'The Baron' Discovers Shoe on the Other Foot

     “Don’t you know there is an entire world out there waiting for you?” It was the “baron” talking to our 14-year-old daughter, who was methodically wrapping her ankle in an elastic bandage before another basketball game.

     “You never see anything of the world except that gym and our house,” pontificated father, warming up to his subject.

     “Oh Daddy, that’s not true,” she answered, naming six other gyms their team had played in during the past several months. She then put on her mod blouse and miniskirt and chain belt, checking her eyelashes and giving her hair one last swipe with the brush.

     “Furthermore, I never saw such a PRETTY basketball team!”

Donna "Legs" Lebo shooting for
thevarsity basketball team
at Towson High School

     She giggled. Then she unwrapped three pieces of bubble gum, and we both winced, thinking of the latest dental bill, which, like Topsy, just seems to grow and grow.

     “Miss Alcindor” left, her long hair bouncing in the March wind.

     I remained a captive audience.

     The Baron fixed himself a plateful of peanut-butter-cracker creations, having just given up smoking for peanut butter. (Where do you run at midnight when you suddenly discover there isn’t a smidgeon of peanut butter anywhere in the house? There ought to be peanut butter machines for ex-smokers.)

     “No, I really mean it,” he continued. “There is a whole great world out there and she should get out of the gym and see it. Do things. Have new hobbies. Meet new people.”

     I rose to her defense. “Well, she does make her own clothes, and she has met quite a few new and interesting people through basketball tournaments.” I was thinking of the high school years ahead with driver education and football stars and long prom gowns and I envisioned the baron then, pacing the living room rug waiting for our daughter.

     “You’re getting tired spending all your Saturday afternoons watching basketball games,” I asked. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

     My husband, the peanut butter addict, the worrier, the golfer, then lied, “Of course not!” he bristled.

     “Why don’t you make arrangements to play 18 holes on Saturday? Besides, there are no games this weekend. The girls are going to see ‘Romeo and Juliet’ for the fourth time.

     I could see already the soothing influence just of conversation on golf.

      Just then our son emerged from the basement playroom where evidently the supplies of pie and milk had just run out or the electricity had miraculously ceased to function in a maze of amplifiers and tape recorders.

     “Hey, Dad” he exclaimed joyfully, “just the man I want to see.”

     The baron was glum. “I’m broke. Forget it.”

     But ‘“Bronson the Second” was not about to be discouraged.”Naw, naw, it’s nothing like that. Say those peanut butter things look good.” He took six.

     Rummaging through the drawers, hunting for the chess set, he described in glowing detail the further adventures of the village hitchhiker, who had just returned from Albany, Boston and the Cape. The village hitchhiker, who has all the mystical charisma of early peddlers in Revolutionary times, has created an audience of peers who listen to his adventures at Berkeley and Yellowstone and Cleveland as though he had just emerged from the mists of Ararat with the ark upon his frail shoulders. He is 17.

     “Where does he earn the money to pay for his meals and lodgings?” I asked, wincing inwardly at all the questions mothers are predestined to ask during adventurous times.. From Sarah on, we have all worried about how sonny will get his pancakes and sausage.

     “Uh oh I dunno” said our son blandly dismissing all the nettlesome little problems of everyday living.

     “He’s going to try to get a job on a freighter and go to Calcutta next.” Well, from Cape Cod to Calcutta is not bad for a rather slow-to-start spring time, I thought.

     “You know, Dad,” continued this overshoot with a case of wanderlust, “I’ve been thinking.” (Ominous, very ominous.) “Maybe I’ll take a year off before college and just knock around, see the world.”

      The baron spluttered. I congratulated him silently for not lighting up two cigarettes and gobbling down an entire jar of peanut butter simultaneously.

     “We’ll talk about it, son,” he said slowly.

     “Your trouble, Dad, is there is an entire world out there waiting for you and you don’t know it.”

