Prelude: The End and Some Means to It
A flash image to start.
Begin with the sun that rises and goes its way over the Jersey woodlands. Fair enough? Pale yellow rays filter through winter trees in a patch of undeveloped land not far from a two-lane state highway that cuts a path northwards through lake and farm country. You hear the sounds of a few cars and trucks passing by, with droning whines from geometrically angular snow tires. Off in the distance, almost out of earshot. Making their way to some workaday destination. Probably in a hurry, probably late. You hear a few birds sing a greeting song to the sun. Not so many. There’s a thin population of stragglers in the trees this morning. Only those that have forgotten to make the trip down south this year.
Not a soul is about. Except you. And your presence isn’t physical. Your mind’s eye is there. Nothing else.
A fawn awakens and stretches her gangly legs. Why not? It was time she was up. She rises from a slight indentation, oval shaped, a flattening of leaves and rearrangement of snow that will remain for a few days as evidence of her sound night of sleep. She ambles off in search of food.
A winter breeze picks up momentum in the attempt to rearrange the surface of the world. But it is not enough. It is unable to dislodge the blanket of fallen leaves deposited months ago. They cling together, partially frozen, with a natural inertia that comes out of damp and ice.
Between the trees lies a well-trodden path scattered with the refuse of passing hunters. Spent shotgun shells and beer cans dot the landscape. Some thrown away recently. Others months ago.
The path winds up a hill, then curves to the left. Highway sounds muffle as the distance increases. Gradually they all but disappear.
Around and over the horizon. You now realize you are walking behind someone. You step onto the crest of the hill. Your feet crunch down on a thin layer of snow and ice. As the path begins to descend again a sight brings you to a sudden halt.
The body of a young woman sprawls at a slight angle to the path. She lies face to the sky. A flicker of pale sunlight moves across her cheek. She has a fur parka on, zipped up all the way. Hair disturbed a little from the breeze. Otherwise she is still. She is silent. One leg crumpled underneath the other, as if she had fallen suddenly. Eyes staring upward into the dawn grey-becoming-blue-white canopy. Lips with a hint of a pucker. Her right hand tightly clasps something round.
Gone. Life has flown from the world years before its time. And with it flies youth. Yours. All youth.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Saturday, September 10, 2011
On Awakening In A New World: Ten Years Beyond the Ground We Felt Shake
They are not there in the morning. I feel like I should be in mourning.
While the harvest of widow's weeds and flowers alike await their own ripening in another time, later.
Could it be said it would have been said. It wasn't. Said.
Creation cries hurricane tears. A gaping maw. . . violincello bowing double stops, strident. . . a thunderous tympani roll marks the knell. Lead us out of the grief arising from coincidal anniversaries that only have Caesar to thank for their synchronicity in a hell not of our own chosing.
Shut off the televisions that market the Twin Towers burning.
Like two bars of laundry soap. A product.
Silence. No more light.
Now. Let us emerge freshly awake into a morning of hopefulness and regeneration. Let's let the clock run out on the game that need no longer be played.
Friar (Rabbi-Mullah-Rimpoche-Guru) Lawrence: "I dare no longer stay!"
We must go. Forward. Those who cannot must stay behind. They are the dead. No longer the quick. Forth.
With God (or the Universe. . . or the All-Seeing-Eye) as our witness. We exist still.
RIP. Our bones will follow some day. We honor you.
While the harvest of widow's weeds and flowers alike await their own ripening in another time, later.
Could it be said it would have been said. It wasn't. Said.
Creation cries hurricane tears. A gaping maw. . . violincello bowing double stops, strident. . . a thunderous tympani roll marks the knell. Lead us out of the grief arising from coincidal anniversaries that only have Caesar to thank for their synchronicity in a hell not of our own chosing.
Shut off the televisions that market the Twin Towers burning.
Like two bars of laundry soap. A product.
Silence. No more light.
Now. Let us emerge freshly awake into a morning of hopefulness and regeneration. Let's let the clock run out on the game that need no longer be played.
Friar (Rabbi-Mullah-Rimpoche-Guru) Lawrence: "I dare no longer stay!"
We must go. Forward. Those who cannot must stay behind. They are the dead. No longer the quick. Forth.
With God (or the Universe. . . or the All-Seeing-Eye) as our witness. We exist still.
