The Age of Unlimited Possibility (Gleason)
The Age of Unlimited Possibility, by Kate Gleason (1956-)
My sister and I, being girls,
wasted the better part
of our childhoods
practicing to be women.
Every fall, our lawn swelled
with the colors of singed orange,
crayon yellow, maroon,
the brilliant ruin we raked
into the floor plans of leaf houses,
elaborate ranches with dream kitchens,
conversation areas, sunken living rooms.
It was the ’50s. The shelf life
of lunch meats had been extended
to an unheard-of two months.
There was no end to the possibilities.
Test pilots had broken the sound barrier,
filling the sky with a synthetic thunder
we could feel as much as hear,
like an explosion underwater.
Housewives in smart A-line dresses
happily vacuumed with their new uprights,
rearranged their sectional furniture,
and invented creative mingling
between Jell-O and miniature marshmallows.
World War II was behind us,
the legion of evil ones again stymied,
forced to retreat, like a glacier,
but leaving in its wake
a mawkish and exaggerated innocence.
It was the ’50s and I’d just learned
that a girl could not so much as hope
to become president, owing to the fact
that women had their time of the month
when they might do something unthinking.
It was the ’50s.
“the age of unlimited possibilities,”
just as World War I had been
“the war to end all wars,”
and like a lot of families back then,
we’d hunkered in
behind our white picket fence,
trying to still believe
that what words said
was what they meant.