The easy answer is that our family was most important to Grandma Bennion. Here are a few things more that I remember about what was important to her:
1. Mother loved her father and mother. Her dad served in WWII. She exchanged letters with him often. She was very happy when her parents moved from California and into our stake in South West Orem--the Sharon West Stake was the name. Grandpa and Grandma Wood would come every Sunday evening and we would read several chapters from the Book of Mormon together and then share a desert that Grandma Wood had made: usually fruit salad, or cream puffs. I loved the cream puffs.
2. Mother love the gospel and taught it to her children. I remember holding Family Home Evening even at a very young age--early 60's. We did it because the Prophet had asked us to do it, and had made wonderful promises to those who would be faithful. Those promises were fulfilled for my parents. We took turns with different parts of the FHE program. As a child I had my opportunities to teach the lesson using flannel board stories. Paper cut-outs would have flannel glued to their backs which made them stick to the flannel board, a little like velcro, but not so hard to remove and move the pieces around. The Children's magazine at that time had pages of preprinted characters that could be cut out and made into flannel board stories. We had boxes of envelops with these stories. So, when it was my turn to give the lesson, I would find a story in felt comfortable with and deliver the message. My Grandmother Wood also kept boxes of every single thing printed by the Church that she could get her hands on. Back in the Berkley, CA days, there was not LDS book store that you could go to and buy what you wanted. Only a visit to Utah meant a visit to an LDS bookstore. So Mom and Grandma both hoarded (for good reason) printed materials from the Church. I have much of that collection for which I am cursed every time we have had to move.
3. Mother was born in 1930, right as the Great Depression was getting underway, and then she lived through the days of rationing during WWII. So it was important to her to use things up, to make do, or to do without. We never wasted things; not food, not old clothing, not anything. It was from my mother that I developed the habit of not throwing anything away. Mother kept a large supply of fabric. At one point we had an entire wall in our basement family room covered with stacked boxes full of fabric remnants and yards that Mom was holding on to. She used to say that we needed a two year supply of fabric as well as food storage. We did have a northeast corner room in the basement as a dedicated food storage room, and it was crammed full of wheat, etc. We also had shelves of bottled fruit and tomatoes in a basement utility room. Add to that a chest freezer full of meat, freezer jam, vegetables, etc. Those who had been through the Depression knew how important food storage was. We will see those days of need again, but it will be after those who remember the Depression are long gone and we will not be prepared. Mother believed in being prepared.
4. My mother was from what I would call a wealthy family. Grandpa Wood was a civil engineer and had money to play with in investments, though my mother usually spoke of the investments as foolish. Grandma Wood was a Cannon, and the Cannons were almost an aristocratic family of Utah. The Bennion boys have a long history of marrying up. My mother and father both loved to tell us family history stories about the Woods, the Cannons, and the Bennions. I knew that much was expected of me because of who my ancestors were. Mother did not love money, and she was not good at managing it. My father spent two years teaching on a Winnebago Indian reservation when Brigham Young High School closed. We didn't see him much in those days. Then Dad got his teaching job at Brigham Young University in the Lamanite Department. Mom had run up a lot of dept keeping us children in school clothes, etc. It was important to her that her children be presentable at school. Dad and Mom worked out a get out of debt quick plan which involved a bit of frugality that they both had learned in their childhoods, and we got the family finances fixed.
5. Mom was impressed with how the Boy Scouts helped me grow as a boy and became involved in it herself. She served as a Cub Scout leader for many, many years. I have the Silver Beaver medal with which she was recognized. It is a treasure to me.
6. When George Cannon (the immigrant) married Anne Quayle, George was concerned with having a posterity. He had noticed that the Cannon family was thinning because most of the Cannons had few children. He wanted to insure that he would have a large posterity and so made a verbal prenatal agreement with Anne that if they could not have children, whether his fault or her fault, that they would divorce so that the other partner could remarry and have children. Anne was agreeable to this. My mother and father both inherited this desire for a great posterity, though the didn't make any such prenup. Mother wanted to have children. We were the most important thing to her. Of course, Mother had the gift of making any child that she worked with feel that they were important to her. This was the case in her Church work and later in life as a Kindergarten teacher. Mother was assigned to work with the least educable students, the ones that the other teachers could not work with. And Mother gave most of these the great gift of feeling important and feeling capable and successful.
7. Mother made Christmas ornaments for her grandchildren. Almost as soon as the grandchildren were coming, Mother began making ornaments. She knew that she could never afford to buy presents for the number of grandchildren she would have. And she wanted to give something of herself, something that hopefully would be treasured. It was a way for her to make a physical connection to her posterity who were too scattered to be with her much.
8. It was important to Mother to have a clean and orderly home, though this was not in priority above having a home in which the children had chores to do. My memory is of a clean and orderly home, though I know in reality that we had clutter to deal with. We were expected to keep our rooms clean, to make our beds, and to help with other chores like washing the dishes, etc. Vacuuming and dusting were regular tasks. But Mother was not, in my opinion, a task master. I was not taught to do my own laundry, as my children have been. But I had plenty of yard work to do instead, which was under the supervision and command of Dad.
9. Mother love Art and Music. We always had a stereo and a record collection of classical music as well as what was called "easy listening" in those days. We also had the sound tracks from the musicals like Oliver, South Pacific, etc. We had all of those songs memorized from playing them over and over and over. We had works of art on display in our home, both paintings and ceramics. Many of my siblings have developed artistically under her encouragement. We were also encouraged musically. In the early years, we all took piano lessons. Eventually this became too much for the family budget, but I continued to play and to teach myself.
10. Intelligence was important to Mother. Her mother was of high intellect, and was one of the few teachers in Utah to have a teaching certificate with no expiration. Mother encouraged me to raise my level of thought, giving me books to read that had been recommended by Hugh Nibley. Mother was always reading, not seldom reading fiction. She enjoyed works of history, philosophy, and other such non-fiction.
That's probably enough for now. The most important thing for mother was to see her children happy, and that meant to see them developing their testimonies in the gospel as well as seeing them progress in the world. But Mother never, to my knowledge, expressed disappointment in a grandchild who was a lapsed Mormon. She let each know that they were of great value to her.
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