Archeology

Lavonna Rubens, Vickie A. Holt, Marty Mclaren and Stevie Kemp

Sunday, 1:15 a.m.

When you wake up at midnight and thoughts are crowding your brain and making reservations for insertion somewhere in a blog post that you MUST write, you know you have to get up and get them down on paper before they are lost.

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“We were foolish. We were young, more than we knew.
Yellow gingham on the bed—remember?
And the canopy in red…or was it blue?
The funny little games we played—remember?
Ah, how we laughed,
Ah, how we cried
I think you were there—remember?”

From A Little Night Music—Stephen Sondheim

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The other day, Thursday, at our co-ed lunch, the phrase of the day was “who are you?” At Saturday’s six hour alumni event at Joyia’s beautiful lavender-ringed house on the hill, it was “Do you remember when (fill in the blank)?” We filled in that blank all day long. I wish I could have heard every conversation, but had I tried to eavesdrop on all the exchanges taking place, I wouldn’t have been able to instigate my own memory conversations—Do you remember Jen Southworth and how aggressively she came after couples holding hands in the hall? Do you remember Mr. Myrvang’s algebra class? Do you remember our slumber parties, Johnny Mathis, the picture of Elvis inside my locker door? Do you remember Darwin Moen, the boy with the ever-changing hair colors? Carole Mann’s beautiful skin? Bud Hawk? Mr. Baldwin? Mr. Quirk?

Every single beautiful 64-year-old woman who came to the first ever Central Kitsap class of ’62 Women’s Get-Together was bursting with questions. Rosanne Carlson wanted to know if anyone who went to Tracyton Elementary remembered when the original log part of the building was torn down, the new section built and the roof tarred. Did we remember how awful it smelled? She recalled that she and Toni Agnesani soaked handkerchiefs in perfume and put them to their faces to keep out the stench. I didn’t remember that particular thing, but I remembered Congressional Medal of Honor Winner and teacher, Bud Hawk, telling us about the steel plate in his head. I will never forget Mr. Peterson asking us all to push our cuticles back to promote healthy nails. I remember the day Pete Bachelor brought a black ceramic panther to class for a sixth grade show-and-tell. How exotic and artsy it seemed to me. I remember doing my required long research paper on Grace Kelly’s transformation to Princess Grace of Monaco, complete with pictures cut out of my mother’s movie magazines. Bless Mr. Peterson for letting me do it! I remember singing, “I’m Wishing”, from Snow White, in a fourth grade talent show in Mrs. Theis’s room. And this was only grade school! There are so many memories still waiting to be shared with only those of you to whom it matters.

“Did he die? I can’t believe it! How?” I heard this question, with shocked exclamations, plenty of times during the day. How can it still shock so much to hear of one of our school friends dying? Is it because they are still 18 years old to us? So many are gone—and more to come as we begin to push 70. Only a couple of weeks ago, Doug Garland, a man who had an amazing life, unknown to most of us until we read his obituary.

This time we women got down and dirty: “Okay”, I dared, “who’s had a face lift? Tell!” To my surprise four women in a small group of ten in an outdoor tent with a view of Mt. Rainier, admitted to having eye lifts.
“I couldn’t see without opening my eyes like this!” one of them said as she demonstrated a bug-eyed stare. When a camera trained its lens on us, I taught everyone how to do THE INSTANT FACE-LIFT:
1. Lean elbows on table
2. Hold hands at sides of face
3. Subtly pull the sagging jowls and neck skin back before the camera shutter clicks.
4. Result—taut skins, while appearing to be in a nonchalant, relaxed pose.

My friend, Kay Greaves Morgan and I used to do it whenever anyone had the temerity to approach us with a camera. Remember when?

Being a group of women-only we had brought pictures of husbands, children and adored grandchildren—so many beautiful, young people with brilliant futures ahead. Judy Benjamin showed pictures of her four sons and youngest daughter. She and Lavonna Rubens told me their grandsons (or sons?) were in Iraq. They couldn’t hide their fear. Billie Ann proudly brought out pictures of two model-perfect granddaughters who are entering serious careers. We recalled our limited expectations as young women with resignation. The Eisenhower years were not a good time for women to be ambitious and by the time Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan came along, most of us had children and homes to keep. Nancy Goit wondered if we had accomplished anything we were proud of aside from our children. Our families, though, were what we women expected of ourselves in the sixties and if we felt we’d done a good job of raising our children to be blossoming adults, and hadn’t let the crud build up in the corners of the kitchen and had made the bed most days and learned to cook and had sex with our husbands, too, then we were proud. Those of us with at least one failed marriage, or who had children with serious problems, might not have felt as proud. But we all tried.

Some of us found careers, or more often long-term jobs, after we had happily accomplished domesticity OR failed to appreciate a clean floor and a well-made Jell-O salad, suspecting and hoping that we could realize something larger. Now that I am retired I am rediscovering just how pleasant it is to have a tidy house and clean laundry, and time to go to Alumni Lunches.

Nobody at Joyia’s dared to venture into the tricky area of politics, but I wore my Obama for President button and was heartened by a nearly 90% approval rating. Can’t do much better than that. We barely scratched the surface of who we are now. We are decidedly not just who we were in high school, though what we were then is still in us somewhere. We’ve loved, hated, grieved, worked, raised kids, built houses, constructed our lives around what we thought was important, in some cases watched that life crumble, picked ourselves back up and we went on. We’ve lived through the Doris Day/Chevy BelAir 50s, the marijuana/free love/Jimi Hendrix 60s, the Mod-Squad/Black Power/Laugh-In 70s,the big hair/huge shoulder pad/Madonna 80s, the Bill Gates/Steve Jobs/Computer Age 90s, The Millenium and here we are in 2008, “still crazy after all these years”.

Wouldn’t it be fun to have a huge slumber party at Joyia’s house? What a great place to put down a sleeping bag on the floor, listen to Johnny Mathis, eat popcorn, drink Coke (or something stronger, after all we’re older now), watch a chick-flick and talk into the night? In the morning Betty Nelson could make us her Tea Room scones, women who love to cook could help her make breakfast, Nancy Goit could wash the dishes because that’s what she likes to do, I would take pictures and mental notes, we’d drink strong coffee or lovely tea, pad around in our slippers and watch the morning sun light up Mt. Rainier. Trouble is, if I slept on the floor in a sleeping bag, I wouldn’t be able to walk for days!!!!

“Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?”
Sixty-five? Sixty-six?

Ladies I offer a toast in champagne or gin tonics or wine or beer or iced tea to you. I love you all. The toast: Here’s to survival, to laughter, to remembering, to more of the same.


P.S. We found out that Sandy Harkin’s hair is still its natural color and thickness, naturally. She told us she doesn’t color it. She counts on the kindness of the sun to lighten it in the summertime. We knew you’d want to know.