The Return of the Prodigal Son

 

Hello there. I am still alive, despite the best efforts of the superbug and the political leadership of the Vampire State, although calling what we are enduring political leadership stretches the plain meaning of words to the breaking point and beyond. All is vaguely well here: nothing is happening, and I suppose that we should all be grateful that this is the case. Large numbers of people are moving into our happy little burg from the great metropolis to the south and they bear with them the same stupid habits that caused the great metropolis to the south to go south in the first place. The day of the locust has come upon us here in our little town and its ugly name is gentrification. New buildings are going up left and right hereabouts, sometimes literally left and right, as in directly across the street from one another, and the twin edifices, which are bigger than the rest of the buildings on Main Street, of which more later, block the sun, leaving that part of the street in a more or less perpetual shade. What I find interesting here is the rents charged for these apartments.[1] The landlords are charging city rents for an apartment here. I suppose that the landlords think that the city people are used to spending two thousand dollars a month and so won’t complain about the rent—rent  here was eight hundred dollars a month not too long ago—and what the city people don’t know won’t hurt them. Also, the landlords are making the prospective buyer a sweet deal here: two thousand dollars a month in the city buys the interested would be tenant an apartment so small that it would be illegal to house prisoners, pigs, and most forms of bacteria in, whereas two thousand dollars a month here buys you two or three bedrooms, a full kitchen and living room, and maybe a couple of bathrooms as well. Yes, the price is the same as the city, but here, Mr. I need to get out of the city quick, you will have space. Real space. So much space that you can keep chickens here if you want. Fresh eggs, people tell me, are a powerful inducement to move.

But enough bitterness from me. I am alive in a plague year and so I must be happy. Therefore, let me count my blessings. The country is tearing itself apart with mostly peaceful protests, but the country facing this unfortunate circumstance is that portion of the country the Donkeys hold hostage and therefore the destruction is of little consequence. An electorate gets the politicians it deserves and if the people elect doofuses, well then, that is their right, isn’t it? Elections have consequences, a bit of wisdom the former junior senator from Illinois enjoyed annoying the passersby with whenever he had the chance, and if the people asked for doofuses then they deserve the doofuses. One must, in times like these, remember the wise words of the late George Ade, who said at the turn of the 20^th century that the people are worth dying for until you put them all in one place and give them the cold once-over, and then they strike the disinterested observer as largely bovine, with a high percentage of vegetable matter.

In any case, I have been doing well, or at least as well as anyone can expect in this time of pestilence. I lost twenty-five pounds and then promptly regained five of those lost pounds, which leads me to suspect that the weight didn’t really leave so much as it took a two-week vacation and is now back to work, happy and refreshed and looking forward to expanding my belt even more. I bought a new computer for my home; Windows 95 is apparently one with Nineveh and Tyre, so it seemed time to ditch the old beige box and buy something new. The new computer is nice, and I am enjoying my big new monitor. There is something to be said for working on a computer that does not cause eyestrain and a headache after fifteen minutes of use. I would like to apologize for the jumpiness of this piece. I have not actually written anything except checks for the past several months and I am now out of practice. Well, that is it for me right now. I will be back, and I hope that all is going well with you and yours.

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[1] As well as the prices of buildings. Forty years ago, someone could have bought half of our happy little burg for what the realtors are charging for one building nowadays.

CHANGE AND ITS DISCONTENTS: Yes, the times, they are a-changing, even here in our happy little burg, even though you wouldn’t know it to look at the old place. We don’t think much of change in this neck of the woods; what was good enough back in the day is good enough nowadays, that’s what most folks hereabouts think, and we prefer that people with new-fangled notions about how to do things keep their notions to themselves and let the rest of us be, thank you very much, or if the urge to go a-fangling their notions becomes too great, and let’s face it, sometimes it does and no cold shower will turn your mind to other, more uplifting subjects, that they then have the common decency to go across the river and fangle their notions on the unhappy inhabitants of the slough of urban despond that lies directly across the river from us. Living in any kind of slough is depressing enough and those people could use a good laugh every now and again. We dislike change so much here in our happy little burg that many of us refuse to change our moods if we can help it, and those people who can’t help but change their mood every so often will compensate for their distasteful lack of self-control by not changing their socks as often as they might, which often makes our town a bit easier for the confused motorist to find, especially during the summer months.

