by Freida Marie Crump
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Greetings from Poosey.
Olga wouldn’t leave her porch. I was just a kid running wild and loose along the roads ’round Poosey when I noticed her sitting there. She’d come out early that morning to take her usual place in the wooden rocker on her porch, coffee in hand, but unlike her usual practice of watching the traffic, listening to the birds, then going back inside to do her housework, on this summer morning Olga simply stayed in her rocker …two hours …four …noon came and she was still there. Being young, impetuous and only half-smart I walked up onto her porch and asked if she was okay.
“No, Freida, I’m not,” she said, then took a sip of her cold coffee and stared out onto the street.
“Then …I mean …what’s the matter, Olga?”
This old gal who was among the friendliest and most hospitable of our neighbors didn’t even turn to look at me. She said, “I give up.”
This was a consternation pure and simple. Olga had sort of been my hero growing up. She always had the neatest yard, she fried the tastiest chicken, and if the folks in your family were having a rough week she’d be the first to show up with a blackberry pie in hand to help you through your miseries. The lady I saw sitting in front of me that morning didn’t resemble the Olga I’d always known.
But one of the advantages of being very young or very old is that you can ask questions that the middle ages are too polite to put forward, so I said, “You give up on what, Olga?” For the first time that morning she turned to look at me and did her best to offer me a small grin. “Life,” she said. “I give up on life. Things are changing too fast for me, Freida. I can’t keep up. I don’t seem to agree with the way the world is going and I just don’t understand a lot of it. I’ve decided to just give up.”
At 10 years old I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about so I pulled the 1950s version of calling 911 …I went home and told my mother. Mom was a good friend of Olga’s, so she quick hurried down to our neighbor’s porch to investigate. Olga’s friendship meant enough to my mother that Mom didn’t even come home to fix lunch, an almost unheard event in our house. My mother came back a couple of hours later and tried to explain it to me. “Olga belongs to another generation,” she said. “She tries to love and understand everybody but the world is changing faster than she can. She’s just confused and a little bit sad.”
It was years later before I thought to look into the events of 1959… the Pope convened Vatican II bringing huge changes to Olga’s church, Castro took over in Cuba, rock-n-roll ruled the airwaves, Civil Rights protests began to dominate the headlines, women’s fashions took on a scantiness that shocked the previous generation, steel workers went on strike, Khrushchev was denied access to Disneyland, and they’d mentioned sex for the first time on the Dobie Gillis TV show. Olga was an accommodating, understanding lady, but things were just happening too fast.
I’ve thought a lot about Olga in recent months as Supreme Court rulings, legislative acts, and Presidential news conferences have brought changes to our American way of life at a rate that’s been hard to digest. Things are simply moving more quickly than some of us can assimilate, much less come to an understanding. What Olga needed was time. What a nation needs is time. Those who propose these changes can be every bit as bigoted in their insistence on fast transformation as those they accuse of narrow-mindedness. Laws may change overnight. Long-held beliefs and customs take longer. We need to give each other that time, that space, that room to come to an understanding, whether or not this ends up in full blown acceptance. We all need to realize that we’re dealing with human beings, not simply words on a page.
Olga eventually went back inside that afternoon, and after a few weeks she was back to her normal routines. The flowers in her yard continued to bloom and her oven once again became our pie factory par excellence, but it took time. May we all give each other that simple gift of time to understand.
You ever ‘round Poosey, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip.