I need some old people. My 5 ½ year old talks so much, has so much to say, that we have long ago reached the limit of what we can listen to on a daily basis.  But he keeps going.   He is smart, insightful, creative, comedic, and if my definition is correct, an extrovert.  Or maybe it is just part of being 5 ½.  He seems to process most of his thoughts out loud.  He loves to challenge me with his ‘tricky’ word puzzles and he wants math problems.  He likes to play twenty questions.  Constantly.  All day.  Every day.  Non-stop.  See where I’m going with this?  Car rides can be mentally exhausting.  I take naps now.

When I was a kid, we had lots of older neighbors.  The Steinacker’s lived right next door.  Willie and Katie never had children so they became like grandparents to me.  According to my mom, I would go over there almost every day…either knock on the door or press my nose up against the back screen door to see into the kitchen or join Katie while she was gardening in the back yard, hanging up laundry to dry or sitting on the back step dipping her arthritic hands into a coffee can full of hot paraffin wax.  We talked.  We hung out, really. 

On the other side of our house was Lizzy.  She lived alone. But I would go over to her house and knock on the door.  She always had a full candy dish on her dining room table.  That may have been my excuse for going over to hang out with her.  Otherwise, we would sit at the kitchen table and talk, while she drank her coffee.  I remember she would fill a tea cup full of coffee, then put cream in it so that it overflowed onto the saucer.  She would stir it so that more would spill on the saucer.  Then she would remove the cup and drink from the saucer, since the temperature of the coffee in the saucer was cooler.  I loved watching her do that.  I would hang out with her while she worked her flower garden.  She grew huge orange and black poppies and enormous peonies.  I can’t remember what we would talk about.  Just chatting I guess.  I didn’t have the kind of childhood where I experienced any trauma and needed someone to talk to about being sad.  I guess I just liked to hang out with people.  And these people were right next door, they were home and they didn’t send me away.

On the other side of Lizzy’s house lived the other Steinacker’s.  Geraldine and Les were brother and sister and I spent a lot of time with them as well.  Geraldine always greeted me in German.  “Guten Tag!”  I had my very own special little drawer in one of the pieces of furniture in their dining room.  Geraldine would put stickers or anything interesting she received in her junk mail in “my drawer”.  So I would knock on their door and when I went in, my first stop would be my drawer.  And then we would just chat.  I liked to rock in the rocking chair in their living room.  Or eat Saltines and Fresca  with Geraldine while her other brother Norm sat at the kitchen table on Sundays doing the crossword puzzle. 

So, it seems a big part of my daily life as a child consisted of dropping in on my elderly neighbors and hanging out with them.  And since reconnecting with childhood friends via Facebook over the last year, it seems they, too, spent their childhoods doing the same thing.  We have been sharing stories about what a huge impact our older neighbors have had on who we are today. 

And I can’t help but think…this is what my 5 ½ year old needs.  I could see him confidently walking door to door, visiting, chatting, wondering aloud about infinity and war and growing watermelon and how hot the sun is and  playing twenty questions. 

This idea of kids needing or being enriched by the attention of seniors in their neighborhood connects to bigger issues in urban planning, housing and community building.  But for now, I will keep it at the simplest level.  I need some old people.

So, how would I do this?  It’s not like signing him up for camp or gymnastics class…I guess I have to go knock on my 90-year old neighbor’s door and schedule a “play date”.

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