RIP. Our bones will follow some day. We honor you.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Big Lumps of Stuff, Or Looking At Your Roots For Amusement or Enlightenment
I am back. I don't know why I haven't felt much like adding to this particular blog since this past January, except maybe I needed to think a little about what would be worth saying in it, and what wouldn't be. I guess that's come about. Because, dear readers, here I am again.
Actually I have been thinking a great deal about something. And since it is a general sort of thing, this is perhaps the best place to express it.
First things first. A little background. My dad died 11 years ago this coming December. He lived a long life and since he didn't often confide his feelings to the kids, I can't really say whether deep inside his life was a happy one or not. He did not appear especially unhappy most of the time, but then again he didn't seem especially happy either. He worked pretty hard, had a kind of work-centered stability in his life that his generation was able to have (perhaps the last generation as a whole with that, at least in the States). And his life seemed to follow "the plan" as more-or-less conceived by his contemporaries. And that was something he inculcated in the kids (me and my siblings, duh). Your life followed a path from birth to death. You could figure out more or less what it was going to be and have some confidence that that's what was to be, if you worked hard and all that. It wasn't completely true even in his generation, but his life, if you talked with him about it on some level, was an a-to-b sort of existence. He had a couple of options, he exercised those options, and things followed from there, more or less. (But I am leaving out the Depression, WWII, the Cold War, and other external things which most certainly DID have a great impact.)
Anyway when he died I fell heir to his record collection, or at last those records that I thought worth saving, as either musically enjoyable in their own right, and/or as something that captured him as a person, and/or him as a person in relation to the family, to me.
So at first I found it very hard to listen to them. He was gone. They reminded me of that too much. Just in the last six months, though, I've set myself the task or pleasure of listening to all of them again, one by one, a side or two every day. And as I listened what was once very familiar became not so. It became a mystery, an enigma. Who was this man and what was this music to him and to his life? What is music to anybody's life?
Part of that strangeness comes about because what he chose to listen to is mostly now music very few would remember. That generation is gone along with its memories. The Mills Brothers weren't just something my dad liked. They were very popular with a lot of folks. Nowadays I doubt if the generation coming up has even heard the name. We sure did in the house as kids, because he adored them. And other records in his collection were of the same sort. Things many people had in their ears in the halcyon days of their youth. Other records were popular with his generation in later years, especially hifi sorts of things. He was in the Columbia Record Club and he received many of the monthly selections and liked them. They were picked by the marketing folks at the record club because they were popular as part of the category of records that pre-rock-and-rollers, mostly males in the record club demographic, found compatible with what they wanted to hear and etc. Then there were the Broadway shows, the mood music albums, big bands, the singers. As a person of his generation his record collection was probably not all that unusual. Many others had similar tastes. And that fact, the act of listening to this music for the past five months of 2011, many years after that generation had ceased to be a driving force in the world, plus the fact that every note on those 33-rpm disks was associated pretty much with my coming of age in the world in one way or another, had a great effect on me sitting there listening today.
Here was a set of musical roots, in a way, that I had come out of. Those records, along with what was on the radio and the television, what we sang in school, what we heard, sung, or played in whatever institutions I was a part of, and finally for me the kind of music I myself picked up and interested myself in at various times and places, all that and the other experience of music in my life were in sum total MY roots. And what my dad left behind were especially a part of HIS roots.
And I thought as I listened to HIS records, what a strange set of roots they are/were. Strange because the complex of things represented there are mostly not even remembered today, yet they resonate very much with me as I think of my experiences. And I am sure that others in my generation have similar complexes of music that they got growing up. Yet when my generation is thought of, by themselves or by others, it is mostly for just what they themselves actively added to the mix of what they heard--Beatles. Stones, Hendrix and on and on. The same goes for every generation, I am sure.
I thought about it and wondered, if you did an in-depth biographical interview of others from my generation, you could start affirming patterns. This may not sound particularly astounding at first read, and perhaps it is not. Still, though, there is for any generation in space and time, by the time they reach later adulthood, a point where they might look back and realize, "this was what music was for me back in my youth. And there is much in that experience that is not something I share with people of later generations." That individual thought, if you collectivize it, gives you at least in part the experiential history of music in that neck of the woods for that time. And it might be very different than the one written from a "God's-eye" point of view. I mean that the authoritative, experts kind of narrative that might be given about music in America from 1930 to, say, 1970 might be very different from an experiential history. Not that the former narrative would be wrong. It might cover the musical achievements of that age better than the experiential version. Yet it would be missing that something that one expresses when one says, "you had to have been there to understand what I mean." That "having been there" can be understood by those that haven't, though. If somebody wrote well enough about it, after talking in depth with others who WERE there.
