For those that don’t know I have recently begun work with my son on a really fun business project. Honestly love my adult children, they are creative visionaries with powerful energy!! This particular son of mine thought it would be really fun for the two of us to work on this project together and he wasn’t wrong. I’m having a blast!

Yesterday I had the opportunity to sit in on a Zoom meeting with my son and other professionals as we went over development of our ideas and a strategy to bring them to life. Zoom meetings are usually not my favorite way of doing business. In fact I once gave a previous boss a wall plaque for his office that said Me: “This show is boring” Boss: “Again, this is a Zoom Conference.” It was well known between the two of us that I was not a fan of this new technology.

As I sat in on yesterday’s Zoom conference, with my computer adjusted to just the right height so that it showed my best angle, my mute button on so that the others would not have to listen to Susan and Douglas scare away the mailman yet again, I looked at my son sitting in his home office, hours away from me. Now I have been in his home office a time or two so I knew what it looked like, and as he sat there I thought how proud I was of him and all that he’s accomplished so far in his life. He is, after all, only thirty. Gosh when I was thirty I was still winging my way through life. He, on the other hand, has a clear and dedicated path he’s working towards. He’s my goal oriented child and he has many goals he’s pursuing at once right now.

Anyway as our meeting yesterday began to wrap up my son needed to schedule a follow up with one of the other people also on the call. I listened as the two of them discussed dates and times that worked for both of them. In the blink of an eye I saw my son glancing up to something on the wall above his head. He confirmed the date and time with the other person and scribbled something down on the notepad in front of him. Like I said I have been in my son’s office so I knew immediately what it was he had glanced up at. You see my son has a giant dry erase whiteboard calendar on the wall of his office. I’ve seen it, but until yesterday when I actually saw him using it, the implications of this practice hadn’t dawned on me. I taught him that!!

Back when all five of my kids were home I managed an incredibly hectic schedule. Five children, spread out over nine years, meant different schools, different activities, different interests. Each day a different child had a different household chore to be responsible for as well. In addition, even though I wasn’t working full time, I maintained involvement in several community organizations myself. Trust me all of this would not have fit on your typical wall calendar. To solve my scheduling nightmare I went to Staples and bought the biggest whiteboard dry erase calendar I could find. Visualizing it now, and where it hung in the hallway, I want to say it was a good four feet wide. It was massive! I also picked up a handful of different colored markers. Each member of our family was assigned a color and it was with this that I kept track of everywhere we had to be, what needed to be done by each child and any other important information. This giant calendar in the hallway became our hub of knowledge. Each child knew there color and with a quick look know exactly what they were scheduled for each day. Worked great!

As I watched my son glance up to his own dry erase calendar I realized that my organizational skill had been transferred. lt made me pause and wonder if he was using different colored markers for all of the projects he has going on right now. I chuckled and then, because I’m the Mom, I called him out on right there on the Zoom call. “Did you seriously just look up at your whiteboard calendar?” I asked him. He smiled and confirmed that he had. Again, because I’m his Mom and I’ve earned this right, I then had to tell the story of how he had grown up with a giant dry erase whiteboard calendar to everyone on the Zoom call. Because, you know, that’s what your Mom does right? He was a good sport about it and wasn’t to embarrassed. He’s a good son.

Later in the day I was still thinking about this, how knowledge that we have as parents gets passed down to our children, sometimes without us even realizing it. We hope that they absorb the standards, morals and manners we try to teach them during those brief few years we have with them when they are teachable! But sometimes things we never even imagine gets passed along. It made me think of my own mother and had she passed along something to me, completely unintentionally, that I know took as solid fact. Enter the humble cucumber!

When I was growing up summer meant one thing, cucumber sandwiches. Two pieces of white bread, because that’s all we bought back then, both pieces of bread slathered with mayonnaise and then one piece covered in slices of fresh cucumber sprinkled with salt and pepper and then topped with the other piece of bread. Nothing said summer like a cucumber sandwich! As I grew older my mother taught me how to make these summer treats all by myself. The very first step was that you must cut off both ends of the cucumber. Second step was that you had to then take the cut off pieces and rub them all over the freshly cut ends before you tossed the end tips into the trash. Why was this such an important step? Because if you didn’t cut off the ends and rub them like that the cucumber would be bitter and no one wanted a bitter cucumber sandwich. After you had done this very important step of making sure your ends were well rubbed, then you could go ahead and peel the cucumber, slice it and make your sandwich. I have completed this ritual religiously ever since my mother taught me in the 1970’s.

As a young wife and mother I remember eating a salad my new mother-in-law had made. I bit into a slice of cucumber and it was so bitter! I remember thinking that because she was from Arizona she clearly had never been taught the correct way of getting the bitter taste out of a cucumber! I mean this was the woman who put avocado in her salads for crying out loud! Over the years I myself have eaten a cucumber, prepared by my own hand, that was bitter even though I know I rubbed those ends well! When this happened I would think to myself, maybe I didn’t rub them right.

It was only a few years ago that I was reading an article that spoke to the bitterness in cucumbers. It’s actually caused by a natural compound called cucurbitacin. Poor growing conditions such as lack of water, to much water, not enough sunlight, etc can cause the levels of this compound to rise and increase the bitterness of the cucumber. Probably didn’t matter how much I rubbed the end of the cucumbers then. But I still do, just on the outside chance I can avoid a bitter cucumber sandwich! I mean, after all, my mother taught me that!