for children!"

"And yet you think you know what our grandmother thought about anything other than if your piano recital was the best she'd ever heard?"

"Well she will know that I stood for good wholesome things."

"And I will make sure we get that turbine hooked up to you so when you start spinning we don't waste it."