It doesn’t fall from the sky
It took me until my late teens to realize that there are a few sentences that you keep lingering on your mind. It probably won’t be ‘my fave quote of Dickens’ (it shouldn’t be, really), but it would be something that moves your mind into some quiet, cozy place – someplace comfortable. That’s what keeps happening with ‘it doesn’t fall from the sky’, a common expression I’d guess, but one I only hear from my grandma’s mouth. It would be one of those few sentences.
Except I only realize it a couple years ago, probably because it became much more present after my grandpa died. The ‘it’ is usually ‘money’. It’s a generational thing or a sense of financial preservation that I don’t quite get – but I wouldn’t argue it with my grandma, of course.
She keeps repeating when we talk about work, and being in journalism that usually comes with complains. Being from a small (really small) village, her saying ‘it has to be, money doesn’t fall from the sky’ always sounded like a twisted justification for suffering and hard labour in the pasture, rice paddies and crops. Most likely, something inspired by some priest’s and their reading of the Bible – I’m a staunch atheist with some post-its stuck in the holy book, but I’ll have time to dig into that in the future.
Lately, as stories seem more recycled than they did a decade ago, I’ve started to think that ‘it has to be, money doesn’t fall from the sky’ is more a survival mechanism (or coping mechanism, psychology would say) than an debauche of conformism. In a tiny village, with fewer than a hundred people, you listen a lot of ‘it has to be’, as if it is a deterministic fate, probably devised by Weber or one of those guys, that’ll give you the inner reason for the late hours and the extra work on the backyard as soon as you get home.
Those days, language seems a lot more intriguingly powerful than I usually think it is. But it’s just a fraction of the year – the fraction where I’m at home, in this tiny village, where sentences stick to me like glue. Perhaps, your attention deficit will abate as well. In the city, where I spend most of my time, you don’t have ears for this. Well, it has to be.
Breakfast (1), with Gabriele Münter (1934)
