Jan Galletta, My Life: 50s
Never having been a quick study, I had to reach retirement age before realizing that what I really want to be when I grow up is just one of the girls.
This occurred to me after a crowded month of merrymaking, during which I saw a dozen or so of my favorite women friends on several festive occasions.
While I’ve always relished being with my female relatives, whose differing personalities seem to belie a documented biological link, our time together has always been limited by the fact that all of them live hundreds of miles from here. And in my male-dominated household, where conversation always comes with the TV as backdrop and the talk itself generally runs to trout streams and fly-tying, I often forget how funny girl-speak can be.
My friend, the vivacious redhead, not long ago entertained her luncheon companions by recounting a recent spate of commode-related casualties.
In the span of a week, she said, she’d dropped a blow dryer, a curling iron and a handheld computer in various toilets she’d visited.
She said after she lost the hairdo appliances she’d perched on the tub sill and sink ledge, she gave up bathroom-site grooming. But since her PalmPilot took the bowl plunge when it fell from the purse she’d hung on a stall-door hook, she’s braved bathrooms only when empty-handed, she said.
At the other end of the table, my friend, the surgical nurse, described the mud events that closed her daughter’s Colorado restaurant for a month. The way she told it made spring skiing sound like a secondary tourist draw, compared to the earthy action dished up at the Steamboat Springs eatery.
Later, my friend, the recreational bicyclist, told of a scholarly book she was reading that was set in a mental institution. But as the wine flowed, she repeatedly referred to the insane asylum as an “assail asylum,” and I kept flashing on the not-so-serious fishing scene in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” instead.
“The girls” can make me laugh even by not showing up for social soirées, as when my friend, the flower grower, called to give her regrets for my husband, Fred’s, retirement keg party.
The event was the first of two weekend functions, planned to take advantage of the presence of visiting relatives, and we’d already known she couldn’t attend the second affair, a baby shower, because of a long-scheduled family wedding.
But she said now that she couldn’t be at Fred’s party either because of the sudden death of an elderly relative — sad news that she tempered by telling us that fortunately the musician lined up to play for the wedding had agreed to do a “two for,” and bring his bagpipes to the funeral as well.
Somehow, I didn’t see the men in my life having conversations like these, and as I pondered the differences between guy- and girl-talk, it reminded me that I was with many of these same women at a shower when someone read “Recommendations for a Successful Marriage” to the future bride as a joke.
Consisting of 11 suggestions for husband-pleasing, the advice supposedly was taken from a 1950 home-economics textbook, and my favorite item concerned greeting one’s husband upon his return from work.
“You may have a dozen things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time,” it counseled. “Let him speak first and try to understand his world of strain and pressure, his need to be home and relax.”
The recommendations amused me so much that I had to get a copy, if only to remind myself that despite the disparities in earnings and opportunities that still exist between the sexes, feminism has marked some successes.
Mainly, it’s brought freedom of choice to women, even if one’s ambition is only to be one of the girls.
E-mail Jan Galletta at jangalletta@yahoo.com