Well, so it was...and so it is.
Actually I have been thinking a great deal about something. And since it is a general sort of thing, this is perhaps the best place to express it.
First things first. A little background. My dad died 11 years ago this coming December. He lived a long life and since he didn't often confide his feelings to the kids, I can't really say whether deep inside his life was a happy one or not. He did not appear especially unhappy most of the time, but then again he didn't seem especially happy either. He worked pretty hard, had a kind of work-centered stability in his life that his generation was able to have (perhaps the last generation as a whole with that, at least in the States). And his life seemed to follow "the plan" as more-or-less conceived by his contemporaries. And that was something he inculcated in the kids (me and my siblings, duh). Your life followed a path from birth to death. You could figure out more or less what it was going to be and have some confidence that that's what was to be, if you worked hard and all that. It wasn't completely true even in his generation, but his life, if you talked with him about it on some level, was an a-to-b sort of existence. He had a couple of options, he exercised those options, and things followed from there, more or less. (But I am leaving out the Depression, WWII, the Cold War, and other external things which most certainly DID have a great impact.)
Anyway when he died I fell heir to his record collection, or at last those records that I thought worth saving, as either musically enjoyable in their own right, and/or as something that captured him as a person, and/or him as a person in relation to the family, to me.
So at first I found it very hard to listen to them. He was gone. They reminded me of that too much. Just in the last six months, though, I've set myself the task or pleasure of listening to all of them again, one by one, a side or two every day. And as I listened what was once very familiar became not so. It became a mystery, an enigma. Who was this man and what was this music to him and to his life? What is music to anybody's life?
Part of that strangeness comes about because what he chose to listen to is mostly now music very few would remember. That generation is gone along with its memories. The Mills Brothers weren't just something my dad liked. They were very popular with a lot of folks. Nowadays I doubt if the generation coming up has even heard the name. We sure did in the house as kids, because he adored them. And other records in his collection were of the same sort. Things many people had in their ears in the halcyon days of their youth. Other records were popular with his generation in later years, especially hifi sorts of things. He was in the Columbia Record Club and he received many of the monthly selections and liked them. They were picked by the marketing folks at the record club because they were popular as part of the category of records that pre-rock-and-rollers, mostly males in the record club demographic, found compatible with what they wanted to hear and etc. Then there were the Broadway shows, the mood music albums, big bands, the singers. As a person of his generation his record collection was probably not all that unusual. Many others had similar tastes. And that fact, the act of listening to this music for the past five months of 2011, many years after that generation had ceased to be a driving force in the world, plus the fact that every note on those 33-rpm disks was associated pretty much with my coming of age in the world in one way or another, had a great effect on me sitting there listening today.
Here was a set of musical roots, in a way, that I had come out of. Those records, along with what was on the radio and the television, what we sang in school, what we heard, sung, or played in whatever institutions I was a part of, and finally for me the kind of music I myself picked up and interested myself in at various times and places, all that and the other experience of music in my life were in sum total MY roots. And what my dad left behind were especially a part of HIS roots.
And I thought as I listened to HIS records, what a strange set of roots they are/were. Strange because the complex of things represented there are mostly not even remembered today, yet they resonate very much with me as I think of my experiences. And I am sure that others in my generation have similar complexes of music that they got growing up. Yet when my generation is thought of, by themselves or by others, it is mostly for just what they themselves actively added to the mix of what they heard--Beatles. Stones, Hendrix and on and on. The same goes for every generation, I am sure.
I thought about it and wondered, if you did an in-depth biographical interview of others from my generation, you could start affirming patterns. This may not sound particularly astounding at first read, and perhaps it is not. Still, though, there is for any generation in space and time, by the time they reach later adulthood, a point where they might look back and realize, "this was what music was for me back in my youth. And there is much in that experience that is not something I share with people of later generations." That individual thought, if you collectivize it, gives you at least in part the experiential history of music in that neck of the woods for that time. And it might be very different than the one written from a "God's-eye" point of view. I mean that the authoritative, experts kind of narrative that might be given about music in America from 1930 to, say, 1970 might be very different from an experiential history. Not that the former narrative would be wrong. It might cover the musical achievements of that age better than the experiential version. Yet it would be missing that something that one expresses when one says, "you had to have been there to understand what I mean." That "having been there" can be understood by those that haven't, though. If somebody wrote well enough about it, after talking in depth with others who WERE there.
