MAE JULIAN
STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
When you are a child, say kindergarten age, it never occurs to you to wonder what your best friend would be like when you were both over 60.‑ What Waynedale offered its children, was the continuity of starting Kindergarten at Waynedale Grade School, and graduating from Elmhurst together. This is a picture of Marilyn DeLancy and me. Well, it is the older version of Marilyn and me. We became fast friends in Kindergarten, when we had Miss Walters for a teacher. Funny how you never forget the name of your first teacher.
How different things were then. Playground was a time of peril and we never expected to be babied with plastic playground equipment. We may not even have known what plastic was. If you fell out of your swing and skidded on the pavement, you got patched up. If you fell off the perilous merry-go-round, you kept your head down and rolled out. The kids pumping the merry-go-round weren’t expected to halt and go get the teacher. We learned survival skills early.
Marilyn and I were inseparable. We used to go to the Waynedale Woods, before it became Waynedale Park.‑ We had a path that wound around through the woods, and had our initials carved into the “big tree.”‑ It was a feeling of great sadness when we heard they cut it down. All the kids had their names carved in it. It is sad to think that modernization and progress destroyed our cherished memories. We used to go over to the Waynedale Woods and pick wildflowers in the spring by the bucketsful. That was when there were a lot of wildflowers there.
The old Wayndale School has been torn down, and a new one has taken its place. It will never be the same. We had great perils at the old school, too. We would tear around the school on our bikes and couldn’t tell if someone was coming the other way. Crashes were common.‑ Nobody complained about that, either.‑ We would have contests on our bikes on the bleachers. The challenge was to start on one side of the bleacher seat and tear as fast as you could, until you flew off the other end. If you did it right, you would sail off the board and land your bike perfectly. If you lost confidence and slowed at the end, the front of your bike would go straight down and you would go over the handlebars. This provided much amusement. I was one of the ones who chickened out and fell head first. I never did learn to sail like I was supposed to.
The big vacant lot close to the school had the biggest garden spiders in it.‑ We would make a path thru the weeds, making sure we dug a hole and covered it with weeds, as a trap, so the “enemy” would fall in. That was long before television, and our only paid entertainment was the Indiana Theater which showed western movies, double features, comics and the news for only a quarter. Popcorn was 10 cents. Marilyn and I went to lots of movies, too. We did everything together. We used to go out to her farm and she taught me to run and jump off a huge sand dune. It was also my lesson in what sand burrs were. Then, I had to make a choice between the fun of jumping off the sand dune, or jumping and risking the dreaded sand burrs. Wearing shoes never occurred to us.
I lost track of Marilyn through the years. We both married, had families, lived in different states, and drifted apart. Still, she remained in my heart and in my memory. One day, while home,‑I called her and invited her to come out to where we were having a sort of costume party. She came, and it was like old times all over again. I forgot how easy it was for me to make her laugh. Once I got her laughing, I couldn’t quit. Someone took our picture and I treasure this shot of the two of us. One thing I have to give, no matter what else happens in my life, is laughter.‑ A sense of humor is such a treasured thing in my family. My parents, siblings, cousins….we all found humor in everything. And, so it is today. After all these years, I can still make Marilyn laugh. She is such a treasure. I love what we were and what we are. I hope that when we are 80 or so, we will still be laughing our heads off. Marilyn is mixed up in my happiest memories of childhood. She still is, after all these years.
Mae Julian
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