Me versus Us

The problem, she said, is with the me versus us generation. We all turned our heads towards her small framed body sitting on the floor in the living room. She was sprawled out like an easy woman, dressed entirely in black and with a hideous hairdo. She had these awful bangs. With hairspray, the bangs were spaced out far apart in clumps and never moved. And it was immediately apparent that the years of smoking had done a number on her face. The wrinkles congregated underneath her eyes and her ears; her face was hanging on by her stories and her furious love for her husband.

My friends and I had just arrived in Long Island from Alabama and were making a pitstop in Long Island by his grandparent's house. We were on a road trip set to explore the east, and were feeling pretty confident now having traversed several states and landed in New York. Nestled in a suburban neightborhood was this Italian household with statues out front with good smelling food and particular accents through the door. We were greeted by his aged grandmother first and foremost who stood no taller than five feet at most. She took turns shaking all our hands with the gentlelest shake I've yet to experience. Her voice was throaty and it called us to the living room where the Santas and Snowmen hung, alongside the yards of intertwined Christmas lights strung on an artificial gawdy sparkling tree.

The five us in a line trailed through this new household, which reminded us all deep down of a house we had been to before. This is a grandparent's house, perhaps somewhat like our grandparent's back home, wherever home is for the five of us. It was friendly, the carpet red, and the decoration welcoming. She invited us to take our seats while she went to find Grandpa Buckley.

We sprawled out, some at the kitchen table with the others claiming the finer and more cushiony chairs and loveseat. On the walls, in between the decoration, hung numerous family pictures and instruments. The instrument hanging a few feet above my head read Chloe. It was handpainted in small white letters and looked eager to be held. To the left end of the living room, there stood an older piano, which I could tell by looking at it that it was probably out of tune and could use a good fingering.

My mother played late at night, and it always put me to sleep. I'm not sure where our piano has gone.

We sat quietly taking in the new room and watching as Luke walked to a wall and too k down one of the hanging guitars. He naturally held it like a child and stroked it cooly. Grandpa Buckley made his way up the stairs and peered in through the door before entering. He was beautiful. Perhaps in his sixties, late fifties, he was a man any woman could find herself falling for. Mrs. Buckley, his wife with the bangs, was a lucky lady. He walked in, grabbed Luke with a handshake and a consuming hug. We automatically stood up at this point to take our turns. We all received hugs and a wiff of his masculine smelling cologne.

He was wearing a worn in khaki jacket with stylish blue jeans for an older man. He still had his hair and it was a prettily aged grey which he kept neatly brushed for appearance's sake. He matched his wife on a comfort level, plopping himself in the only chair left available. He smiled cooly at his wife who sat on the floor directing him. You could tell that their attraction was and always had been mutual. Whenever he entered the room, he was the only man in the room and vice versa. Their appartment was never lonely I can imagine.

To establish this even further, their first story is to tell Luke about their garden in the back. Luke is strumming while his grandfather and grandmother talk back and forth, telling each other while telling us about their project. Their project had been to grow a garden in their backyard and now it was not only a garden but it now included a walking terrace, a pool, a storage house, and the newest two additions: a hanging street light and old fashioned telephone.

"A telephone?" I asked. "Why the telephone?" And so Grandma Buckley who is bobbing her head a little to Luke's guitar playing, explains to us that her husband has just had open heart surgery and she likes to keep a phone in every room because she hates for him to be alone. "We are never far apart," she says. "I like to be where ever he is," she explains.

He smiles to acknowledge her statement. But surely she is mistaken. This man is too good looking to have a faulty health. If he were a smoker as well, the lines haven't appeared in his face. His wife looks twice his age but in reality, she tells us that there were married when she was sixteen and he a few years older.

The conversation starter at the Buckleys revolved around their constant togetherness, which soon flowed into today's divorce rate. Grandma Buckley, whose terrible bangs were now smoothing themselves into the walls of her house, spoke like a sultry young woman who moved her body gently to the music of a concert in the attempt to capture the musician's attention.

She asked us all where we were from with a strange curiosity. Alabama was entirely foreign to her.

"I grew up in Brooklyn, " you see. "I've never been out of New York in my life. Luke's parents were the first to get out, and we've heard nothing but good since they left," she said.

"I love it here," she said. "See, I lived in the city before I met my husband and moved out to this part of Long Island, and things were a lot different back then." "If there's anything you want to know about the city, I can tell you because I've seen it and I know what it's like."

"Are you guys planning on heading to the city anytime soon?"

"Yes, Luke responded, taking a respite from his playing the guitar. "We've going to take a train into downtown on New Year's Eve for cousin Michael's party."

