One of life's treasured joys, for me, is basking in the glow of the shining, new, inchoate little people whom - in our family - we call grand peeps. Theirs is a world of infinite possibility, potential, possessions designed only for them, powerful emotions, and - on a REALLY perfect day - potato chips, with dip, maybe. Sharing slices of their developing wholeness - priceless! And they share this bounty freely with Grams - aka Gigi, for those who are still struggling with the hard "g". In turn, I love telling them stories, answering their questions, all with as much animation and drama as arthritic joints will allow. Of course we do 'silly' stuff, too. We march, hop over imaginary obstacles - sea horses, ladybugs, sleeping kittens - don real or invisible costumes, sing many an old and lately some more current tunes. I've decided that the magnetism of our relationship, the siren who sings SO sweetly that I must follow her to their lair is freedom. Their reality is completely free - a luxury that growing up will ultimately snatch away.
(I'm reminded of this blessing daily as I walk our Beagle around the neighborhood. This because Bridie is a slave to routine, absolutely worships at the altar of repetition, offering gifts, little 'forget-me-nots' along the way in canine gratitude. And so we pass, wave, greet the same folks in the same order daily. Ours is a quiet, relaxed neighborhood. The prevailing temperamental climate, or 'Zeitgeist' as the philosophers might say, is peaceful, contemplative, big on reverie as the community has decades of living on which to dwell. This pleasant, friendly insularity breaks - or at least leaks - at one home-pass each stroll. This when we're walking by the truly picturesque home, which keeps itself tucked back thirty or so yards from the road, belonging to - we'll call them Bubba and Opal. There was a time when I looked forward to a breezy, warm - always interesting - chat with Opal. A lady whose life has been a swirl of vibrant activity, color, the Arts, travel cannot but entertain, enrich with each exchange. She had chosen a lifetime behavioral pattern of freedom and, like the peeps, relished sharing it. Until, like a breeze building to a gust, her candle was snuffed. Opal's memory has been snatched away.)
I often find it odd that with all the trappings of amusement modernity has bestowed on our peeps, they much prefer the telling of what 'long ago' was like. Having assured them that when I was little - I'm afraid they'd have trouble forming the "Gigi YOUNG' image, so I go with size - I read by lamps, not candles; we had running water; my Dad drove a car, I can progress to the games we played, the friends we had, the toys we cherished. We lived on a dedicated "Play Street" in Brooklyn. Early each morning two policemen would dutifully roll two tall iron poles, set in bases of cement discs and topped with a round yellow metal sign announcing "Play Street" at each end of the block. So, from six AM until six PM NO cars or trucks could drive on Jewel Street. There were two exceptions: the occasional horse-drawn wagon of a green grocer and Johnny, the ice-cream man, who drove a white "Brinks-looking" refrigerated Good Humor truck in the Summer months. Both were occasions of opportunity. As soon as the green grocer had concluded sales and gently urged his ancient steed forward, there'd be a race of old, babushka'd, shovel-wielding women down their respective stoops to be the FIRST to get to the horse's droppings - the most prized of fertilizers for backyard veggie gardens. (What is it Robin Williams said? "You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it.") Of course Johnny presented the high-point-of-the-hot-day potential - a creamcicle, ice cream cup, fudgecicle and a variety of cones. The peeps can listen endlessly, wide-eyed and alternately grinning or pinching pinching their noses during a fertilization scoop. "Tell us what it was like - you know, playing on YOUR street.
(Weather notwithstanding, Opal ALWAYS leaves her ornately carved, white, two-seat er bench, careful not to spill her iced drink or forget to bookmark her page, and runs to greet us in the street. arms waving akimbo, a dance step or two for Bridie before bending down for her daily Beagle smooch. Opal has always worn a stunning gold choker, usually sporting a dangled oval olive-sized sapphire. There were times when, after admiring it I'd take a stab at warning her of its potential for reeling in an "artful dodger" or Southern Gentleman old thief. "Oh, Bubba's home!", she'd laugh in that truly self-enchanted way with Bubba's meticulously-painted backdrop - their house - behind her. Sometimes, we actually met on the street when Opal and Bubba were walking their two white poodles. I'd be coming out of our driveway and see Bubba. I felt like greeting him in Farsi because sure as sh _ shootin', Opal would be seventeen feet behind him with poodle # two in tow. Then, seen any bluebirds yet?" to which I'd respond in the negative. "Can't be-leeeve it!", from B. "Why I saw a FLOCK of 'em swarming out from your point other day." Well I had seen ONE marble-sized, robin's egg blue egg in the grass by our trash cans out back. I've YET to see ONE bluebird ". . .so perty, takes yer breath away!" One can only hope, Bubba, I'm thinking. Bubba's civic project that year was building tiny, wood bird houses, asking permission to trespass on your property and nailing one of these things to a tree. He lines them with some fetchingly-malodorous hay which, he says attracts this particular blue bird which, if you've not had a respiratory arrest from the sight of it, leaves you AND your property free of pesty insects. And, of course, grants shady Bubba presumed legitimate entrance onto your property. You CAINT make this stuff up, my dear readers!)
The peeps do remarkably well at reading and, if ability fails them, they've inherited that marvelous quality of "making it up" without skipping a beat - a skill my oldest son had mastered; I had admired; my husband, when he finally caught on, flew into an Irish rage and would grab the textbook and thump the kid on the head with it. SOOO macho. And when he sleep-walked at age fourteen in a three floor plus finished attic house and Mom had to find and lead him back to his bed, I'd spend that thirty minutes of adventure recalling the reading sessions of yore.