     So help me, I couldn’t help it. I giggled.

- March 22, 1970

Empathy for Hip-Huggers Not Always Reciprocated

Don’t bother me about “hot pants”. I’m still trying to understand hip-huggers.

Actually, it’s simple. Hip-huggers are nothing more than slacks designed by a guy with no sense of humor for a girl with hips like an 11-year-old boy.

Hot pants are designed by the same guy who has now developed a sense of humor.

I happen to have enormous empathy for hip-huggers. They do not reciprocate. This probably has something to do with the fact that even when I was 11 I did not have hips like an 11-year-old boy.

It is possible to get a smashingly beautiful pair of hip-huggers to fit. However the waistline then gaps alarmingly like an ebullient kangaroo with a incipient case of heartburn.

A manufacturer of hip-huggers used to like to advertise that it was impossible not to have a good time while wearing ladies’ pants of his design.

I’ve always wanted to answer.

No, actually, just last Friday while bailing six inches of water out of the bathroom I felt like Frieda the Frump in pants of your design.

I had a perfectly ghastly time at a cocktail party in hip-huggers of your design because I couldn’t sit down and didn’t dare try a French pastry.

As a matter of fact I was wearing a pair of hip-huggers you designed last week when the garage mechanic called me some very unflattering names and charged me $10 to tune the motor of my car, which he also called some very unflattering names.

I happened to feel exactly like Greta the Gruesome as I was seen chasing our only two remaining trash cans up the street on a windy morning, wearing the same hip-huggers.

You name it, baby, and I’ve had the experiences rated “U” for “unhappy”-- wearing pants of your design. Cassandra at the dentist, Miranda at the movies Saturday with 37 Brownies, Minnie Mouse at the hairdresser’s with nothing but a bent safety pin and one earring in her wallet. Sophie the Sorrowful at the kindergarten party, the only mother in the room who hadn’t remembered to bake cupcakes.

One teen-age daughter now “ages” her hip-huggers properly by sitting in the bathtub while wearing them and then hanging them up to drip-dry all over the bathroom tile.

Of course they shrink, sometimes they really shrink! Then she sews braid around the hems to lengthen them and plays an extra set of tennis that day to take off a pound.

The other teen-age daughter has what is known as “illusion” hips. One her, hip-huggers float magically over the hip bone as though propelled by some magic. On top of this, her favorites attire is sloppy sweatshirts or sloppy undershirts, preferably too big or too small, paint-stained, and timeworn.

At South Beach on Martha's Vineyard, 1971

Yesterday the Baron and I went to the ice-cream store for milk and eggs. (Well, some people go to Monaco, and some to Miami; everyone has to do their own thing.)

Two beautiful people were emerging from their EKG ( ot was it MKG), I always get mixed up about those things!). One had short curly golden hair and a turtleneck sweater. The other had a shaggy golden mop and was wearing lavender corduroy bell-bottoms.

“Which one is the girl?” I whispered.

“Are you kidding!” answered the Baron, whose eyes never left the hip-huggers for a moment. Then I knew, for the first time, what a girl really looks like with the hips of an 11-year-old boy.

And let me tell you something. I’ve been so depressed ever since!

So I just trotted back home and pulled on my favorite pair of jeans and sat down in a full bathtub of warm water to read the new issue of Life.

There was a picture of Sophia Loren in a midi. I began to feel a little better.

There was a picture of Samantha Effar in hot pants. I had an immediate relapse.

I crawled dripping out of the tub and went to sit dripping on the back porch. I began to think about how nice it would been to live in Elizabethan England and then I remembered no one ever drove small foreign cars while wearing hoopskirts.

Why don’t they go completely candid and call it “Women’s Fears Daily” instead of “Women’s Wear Daily”?

--July 4, 1971

Mom Feels 'Out of Touch' with Two Active Daughters

Now that our eldest is off to college, the house is no longer populated by gangling young men from the rock group or the lacrosse team. Instead, our daughter, the interior decorator, and our daughter, the disc jockey, have taken the spotlight.

