The Village Idiot: Young enough to know better
Sue and I recently stayed at her sister Mary’s house for a visit. Mary, who is 15 years younger than we are, has a night job, so she sleeps late.
Early one afternoon while waiting for her to wake up, I was watching “Young Mr. Lincoln” on her television, with Henry Fonda playing the president when he was a young, country bumpkin lawyer.
It’s one of those movies that as you flip the channels you can’t help but stop and watch. It doesn’t matter if you came in at the beginning or in the middle or near the end, you’re going to sit down and watch the whole thing.
As it gets to the emotional climax, Henry Fonda makes one of the best speeches in movie history. Just then, at about 2 in the afternoon, my sister-in-law Mary stumbles out of her bedroom, still in her pajamas, still rubbing her eyes. She looks at the TV screen for a few seconds, then turns to me and says, “How can you watch that black-and-white crap?”
It reminded me what a huge communication gap only a few years’ difference in age can make. When I was a kid, we lived next door to the Oldest Woman in the World: Mrs. Sally Rosen. When I was 8, she was 119. None of the children knew how old she really was, but we knew she was really old, and cranky.
Every time we’d ride through her garden on bikes, she’d call my mother and complain. The time we tried to shoot off all her crab apples with a BB gun, she called the police. Any time one of our footballs or baseballs or basketballs ended up in her yard she’d keep it until my dad had to go over and ask for it back and make his apologies.
This sounds sick, but all the time I was growing up I just figured we’d wake up one morning and find out she was dead. The paper would say “World’s Oldest Woman Passes Away; Mullen Children Finally Allowed to Play in Her Yard.”
It never did happen, of course. We moved away when I was 13 and I didn’t think much about her from then on. Every now and then, my mother would get a note from an old neighbor and tell us that Mrs. Rosen says hello and that the people who bought our house were making her life miserable, the kids were playing in her yard making noise and scaring her songbirds.
Each bit of news I figured would be the last.
She must be in the Guinness Book of World Records for sure.
Years later, when I was in my 30s, I went back to the old neighborhood and drove past our old house. There were all kinds of toys and swings on the lawn, the place looked lived in. Next door was Mrs. Rosen’s house, looking exactly the same as it always had, stately and proper, her garden a thing of wonder, with camellias, dogwoods, azaleas, all arranged just so.
Why, if you looked closely you could swear that Mrs. Rosen was still in the garden, mulching her crepe myrtle trees, dusting some roses.
I couldn’t believe it — that is Mrs. Rosen out there mulching her crepe myrtle trees. It cannot be possible. She’d be a 130! I got out of the car and introduced myself. She remembered my parents well, their noisy kids not so well, not by name.
“I’m sorry, it’s been 20 years. You look so different.”
“So do you,” I didn’t say. She looked to be in her mid-80s, healthy and active. When I was 10 she was probably in her mid-60s. I couldn’t get over how my mind played this trick of perspective on me. When I’m 80, I wondered, will I find out she’s 40?
(Jim Mullen contributes regularly to Entertainment Weekly, where he can be reached at [email protected])