When four-year-old Christian Hawes told his his Uncle Dick, “It’s not the long-agos that are hard to remember; it’s the short-agos” I knew exactly what he meant. But Christian is older now — maybe in his late thirties? — and we might be a bit older, too. Though I hate to admit it, the long-agos and short-agos are beginning to blend together.
So, it was with particular delight that Nyel and I recently reviewed the scrapbooks from the sixteen years of our Annual Oysterville Champagne and Croquet Galas. The first noteworthy thing was the sixteen (count ’em: one-six) years. For at least a decade both of us have thought we put those galas on for twenty years. WRONG. Anyway you slice it, 1985 to 2000 made sixteen and we have the registrations, the score cards, the pictures, the news reports, and the scrapbooks to prove it.
How slim we all were way back then! How un-gray and how lithe and athletic. And energetic! For the most part, Nyel and I did the work ourselves. We laid out the courts, put up the tent (loaned each year by Noreen Robinson), schlepped the champagne (donated yearly by Jack’s), sent out the invitations, registered the teams, asked friends to be judges and my uncle Willard to act as Master of Ceremony. Whatever non-profit was the beneficiary was asked to provide finger foods (always fabulous!) and the guests (who had each donated $20 toward the benefitting non-profit) came in whatever they deemed was an appropriate croquet costume. The setting was my folks’ place (now ours) in Oysterville and, often, Willard and Louise Espy hosted a potluck picnic at their Red Cottage afterwards.
There was, of course, the trophy which “lived” at the Heron and Beaver Pub at the Shelburne. Our festivities began the night before the Croquet Gala (always held on the Sunday following Labor Day) with the traditional “stealing of the trophy” from Tony Kischner so that it could be presented to the winning team the next day Over the years, the Saturday night event gathered enough followers of its own that Tony had to have us sit in the garden area outside to leave room for other pub customers.
Sadly, one of the scrapbooks will probably have to be discarded. It was the victim of a 1992 water heater disaster and, though I plan to work on it a bit, I don’t know if it will be worth turning over to the Heritage Museum with the others. Some long-agos will just have to be remembered without benefit of visual aids! Perhaps, if Christian’s theory was correct, the longer we wait, the better we will recall those badly damaged 1994-1996 years… We can but hope!