Month: August 2021

The Wells Fargo Wagon

As I found myself shaking my head at the constant prowling of delivery trucks in my neighborhood, I thought the best way to express my anxieties might be in a new piece of fiction.  You can find “Prime Time” here, but there were some additional thoughts on the subject I wanted to share.

When I was in eighth grade, I participated in the chorus of a junior high production of The Music Man.  In that musical, there is a piece about the exciting experience of having the Wells Fargo delivery wagon show up in one’s neighborhood:

Oh the Wells Fargo Wagon is a coming down the street

Oh don’t let it pass my door

Oh the Wells Fargo Wagon is a coming down the street

I wish I knew what he was coming for!

The song goes on to detail memorable deliveries from the past (grapefruit from Tampa and a cannon for the courthouse square), and soon the whole town is celebrating the rare pleasure of a gift brought to one’s door.  I remember a similar excitement as a child when someone in the family got an order from the Sears or Montgomery Ward catalogues – although most often the packages were picked up at the counter in the back of the store and not delivered to the house.

These days delivery trucks prowl my neighborhood streets daily.  There is the ubiquitous Prime van, the jeep that delivers the mail, the big brown UPS truck, and a multitude of other vehicles delivering groceries, pharmaceuticals, take-out food, and almost anything else one could imagine.  This trend started years ago, but Covid accelerated it.  We all succumbed, and we all got used to it.  Deliveries helped us maintain isolation during the pandemic, but I fear that continued use of such services will increase our isolation as time goes on.

We used to get to know the people who came to our doors regularly, be they mail carrier or milkman.  Drivers are now on such tight schedules that they have no time to exchange words with us.  They do not even ring our doorbells, but rather send us a text or e-mail telling us the package is there and perhaps even enclosing a picture.  Meanwhile, our motion sensors often take pictures of them as they run to and away from our front door.  I don’t have any more relationship with the people who bring me my orders than I would have with a drone.  (I would, however, prefer not to have the drone.)

Now, this capability is wonderful for some older people who have trouble getting to the store, and I surely don’t begrudge any of us this service.  But the process is both non-geographic and impersonal.  We are not doing business locally (other than perhaps with orders from local restaurants or grocery stores), and we are not interacting with anyone to do it.  This worries me.

I also have a parallel concern about the number of storage units that are being built in my area – in all areas of this country.  For the last period for which I could get statistics, the industry expanded construction of units by 27% – this was in 2018 and the industry has certainly not stopped growing.  And deliveries have increased – aggregate statistics hare hard to come by, but some delivery services like Instacart have seen 500% growth and we all know how well Amazon is doing.  But does this all mean that much of the stuff we are ordering we are paying to store?  What is going on here?

Add to this, of course, the fact that we are watching movies at home, playing games online, and meeting our friends and relatives via Zoom.  Some of this will loosen when and if Covid gets under control, but some has become habit and convenience.  I think that social norms may have lapsed and changed in ways that cannot be fully restored.

Perhaps I have always been fascinated by the delivery services –  you might remember my story about the end of the world and the UPS man.  But if we are not going to interact with people in stores, restaurants, and entertainment venues, what will fill the void?  If the elderly can be “served” without human interaction, what has been lost? 

Again, I refer you to my new story, “Prime Time.”  I would also note that the very word on which Amazon stakes its relationship with us, prime, has particular connotations for the elderly, who may not be in what is traditionally labelled the “prime of life,” but who are still very much alive.  Keeping us off the road and out of the stores may be for our own good for now, but I fear it will be a lesser good in the long run.

 

Reunions – Looking Back with Affection and Embarrassment

I was recently tracked down by a very nice woman who was a classmate of mine during my first two years of college – 50 years ago.  After my sophomore year, I married and could not afford to return to school right away, so I quickly lost track of the good friends I made during those two years  – perhaps the kind of friends you never make again.  We were young, female, and completely out from under our parents’ thumbs for the first time in our lives.  In addition, this was the sixties.  When I arrived, there were strict curfews and prohibitions about spending nights off campus without parental permission (this was a women’s college); within a few months all restrictions were lifted.  Fun, but dangerous to a seventeen-year-old like myself who had no idea what to do with such freedom.  I often think that I burned myself out quickly and retreated to a disastrous early marriage.  In any case, that was the situation, and – while I could recall those days and people vividly when I tried – I mostly struggled not to remember.

So out of the blue comes one of the nicest of those remembered classmates, who has volunteered to be in charge of rounding up all the women who lived in our campus residence house for the 50th reunion.  I have no intention of attending the reunion (I ended up graduating from a different college), but I found myself interested in catching up with her and ultimately agreed to submit some basic information for the reunion book – including a 500-word essay on what I had been doing for the last 50 years.   That would be 10 words per year, but – then again – some of those years I barely remember.

