Make Way for Tomorrow

Married for upwards of fifty years, Barkley and Lucy Cooper convene George, Cora, Nellie and Robert, the four of their five offspring who live within relative close proximity, to relay some news: with Bark not having worked in four years, the bank has foreclosed on their home, and while they have known for months, they are imminently forced to move out, to where they don't know. Under the circumstances, the four, none who has the space to take both parents, decide that the immediate short term solution, which should last for no more than three months, is that Father will sleep on the sofa at Cora and her husband Bill's home, and that George will take Mother who will share a room with George and his wife Anita's grown daughter Rhoda in their apartment a hundred miles away. While all family members love each other in their own way, they all make it quite clear behind closed doors, albeit more quietly by Mother and Father, that Mother and Father living with any of them is not a sustainable situation on either side, everyone making one excuse or another to foist Mother or Father on someone else, both for the short term and long term. Nellie and Robert make it known to their siblings that they have no intention of ever taking either parent, while all Bark and Lucy want is to be together on their own which may never happen in Bark being past his working prime and thus financially incapable to support the two of them.