i pointed the grandmother character out to a fellow movie watcher and told him, "That crazy lady that lived down the street from me that I told you about? That's dead on to her."
The scene where the grandmother visits the strange family. I remember things like that. The moms didn't all work, but they had cars, so you'd have to go visit their weird friends and relatives, (And adults Never! explained their friends' weirdness, you were just supposed to understand by osmosis.) and you'd have to sit there quiet while they spoke over coffee. God it was boring, and they gossiped about stuff way over your head, and raised questions you weren't allowed to ask, but you couldn't go outside or watch TV or do anything else, because it would've have disturbed your mom's gossip time to wonder what you were up to.
Kids were more on the back burner at the time. You were kind of an addendum to your mom's life. It's not like they were abusive, it's the just the way moms were back then.
This is dead-on some of my experience when I was a kid. You had to sit still at the table while their cigarette smoke got in your face. You couldn't swing your feet or make noise, you had to be "polite" while the grown ups talked. If you were lucky you could go outside and sit on the porch, but you still couldn't make noise, if you had to go pee you had to just hold it in, and you couldn't ask for a drink of water.
Some of the old people's homes just reeked of stale cigarette smoke and old people sweat.
It wasn't just the mom's though, sometimes my dad would bring us buy one of his drinking buddies home and we'd have to do the same with them only those bas tards would drinking too much beer and smoking cigarettes. WE were supposed to use our good manners and be polite; a perfect case of do what we say but not what we do.
Your entire summary and reflections were it for me too. I was 10 years old when the Manson Family committed their insane attacks. Before that we never locked our doors at night, didn't lock up the cars, in the summer we left the windows rolled down. We were safe. After that, nobody really felt safe.
My folks used to take us to our grandparents farm for a couple weeks each summer. No TV only radio and then mostly farm and weather reports. We didn't have a corn field but we had cows in the pasture and pigs, rabbits, chickens and roosters, turkeys and dogs and really huge non-poisonous snakes and the vipers, rattle snakes and copperheads, and water moccasins. We had to watch out for them constantly.
Some days were terribly long and boring but others were a shear adventure. But at night it was no thrill going to the outhouse by flashlight. Not with poisonous snakes and spiders to worry about.
The my grandmother would drive us in to the Grange or the Feed store and she'd gossip while we sat sweltering in the back seat of her old station wagon. She'd say five or six times "Well I'd better be gettin' back. I've got to get my youngins' home." Then she'd start up gossiping again.
I haven't thought about this stuff in a long while.
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