Well, so it was...and so it is.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Change That is Apparent; Change That is Not. . .
Thomas Jefferson was obsessed, one might say, with the weather. For most if his life, if I remember correctly, he made daily, detailed observations and notations as to the local weather conditions. To us today it might seem rather eccentric or compulsive to do such a thing. But we live in a very different world. Imagine more or less being cut off from the media we take for granted today. That is, imagine one could no longer consult weather reports on the internet, televison, radio, in the newspaper and what not. Further imagine that news of weather outside your immediate local area took longer to reach you, and often came in incomplete form, some through word of mouth. That's a world that fits in more closely with the one Jefferson encountered at Monticello.
In fact the world of "expert" opinion, of those who attempt to describe or, alternately, impose patterns on an individual may have been much less pervasive then on a daily basis, at least at certain levels of society. You had newspapers, pretty much the local ones; you had books; you had the testimony of fellow citizens, some of them in positions of authority, in local meetings of an official or unofficial nature. And you had opinions and information handed to you by close friends, neighbors and such. There were the local authorities who prescribed patterns certainly, as well, but perhaps left more gaps in your daily cycle to be filled as you saw fit. I do not know.
We have all such avenues of communications today too. But we have many more voices as well, to be disseminated in the various electronic media. So we are all aware of global warming, for instance, even though our direct experience of day-to-day and year-to-year existence would not necessarily underscore or call attention to the pattern (unless you happened to live on the North Pole, for example). (I'm not going to talk about those who do not believe in global warming. That is not relevant to this discussion.)
One point of this is that the experience of our daily life and the experience of hearing what those who tell us what the patterns are outside of our little world are two very different things. The more pattern weaving and spin doctoring we are subject to, the less we are obliged to think things through ourselves. Gentlemen farmers like Jefferson knew that understanding weather patterns was vital to agricultural well-being and so they needed to try to discover those patterns on their own. Nowadays others tell us what is happening and what they think is going to happen in the future. Of course they can be wrong; they can also be trying to put a spin on things to their own advantage.
But if you get enough of your thinking already done for you in this way, you may come to a point in your life where you aren't doing much in the way of thinking "for yourself." Perhaps there was also lots of predirected non-thinking happening in earlier times via the authority of consensus, religious doctrine and what people on the local level were saying--the religious leaders, local politicians, influential citizens, etc. I'm not saying that it was "better" then. But the expectation of change was not a constant either. Your farm, if that's what you were about, was something you imagined in perpetuity--for better or worse. (For worse for those who were slaves, if that was what was going on. That's another huge difference between what is the case today and what was the case then but I am not addressing that here for the moment.)
My point is that there was an expectation of continuity then much greater than there is now. We don't expect our children to be doing what we have been doing for our adult lives. In fact many of us have found that "doing one thing" for an entire lifetime has no longer been possible. So we have a greater expectation of constant change and we have a greater number of voices telling us what those changes may or will be.
That doesn't mean that everything we hear covers all the changes we may be experiencing in our lifetime. There may even be changes taking place, patterns that are shifting in ways none of us are aware of. A thousand years from now, people may say, "oh, yes, the 21st century was the time when bla-bla-bla began." Well what would it be that they'd say that we aren't thinking of now?
Something to ponder, anyway.
In fact the world of "expert" opinion, of those who attempt to describe or, alternately, impose patterns on an individual may have been much less pervasive then on a daily basis, at least at certain levels of society. You had newspapers, pretty much the local ones; you had books; you had the testimony of fellow citizens, some of them in positions of authority, in local meetings of an official or unofficial nature. And you had opinions and information handed to you by close friends, neighbors and such. There were the local authorities who prescribed patterns certainly, as well, but perhaps left more gaps in your daily cycle to be filled as you saw fit. I do not know.
We have all such avenues of communications today too. But we have many more voices as well, to be disseminated in the various electronic media. So we are all aware of global warming, for instance, even though our direct experience of day-to-day and year-to-year existence would not necessarily underscore or call attention to the pattern (unless you happened to live on the North Pole, for example). (I'm not going to talk about those who do not believe in global warming. That is not relevant to this discussion.)