"Oh boy," she said. "Well, you should be careful. New York is a dangerous city. When I was a kid, I would climb up the high rise stairs to my parent's apartment because they wouldn't give me a key. I kept thinking that I would eventually fall and there was always the fear that someone would follow me and I would be alone with a robber or murderer, you know?"

"But when I lived in Brooklyn, there were a lot of families around so we all took care of each other. New York has changed in the past thirty something years, and I like it much better out here away from the noise and mess. Back then, life was different you know?"

"You got married young, moved to a house with your new husband, stayed at home because it was more expensive to work, and made your marriage work. Now everywhere you look, someone's getting divorced. Everybody's too focused on themselves and fail to look at things from the other person's perspective.

My husband and I always worked things out, and we're happy as can be, you know?"

Luke whispered into my ear, my family doesn't believe in divorce.

Stable marriages were entirely foreign to me and so when Grandpa Buckley asked the group if their parents were divorced or together, I kept my mouth shut. My mother had recently divorced and remarried for the third time now, and I was not sure how they would take the news. I mean it was my family so it shouldn't matter but I cannot as easily explain my family situation as did Grandma Buckley. She said she married at sixteen and now lives in a cozy house decorated with hundreds of santa figurines but wears all black. My mother likes to change things up a bit, wears colors, and just moved into a million dollar mantion in Memphis, Tennessee. Her decorations are slim but are made with gold.

Like I said, sitting here, listening to a happy older couple who would probably spend the next ten to twenty years of their life smoking and working in their garden happily together, reminded me of someone's house I had been to before. For all of us, at least for myself, it was every child's haven. A grandparent's house was where you went for exciting stories, cookies, music in the living room, and the genuine smiles that stayed plastered on both grandma and grandpa's faces.

Grandpa Buckley came and stood by my wall, where he took down the guitar which had Chloe written on it. We swiped it from its nail with caress, and returned back to his seat in the chair. Our first stop in New York and we would be serenaded with guitars and a trip back into the past. He suggested that he and Luke play a song they both knew. So Luke stopped, gave his grandfather full reign, and they started to stum a song entirely unfamilar to me. As soon as they started playing, the grandmother started to clap their hands with a rythym she probably had always got right.

Her statement struck me pretty hard. I've only witnessed a few solid relationships my entire life and am never sure what makes one work. From what I've experienced, the unstable relationships are the more realistic and exciting ones. My parents would try for so long, there would be the ups and downs, before they both just called it quits. But after they separated, both would appear happier for a short while hereafter. But listening to her talk about the success of her long marriage, I started to wonder what it would be like if I had let my own relationships play out a little longer or further more, what it would have been like if my mother had stuck to my first father.

On the loveseat, I closed my eyes and pictured Grandma Buckley, then Chloe, climbing down the stairs from her parent's apartments before they arrived home from work. She would walk down to a nearby park to spread her books out and watch the people travel near her. She would by now have developed a tolerance and fearlessness towards all strangers. And so on the five hundred and seventy seventh time she visited the park, she would be prepared to make conversation with the best looking guy there, who would end up being the man she would spend the last years smoking and dancing to music with. She would tell him her name was Chloe, ask where he was from, and say "Oh, yeah? Me too. I've lived in Brooklyn my whole life." It was probably an easy beginning because they were both from a city so big you could spend everyday of your life running into someone new.

A year from then, after family dinners, and smooth conversations, third base but never fourth, he would get down on his knees to propose, and it would be everything that she had asked for and more.

There would be fights after she gave childbirth. They needed space, he had to work more, they couldn't make ends meet, but they probably found themselves sitting in a living room forcing themselves to bring back that smooth conversation. If they could just get it back like it was before, if they could force themselves to remember the way it was before, then they would be okay forever.

And now after fight number twenty, they find themselves more in love, working on a garden together and placing phones in every room so they will never be apart.

I open my eyes to Grandpa Buckley's words, "Stop playing like a pussy, Luke. Pick it up!" Okay, so of course, their meeting was a little different and their history a little bit more complex, but I am allowed to let my imagination run a little wild. I'm in New York, a city, where people climb down the same apartment stairs and visit the same parks daily, knowing full and well that the potential to meet someone new is availabe each day.

This is a healthy stop for a traveler. If anything, I'd like to learn what it's like to make situations and relationships work. I saw it today at the Buckley's, and I've seen it a couple of times at my sister's father's house. But never mine. I think that deep down aside from the group from Alabama, I am craving someone who will want a phone in each room so we'll never be apart. And surely, Chloe met someone one day, who she thought would be the one, but he passed by and the conversation didn't flow like she had hoped. As I see it, she had some climbing to do.

I'll get this climbing thing right too. I'll embrace the city of strangers and pick a few stairs myself. It's lonely to be young in someone else's grandparent's warm living room.

Was she right in saying? "That's the problem with the me versus us generation. Everybody's thinking about themselves"