Nevertheless, I gave it a go and recommend it as an exercise.  In fact, we all do it verbally pretty consistently when we meet new people, and they want to know something about us.  But this felt different.  These people knew what a mess I was a half-century ago.  I wanted to show the trajectory of where I had been, how I had recovered, what was still left to do.  Here is a brief excerpt, leaving out those parts about my children, husbands, degrees and locations:

I think we went to college in strange times – when I arrived at _____ as an innocent young woman (girl) of barely 17, I had just managed to learn what parietals were when they were abolished.  It was a wild time that I remember well and yet often find painful to recall.  I met warm friends, and tested myself, my friends, my teachers, and my parents in a multitude of ways – but apparently got the wild oats out of my system.  I have been determined that my old age would be more thoughtful and deliberate than my youth (wouldn’t take much) and have been much taken with the study of old age and literature – the topic on which I wrote my dissertation and on which I maintain a blog…. Through all these years I have read voraciously, taken piano lessons most of the time (with little effect), belonged to writing groups (same result), hiked, and knit….

Before she died, my mother gave me a pile of letters I wrote home while at ____.  I haven’t read them (sense of embarrassment surely); they reside in the back of the bottom left-hand drawer of my desk.  It is telling that I haven’t discarded them. But hearing from some of my classmates has perhaps given me the strength to revisit those years.

If fact, those letters in the drawer – envelopes covered with little pictures and slogans (“Wear Your Love Like Heaven”) have silently mocked me for years.

But I am reminded of a poem by Paul Fenton (“The Ideal”):

This is where I came from.
I passed this way.
This should not be shameful
Or hard to say.

A self is a self.
It is not a screen.
A person should respect
What he has been.

This is my past
Which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal.
This is hard.

It is hard to deal with those portions of our life of which we are not proud, but I am glad to have had my old classmate give me a shove.  I wrote those letters; I was exuberant if misguided.  And I was lucky to be surrounded by kind people.  As I age, as we all age, a common phenomenon is to have a better memory of the far past than we have of the recent past.  But those memories shouldn’t hurt.  They made us who we are.

It has always been so.  One might incant a line from Psalm 25: “Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions: according to thy mercy remember thou me for thy goodness’ sake, O Lord.”  Amen to that.

I have never written about my early college life – even in fiction.  But “The Iscariot” or “Shrove Tuesday” contain characters who try to deal with the irreversibility of the past.

“This Will All Make Sense When I Am Older”

I ran across a cute Disney video from Frozen II,  wherein a young snowman (snowboy?) named Olaf sings a delightful song about how life is scary, but comforts himself that “this will all make sense when I am older.”  Of course, that got me thinking (now that I am older) about whether that was true.  I invite you to answer the same question for yourself.

Separated by time and hormones from experiences of our younger years, there is a certain detachment in old age that allows us to calmly consider why certain things happened, why we did the things we are now embarrassed to remember.  And there is sometimes a bittersweet melancholy to such thought.  As Kierkegaard told us, “life can only be understood by looking backward; but it must be lived looking forward.”

Many people have tried to make sense of their lives, to give it a linear and rational narrative.  One of the things we learn in old age is that human beings are not always (or often) rational animals, lessons are sometimes earned but not learned, and we accumulate at least as much guilt as we do wisdom.  In these days, wisdom is needed, guilt seems to be confused with embarrassment, and the old often seem willing to let the young set the moral agenda – on civil rights, women’s rights, gay marriage, humane acceptance of all kinds.

This reminds me of the story of the woman about to be stoned for adultery.  There are a couple of mysterious things about this episode, which occurs only in the Gospel of John.   The Pharisees bring  a woman caught in adultery to Jesus; Mosaic law calls for her to be stoned to death and the crowd is ready. Jesus responds by crouching down and writing in the sand.  Over the centuries there has been much speculation about what he wrote.  Perhaps he was writing the sins of the onlookers, because finally he rises and tells the crowd that “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” Personally, I wonder if he was just writing to get his thoughts straight – something I do all the time.  So the writing in the sand is one mystery, but not the one that interests me the most.

Soon after Jesus’ challenge (let him who is without sin throw the first stone), the crowd starts to drop their stones and disperse.  And here is the most interesting part to me in this familiar passage: John clearly states that “they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last.” The old people left first. Why? 

Did the old leave first because they were wiser? Had they learned that youthful indiscretions are not the end of the world?  Or did the old leave first because they had accumulated so much sin of their own that they knew clearly and immediately that they were not eligible to cast the first stone?  Is this an example of the value of experience?

I have elsewhere mused on the value of reflection in old age, and of writing one’s own story.  Maybe there will not be a clear narrative when we go to string the episodes of our life together, but there will surely be lessons there which we were taught, but never had time to really learn.  In the episode of the woman taken in adultery, the issue was forced.  For most of us there is not such a crisis.  But there is still a need, and time to learn the lessons that have accumulated in the parts of our minds we don’t visit very often. “This will all make sense as I get older,” says young Olaf.  Perhaps, with distance and time and attention, anything is possible. However, we might also remember the lesson that Sara Teasdale shared in one of her last poems: “The heart asks more than life can give, /When that is learned, then all is learned.”  

Many of my stories involve lessons learned late. For such tales, you might try “The Iscariot,” “A Balm in Gilead,” or “Eye of the Needle.”