The Magic Hour

After dinner activity lay somewhere between bedlam, a genteel retirement to the parlor, and my father's customary Beethoven piano recital. These evenings held some of my fondest memories of my early family life.

As I was in college by this time, I was deemed too mature to accompany my siblings and their friends for the usual summer after-dinner games. My parents expected me to remain in the parlor to discuss the topics of the evening: often, these discourses began as quasi-serious philosophical treatises; then, as the evening progressed and wine or spirits much loosened the inhibitions of our dinner guests, the discussion lapsed into games of matching wits or attempts at making sophomoric arguments into sound arguments.

Personally, I found these affairs tedious.

The conversation paled in comparison with the genuinely sophomoric arguments we college freshmen held late into the night. The topics my student friends and I discussed revolved around relationship blunders, broken hearts, on how to get hot people into your bed, and on which frosh course is best to take to avoid flunking out.

In my parents' middle-aged world, they were trying to appear young, with-it and collegiate. The main difference was that I and my college pals were actually living the fantasies that society awarded us: the right to behave less maturely than ever before.

My middle-aged parents were trying to recover their youthful experiences by dredging now-ancient memories of their  supposedly wild youth, then dusting them off and presenting them to me as if their foibles were better or worse, or just more real - than those that I and my collegiate pals experienced - or that their experiences were more important because my parents' generation was concerned with 'issues', 'revolution', and 'unprecendented cultural change'.

If my parents expected me to pale before their proud exhortations of the 60's, I couldn't. I stood speechless. I tried to explain: I wasn't there, I didn't do all those things. In truth, much of that era is lost on me, except for the carefully crafted ideologies published in my 'Contemporary American History,'  or in my 'Culture and Politics' class.

And so my summer evenings at home were spent listening to the old folks talk about their youth, while I wished I could return to my youth and freedom, as I had lived it in college.

And as much as I longed to break free from my parents' lives, I did not want to join my younger siblings in their youthful games in the garden. So I remained wedged between yesterday and tomorrow, with little breathing room for my personal moment of today. I longed for a magic hour.

My younger sisters and my younger brother seemed to have the world at their feet. They would gather at the edge of the parlor door, stand on tiptoes with their necks craned as they stood together in a huddle - appearing as a clumsy cluster of children trying to look taller, older and more responsible than they actually were.

The reason for their awkward anticipation was no more complex than their desire to engage in a game of tug-of-war, tag, or in a treasure hunt. They grew as bored with the grown-ups, just as I did.

At these appearances, my siblings often brought young neighborhood friends who also begged for an hour of unrestrained silliness before bedtime.

And so this motley crew of scrubbed, groomed and usually polite children transformed into a gaggle of children whose plaited locks and combed tresses  became ruffled, whose knickers  became ruined with muddy grass stains and whose Oxfords became unrecognizably scuffed.

But it was this one magic hour each day that gave them their simplest pleasure: to be children.

Not until they left home for college would they again find this simple pleasure. It was during these unsupervised moments that my siblings had the pleasure of being themsleves without the interference or admonishment from a grown-up.  Such an appearance by a grown-up would undoubtedly leave an invisible scar upon these games, or so they believed.

There was a magical tension in the air.

Even a grown-up's unwitting glance from behind a tree would break the tension in which these games were engulfed. During these games, self-consciousness did not exist and the children played as they never played before and as they never would again.

One summer evening, as my uncle was strolling in the garden after dinner (on account of him having felt lonely after his wife's death),  he felt a deep longing to return to his childhood days.

In walking around the garden, my uncle did not make any deliberate motion to signal his presence to anyone; indeed, he was not aware that children were present in the garden.

But upon looking over a hedgerow too high for children to see over but just high enough for my uncle to peer over, an occasion arose in which my uncle accidentally caught my tallish but younger brother's eye across the hedge.

My brother and his friends were pulling on a heavy rope in a deadly serious game of tug-of-war against my sisters and her friends. Never mind that my sisters and her friends outnumbered my brother and his friends two-to-one: the boys were trying their mightiest to yank the rope so as to catch the girls in an awkward tumble so their dresses and petticoats would be muddied, and the girls would have to let go of the rope only to land unceremoniously on their bottoms.

