I am sitting in my little house with my little wife and my big dog and my snazzy car, in a gated golf-course retirement community in Florida, many, many years later. And much, much wiser. If I do say so myself. From April 19, 1989 – JDW
My folks called Sunday morning. The phone rang and – before the second bell – Norma Louise says, “That’s your mom.” Of course, it was. How do women do that? Spencer and Katherine are a legend in my mind. Especially now that I’m older. Middle-aged, I guess.
Spencer is, beyond a doubt, THE KING. Master of all he surveys, unless Mom tells him different. The matrimonial jujitsu is something to behold. Mom always dials. Dad hasn’t quite mastered the use of the telephone. He’s waiting to see if it’s completely accepted by American culture. “Spencer! Spencer!” she calls out. “Pick up the phone.”
Mom will chat with me for a couple of moments, then she’ll instruct, “Say something to your son.”
“Hello, Son.”
“Hello, Dad.”
And that’s pretty much all we have to say to each other. Pretty much says it all. Moms always have stuff to talk about. Certainly, you’ve all heard the familiar expression: Show me a silent mother and I’ll show you a woman about to speak. Of course, after the first couple of minutes, my attention isn’t all it could be. I need only to hear one word each from my parents.
“Yes.”
The answer I want when I ask them if they are feeling good. The rest is small talk by comparison.
Truth is, I think my recent visit with Spencer and Katherine took us all a little by surprise. I’m the baby now – sole survivor – of the family, and I’m older than the Vice President. A better speller, too. We sit down at dinner table and we set a place for Mr. Mortality. We look at one another and there is so much love we feel generally blessed to be together. Simultaneous sighs of comfort.
The Waltons on their best day couldn’t match my family. It’s kinda spooky. And so the phone calls have changed. The distance is farther, the time longer, separation greater. All of us are older. It wasn’t always this way. We all used to be much younger.
I grew up in Carmel, New York, a village once considered “upstate.” About fifty miles north of Manhattan. I distinctly remember when the first stoplight came to town. Big event.
Haven’t been back for a decade or more. No reason to. You can’t go home again. It’s like your passport has expired. Once a bucolic hamlet nestled along Lake Gleneida, with a population growing rapidly to maybe two thousand white folks and one old black guy, most of them salt-of-the-Earth types, my ancestral home is now a suburb of the Big Apple.
Generations of Welches – if you can grasp that concept – had eked out a living there, when eking was still an honorable profession. We got through the War-To-End-All-Wars, then we got through the next war, the big one – WWII. Baby Boom!!!
Truman was President. After surviving guard duty at Hyde Park, New York, Spencer got a government job. Things were, if not comfortable, at least stable. Nobody fires the mailman.
Katherine, after years of night school, commuting, working days, and raising two boys who might as well have been advertisements for birth control, became a teacher. Then she found out more credits meant a bigger pay check. More night school, more commuting. Finally quit just shy of her doctorate. Finally got tired.
Ask me sometime what it’s like to be a rebellious teenage boy when your striving mother is studying adolescent psychology.
My parents worked and they saved, struggled and overcame. Sundays we’d all climb into the family sedan and drive over to a bigger town to look at the rich people’s houses. Or maybe we’d go up the Hudson River Valley and marvel at your basic panoramic vistas. Like the Columbia River Gorge, but not as good.
Sometimes we’d drive to Peekskill’s Nor-An Drive-In and get lunch. Twenty-one succulent shrimp in a wicker basket with French fries for $1.70.
That’s how we spent our family leisure time. All three hours a week. Automobile rides, back in those days, were big doings for our little household. Entertainment-wise.
Katherine and Spencer had modest goals. Pay the bills, put the kids through college, if the underachieving rascals could get in, and retire, if not prospeously, then at least securely. Every move they made was predicated on some future reward. This Calvinistic ethic was, literally at times, beat into me.
Which is doubtlessly the reason why I have long considered the concept of delayed gratification to be, if not inhuman, then at least inhumane. Like it’s supposed to increase the pleasure because I display some kind of self-discipline? What about today? What about now?
Mom and Dad invested years and years of effort and tears, the big payoff to be found hidden behind Door Number Sixty-Five (65). The fear, the horror, the reality of those memories known as The Great Depression was doubtlessly a motivating factor. Katherine and Spencer pursued the American Dream, a vision that was possible THEN, if only you worked hard enough.
Well, they worked plenty hard. As a child, I remember thinking – this was on a lot of kids’ minds back then – ‘suppose the bomb drops.’ Or ‘suppose things don’t work out.’ Or ‘suppose you die.’ My parents didn’t have time or the energy to plant roses, let alone stop and smell them.
So, today we have glasnost and they’re holding elections in Moscow. Spencer is driving slowly a Lincoln Continental and traveling around the world and living in a house on the water and somebody else is mowing his lawn.
The man planned his life and he lived his plans.
And it is all starting to make a little more sense.
It’s still not my style.