Chapter 16 - With the Taylors

Sundays were spent back in Smithvale with my real family. It took only fifteen minutes to get there but all day to get back in the rhythm of the family. Life at the Taylor household went on much as it always had with a few changes. Felicity was married so she no longer lived at home, Tyler was in Vietnam, and Gertie was a new bride. Only four of the eight Taylors were living at home. We seemed to be split into two families, the grown ups and the kids. Robert, Emily, Rebecca, and Morgan were still home, past the Robert torture days, into the “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida” days. The revolution hit the younger four somewhat, the older three not at all. Robert had mutton chop sideburns and wore his hair longer; the girls wore flowered mini skirts and dresses with white go-go boots. Their hair was long and straight and their pant legs were wider. The styles in public schools were changing.
My family welcomed me, but they were withholding judgment. I still had a good job, I was evolving slowly, but I fit in less each time I visited. Even so Sundays unfolded as tradition demanded. We sat around the living room and chatted. We watched Felicity’s new baby, took turns holding and feeding the baby, we laughed and ate and celebrated being Taylors.
Our family was actually larger because Felicity came with Dean and the baby, Abby, Gertie and Jason came with their puppy, Waffles, and Tyler’s pregnant wife, Sara was usually with us, Tyler being always on our minds and in our conversation.
Augusta would cook Sunday dinner and then all of us “girls” would help: peel the potatoes, cut up the vegetables, set the table, clean the pots and pans. We no longer fit at the table and often had to eat buffet style. In summer we always ate outside on picnic tables, weather permitting, and sat around the semi-bare backyard in lawn chairs. Hobart’s grass was slowly coming back as backyard games died out.
In the summer of ’68 Hobart had to deal with a cement block cellar wall that was buckling. He was grateful to have new male energy in the family, and although he missed Tyler, Dean and Jason helped fill the void. They also helped with the cellar wall project. First they had to install jack posts in the basement to hold the house up while the wall was removed. Then they had to dig out the offending cellar wall to expose and remove the old cement blocks. Most could be reused with new mortar. They had to rebuild the wall, fill in along the outside and lower the house slowly back onto the new wall. This was a huge project and a hungry one, so lots of cooking was also required.
I kept going home, almost every Sunday, even though I had to wiggle my way back into the family each time, even though it became clear that my family approved less and less of my lifestyle. I helped with the cooking, sat around and talked, talked, talked, did dishes, set tables, and held Abby whenever it was my turn. I found my family hopelessly conservative and square, no revolution happening here, which should have been a clue that the cultural impact of the hippie movement was not quite as widespread as I imagined. I refused, however, to believe that my family reflected the American majority more closely than I did. I loved them, but felt that I was in the mainstream and they, in a little backwater somewhere. Felicity was still styling herself on Jackie Kennedy Onassis for heaven’s sake. Who’s judging whom?
Once in a while Annie came with me to visit my family or I went with her to visit her family. Annie’s family lived out in the sticks. She was the oldest in a family with ten kids. Most of her sisters and brothers were quite young. They thought we were as cool as we thought we were. At Annie’s house we played baseball with the kids or sat in the crowded kitchen and talked with her mom, Wilma. Her Dad, Harwin, would bustle in from his travels, order Wilma to find some papers he needed for one of his real estate deals and then disappear again. I think Annie’s family had more money, but less available cash than mine. Annie also had a brother who was born hydrocephalic and irreversibly brain damaged. He was treated like any other member of the family, dressed each morning and carried downstairs, but he could not sit up, could not feed himself, and would always wear diapers. Everyone lived his or her life around him, and all the care of him fell to Wilma, who fortunately was a cheerful and sassy soul. His disability affected every aspect of Annie’s family’s life. Annie took very few people home with her. She loved her family but her desire to escape was palpable. We didn’t go there often.
On Mondays, in our pretty apartment by the park, we would wake up to our jobs and our music and our friends, our movies, our concerts, our barhopping and our increasingly more frequent highs. We felt more at home with this life than we did with our own families.