We kept our grandson, my namesake, for a few days last week, and the visit reminded me of the world around me when I was around his age.
Wanting to please his grandparents, Arthur asks permission to play, say, across the field. Permission granted, just check in every hour. Instead, he checks in every half hour, “just so you won’t worry.”
By contrast, a constant playmate of his simply shows up at our house. She’s no trouble at all — in fact Arthur looks forward to her visits — but her mother, I suspect, makes a dozen calls when night falls to find out whose house she’s been visiting.
As grandparents are we needlessly cautious? Shouldn’t children’s formative years be like those of Scout and her friends, all of whom had the run of the town, worry-free, in “To Kill a Mockingbird”?
My early years in Las Vegas were different, in a lot of fronts. On the one hand, parents seemed anxious to send us off to school and to our part-time jobs. Yet, we needed to be able to account for every second we spent out of our parents’ sight.
When I was 11, I was part of armies of youngsters allowed to go out and get jobs. We got pep talks about how much fun it would be to buy our own clothes and school supplies; accordingly, I used to set pins at the bowling alley and sell papers.
Girls — many of them around the neighborhood, not just my sisters — earned spending money through housecleaning and babysitting.
What makes the early ‘50s seem different was the fact that we had the run of the town. There was little opportunity for “quality time” with family. Many of my peers went straight to their part-time school after hearing the last bell at Immaculate Conception School.
In spite of spending several daylight hours away from family, we still remained in our mothers’ cross-hairs. I don’t know how they did it. How did they keep track of everything we did without witnessing any of it?
A movie, “How to Murder Your Wife,” with Jack Lemmon and Virna Lisi, demonstrates the kind of leverage some people have. In one scene, a female friend of the newlyweds shows how she keeps rein over her husband, at the time in another room, minding his own business. “I heard that,” she hollers through the closed door.
The penitent, confused spouse responds, “Oh, Sweetheart, I didn’t really mean that” to an accusation that she merely imagined and that he never committed but apologized for anyway. And that’s how my mother was. If she figured I’d gone too many days without getting into trouble, she’d surmise something was amiss and she’d confront me with the accusatorial guilt by assassination.
The dialogue often went like this:
“What have you been doing?”
“Oh, nothing much, Mom.”
“Well, that’s not what I heard. Care to explain?”
“Well, whoever told you I was horsing around playing pinball machines was lying.”
“Oh, so you were malingering, being a good-for-nothing.” Then she’d punctuate it with, “¿Que dira la gente?” And she’d ask that question as if all of the town’s denizens were crystallized, every one in a collective gasp over whatever crime they surmised I’d committed.
At the time I didn’t give much thought to what neighbors might think, what with my being too busy saving my hide to care about public perception. Sometimes I wondered whether Mom was just honing her skills, practicing for the main event. Was she merely rehearsing a scene from a movie, “Pay it Forward,” which wasn’t produced until five decades later? It’s a safe guess that Mom’s third-degree guilt-by-accusation technique was her way of “banking” future retribution.
If I could have absolutely proved — through the testimony of six nuns in a station wagon — that it was someone else who bounced dried peas off the classroom ceiling so they’d land on Sister Mary DiPazzi’s desk during study hall, it wouldn’t have mattered. The fact is, it was Wilfred who silently flicked the peas to land on the teacher’s desk, but from my desk there was a better trajectory. And since any pea originating from my desk could certainly have hit the target, naturally, I was presumed guilty. Guilt by implication.
Even if I proved I was innocent, the “could have” assumption then kicked in. Mom would reason that “then you admit that it would have been possible to flick those peas on her desk?”
“Well yes, Mom, I guess anything’s possible.”
Gotcha! This way of storing up punishment possibly worked for her. So the next time I was culpable, she’d cut me some slack? Yeah, right.
It’s possible life in the ‘40s came replete with constant attitude adjustments performed by parents but precipitated by concerned neighbors who never failed to report us, “just for our own good.”
Somehow we survived despite the lumps. And it’s interesting to ponder the ways in which lives have been transformed. Back then, we all had a pair of shoes and/or a bike; today, kids too old to be chauffeured by a soccer mom cruise around instead.
Back then, when the pedestrian business district consisted of Douglas Avenue and Bridge Street, the likelihood of meeting many people was much greater than it is today, when on any Saturday afternoon it’s possible to pitch a tent on Douglas.
Our childhoods, for those of us who remember the ‘40s and ‘50s, were no different. In essence, we were children just like children today. We liked to run and play, talk about our friends, hang out and even squabble.
But today children are groomed, scheduled and psychoanalyzed hour by hour. Yesterday, there was a newspaper article about students fighting to regain a few minutes of recess, which has been pre-empted by extra testing.
I wonder what memories our grandchildren they will have of their childhoods when they are in their 60s. No doubt the behavior of the adults in their lives will seem inexplicable.
And I assume when my grandson reaches my current age, he’ll want to tell his own grandkids about the olden days. And will they say, “Oh, Grandpa, we’ve heard that story before”?