FROM THE ARCHIVES TATTERED THREADS

 

And slightly revised. From 2005. When I look at the map of our country this is kind of what I see. 

It looks like my cranky genes are rearing their heads big time. This has been simmering just below the surface and it finally had to come out.

William Raspberry was an African American writer with a forty year history of writing for the Washington Post when he retired in 2005. So I suspect this may have been one of his last columns. This piece was in the paper one Monday discussing the changes in our community life since the end of WWII. I believe I understand where he was coming from. While I’m not sure I want to give up ease of travel that the car gives us or the fingertip access to entertainment and information that television and computers give us, the loss of community that has crept into our lives over the past forty or fifty years frankly scares the bejesus out of me. 

And the chasms we have created since 2005 scare more than the bejesus out of me.

When my folks got married they moved into a little place on D Street in Springfield about four blocks from the main drag. Basically the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker were within a dozen blocks of the house. Folks walked a lot more and the meat cutter knew just how you liked your pot roast trimmed. They used an ice box for the basic needs, the milkman still made deliveries, there was a garden in the back, mom canned anything that wasn’t nailed down or failed to salute and if you needed to store frozen food you rented a locker at the market on main street.

 They bought two items right after they were married. A sewing machine and a pressure cooker. Man that puppy was heavy. Processed seven quart jars or nine pint jars. And I'm not sure but that house may, I repeat may, still have had a wood stove for cooking. 

We moved to a logging town about forty miles from Springfield, Oakridge, right after I was born and came back to the same house eighteen years later. Richer by two sisters and poorer by a disabled,stove-up logger. Dad wore himself out working in the logging industry. When his legs and his back gave out he ended up on the scrap heap. Thank you FDR for Social Security Disability. We moved again four years later. We ended up about five blocks west and four blocks north from where we started. 

Ironically the house on Kelly was about four blocks from where my sister's first husband was raised. 

 All the basic shops are gone from Main Street except for a large fabric store. They’ve been replaced by second hand stores, small offices and vacant storefronts. The store that housed the lockers is now a nice little butcher shop where you can still point out the steaks you want, they grind their own ground beef, make their own jerky and the beef is raised locally.

The closest grocery store is still a Fred Meyer. It’s about a mile and half away on the other side of several very busy streets. Nobody walks there if they can help it, nobody really knows you and almost everything comes wrapped in plastic. There is a small bulk food department that is nothing to write home about. You drive there in your individual tinted window vehicle, you drive home behind your tinted windows and nobody looks you in the eye if they can help it.

We’ve been sold self-service in the name of convenience but all it really does is cut down the number of people they need to hire and pay employee taxes on. And checking out your own groceries doesn't get you a discount on the final total. The trick is to tell us we're getting it our way, when what they're selling is their way. Orwells’ Newspeak is alive and well. Marketing managers are fluent in it

Instead they use the money they save on people to try to convince me to buy stuff I probably don’t need, didn’t even know existed until I saw the commercial and isn’t worth half what they want for it in the first place, if that. When mom talks about what she and dad had when they got married it wasn't much but they seemed think it was enough. Madison Avenue was just getting into the game of convincing us that no matter how much we have it isn't enough. That somehow if we buy just the right combinations of stuff we’ll  somehow be smarter or sexier or some darn thing. We keep shoveling things into the black hole at the center of our spirits and wonder why all we keep hearing is the sucking sound as little pieces of our selves follow them in

I don't want to make those early days of mom's marriage sound better than they were. People spent a most of their time just making sure the basics got done. A lot of time was spent doing the wash in a wringer washer, hanging the clothes to dry and then ironing the blessed things. And man, you did not want to let my grandmother get near the laundry. Dad used to say she could shrink a house if she put her mind to it and no button was safe. The trick was to fold the shirt so that the buttons were on the inside, safe from the wringer. Most of the time anyway. 

There were just as many gossips per square mile as there are now. They just had to be nosy closer to home and most of the local nosiness stayed local. Now thanks to the internet we can be nosy half way round the world and the axiom that a lie circles the world while the truth is pulling up its socks is truer than ever. 

I really don’t know how the repair the tatters of the threads that tie us all to each other but I think we’d better start mending………real fast

And now those chasms are looking like the Grand Canyon, the Marianas Trench and the hert of the Sahara Desert. Combined.