E Pluribus Unum

By Barbara Groark

Have you seen the television commercial for Enablex, a pharmaceutical treatment for bladder control problems? The ones with the bouncing water balloons in different colors? It has a group of ‘balloons’ representing the class reunion of 1968, who all seem to have to run to the bathroom a lot. Aren’t we about 25 or 30 years too early for this representation? Shouldn’t we all write to the advertiser complaining that the reunion year ought to be somewhere in the 1940s or early 1950s? The writers must be about 23 (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

I grew up in Cinnaminson on the Moorestown side of Route 130, versus the Delaware River side. My family moved there when I was nine and my mother was pregnant with her fifth child (there would be six). My parents grew up in West Philadelphia, married and moved to Clifton Heights, Pennsylvania, and then we moved to “the country” as my Irish Aunt Win called it, that is, South Jersey. My grade school was Sacred Heart School in Riverton, a few blocks from the river, where the nuns were from Boston and Nova Scotia and had very funny peaked hats and tried to turn us all into little princes and princesses. Before the new parish of St. Charles Borromeo (famous now for its June carnival) was started, we all took the long bus ride on Riverton Road from our bare-new-tree and new-split-level-house side of the highway through leafy Riverton, across the old tracks (now the River Line) to the school, whose original church with its dark-red-painted, wood-slat siding, was built in 1892 for the Irish girls, of which several were relatives of mine (one of the Brennan families), who were the maids in many of the big houses along the waterfront and through the town. The ride was like taking a trip back through time every day, and I occasionally still have dreams of riding along this road. The bus driver was Father Delzell, who occasionally sang to keep us all quiet. He was a very good tenor. We’d hear him again singing the litany amazingly during First Friday afternoons in church. It was interesting to see him in the bus, and then “on stage” in dramatic gold vestments.

But my first school, where I went to first and second and started third grade, was called Holy Cross School in Springfield, Pennsylvania. My first-grade class had 70 or so students, and there were four first grades. My sister Pat started school a year later, and there were 95 or so kids in her particular class, again with four classes of the grade. Our Christmas pageants and May processions were conducted with military precision, with a lot of standing and waiting with folded hands, and I can see now that this was the only way to proceed with numbers like these. The alternative was not to do any of these things, but I think the nuns really needed to get out of the classroom once in a while. I’m much more sympathetic nowadays with those teachers (especially after I taught second grade for a year in Camden).

My third-grade class in the new school, Sacred Heart, had only about 50 kids, and there were only two classes of each grade. (Marie Griffin, Eileen Costello, Janet Sanford, Christine Hill, correct me if I’m wrong on this.) I was pretty good at spelling bees, and have the Miraculous Medals to prove it. Well, I don’t really still have them, but what I’m trying to say is that these numbers were just ordinary to us. Most families had several kids in different grades, with more coming along.

In fact, in Cinnaminson alone, I can name ten families of ten or more children, all Catholic, some of whom moved through Holy Cross High School later. OK, I’ll do it: Vassallos, Rineharts, Kostiuks, Corrs, mmmmmmmm. Well, I confess that, even after consulting my sisters, I can only remember four family names. I used to have them on the tip of my fingers. Guess I’ll have to do a memory dump of more recent useless information, of which there is quite a lot, so I can get back to these important facts.

And then in Holy Cross High School there were the Moseleys and Callahans from Moorestown, with Mary and Kate (or Mary Kate, or Mary Kay, what did you finally settle on?) in our class, and I think the Zehlers were ten. (Or was it fewer, Annette?) Who else?

So perhaps birth control was inevitable after that. One father of a family of ten once said to me, “If all my kids have ten kids, I’m moving to California.”

However, if all the smart people used birth control, why do we have the Congress that we have today? How smart were they?

But how can I criticize? I have no children, a condition not unheard of in people from large families. And we were only six, only average-to-large numbers for that time.

And now that we are in the third quarter of our life span, the financial marketplace advises us to put our supposed millions into medical care, pharmaceuticals, and other services for the aged. Invest in our decrepitude. The numbers will be staggering. That’s something to think about, isn’t it?

I once sat down at a table at an event with a woman, maybe five years older than our graduating class, whose husband as a side job had just made an album of doo-wop music and was traveling around New Jersey with his group. Her view of the financial advice to our age group was, “Nursing homes? Sitting at home in rocking chairs wringing our hands? This is what they are telling us? Sorry, something livelier please - I’m not done yet!”

Me neither. Not that we’ll be training for the Olympics, but there’s no need to rush things.

Occasionally, though, I see a thought on the horizon, and I wait for it to come in closer so I can see what it is, but it just hangs out there. What’s up with that?

Here’s a poem by Billy Collins.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrEPJh14mcU