Faced with cultural recalcitrance on such a massive scale, how do I know that the times are a-changing even here in our happy little burg? It’s the little things that give the game away. I was eating my lunch a few days ago in the Gnocchi Deli, something I do every day of the week, primarily because I hate change as much as the next person here and also because I lack imagination. The Gnocchi Deli is basically a hole in the wall you couldn’t force a pig to live in without half a dozen animal rights organizations and the municipal health department trying to close the place down posthaste, but they have the best mortadella sandwiches anywhere in town, and, in addition to this, the deli is the only Italian-themed eating establishment within the city limits actually owned by Italian Americans; Albanians own all the others, except for the two places owned by Mexicans (there’s great pizza at the Mexican places, though). As I sat there chewing upon my cud of miscellaneous pig parts, ruminating on the role pistachios play in the making of the perfect mortadella while listening to the radio emit the sound of a heavy metal band cacophonously smashing their instruments over the head of a stoned and semiliterate teenager from Shaker Heights, Ohio, to the tune, I think, of Cole Porter’s Night and Day, although it could have been J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto #6 in B flat major; I don’t follow popular music much anymore, sorry—my tastes here are still more or less frozen in 1975 and Springsteen’s Born to Run album; our happy little burg’s music teacher came in and bid me a good day.

I am not a very sociable person, in the main; people who knew my father or know my younger brothers are often surprised when they meet me—they simply assume that gregariousness is the standard operating mode for all the male members of the Bashmachkin clan—and they seem somewhat perplexed to find that at least one member of the clan in not at all gregarious, but rather something of a dour, uncommunicative stick in the mud with better things to do with his time than sit around all day chatting with you. But if I am not a hail fellow well met, I do try to be civil to all and sundry, and then I surprised myself mightily by inquiring how her day was going, a question I don’t ask all that often, since, to be honest, I don’t really care how your day is going—I usually don’t care how my day is going, so long as it goes with minimal effort on my part. The other reason I don’t ask this question very often is that some people will take the opportunity that the question presents to tell you, often in excruciating detail, just how their day is going, up to and including the details of the colonoscopy they endured that very morning and all about the frightening thing the doctor found lodged in their viscera. You may provide your own drum roll here, if you feel the need. Suffice it to say that unless your gastroenterologist found glow in the dark Obama for President campaign posters epoxied to the walls of your large intestines, I don’t care what your doctor found stuck in your guts and I would just as soon not hear about it while I am trying to eat my mortadella sandwich. But our music teacher, a very nice and cheery lady known to one and all as Miss Susie, said that her day was going well for the most part, the even tenor of the hours complicated only by the need to get back to her studio and tune a dulcimer before one of her students arrived.

There may have been more to the conversation; I don’t know. If there was, I’ve forgotten it completely. In that moment, in that smallest split second of time, to say that all of my gasts took an extreme flabbering would be to make the understatement of the millennium, a fairly easy trick at this moment, given that we’re only seven years into the new millennium, but the principle is the same: I was stunned. I don’t believe I had ever contemplated the possibility that someone here in our happy little burg would ever use the word dulcimer in a sentence outside a high school English class discussing whether or not the Abyssinian maid in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ was angling for a record contract. And yet there Miss Susie stood, in about as nonpedagogical a setting as you can imagine, waiting patiently for her chicken salad sandwich, not only using the word in a normal conversation, but with an actual dulcimer stuffed somewhere in her tiny Main Street studio waiting for a tune-up and a tire rotation, along with, no doubt, a lute, a gamba, and an electric psaltery with iodized stereophonic amplification, the better for her students to blast out heavy metal covers of the greatest hits of 1139 at their graduation recitals.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. Our town is changing, whether us old-timers like it or not. Thirty years ago, the word dulcimer would not have come up in any context in any conversation you could think of. I doubt that high school students would have known what the word meant, as most of them didn’t bother to read the poem for their 9 AM English class the next morning, choosing to spend the evening watching the prodigiously jiggling racks on Charlie’s Angels jiggling prodigiously instead. Today, dulcimers not only come up in everyday conversations, there’s someone in town that actually knows how to tune one. Now, I don’t expect that Main Street will suddenly fill with dulcimer repair shops run by medievalists named Lenny who spend the day discussing the comparative virtues of the Guelph and Ghibelline causes before they shake their heads apologetically and tell you that not only will your dulcimer not pass the mandatory state inspection, it will cost you $500 in parts and labor just to put the damn thing back together again, but I do expect that this ongoing gentrification will continue apace, and our decidedly blue-collar happy little burg will never be the same place again. I don’t think that new vegan restaurant is going to last, though; change is one thing, but having our sensibilities assaulted in this fashion is quite another. The side order of smug that comes with every entrée in that place leaves a bitter aftertaste in our mouths.