But they prefer oral story-telling - which is fine with me. Leave the book reading to the 'teachers' in these pre-schools that run on blatant thievery. And 'street-play' and Brooklyn "toys" are still at the top of the charts. I would say our most valued/versatile 'toy' was the steel/aluminum roller skate that you attached to your shoe with - ready? - your "skate key". Good. We raced, played skate-hockey - no cars on a "Play Street" so we could ALWAYS field a team on Jewel. In the fall, we build 'scooters' from an orange crate, a two by four and worn-out skate wheels. (Crate nailed vertically to board which is mounted on four wheels - two front of board; two rear. Then elaborate, very individual painting/chalking of crate for "The Races". The girls got to sit in the crates and monitor the action, giving their driver tips on dodging, veering, speeding up, stop-spinning 180 degrees for a 'head-on' etc. GREAT sport. Of course there was stick ball year round: Pink Spaulding ball "pitched" off the third or fourth step of a stoop, he swings. Or standard pitching with measured, chalk-drawn bases. Chalk was indeed a mainstay: bases, Potsy, "I declare War", cartoon faces - then rub hand in colors on street and paint own face. Those WERE the days.
(Not long ago, both my husband and I were 'kidnapped' by Bubba in the evening - en route home/wine. "Got a minute? I want you guys to see for yourselves who Opal really is." We both poin- ted to Bridie as the poodles were already raising bloody hell just inside their front door. "Oh, I'll just tie her leash to Opal's chair. She'll have shade, water. She'll be fine." Opal was already doing a slow, tango out of the house with a bowl of iced water. Bubba had launched into a history of Opal's career as an artist - in all media and his own, humble career at the Ford Plant as an engineer from which he started his own international engineering firm post Ford retirement. His accumulated evidence of their dual careers was staggering in amount and a KO bore in delivery.
Then the Tour began. Overwhelming doesn't touch it. Opal's paintings - oil, pastels, palette knife, lithography - was wall to wall times at least seven rooms. The living room had a decided twenties feel - tres Isadora Duncan, flapper, Zelda and Scott, Art Deco and ALL with a haunting attention to detail. Rounding a corner we passed a hallway leading back to the front hall through a door the transom of which had been replaced with a magnificent stained glass window Opal ferreted out of a pile of cast-aways at a yard sale. That hall's walls were all adorned with stills - of edibles. And then the kitchen, looking out on the Buddha Alter-inspired garden apprentice piece but dominated by an island centerpiece the panels of which had been retrieved from a storefront in Rome. Two by four foot panels on either side were each consumed by large, round, brightly-painted faces with Keane-portrait eyes. One end was a very happy young woman; the other a crying young man. The side five by four panel was of two large, round, faces - a smiling version of the happy woman cheek to cheek with a coyly-smiling woman who, the story went, had taken smiley away from crying man. Oye. And Opal had repeated versions of this tragedy on the floor tiles in the kitchen. We processed, Phil and I open-mouthed, down another hall - first into Bubba's "study" - incredible large paintings of horses, races, the Kentucky Derby and his rifle collection, then to Opal's magic room, adorned with old photos in frames like gold, but more burnished, of her and her mother - obviously/admittedly the inspiration for the ladies in the twenties art. Little china dolls, lace dresses, baby-sized, artfully displayed. It was all pastel and floral and soft and OPAL. Then back to the front hall - dominated by an ornately-carved bird cage, as wide as the bay window through which it is seen from the street. SO eerily telling. Opal's art is continual movement - what we know as history whereas Bubba's functionality reaches an omega point where there is no longer a need for material production.
Of necessity, then, he must display Opal, HIS Opal because her art - her images - enter into consciousness as synthesis - a CONSCIOUSNESS OF SOME THING. And that is why they are dynamic, creative and will always be useful. She does not remember them. We could never forget them. Bubba can never have her genius, her art so he garners meaning/importance of Bubba via a warped 'she-chose-me-and-her-taste-is-infallible' construct. "She was quite prolific.", as he's escorting us out. Hmmm, I think. Indeed. You were but a tiny pellet in her enormous arsenal. . .)
I do try to stress with the peeps that when I was little I had and did lots of things because they weren't pre-fab. And it was fun. And our "things" - like the wicker doll carriage, cradle and high chair Grandpa made for my baby dolls, were beautiful. Maybe some day, I'll tell them the story about when I was four. I put all my stuff in my doll carriage and was standing by the door of our fourth-floor walk-up apartment when my Mom asked me what I was doing. ""Surely, we're leaving here, right?"
Later, Lorane. . . .
Somehow, putting all of this drivel on paper is therapeutic. There is no QUESTION but that daily life presents far more complicated 'to dos' than in the days of yore. And mine, too. AND, I just heard from my dear friend KD yesterday - our B-day mother of seven, grandmother of seventeen? She was a smidge melancholy because although Thanksgiving was wonderful, spent with her eldest and her offspring only, she missed 'the house' as she hung seventeen little stockings in their condo. No 'day at the beach'. But she did add a chuckle-tag. She and Will had gone up to Vermont, I think, to see one of their daughters receive the "Teacher of the Year" award. At THE moment of presentation, Will jauntily whipped out his new i-phone for a 'Cell Phone Moment'. Aim, click, shoot - a great image of Will's nose. Where does it say "Turn the thing around, stupid!"? I ask you.