This is, in fact, exactly what happened. The boys gave a quick, hard double yank to the rope, then let up some slack. When my brother caught my sisters not paying attention to the fierce competition, my brother winked to his friends that the end was soon at hand.

The boys then gave another quick, hard double-yank, let up a little more slack and then gave a final, quick double-yank that rippled through the length of the rope like the crack of a whip. The boys knew the game soon would be theirs.

My sisters and her friends were caught by surprise; and so, one-by-one, from the youngest to the oldest, my sisters let go of the rope as it began to sting their tiny hands from the awful jerking of the tugs and yanks.

The girls, caught off-guard, did slip and slide in the muddy grass and landed on their bottoms, pretty dresses, petticoats and all. They wore a look of shame on their faces, as the boys laughed out loud.

At first, the oldest sister of my younger sisters felt angry and vengeful. She did not like being beaten by our brother and his ragtag friends.

Unbeknownst to the boys, my sisters and their friends were plotting their revenge, which they promised would show its hand another day.

They would catch a dozen garden toads and hide them in my brother's drawer next to his bed, only to open the drawer after he went to sleep. The thought of this future sisterly mischief comforted the girls greatly and mitigated their embarassment.  And so, after an initial pout from the girls' team, they all shared a good laugh.

Upon standing up, my brother was the first to see my uncle looking over the hedge. My uncle had seen everything. My uncle had been an unwitting party to this brotherly mischief. My brother dusted himself off and gathered all the pride he could muster, at 14 years of age.

My brother looked sheepishly at my uncle for having been caught as the instigator of such mischief. In turn, my uncle blushed in shame for having unwittingly spied upon their game and for having spoiled their fun.

Even though only a brief moment lapsed, the lapse stretched into an eternity etched in the children's souls. At the moment the children became aware that their frolic had been spied upon, they stood freeze-frame and slack-jawed with the pain of disappointment widening their eyes.

They and my uncle exchanged knowing glances of mutual embarassment and shame.

For several years afterwards, other summer evenings would see my siblings and their friends play their usual repertoire of garden games. Not one word was ever again spoken about the incident concerning my siblings and my uncle, but  that moment had dampened their future fun.

After that evening, their games were never as silly nor as spontaneous as they had been before. The invisible, magic hour of non self-conscious play seemed to be lost forever.

The girls did capture the dozen toads and did let them loose upon our brother one night that summer as he lay sleeping; he let out a yelp so shrill that the dog turned tail and fled the room; the girls squealed with delight as they hid behind the French doors, listening. 

The girls were now even with the boys, but they took little satisfaction in their deceit. The incident concerning my uncle took the fun out of their childs play.

Before I ran off to college the first year, the children would run back to the house after playing, all giddy and stumbling over each other as they noisily crowded through the kitchen's back door.

Now they entered the house in an orderly, somber fashion. They were older and no longer played as children, but as young adults whose actions were  performed as purposeful actions.

When I returned to college that fall, I am certain the children played these garden games nearly every warm night. I am certain they laughed and cried as they had done before and that they seemed to be without a care in the world.

Sitting in my dorm these past few months, I, too, remembered that evening last summer that droned on as my parents sang 60s protest songs, prayed for the young men and women who did not return home from war, and decided for themselves that their youthful years were the best of times.

That same evening last summer, my siblings came  to the same conclusion - that they had enjoyed the best of times of their very short youth, that the magic hour of their childhood was forever lost.

Looking back upon that summer (and the incident between my uncle and my siblings), I realized I was forever wedged between the world of my parents and that of my siblings and that the magic hour was not lost but that it would be forever lodged within in our memories, as the hour when we experience something never before or since experienced.

***

The Magic Hour  is a fiction I'd  written in 2001; I had stored it elsewhere and had forgot about it until recently. 

Copyright © 2001 - 2008, Kathryn Esplin-Oleski