As I weave through the cherished memories of my grandmother's 91-year long life, a poignant tapestry of love, strength, and wisdom unfurls. Her time as a telegraph operator, her exceptional marriage, and the life lessons she embedded in the fabric of our family's history are stories I hold close to my heart. In this intimate episode, I invite you into our family circle to celebrate her legacy, sharing how she transformed the scarcity of her youth into a life rich with abundance and leadership—principles that she instilled in us through her exceptional culinary delights and her daily embodiment of grace and resilience.
Embark on a journey that travels through the art of connection, as we remember a grandmother whose calligraphy-like handwriting in letters and cards became the glue that kept our family bound across distances. Her global perspective and the courage to stand firm in her convictions are pillars of the character she cultivated within us. This episode also contrasts the diverse marital dynamics within our lineage, distilling the essence of trust and love's transformative power. Wrapping up with a tender reflection inspired by "The Little Prince," we unveil the wisdom that our most treasured relationships, much like the rose that is dear to the Little Prince, are those we have nurtured with our hearts. Join us as we honor the indelible mark these matriarchs have left on our lives, and perhaps find a reflection of your own family's matriarchs in the stories shared.
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Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Grand Slam Journey podcast, where we discuss various topics related to finding our passion and purpose, maximizing our potential sports, life after sports, and transitioning from one chapter of our lives to the next, growing our skills and leadership in whatever we decide to put our minds into. In a nutshell, we talk about the Grand Slam journey of our lives. Today is a special episode that I want to dedicate to my grandmother. My grandmother lived an amazing 91 years. We're very grateful for the time we have had with her, and yet it is not easier to let her go. Our hearts have been very heavy the past two weeks, and I've been pondering for a long time whether I'm skilled enough to create this episode and paint my grandma at least in half of the picture for the women that she was and all that she has taught me. I'm pretty sure it will not do its justice, but one of the lessons I have learned from my grandma is you never know until you try, and so here is my attempt, and so here's my attempt.
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My grandma was born on November 3rd 1932, as a fourth child of her parents, barbara and Antonin Knotek. She was fourth out of ten kids, and so the family dynamic was always very lively. After she finished her elementary studies, my grandma became a telegraph operator. She worked in this position her whole life until she retired. She always took her work seriously and performed it with a high level of care and conscientiousness. She attended several courses to advance her understanding of the telegraph technology and all that it entailed. For those listeners who are younger and may not know what telegraph is, a telegraph is a device for transmitting and receiving messages over long distance. In a nutshell, it is the way people used to communicate back then, before telephones existed. This meant that my grandma received some of the most important messages that were addressed to the people in the area we lived in, and she needed to translate and deliver them to those they were addressed to. This also meant a great deal of secrecy, because those messages were personal and so her job required keeping information safe, secure and private.
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At the end of the 40s, she met her future husband, josef Chmelash. My grandpa Josef noticed her at a dance party, and their relationship kept evolving. During his military trainings and sporadic short vacations they were able to take together, my grandpa would write my grandma love letters, and she saved every one of them and read through them periodically almost all the way until her last day. They got married on the 18th of April 1953, and had two kids, josef and Maria. You probably noticed that there wasn't much name creativity, but that's perhaps the only creativity they were lacking. Their marriage was full of love and lasted 43 years, up until the death of my grandfather, who died on December 7th 1996. They were a true example of what a marriage should look like Love, happiness and joint respect. It doesn't mean that there are no arguments, but they were always able to voice their opinions and different sides and come to an understanding and an agreement.
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One of the things we always remember when we think about my grandma's and grandpa's marriage was their industriousness. Back in the time, during the communist era, there weren't many things that you can generally buy, such as cars or lawnmowers. Back then my grandpa was very industrious and so he decided he's gonna make these things himself. He would always call my grandma, darling, come and help me, and my grandma would go help my grandpa put together a car, build a lawnmower, a washing machine or create a swing. That's still on their yard up until today, and my grandma enjoyed sitting on with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren enjoying the weather and the seasons of the year.
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My grandma was a master educator Due to the big family she was from. She had to help take care of her siblings because she was the second oldest daughter out of 10. But her true care and passion for helping the next generations be better really came with her grandchildren, which is me, my sister and my two cousins, and then also with her great-grandchildren. She taught us many lessons in life and I'm going to try to sum up just a few of them. Lesson number one Everything can be figured out after you eat something. My grandma was a master chef. Sitting down and eating her food was always the number one thing we had to do after we came home from school or work. She often made several courses for different family members because people were picky and enjoyed eating different things. For example, my grandpa never liked chicken, but other members of the family enjoyed chicken a lot, and so she would cook several meals and courses to make everyone happy. She never complained about it and always did it with care and love. Lesson number two Scarcity and abundance is a mindset shift.
