An Older Lady Reacts: Sex and Severed Heads

flowers and Carrie's sofa

What’s more old-fashioned-looking than a bouquet from your own garden? I look at this picture and suddenly it’s the 1890s again and my grandmother Carrie Maloney is home from college playing the piano in the parlor. (OK If I’m honest I’ll admit this bouquet was supplemented by a few gorgeous blooms that came my way on Mothers Day.) And speaking of  mothers and earlier times here below is a picture from my kitchen of  the framed sampler our famous friend needle-genius Ruth McDowell once made for me. It memorializes a phrase my mom used all the time, whenever she was confronted with the crudeness of modern life. “Oh Say!” she would shout when she saw kids making out in public. “Why aren’t those children home studying?”

Oh Say Sampler

Mom was born in 1907 which is hard even for me to believe since I still see myself as a mere girl. Her mom was born in 1878, the young Carrie who wrote sweet passionate letters and was dead by 31. Imagine a couple of people like these two fending off today’s many assaults to gentility! Imagine that I actually took my mom to see "The Godfather" when it opened! Because it had been such a good book? Because I totally forgot about that sex scene up against a bedroom door between Sonny Corleone and one his sister’s bridesmaids? The theatre was pin-drop silent, and suddenly there was mom’s clarion voice dripping with shock and scorn - and that was even before we got to the severed horse head in the old gangster’s bed:  “OH SAY!” she yelled. I almost melted with the embarrassment.