One point of this is that the experience of our daily life and the experience of hearing what those who tell us what the patterns are outside of our little world are two very different things. The more pattern weaving and spin doctoring we are subject to, the less we are obliged to think things through ourselves. Gentlemen farmers like Jefferson knew that understanding weather patterns was vital to agricultural well-being and so they needed to try to discover those patterns on their own. Nowadays others tell us what is happening and what they think is going to happen in the future. Of course they can be wrong; they can also be trying to put a spin on things to their own advantage.
But if you get enough of your thinking already done for you in this way, you may come to a point in your life where you aren't doing much in the way of thinking "for yourself." Perhaps there was also lots of predirected non-thinking happening in earlier times via the authority of consensus, religious doctrine and what people on the local level were saying--the religious leaders, local politicians, influential citizens, etc. I'm not saying that it was "better" then. But the expectation of change was not a constant either. Your farm, if that's what you were about, was something you imagined in perpetuity--for better or worse. (For worse for those who were slaves, if that was what was going on. That's another huge difference between what is the case today and what was the case then but I am not addressing that here for the moment.)
My point is that there was an expectation of continuity then much greater than there is now. We don't expect our children to be doing what we have been doing for our adult lives. In fact many of us have found that "doing one thing" for an entire lifetime has no longer been possible. So we have a greater expectation of constant change and we have a greater number of voices telling us what those changes may or will be.
That doesn't mean that everything we hear covers all the changes we may be experiencing in our lifetime. There may even be changes taking place, patterns that are shifting in ways none of us are aware of. A thousand years from now, people may say, "oh, yes, the 21st century was the time when bla-bla-bla began." Well what would it be that they'd say that we aren't thinking of now?
Something to ponder, anyway.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Oh, What I'd Give Right Now For Some . . . . . (I Don't Know)
And so on a soon-to-be-winter's-day. . . . I pause and look around my neighborhood. The house I mentioned in a post last summer is still empty. The last newspapers left for recycling have turned into a mushy pulp. Last July 4th another house right across from it had a serious fire. The old couple who lived there had to move out (temporarily?) and renovations are ongoing. A stuffed Uncle Sam stayed on the front porch through September, when someone put it out of its misery. It disappeared. One day a couple of family pictures in elaborate frames were put out for the trash. Who were they? Who knows. The construction crew has gutted the interior, put on a new roof. . . they are almost finished rebuilding the garage.
In a season where good will toward men is supposed to be happening, the neighborhood seems even more isolated than it did last summer. Few people stir except to go to work. Those who still have jobs. By my reckoning about 50% of my immediate neighbors are unemployed right now. My guitar business hobbles on its last leg. Once I sell the remaining stock it will be gone. I see a horizon ahead with hope, but I can't tell you what the future will bring.
And it's funny because a few years ago I thought there were things you could hang your dreams on. Solid. Home "land-line" telephones. Books. Prime-time dramas presented by the major networks. Rock. Work. Manhattan as a center of. . . something or other. Now I don't feel that there's much one can depend upon. The future never seemed so open. . . and so empty.
I'll shake this mood. But right now the idea of "happy holidays" sounds like some sick, twisted oxymoron.
The sun will rise again tomorrow. And a new generation will grow up and there will be a few that will do unbelievable things. Great things. I wish them well.
In a season where good will toward men is supposed to be happening, the neighborhood seems even more isolated than it did last summer. Few people stir except to go to work. Those who still have jobs. By my reckoning about 50% of my immediate neighbors are unemployed right now. My guitar business hobbles on its last leg. Once I sell the remaining stock it will be gone. I see a horizon ahead with hope, but I can't tell you what the future will bring.
And it's funny because a few years ago I thought there were things you could hang your dreams on. Solid. Home "land-line" telephones. Books. Prime-time dramas presented by the major networks. Rock. Work. Manhattan as a center of. . . something or other. Now I don't feel that there's much one can depend upon. The future never seemed so open. . . and so empty.
I'll shake this mood. But right now the idea of "happy holidays" sounds like some sick, twisted oxymoron.
The sun will rise again tomorrow. And a new generation will grow up and there will be a few that will do unbelievable things. Great things. I wish them well.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Baby Huey's Birthday Parties
Baby Huey is giving another one of his birthday parties. We're all invited. But you know what? Last time I went Baby Huey decided he wanted all the cake, all the gifts, all the food because he didn't think he got enough last time. And we all just sat there wondering what kind of a party it was.
