Ordinary Care: I listen far better than I talk...

I just love listening to my elders. They can teach me so much.
I have become the driver to my septuagenarian family matriarch, and she has no idea how she blesses me every time we go somewhere, even if it's just to the doctor's office.
Take yesterday, for instance...
First, let me say that, when you roll with older people, you must be prepared to talk about any and every thing, and switch subjects at the drop of a dime. Also, know that, even the most educated, elegant, and refined of them, when they are passionate about something, their language tends to get a bit "bawdy". And, they READ EVERYTHING!!
She asked, "Have you been reading about Bill Cosby?"
Before I could answer, she said, "He's as old as hell.... Why do you think they waited this long to bring this mess up?" Pointing her finger at no one, she said... "Follow the money!!" She proceeded to talk about entertainers and athletes, and how it is common knowledge that they  have followers, hangers-on who have a need to find their place in the limelight, so they go to a grown man's hotel room, late at night, alone, to have drinks and do "whatever else", and they get paid in the process. "They know what's going on, and they know what's going to happen, but they go anyway..." Her voice trailed off, while she thought for a moment. When she spoke again, she said, "He is about to reinvent himself, to do something big again, and they're trying to stop him!" Satisfied with her assessment of the matter, she stopped, and I pondered what she had said. I thought about her, and how she had, in the course of her 57-year-career, reinvented herself, upgraded her skills, studied to make her skills marketable, and moved up in her field... and even though she swears she has retired, I sense only a transition.
During our comfortable silence, she had been thinking, and suddenly she said, (and I felt like I was coming in on the middle of a conversation she had been having in her head), "and those girls who have come forward at UVA... What were they thinking when they went to fraternity parties alone, drinking?" Since it is both our alma mater, I wanted to hear what she thought. I had had this conversation with my "daughter-in-law" (my son's best friend, who I adopted as my own, married a Wahoo) the night before last, and we both agreed that it is a rule never to go anywhere alone, especially at night, in Charlottesville. That was true, even in the '70's, and she assured me that it was still true when she was there, and she graduated in 2013.
"What are mothers teaching their girls these days?"
I thought back a couple of weeks to my daughter's return to ODU for Homecoming, and realized that, although she left home alone in the middle of the day, her entourage was waiting for her in Norfolk, and they were together the whole time. The same thing goes when she goes to D.C. She even nixed a trip not too long ago because the friend who wanted her to go was an unreliable companion... and she wasn't about to get left by herself!!
So... why didn't these girls know that?
My septuagenarian mentor said, "ORDINARY CARE... that's all they needed to know. Mothers have been failing their own children, boys and girls, by not teaching them ordinary care!"
You heard the lady... Ordinary Care!