Prose

Everybody Needs a Kramer | by Tonda Phalen

In the house where I grew up there was a constant stream of people coming and going.  My parents’ friends and relatives would bring their kids over to play, which really meant that they would shoo us kids outside except in the absolute worst of weather in which case we would be relegated to my room or the back porch.  Anywhere, as long as we were not underfoot of the adults who had their own social agendas.  Our next door neighbor would show up at 2 o’clock in the afternoon still in her robe and slippers just to do a little gossiping.  My uncle would drop by to borrow one of my dad’s tools, and usually my dad too because he wasn’t sure how to go about fixing whatever  was broken even after borrowing the proper tool.  A lady who mom knew from somewhere – I swear she could make a new best friend in line at the grocery store – would bring by some curtains that she wanted my mom to hem.  A neighbor from down the road would open the kitchen door and yell in, “Hey Bobbie, those cows are out on the road again.”  And then he would offer to help my mom herd them back in.  My grandmother would bring over a platter of freshly made fried apple pies, or if we were really lucky, mine and my dad’s favorite, raisin pie. 

But it wasn’t just at our house that this sort of thing happened.  My grandparents’  house was a regular gathering spot too.  In fact, I think that my aunt Susie rarely put her makeup on and did her hair except at my grandmother’s kitchen table with a cigarette, a cup of coffee and about a half dozen or so people to chat with throughout the sometimes lengthy endeavor.  I sort of always felt like the day’s party was over when Susie would start doing circles around her head with the hairspray can.  Usually though it just meant that some folks would move out onto the front porch, especially my grandfather with his asthma, or that my grandmother would get up and do the dishes, with some forced assistance by one of us grandkids, and then she would start some chicken and dumplings so that when the next wave of people came through the door there would be some hot food to offer.

Sometimes my dad would say to us kids, “Get in the car.  Let’s go see Bill.  He has an old roadster I want to take a look at.”  Of course, we kids had no idea who Bill was nor were we interested in seeing the roadster, but we were ready and willing to go.  Hey, Bill might have some kids who were fun to play with or, as I got a little older, maybe even a cute son to ogle.  It really didn’t matter anyway because it was just about going visiting.

Of course, all of this happened without any plan or schedule.  No matter who was dropping by or who we were dropping in on, these visits were never preceded by a telephone call and rarely by a knock on the door.  And they all included consumption of copious amounts of coffee and lots of stories and laughter. 

In our house the first person up in the morning put on a pot of coffee and the last person to go to bed turned it off.  In between, as everyone knew the “house rule,” the person who took the last cup had to make the next pot.  So in addition to a continuous stream of people there was also a never-ending supply of hospitable beverage.  I hate to admit it only because I don’t know the statute of limitations on something like this and my mom is too set in her ways to do hard time, but I think I actually started drinking coffee when I was about ten because it was the social thing to do and allowed me to sometimes hang out with the adults for a while.

Sure, there were the occasional pre-planned events, like a special 60th birthday party where so many people were invited that we had to rent out the community room at city hall.  I always wondered how many of the people who showed up at these enormous events I was actually related to.  Truth was there was usually a second cousin or two from out of town that I had never met before and didn’t even know of their existence until that day.  And then there were the Saturday nights every few months when my mom would make enough homemade pizza to feed an army, which was a good thing because my dad’s family was certainly large enough to qualify as at least a battalion, if not its own brigade.  I am pretty sure that my mom planned those evenings ahead of time, although I wouldn’t swear to it.  But other than those special occasions, people just came, “stayed a piece,” and then went on their way.  That is the way we socialized; it was a drop-in society back then.  Or at least it was with the people we knew. 

I have really fond memories of that type of socializing and I think today’s society could probably benefit greatly from an attitude shift back toward that vein of spontaneity.  Now we schedule everything - the playdates for our kids and Girls Night Out and Bunco are all on the calendar for weeks or months ahead of time.  We even schedule our scheduling, as is evidenced by the big late spring event that my fall-to gal and I do in order to determine camps and carpooling and swim practice and all the other summer activities for our four collective kids; at least we have coffee at that.  It seems that as a society we have entirely failed to be spontaneous social creatures.  Our schedules are all negotiated far in advance and we are often juggling outside activities to the point where we are rarely home even if someone wanted to stop by for a cup of coffee or just to see the roadster. 

I am just as guilty of this as everyone else, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to see a little change.  For a couple of years, I even held these get-togethers that I started called Mom’s Morning In, which morphed into MMIs for the regulars, a moniker that ultimately served us better by being more mysterious and intentionally vague when I changed the event to lunch (thus Mid-Day instead of Morning) and realized that I couldn’t be gender exclusive in the title because it would discourage participation by stay-at-home dads (thus edited to Moms and Men).   The idea came from the fact that we were all so busy that we couldn’t even manage to plan a Girls Night Out and get a quorum.  So I decided that maybe we would have better attendance if it took place while the kids were in school.  Of course, this knocked out those with full-time Monday through Friday jobs, so it ended up being was sort of a club for stay-at-home parents and those with part-time or flexible hours.  And yes, the MMIs were pre-scheduled with lots of advance notice, but the idea was that you come and go as you please any time between set hours on set dates, and you need not RSVP for any dates, just come if you can. 

Those in attendance at MMIs were always very gracious and we had big fun.  And I said time and time again to them all when they would thank me for opening up my home to this little social experiment that “If my car is in the driveway, my door is open; no invitation necessary.”  And I meant it, truly and sincerely, and I said it often.  Yet, in the two years that I did MMIs, no one ever took me up on it. 

I guess it is just not done these days because it is not on the schedule, or perhaps people are too afraid of intruding on someone else’s schedule and space.  They may be thinking of a time when someone unexpectedly stopped by their own house, just to drop off their child after a scheduled playdate or something, and they apologized profusely for their house being “a mess.”  When, in reality, there may have been a few piles here and there from projects that they were are actively working on, but a mess is very unlikely in an era where most of us have a cleaning service come every two weeks.  Perhaps they just don’t want to be the one on the flip side of that apology by showing up at my house unannounced.  I can pretty much guarantee that when unannounced guests showed up at my mother’s when I was a kid, they moved aside the pile of fabric that she was cutting out on the dining room table and sat down to have their cup of coffee and a chat – no apologies, no regrets – and my mom did not have a cleaning service.  We have come to think that if every room in our house doesn’t look as though it is camera-ready for a Pottery Barn catalog shoot, then we are living in squalor and can’t enjoy someone’s company.  Again with the schedules and order when it really should be just about going visiting! 

So today after three different knocks on my front door by tree service companies who happened to be in the area working on cleanup of all the fallen limbs from the recent snow and wind storms (I guess my yard was truly a mess to bring in so many offers of service!), as I stood in my kitchen unshowered after a brutal Body Combat® workout at the gym and a 45 minute bike ride, putting on a much needed pot of coffee, in walks my very own “Kramer,” my dear friend Sharon.  Not only did she show up unannounced but she stayed and had coffee and chatted with me for two hours.  And neither she nor I cared  that I was post-workout sweaty and that my kitchen had three days worth of newspapers scattered about on the kitchen island along with the kids’ breakfast dishes.  We talked and laughed at length about lots of things, including this whole phenomenon of the pleasure of unannounced visitors and she promised that she would do it again soon.  And I believe that she will because now she knows where my cereal cabinet is and it doesn’t get more Sienfeld-esque than that.