When Sherry Phillips noticed a plumbing leak was endangering an old trunk in her basement, she opened it up and was plunged back into a lifetime of experiences she hardly remembered.
Phillips, after all, lives in the present. Right now, for instance, she’s intensely interested in — and none too pleased with — the nation’s political situation. She shares her south Wichita home with a grandson and gets around town with the help of a cane.
But the contents of that trunk, well, they were certainly interesting. Take the stack of letters from a grade-school pen pal who lived overseas. The writer alternated between describing her life and asking earnest questions about Phillips’. It took Phillips awhile to decipher the writer’s name and remember that she had lived in Stockholm. The English handwriting was admirably done.
There was a scrapbook she’d kept during the fifth grade, with several pages devoted to photographs of singer Eddie Fisher, Elizabeth Taylor’s second husband. “When you’re young, it’s the stars that are attracting you,” she said.
And a diary, with entries like: “Barbara came over. So did Diana. Elvis Presley is on TV. Worked on extra credit the whole weekend. Can’t wait until the new telephone book comes out:”
Phillips grinned as she read another entry, possibly less than friendly, about a teacher — “Mrs. Legree was absent.”
There were references to passing boys in the hallway and to a particular boy who gave her a rose on the last day of school.
Also in the trunk was a photograph of her mother from a 1985 issue of The Active Age, holding a prize-winning two-pound tomato.
Like most people’s lives, Phillips’ has had its share of twists and turns.
When she was young, her folks separated and then divorced, a less common occurrence then than now. Her mother was sometimes referred to as a “displaced homemaker” while her father “married two or three times more later,” Phillips said.
At 19, suffering from insatiable thirst, Phillips had been hospitalized for two weeks and diagnosed with diabetes. “Back then, living (with diabetes) for 20 years was the national average,” she said.
She learned to give herself four shots of insulin a day and now wears a device that continuously monitors her glucose level. When she’d lived 50 years with the disease, the American Diabetes Association gave her a medal and flew her to Boston for testing. She is one of a small percentage of diabetics who don’t suffer problems with organs other than the kidney.
“When I die — and they’ve had to wait a good long time — they will take tissue samples,” she said.
“We’ve had a lot of cutting-edge technology,” she said.
Her husband died at age 59, when all along they’d expected he would be a widower.
When that happened, Phillips said, “I decided to learn to live alone without being lonely. That goal has motivated me for the last 26 years or so.”
Staying close to five grandchildren helps. One granddaughter, Abigail, was especially interested in the unearthing of Phillips’ diary.
“She sat right down to read about my boyfriends,” Phillips said. Asked if that made her nervous, Phillips said, “I read it first to make sure.”