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A true art of a leader is creating something great out of limited resources. During the communist era there weren't many things you could buy in the supermarket. I remember my grandma telling me the long line they had to stand in to buy a few bananas, and those were usually dedicated for us. But that didn't stop my grandma's culinary skills. Some of the best foods I still make myself and remember are some of the easiest ones which my grandma always made special Fresh slice of bread with homemade ghee, salt and freshly cut onion. Or fresh slice of bread with whole bunch of butter and sardines. Because fish was healthy, my grandma said. But there weren't many fish options back then. The reality is sardines are actually some of the best fish when it comes to nutrition you can consume. So my grandma was right. I really enjoyed my grandma's tea, homemade vanilla pudding, cream of wheat with cocoa and sometimes homemade canned fruits such as peaches. My grandma always made delicious pancakes, balish pěry pasta with sugar and ground poppy seeds. This one may sound weird but it's really delicious Kynuták, nadlíky, plněne, ovocem, sweet rice, žemlovka and many others Sorry, some of these I don't know how to translate in English, so you may need to look them up and check. We all had our favorites and my grandma was always happy to make whatever food made us happy. She was a master orchestrator.
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Lesson number three do the hard things first. After we came home from school and ate, the first thing we had to do is do our homework. That is the number one important thing, and we couldn't do anything else until our homework was done. If we wanted to go out and play, we had to finish all the work first. I think this skill is really important to learn early on and helped set me for success later in my life. Even famous Annie Duke talks about in her decision-making books how important it is to start with the hardest problem first. Once you do that, everything else becomes easier.
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Lesson number four never compare yourself to others and set high goals for yourself. When we came back from school and, for example, we had a B plus grade but everybody else had worse grade, we would come to grandma and say, well, our grade wasn't actually as bad because everybody else in the class had worse grades. My grandma always said that it doesn't matter what everyone else had. It is important to only look at our own performance and see what we can do better. On the opposite side, if we came from school and we had a B+, but there was another person in the class that had an A. Our grandma always found a way to inspire us to work harder. What this meant is that we had more room to grow, practice and learn, but she never made it look like she forced us to do that. Her approach was to set high goals for ourselves because she knew we could be better and she believed in us, probably more than we believed in ourselves at that point in time. Her belief is something that inspired us to study more and work harder.
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Lesson number five you can learn anything if you're willing to put in the time and effort into things. My grandma, even though she only had elementary school education, knew several languages in her 60s, and that's because she quizzed us on all the material that we took during our education. She learned all the subjects with us and quizzed us on everything from, obviously, the Czech language, mathematics, history, geography, but also foreign languages such as English, german, spanish and, at the end, even French, spanish and at the end, even French. How did she do it, I don't know, but she made sure we understood all the subjects, and the way she taught us was she would quiz us on all the vocabulary from the beginning to the end of the year or wherever in the school year we were. For example, if we had an exam in December, she would quiz us on all the materials starting from September, october, november and December. It wouldn't be just one lesson or one chapter we would rehearse, but we would go all the way, from the beginning to an end, to ensure we had a perfect memory and nothing surprised us. And if we made a mistake somewhere in the middle, she would start over to make sure we remember all of them. My grandma knew that repetition and hard work pays off. Lesson number six Diligence and consistency, are learned skills and they will take you further in life.
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My grandma had a special eye for writing that, as you know, you learn early on in life. When we were young, she would help us create lines in the notebooks and she was very diligent on the way our writing looks. She would coach us on when to turn, when to go straight and make sure that every single letter looks exactly the same as the previous one. She called it psát jak tiskne, which would translate to English something like write as you print. It was a form of calligraphy. My grandma also never forgot anyone's birthday or name day. She would pick some of the most beautiful cards and make sure she would send it to us no matter where in the world we were At the beginning. She would either type it in with the typewriter or later she would write it in her own hand in the same type of writing she taught us, with precision, love and care. It was always beautifully written in the same type of calligraphy that she taught us.
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She always found a way to keep the family organized and orchestrated. She would remind forgetful people in the family when to pay their bills that there will be a time change, for example when you spring forward, or that it's the new year and people should buy a new autobahn permit means highway permit. When we started to live abroad or we would travel abroad for vacation, our grandma would write the exchange rate and keep track of it and tell us when is the best time to change our money. She kept these papers, written by hand and neatly organized, in her kitchen cabinet, so they're always handy and she always understands what's happening and reminds us about the best timing.
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Lesson number seven If you're uncertain about something, phone a friend. Back in the day when we studied, there wasn't an access to internet such as Google or ChatGPT to look up things Google or chat GPT to look up things and so my grandma always had a group of experts that she would phone to in case we weren't sure about how to complete a specific problem during our homework, she had her selected people that she trusted for specific subjects. For example, my grandpa was really good in mathematics. Later it was also my uncle who would help us. Czech and German was our aunt Anichka and cousin Peter, and so if there was a problem we didn't know how to solve, my grandma always found a way to validate our work and ensure we had it right. Found a way to validate our work and ensure we had it right. I believe it is a great skill for life to always have a trusted group of people that you can phone to and ask about the specific topic or subject you don't know how to solve yourself.
