Читать книгу Lucy Scott’s Grand Stand - Alan Sorem - Страница 6

My name is Lucy Royster Scott. This is my book. I’ve written it to give other older people courage to take a stand for the life they want rather than what the world dictates.

At times it takes a while for me to remember a name, an address, or a date. I’ve heard that the brain is a magnificent computer that in our later years is so full of data that it may require extra time for sorting information requested. I sometimes take naps in the afternoon. I usually go to bed no later than nine o’clock and rise by six.

I am not feeble, infirm or disengaged from life. Respect my opinion: Age is an attitude, not a condition.

I have always lived in Brooklyn, New York. I grew up in Bay Ridge an only child, rare in my neighborhood. My parents shipped me off to my maternal grandmother in Sparta, New Jersey during the summers.

My grandmother was born in 1876. She was a widow and enormously proud of her deceased husband, a West Point graduate who died in France in 1917. Her views on manners were very precise and my activities prompted her to say often during my summer visits, “Lucy, so unladylike!”

She disliked it when I rolled down the grassy hill in her backyard, when I stuck my tongue out at older boys when they sauntered by on the sidewalk, or put my chewing gum under the front pew at church on Sundays, and especially when I whistled a John Philip Sousa march while washing dishes after supper.

Nevertheless I adored her. She had backbone. She could sniff at my antics, but if anyone else expressed an opinion about my behavior, they received an icy stare from her cold blue eyes.

I think it was her stories about her husband and the letters she read to me from wartime France that prompted my early curiosity about all things French.

I live in The Russell House, a comfortable Brooklyn apartment house built in 1926 by Roy Russell across from the Park. It was his first major construction project and he designed it with high ceilings and spacious rooms with grand views because he and his family were to live there.

October 24th, 2013 was my 85th birthday, the sixty-first birthday I have celebrated since my husband and I moved into The Russell House. Jim is gone now, and of the three bedrooms, two are storage rooms of memorabilia for his awards at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and items from the lives of my three children.

But enough of all that. On the eve of my birthday, I had a fairly usual Wednesday: Aqua-aerobics at eleven in the pool at the community center, then a light lunch at the café nearby. I returned books to the Public Library and checked out a romantic novel by one of my favorite authors. I went on to the high school to meet with three students for French tutoring. Afterwards I picked up my special treat at The Bagel Hole on 7th Avenue and made my way home to enjoy two halves of a lovely poppy seed bagel with cream cheese, lox, Bermuda onion and sliced tomato.

After my feast I passed on the evening news and settled in for my annual pre-birthday reading of selected items in my packet of letters I have saved over the years. I always begin with two letters from my mother’s brother, dear Uncle Paul. And this year I will end with a letter that Mr. K slipped under my door recently.