Well we're invited again. The party. There'll be cake, I guess. It's Baby Huey's big day. Some people are just stupid enough to show up thinking maybe THEY will be the ones to get all the cake. Why share? It's a kind of Tea Party this time. But it's really the same old scam. I am not going. You live, you learn, you know what that party is all about. Huey will say anything to get us to come. Have we learned from the last time? I have. I'm not going and to hell with his birthday.
Well we're invited again. The party. There'll be cake, I guess. It's Baby Huey's big day. Some people are just stupid enough to show up thinking maybe THEY will be the ones to get all the cake. Why share? It's a kind of Tea Party this time. But it's really the same old scam. I am not going. You live, you learn, you know what that party is all about. Huey will say anything to get us to come. Have we learned from the last time? I have. I'm not going and to hell with his birthday.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
A Little History From A Dumpster Down the Block
During the course of my daily walks I out of habit nose around the things put out for the trash folks. The other day I noticed a dumpster outside a house that has been abandoned after foreclosure two years ago. I took a superficial look on the surface level and what was there? An Arthur Godfrey 78, not playable, a totally destroyed version of Ideal's toy called Jimmy Jet, which I got for a holiday present in I think 1958. It was damaged beyond salvaging, not that I would. That was a Cold War toy. You sited Russian planes on the screen and shot them both electronically and via four darts at the top of the simulated jet cockpit, onto a target silhouette of the plane. I think it was several weeks before I more or less destroyed my own Jimmy Jet.
Back to the walks and the dumpster. A few days later I noticed somebody had liberated the Jimmy Jet anyway, in spite of its terrible condition. I noticed one other thing that day, which I grabbed. It was a pretty elaborate, tiny Japanese finger bowl. I took it home for my wife. After we washed it and such, I looked at the back of it, on the bottom. It had printed on it "Product of Occupied Japan!" Wow. So I'll bet whoever lived in the house was stationed in Japan at the close of WWII. That dumpster was evidence of a life, of history. Two centuries from now a museum would probably be proud to display a significant part of that trash, as examples of 20th Century America.
Another weird thing in the dumpster. . . anybody remember those solid steel toy trucks the boomer generation had as kids? (OK they were boy toys...) Well, there was one of those, a dump truck, but its color was solid rust.
It was eerie. Like all the stuff in the house you grew up in had been left in that house, abandoned for the past 40 years, and finally somebody went in there and it was just like the whole family had disappeared into thin air some time in 1960. The stuff had sat there undisturbed except by the processes of time and only now somebody realized it was a good moment to throw it all out. There were reel-to-reel tapes, Bobsie Twins books, the guts of a 1950's TV set, a tube clock radio from like 1957...
This economic disaster we all are dealing with has as a by-product a kind of archaeological unearthing of cultural history. Every time someone loses their home, dumpsters of historical artifacts appear on the corner. This is not the way I would like to recall the history of my region. Dig we must, I suppose. No other choice. But I hope the foreclosures stop. Now.
Back to the walks and the dumpster. A few days later I noticed somebody had liberated the Jimmy Jet anyway, in spite of its terrible condition. I noticed one other thing that day, which I grabbed. It was a pretty elaborate, tiny Japanese finger bowl. I took it home for my wife. After we washed it and such, I looked at the back of it, on the bottom. It had printed on it "Product of Occupied Japan!" Wow. So I'll bet whoever lived in the house was stationed in Japan at the close of WWII. That dumpster was evidence of a life, of history. Two centuries from now a museum would probably be proud to display a significant part of that trash, as examples of 20th Century America.
Another weird thing in the dumpster. . . anybody remember those solid steel toy trucks the boomer generation had as kids? (OK they were boy toys...) Well, there was one of those, a dump truck, but its color was solid rust.
It was eerie. Like all the stuff in the house you grew up in had been left in that house, abandoned for the past 40 years, and finally somebody went in there and it was just like the whole family had disappeared into thin air some time in 1960. The stuff had sat there undisturbed except by the processes of time and only now somebody realized it was a good moment to throw it all out. There were reel-to-reel tapes, Bobsie Twins books, the guts of a 1950's TV set, a tube clock radio from like 1957...
This economic disaster we all are dealing with has as a by-product a kind of archaeological unearthing of cultural history. Every time someone loses their home, dumpsters of historical artifacts appear on the corner. This is not the way I would like to recall the history of my region. Dig we must, I suppose. No other choice. But I hope the foreclosures stop. Now.
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