LIVING TOGETHER
LIVING TOGETHER
Living out here is fulfilling, fulfillment being found in the unavoidable interaction we enjoy or endure with one another. We respond to one another continually and, if not always consciously, we consider ourselves in the context of the others with whom we share this island. There exists a communal circuitry, an involvement with one another whether we like it or not, and some of us don’t, and even those who do, don’t now and then. We all know much more about one another than an observer might think comfortable but because we all know these things, the reverse being true is kind of a tempering agent. We’re generally careful with one another’s secrets although a prudent exception can now and then be made.
Years ago, Fred went to a local restaurant with his wife for dinner. The cook’s name was Louie. Fred ordered a big tenderloin, medium, three deep fried mac n cheese balls, creamed carrots and a draft beer. His wife ordered poached flounder, sautéed vegetables, a garden salad and a glass of rose’. The waitress brought the drinks and returned shortly with two orders of the fish & veggies. Fred opened his mouth to call attention to the obvious mistake but the waitress held her hand out to quiet him and said, “Louie says, in the shape you’re in and given your recent spell, you need to be careful about what you eat and I agree.” “That makes three of us” said his wife. He wasn’t happy about it but he’s still alive.
We’re all players and nothing is as omnipresent as familiarity. We find our strengths and our short-comings, our accomplishments and misdeeds, in a mercurial body of common knowledge. By the time a kid has grown to adulthood that baggage and the knowledge that everyone knows every detail of that young life sometimes assumes enormous proportions. Recently, one of the rapidly diminishing number of my elders stopped by while I was doing some charitable work to remind me that if I thought what I was doing was community service, I wasn't even close to done.
When I was a kid my friends and I went to great lengths to pick a secluded spot, or spots we thought were secluded, to smoke, drink or otherwise misbehave, but the parents in this little town of 1200 were a conspiratorial and alert bunch and we often found our clandestine activities woefully transparent. One day in 1958 we picked up a pack of Camels from the Cascade Bowling Alley and headed down the little six foot wide alley between Wentworth’s Restaurant and L.R. Smith Clothing Store to have a smoke and to share a little bottle of vanilla extract we’d lifted at E. G. Carver’s Grocery.
Upstairs over L. R. Smith was the telephone exchange. A team of local ladies, all mothers, all members of the operator’s guild and all among the most well-informed of the aforementioned conspiratorial parents, handled every phone call made by anyone to anyone without exception. Each home that had a crank--the only option--phone--and not all of them did--had a designated three digit number. Ours was 356. Everyone knew everyone’s number both literally and in the broader sense, the latter, of course, still holds true. The operators manned the switchboard, one at a time, 24 hours a day and, except during the colder months, with the window open. Walking by on the sidewalk one floor below on that day, one would have heard the sound of 356 ringing and my mother’s voice answering “Hello”
“Pat, this is Mabel down to the switchboard. Phillip & Jo Jo just headed down the alley and Phillip was smoking and carrying a bottle.”
“Goodness, Mabel, will it never end? I’ll send his Dad right down.”