The Senior Scene

by Sherrie Kenyon

Who says there isn’t any spunk in our young children?  Who says they can’t, under their own steam, work up recreation and entertainment and keep themselves out of any and all trouble?  If you have any doubt about how you’d answer these questions, take a run up to the Eastside, around the Fairview Street area, and find out what the young boys and girls have done this summer for fun, recreation and entertainment. (The Daily Olympian, August, 1955, by Mike Contris)

What do kids do during the summer?  We had no organized sports or transportation to get to special summer activities, so my mother was the self-designated organizer.  The kids always gathered at our house because there was a baseball game in the street, a taffy pull at the kitchen table or planning a sleep out in the backyard.

This summer in 1955, my mother gathered all of the neighborhood kids together to check out how much talent was available.  “Charles can sing” we shouted out.   “Florence, Charlotte and I can do a dance.  I’ll teach them!” my sister, Diane, offered.  I raised my hand to do the hula.  And so it was, a smattering of talent stepping up, but there were other kids sitting there with blank looks on their faces.  What would they do in the show?

The other day they had a big neighborhood show in the Crosetto basement on Fairview Street.  When the parents, relatives and neighbors gathered in the show site, it was packed, with standing room only.  But the biggest surprise was to be proved in what those kids had cooked up in the way of entertainment.  “Simply astounding”  was what adults repeated as they marveled at what had gone on among their neighborhood children.

Sheets were hung over a clothes line in the basement.  The curtains were drawn by the cast of characters in the show.  Everyone was kept busy, either on stage, opening and closing curtains, or getting ready for the next act.

The popular show on television was “This is Your Life”, so we adapted the concept into our own show.  Don, Diane’s friend, was the subject of the life show.  One after another, each of the neighborhood kids would come in and tell a funny story about Don, pretending to be long lost people in his most interesting life.  This skit did not require any special costumes, so it was easy to pull off.

Charles sang not one, but two songs.  Diane and her girlfriends did a skit, adding a few dance steps.  I did the hula.  The rest of the talent was carefully choreographed to our record player.  Gary, Gordon and Tom pantomimed ‘Mr. Sandman’.  Each wore a skirt. A bandana was wrapped around each young masculine head.  Add a little lipstick and they almost pulled it off, except it was hard to control the laughter that came from the audience.

But that isn’t all. To one side, in a separate part of the basement, the children had set up exhibits of their hobbies:  rock collections, salt-and-pepper shaker collection, paintings, dolls and similar items.  No show, of course, is complete without popcorn and stuff to munch on while the arts are going on.  So the children, for several days before, prepared a quantity of popcorn and such for sale during the show.

A nickel here, a dime there and the money started to add up.  In all, we made about $15.  That money was used a couple of weeks later as my mother took all of us, 10 kids, ages from 10 to 17, camping at Millersylvania Park.

What a summer it was.  We laughed as we practiced, each encouraging the others to be even better.  We surprised all the adults with our talent and creativity.  And, it seemed like a professional show to us.  Our prize was not only the satisfaction of putting on a good show, but all going camping together.  Oh, the summer of ’55.

by Sally O’Kane McClintock

Twelve packed boxes stand in the way of my reaching a life “all sorted out.”  Stored neatly in the living room and covered with a decorative cloth, the boxes wait for me to summon the courage for a final sorting. Others may consult practical books on sorting their possessions, but a playwright and a poet are my guides. But because of them, I am stuck in the middle, between postponing and exploring.

Whenever I think of sorting my things, I remember Davies’ recurring plaint in “The Caretaker”:  “Got to go to Sidcup, get myself sorted out.”

In this play by Harold Pinter, Davies is a tramp who calls himself Bernard Jenkins rather than Mac Davies. When questioned, he insists there are papers in Sidcup that will sort this all out: “They tell you who I am.” But he never makes that trip for the documents, blaming lack of shoes or bad weather—always something.

Unlike Davies, I have papers here in my desk that explains my three last names. Birth certificate, marriage licenses, and divorce decree tell who I am.  But I am like Davies in postponing my own sorting.  While most of my stored items are organized in cabinets, basement, and the garage, there are still those twelve unsorted boxes in the living room.

Some bear strange labels: “By the file cabinet.””On the card table.”  Cancer had come to me while living in Vermont.  Chemo was in my life. In a hurry between treatments, my children were moving me west to live near them.  My husband had died the year before.  “Label those boxes when you pack them,” I said as I flew off to Tacoma, “so I know what›s in them when they get there.”  There was no time for me to finish the packing.

Nine years later, a cancer survivor, I look at the labeled boxes and wonder what was “by the file cabinet,” what was “on the card table.” I could open the boxes and look.  But I hesitate, although there might be some precious things stored in them.  Somewhere there’s a jade necklace my father gave me when I was a teenager, bought from a drunken sailor, he said, on a San Francisco wharf. Or I might find my wooden pin of the old woman who lived in a shoe. I had the pin from childhood, the size of a button, with a tiny scene of the woman and the shoe and the children.  In which box might it be?

Still I hesitate to open the boxes and finish the sorting.  I know that sorting is more than uncovering and rearranging the items stored.  I may also uncover my own self, as I remember what was once—or may still be—important to my life. And perhaps consider rearrangement.

I wish I were bold enough to be guided by the poetry of T.S. Eliot, as he writes about exploring in “Four Quartets 4: Little Gidding”:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

If I explore those final twelve boxes, perhaps I will find my jade necklace or my little pin. But to arrive where I started? What would that mean?  And what would it be like to know the place for the first time? Like Davies, I am fearful.

And thus I balance between postponing and exploring, caught between the play and the poem.  The jade will have to wait. And the old woman in her shoe. Why chance a life all sorted out for a possible glimpse of eternity— or of nothing?