A Garden Of Love, Sprinkle It With Affection Elita Sohmer Clayman

Six weeks ago when we saw Ethan and Ava in their home out of
state, Ethan sat at the dinner table at Carrabas Restaurant and he said “I wish
Grammie and Grandpa lived next door to us.” What a fantastic and enthralling
statements for us Grandpa and Grammie to hear. The other night when they were
here and we were at a Chinese Buffet and Grill in Reisterstown, Ava said “When
I am in school, I think about Mommie and Daddy and Ethan and Grammie and
Grandpa and my friend Jessica.”

How do you get in this world two better young grandchildren
at this age in our senior lives?

I did not have grandparents and to tell the truth I envied
my friend whose grandparents came every Sunday to visit her and her brother
Louis. Her grandfather drove a gorgeous automobile and since this was about
1944, do you know what it would be worth if it was still ‘alive’ today? He use
to leave the car door open and she and I would sit in the back seat and pretend
we had a chauffeur waiting to drive us where we wanted to go. We must have seen
a chauffeur in the Saturday movie event all the kids went to and it cost about
twelve cents or so.

This was our luxury in those days of being about ten years
old then in 1944.We had no television sets, IPods, cellphones, air conditioning
or exercise machines. We had our radios where we listened to stories like soap
operas or comedic shows like Jack Benny with his lead singer Dennis Day, who
sang during the episode of Jack and his wife Mary.

One thing we had in our possession then was our vivid
imaginations. Since it was radio, we had to imagine what the characters looked
like in real life. Sometimes we saw their actual pictures in magazines and we
were so disappointed because we had viewed them in our minds as looking this
way and the pictures showed them looking quite opposite.

A male with a deep voice seemed to us in our heads as being
six feet tall and quite handsome. In real life, he was a short and plain
looking guy. That was the difference between radio and the new invention called
TV. Many of the radio actors did not cross over to TV just because of the looks
you think they had, would not have gone over when we saw them on television.

I remember a soap opera radio show called Lorenzo Jones and
his wife Belle. We use to listen to it if we ate an early dinner. When I one
day saw what Lorenzo and Belle looked like, I was amazed because they were so
different than what we had imagined them to be. After you saw their looks in
the magazine, it was hard to enjoy listening to them on the radio. They were
different people than we had envisioned.

Life is like that, seems sometimes events we imagine will be
a certain way and we do not feel like going there even when we were invited by
someone we care for. Though we do go anyway and often, the time was well spent,
the food was delicious and the company excellent. Then the opposite occurs and
the event we looked forward to for months turns out to be a boring time. So it
is hard to decide what we should feel when invited somewhere and we have lots
of time to think ahead about it.

I mentioned before that a young Verizon technician told me
my voice sounded like I was forty-five. He had never seen me, but the voice was
his age guessing time. I had a salesperson tell me that I sounded too young to
have an almost twenty-one year old grandson. I do not know how a voice confers
so much on the person listening that he can think a person younger than they
are. My dad had this booming voice, he sang in the religious choir as a bass.
He sounded on the phone like he was six feet tall. He was only about five feet
tall or six. So his voice added inches to his height.

Our second Pekingese doggie was a small dog, weighing at her
heaviest seventeen pounds. If you were standing outside the door after you had
rung the doorbell and you heard her barking, you would have imagined she was a
big and hefty German Shepherd.

Things can be difficult to decipher and sometimes we are
stunned to see the opposite of our vision in our heads, the person or even
animal we conceptualized. People now days go online to meet persons of the
opposite sex.However; they do see photos of these people online on the dating
site. Some may put in a younger picture of themselves which is silly; because
as soon as you meet, you know this is a different person looking not a bit like
the younger photo. There is a real estate salesman that advertises locally in a
magazine I receive on Fridays. This picture must be about fifty years old. He
came to the house of my friend to list her home for selling and she was
stunned. Here was this eighty year old man who had put in his ad, his photo of
five decades ago. He felt her dismay when she saw him and she wondered if he
had sent some other salesman to her. He laughed and said “it is time I took a
new photo.” She looked at him in wonderment, on how he could lie about who he
is now.

We often like to show photos of ourselves in our younger
years; that is fine but we cannot advertise something with our photo on it from
fifty years ago. Facebook allows us to show strangers how we looked decades
ago. That is acceptable, because this is for fun, reliving our younger moments.

So to little Ava who thinks about us while she is in
kindergarten and little Ethan who wishes we lived next door to him; that is
perfectly delightful for us because when we are gone, they will remember us at
whatever age we left. My own Dad died when I was thirty and he was just
seventy-two. So he remains that age in my thoughts and I often wonder how he
would have looked had he lived to be perhaps ninety. They called up to wish my
husband happy birthday last night and Ethan said with awe to his grandpa, “you
are eighty-three?” To a little boy, that seems like quite a big age. Hopefully,
grandpa will live for Ethan to say “you are ninety-six?”

This is my wish for all the grandchildren out there, that
they can say something like that to their grandparents. I had none, so I missed
out quite a lot. I envied Anita so much because she had that great ‘old’ guy
come on Sundays in that fancy car and I did not have any. Now I am that
grandparent and we come on Sundays and that is quite swell for us and them too.
I am always quoting sayings. Here is an Elita saying. “ Be grateful for all the
good things in your life; you have a flower garden of dear relatives and as you
grow and mature, they get older. So love them and nourish them with love and appreciate
the devotion they have for you. Sprinkle them with a watering of affection as
you water your plants, because time is short and things change. They and all
your beloved relatives thrive on seeing you, believing in you and most of all
adoring you.”

This is your “GARDEN OF LOVE>”