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Lesson number eight it is important to have a family-wide and worldwide perspective. Our grandma was always curious about all that we do. She asked us how we're doing, what we're up to, where we're traveling. If we travel to a specific country, she would always look it up in her map to see where it was. She would follow the news and she would call me when I lived in America whether I'm safe when she noticed there was an earthquake or a tornado or some unfortunate gun shooting. Taking a family and worldwide perspective has been essential skill for my grandma.
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Lesson number nine Create your own convictions and don't be afraid to voice them. Considering the time that my grandma and grandpa lived in, they had a very equal marriage. They always respected each other's opinion and my grandma was never afraid to speak up when she felt she needed to. Lesson number 10. Attitude and character are important. This one was more of an observed one than something that my grandma would tell me, but looking at her life, I have never once heard my grandma talk bad about any person. She's always approached things from a perspective that they're solvable and if you put hard work and effort into things, you may be able to figure problems out. Whether it was cooking for the whole family, orchestrating the house and ensuring everybody arrives to their school and post-school activities on time and people don't forget things, she was that master orchestrator. She kept things and people in check and she had never complained about it. She was almost like the glue in our family that held it together. She did so many things around the house and in the house that sometimes I wonder if we really appreciated them enough. But she never once complained about it and did them with love and care and put her whole heart and effort into them. Lesson number 11. Love makes the world a better place. By now, you probably envision the human that my grandma has been, and all of these actions have been driven by her love and passion for us in the family.
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If I look at my childhood, I had perhaps some of the best examples I could ask for. On one hand, I had my grandma's and grandpa's marriage. That, I'm sure, wasn't easy, but it was full of hard work, commitment, trust. There were arguments, but they always found their way through them. One of their main focuses was on making our lives better than their lives were, and so the progress of the next generation was the key focus of their decisions, and, despite all the hard things they had to go through, they have always found a joint understanding and love for each other. On the opposite side, I had my mom and dad marriage, which there are many positive attributes, but in many ways it was one of the most chaotic marriages I have seen. Obviously, it was my childhood, so I'm looking at it from that perspective, from my lens, I had a perfect example of what a successful marriage and trust could look like, and the not so great example of what lack of trust looks like from my mom and dad's perspective. And sometimes it is easier to start with who you don't want to be or what kind of marriage or partnership you don't want to have, than to envision the one you do, and so having these two polar opposites was really important for me.
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My grandparents provided me a stable childhood, very organized, orchestrated. I always knew what was coming. My grandpa was the fun one that would make everything lighter. He would tell me stories, make us laugh. My grandma was the one who kept things organized, gave us food, taught us how to study, taught us discipline and perseverance, and so the balance of the qualities between the two was a perfect symbiosis and gave me a beautiful foundation for all the years I had. I still use those lessons to continue to grow and learn. There wasn't a time where I would not have felt loved by my grandparents. I always knew that even the hardest things they're asking me to do were from a place that they believed I can do better, and a deep place of trust, love and having confidence in my abilities often higher than the level of confidence I had in myself at that time.
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I could probably keep going on and on, but I will conclude this episode with a short story from the book Little Prince written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. There was my attempt for the right French pronunciation. So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near, oh, said the little fox, I shall cry. It is your own fault, said the little prince. I never wished you any sort of harm, but you wanted me to tame. You wished you any sort of harm, but you wanted me to tame you. Yes, that is so, said the fox, but now you are going to cry, said the little prince. Yes, that is so, said the fox. Then it has done you no good at all. It has done me good, said the fox, because of the color of the wheat fields. And then he added go and look again at the roses. You'll understand now that yours is unique in all the world. Then come back to say goodbye to me and I will make you a present of a secret.
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The little prince went away to look again at the roses. You are not at all like my rose, he said as yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox. When I first knew him he was only a fox, like a hundred thousand other foxes, but I have made him my friend and now he is unique in all the world. And those roses were very much embarrassed. You are beautiful, but you are empty, he went on. One could not die for you.
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To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you, the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses, because it is she that I have watered, because it is she that I have put under the glass globe, because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen, because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars, except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies. Because it is she that I have listened to when she grumbled or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing, because she is my rose. And he went back to me the fox, goodbye, he said. Goodbye, said the fox, goodbye, said the fox.
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And now here is my secret, a very simple secret. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye. What is essential is invisible to the eye, the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember. It is the time you have wasted for your rose. That makes your rose so important. It is the time I have wasted for my rose, said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember. Men have forgotten this truth, said the fox, but you must not forget it. You become responsible forever for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose. I am responsible for my rose. The little prince repeated so that he would be sure to remember. I hope you enjoyed the lesson and learning more about my grandmother. Thank you for tuning in.