I am starting to feel out of touch. I noticed it just yesterday in one of those avant garde shops where the lamps look like street lights and the peace sign is embroidered on everything except the candles.

A young man with handle-bar mustache and amber-colored glasses was explaining an aluminum and burlap wall hanging to my daughter, the decorator, while he straightened the creases in his orange and hot pink striped, bell bottom slacks.

I felt as though I should go off in a corner and try on orthopedic shoes or have my teeth looked at.

“Yes, I see exactly what you mean,” she gushed. “The empathy of the metal does it all.”

Back home, the other daughter was copying notes in her notebook as she listened to a disc jockey announce number 20 of the top 80 in a voice covered with peanut butter and jam.

I had a feeling it was going to be one of those weekends where the disc jockeys play all the top 1600 hits from the last three years, and she runs about sighing, “Oh, oh, it’s my favorite!” The titles all begin or sound like “I’d Like to Love You More,” “I Want to Love You So,” or “I Can’t Love You Anymore.” Done, of course by groups like the Purple Jug or the Broken Axle.

The first week their brother left for college the girls subdivided the house. They very graciously decided Mom and Dad should keep their bedroom, since no one would ever begin to get Mom’s desk cleared out anyway. However they decided brother would no longer need such a big bedroom and they pack up his rock (rock rocks!) collection, his overdue library books, and older sister moved in, His aquarium stayed,even though there are only two fish left and they can’t stand one another, but, somehow he feels that as long as the aquarium is still there he can still come back to the room someday.

Down came the Beatles and up went Romeo and Juliet.

The chemistry set got packed in a closet while big sister very thoughtfully went through borther’s outgrown shirts and found some that fit her.

Dolly, the decorator, charmed Dad in to sanding the floor and painting her entire room white. While Dad lost his religion over the sanding operation, she methodically cleaned sister’s things out of the closet. This included every handbag ever owned by the child beginning with the Guatemalan donkey feed bag, numbering at least thirty, all in pretty bad shape. (When your old things are turned down by Goodwill and Salvation Army, you know you’ve kept them too long!)

Dixie, the disc jockey discovered an all-night soul station. I developed the habit of sleeping with cotton in my ears.

The hallway became very cluttered. In the process of subdivision., boxes of things got placed throughout it. Let Mom throw it out, because I haven’t the courage! The three-dimensional puzzles, the outgrown sneakers, the bedroom slippers looking like droned pink rabbits, and the old class pictures with the cracked fold right down the middle.

The dog began to get confused about where she should take a nap while someone was in the bathroom. She started sleeping on the stairsteps and falling down the steps as soon as she fell asleep.

“You’ve got to do something about that dog. I don’t have time! I have another fabric shop to go to tonight,” I said, doing the cake walk to number 56 out of the top 94 called “Love me a Little More.”

Dolly, the decorator now beguiled her father into putting up a Japanese paper shade on 15 feet of brass chain, the paper shade came in red, yellow, and pink squares and cast an opium-like glow over the yellow furniture and the leopard skin bedspread.

“Where has my little pink and white checked gingham girl gone to?” I sobbed.

“Mother, you’re hilarious,” said Dixie, the disc jockey, as she made her way through the boxes in the hallway carrying her transistor and a gallon of bubble bath into the bathroom. There were just starting number 60 called “You Always Were a Lousy Lover/”

The dog fell asleep and tumbled down the steps one more time. I began to think almost wistfully of those long fall afternoons when their brother comes home with his knapsack full of dirty shirts and the empty cookie jar. At least, I still know how to starch a shirt and roll out  a mean chocolate chip cookie.

“What do you think of a black light poster depicting the arrival of the Rolling Stones in Vienna during 1963?” I was asked.

“It has a certain empathy,” I replied thoughtfully.