I'm Not Company; I Live Here

Last night, I was reading The Trumpet of the Swan (about a swan who, like another famous trumpeter, is named Louis) to Sam and Julia, and it said that with so much stuff hanging around his neck--a trumpet, a chalk board and chalk pencil, a bag for his money, and a Lifesaving medal--Louis felt like a hippie. In the same chapter, a little boy commented, "That's groovy" (all this is from memory because the book has gone off to school for the day). I thought, How do I explain "hippie" and "groovy" to a six- and three-year-old who have never heard "Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In," let alone have a context for it. Fortunately, it was late, they didn't ask, and I was spared. Besides, I thought, That pile of necklaces seems more Coco Chanel than Jerry Garcia to me.

But the idea of hippies popped into my head again this morning when I read a recent post on the blog Woulda Coulda Shoulda about a visit from the grandparents: 

If you'd asked me before they got here what my favorite part of these visits is, I would've responded without hesitation that it's watching my parents interact with my kids . . . This morning, though, I realized that there's another thing I absolutely love on these trips: Having coffee and grown-up chat in the morning.

Woulda Coulda is written by a mom of two named Mir, and I believe she's right on both counts. Wearing a pink cashmere sweater from J. Crew today, I also look far more Coco than Jerry, too. But I firmly believe that apart from Haight-Ashbury and a few other pockets of hippiedom in the 1960s, communes were a brilliant idea that never got off the ground as they should have. When my sister Betsy was making a transition away from Atlanta to live in this part of the country a couple of years ago, she stayed with us for nearly two years; before that, we spent six weeks with our friends Katy and Steve while I was pregnant and our house was being sanded and painted. 

As with everything, there's a downside to communal living: you have to be highly strategic about when you walk around in your underwear or less. But overall, those experiences taught me that a woman should always have another woman in the house to take pressure off the marriage. Imagine how sparing your husband the question, "Honey, do these shoes look OK with this skirt?" would lift the relationship. (I hasten to add that having recently seen the movie The Duchess, in which Georgiana Spencer, the Duchess of Devonshire and ancestor to Diana, was forced to dine at the same table each day with her husband and his mistress and to hear their love-making, I'm talking here about a strictly platonic arrangement.) Betsy and I have put on our makeup side-by-side in front of a mirror since she was 17 and I was 14, she telling me I look better and vice versa. Who among us can't use that kind of boost in the morning, before the run to Starbucks?

Besides allowing for mutual admiration, the set up provides for instant community, including a wider audience for our children's moment-to-moment triumphs and tribulations. It's amazing to watch Betsy with Sam and Julia knowing that her love for them is only infinitesimally less intense than Ralph's and mine--if it's different at all. 

No matter what your age, everybody needs the kind of safety net that a long-ago acquaintance described as a "take-me-to-the-hospital-if-I'm-sick-in-the-middle-of-the-night-and-feed-me-

J-ello" kind of friend. Besides the need for food, shelter, and the money to pay for both, feeling that you're not alone in this big world is perhaps our most elemental need. And perhaps that's why Sam asks every day, "Who else is coming for dinner?"

If I remember correctly, even though Louis the Swan gained fame as a trumpet player and stayed in a fancy room at the Ritz in Boston, what he craved most was to be in the company of his family and the other swans back on Upper Red Rock Lake in Montana.