Back some years ago when a hippie was still a rarity, a jolly young bearded fellow took to sunning himself on Sunday afternoons on the rocky precipices of the goat and monkey enclaves of a large city zoo.
Surrounded by a moat, he watched the crowds watching him with wry amusement and a shade of disdain while the baby animals gamboled about his sandal-shod feet.
There are times now I think back to that fellow, feeling some days that I’m the visitor in a cave full of capricious monkeys, and the only way to save my sanity is to adopt an aura of detached amusement.
ITEM: The Baron was chauffeuring our son and two of his friends bound for the local cinema showing the adventures of a popular motorcycle-riding hero type.
Our son was wearing his “Here Comes Bronson” ski cap, tattered blue jeans, and his favorite too-small topcoat. His one compatriot with long hair was wearing blue jeans painted in day-glo colors, and a surplus Navy coat, while the other fellow was attired in bell bottoms and his father’s World War II intelligence-type belted Army overcoat. A lovely bunch of hooligans, I thought.
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| Our wardrobe source in Towson, Md. |
“Listen,” the Baron was directed, “be sure to pick us up at 10 on the nose! That’s a ROUGH neighborhood.
ITEM: With one teen-ager out babysitting and another out to a party, how to get through gracefully to their curfew times, ignore the far-off sirens, a spook movie on the late show and the fretful snores of their father on the couch?
To wait by the front door, checking the lamppost every five minutes is gauche; going to bed and leaving the house in half-darkness, clearly unfeeling. What to do? The Cinderella hour comes and goes. Someone prods me gently on a numb shoulder.
“Mom, mom,” hissed the pair. “Why don’t you go to bed! We’ve locked up and it’s lated! You crazy or something?”
Chastened, the watchdog, mother-protector of the hearth, goes yawning off to bed.
ITEM: The telephone at our house rings every four minutes all evening. It is not a restful atmosphere. Friends claim they have been trying to reach us for weeks. “Drop a postcard,” I advise them concisely.
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| One phone on a short cord for five people. Those were the days! |
A “romance” is brewing in the confines of the junior high school. Three girls have telephoned to say Bruce is going to call tonight! Our ninth grader has nervously reset her hair three times, and races through the hallway like a giddy giraffe each time the telephone rings. “I think I’m going to have a coronary,” says the Baron. “Not before Bruce invites me to the spring dance, Daddy, please!” implores Miss Information Please.
Two days pass. Now Bruce’s friends are calling, laying the groundwork. “Daddy,” pleads Cinderella, “be nice when you answer the phone. You scare them!”
“That, my dear,” answers father, “is precisely my intent.”
At last Bruce call, his voice sweet-rough with nervousness. “Tell him I’m not here,” Cinderella whispers, braiding her hair. “He’s a real creep.”
Anyone else for a coronary?
ITEM: Feeling guilty about all those ground beef casseroles coming out of the kitchen assembly-line style, I spend all afternoon preparing a three-course roast chicken dinner with sweet and sour salads, warm rolls, creamy gravy, and mountains of whipped cream.
Number one son has band practice, and his sister has to referee a basketball game. She volunteers to broil hot dogs when they get home at 7. I snap. Little sister has a babysitting job and like a third-rate movie, the Baron telephones that he’ll be home late, about eight, just in time for the chicken to dry out and the potatoes to grow lumpy.
I fix 5,000 calories and curl up before the television to have dinner with Randolph Scott on the Early Show, and I think wryly of the young hippie perched on the island with the frolicking bands of monkeys and goats.
Then, why do they always come in and say, “For heaven’s sake, what are you CRYING about?”
--March 1970
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