During World War II, when I was five, my mother, my brother and I lived with our grandparents on their gentleman’s farm for a year and there I met my first love - my mother’s younger brother, Chaz. He was cheerful, easy going, an outdoorsy kind of man and I used to tag after him as he milked the goats, watered the gardens, or fed the horses. I would find him painting a landscape in oils or watercolors or sitting whistling as he sharpened the blades of his reel lawn mower and I would pester him with questions about why things were the way they were.
When I would complain to him about something that I felt had gone wrong in my life, he would listen carefully and then tell me something that would help me understand why things had to be that way, or what I could do instead of complaining. He never blamed me or scolded - just shared his point of view, his ways of coping. He’d say, “If we want to get along in life sometimes we have to....” When it was clear that my questions were finished or that I felt better, he would end the consult with “So git along with it.” I came to think of these gifts, these happy resolutions as “gitalongs” - ways to “gitalong” with myself and others, ways to “gitalong” with life.
As a graduate student, I studied theories of “normal” human behavior and ways in which some people deviated from the “norm.” As a psychotherapist, and later as a social worker, I was often involved in helping people learn better ways to get along with themselves, their loved ones, their lives, their jobs, their kids, or their world in general. Their struggles taught me, and caused me to learn, a lot. What follows is my collection of “gitalongs” - stories of things I have read, seen, learned, discovered, or been told that have helped me and others get along with living. Enjoy!
Gitalongs by Abby Williamson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Comments may be addressed to randmxcentric@gmail.com