I am back from the Chicago pipe show; it was very good, very well run and the Chicago pipe club found a fine new venue. More about all that later; the main point is that I’m here and open for business.
I’m unhappy about the last post in this space (I’m going to keep it for a while longer…below this new posting) and luckily for my sense of worth something more edifying came to mind. The idea was prompted by a remark made by the check-out clerk at the local supermarket, smallish, as supermakets go these days…but it does have a dedicated butcher/meat/fish section as well as a cheese counter that is always manned, or womanned if you please. You can also buy celery by the stalk as their organic celery is sold by weight and not by the bundle. But I digress.
What the young clerk said, after she told me the total bill was $19.58 and I remarked that 1958 was a good year for me, was “I think that must have been a better time.” Not that she would know because I doubt she was born before 1998. I think she was Hispanic, and it might not have been a better time, at least in some ways, for Hispanics in 1958, or for Blacks or other minorities. Although maybe it was a better time in terms of quality of life if not in paycheck revenues. Maybe hope and belief were higher. I can’t know.
But it did get me to thinking a little and one way of measuring quality of life came to mind, one probably insignificant yardstick. In 1958, America was amenable to people, like me, hitch hiking. Lots of youngsters, and some not so young, did not have the money to own and operate a car or even use public transportation for inter-urban travel, but could still travel, safely, from place-to-place, often far away places, by hitch hiking… for free. And not just guys. My friend, and his very attractive blond, brown-eyed girlfriend often hitch hiked long distances and never, to the best of my knowledge, got molested or threatened. Nor was I ever put in an uncomfortable position, except when hitching back to Syracuse, N.Y. from Florida after Spring Break and the driver told me to shut-up when I burst out singing along with the pop radio songs. (I think it was on “Easier Said Than Done” that he lost patience.)
I hitched up and down the long Calif. coast almost weekly when I was in the Army, and no, I was not wearing a uniform in an attempt to elicit the sympathy ride, although my relatively short hair on the West Coast of Calif. in 1966-68 might have been a clue to many. I don’t remember having to wait particularly long for a ride, either. One time, hitching from Ft. Ord (near Carmel, Calif., on the beautiful Monterey Peninsula. I had, incontestably, the best duty of the million active duty soldiers at the time and never was ordered to Viet Nam…likely because they knew that at the first sound of gunfire in my direction, I’d have shit my pants and stunk it up for the entire platoon) I was at the same on-ramp as a very young girl (16?) also trying to get a ride northbound on Hwy. 101. We were near some farm town, (Watsonville perhaps…lots of Latino fruit and lettuce pickers there) and she was intent on going to San Francisco, to find her boyfriend. I could not convince her of the folly of her plan, that S.F. was not a one-block-long town like Watsonville (then…not now I suppose) and if she did not have a specific place and time assigned for meeting up, she had no chance of seeing him in San Francisco among the 750,000 people who lived there, not counting visitors. She simply had never strayed from her little burg and and had no visual image of what a city was like. I was, frankly, also more than a little concerned for her safety. In some ways the country may have been friendlier, but a young, solo, befuddled, vulnerable female was certainly going to be a target for that bad element which in every society.
She let me take her under my wing, knowing (or at least believing) that I had a safe place for her to stay while in the big, bad, drug-ridden city (this was probably 1967 and some drugs were not entirely unknown to me, either).
A very sweet, welcoming ex- NYC roommate of my older sister had a nice, but small apartment in S.F. in which a few of us could crash every weekend. It was a fine, upscale part of S.F. but then rents in the 60s were quite reasonable. The area must have looked like Versailles to this girl, and this youth, whose name I certainly can’t remember, stayed with us as we traipsed through The Haight and other sections of the city that weekend. I had the sense, even then, that what she saw opened her eyes no little and quite some to how a rather privileged, educated class of White people lived, behaved toward each other and amused themselves. Poor, perhaps, but really quite elite in attitude and manners next to more-or-less migrant farm laborers. The 100 miles between Watsonville and San Francisco certainly must have been a shocking cultural warp. Even then, in my youthful arrogance (I am now reduced to a much older arrogance) I hoped the experience might have planted a seed in this young person’s brain that perhaps eventually germinated and led her to strive for a better, different life, if, indeed, different did mean ‘better.’ For sure she saw how we treated each other with respect, followed the general, unwritten rules of a civilized, gentle (gentile? by some standards, maybe) branch of society and maybe developed a higher regard for the value of education. (I’m a big believer in education. Doesn’t have to be formal…autodidactism is just fine.)
Among my many follies, mistakes and omissions, this is a story that I like, and it started with hitchhiking, no longer a viable way for the young and indigent to travel the country.
The question of equality and the unlikelihood that a Black or a Brown person could as easily use hitch hiking as a mode of transportation can’t recede far into the background without at least a little more scrutiny.
Shortly after getting out of the Army in 1968, and back at my job as a case worker for the NYC dep’t. of social services (or whatever they called it then…the name kept changing to suit the political trend of the time) I borrowed my friend’s new VW Bug for a date with a fine, bright, attractive work colleague, taking us into NYC, probbably to listen to some music at a Greenwich Village club. Likely it was Gerde’s Folk City, where, essentially for free (I always chose to spend the $1 to buy a beer, but one didn’t have to) you could catch Bob Dylan (I thought he couldn’t sing, couldn’t play the guitar well and I was better on the harmonica than he was…at first sighting, I truly thought he was a joke on stage. That’s how perceptive I was/am) or the truly talented Jose Feliciano.
Anyhow, after dropping the young lady safely back at her Queens home, I started out for my mother’s house out on Long Island where I was staying until I could settle myself in an ap’t. in the city after my Army stint. It was early morning when I fell asleep on the Southern State Parkway, went off the road, flipped the Bug, awoke in mid-flight and remember saying to myself, “shit, my neck’s going to snap, I hope it doesn’t hurt…and I’m going to be a cripple the rest of my life if I even live.”
Nobody on the planet is as lucky as me. Upon regaining consciousness, it wasn’t long, I clenched my fist to see if those cords were snapped…they weren’t. Did the same with my toes, to the same positive effect, and laughed hysterically at my fortune, and then set off to hitch a ride to a police station to report the accident and get the car towed, etc. I tried hitch hiking, but nobody would risk picking up a strange soul at 3:00 A.M. Except, finally, a Black couple did, and they went out of their way to drive me to a police station. So, while it would have been rare for Whites to pick up a Black person back then, or now to be frank, the opposite was clearly not true. Perhaps the biggest flaw in the psyche of Black people in the country, in general of course, is their still unflagging good nature and optimism that attitudes and understanding by the White majority (while that lasts…not for long perhaps. Is that what’s bugging so many in middle-America?) will change and reward minorities with the simple acceptance that should be accorded to all members of the same species. Don’t ask me for my opinion on that eventuality.
To end on an upbeat note, and why not, perhaps you are a movie buff and remember one of the more famous movie scenes of all time in the 1934 film “It Happened One Night.” It starred a young Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. The two are in a bit of a financial dilemma and are trying to hitch hike home. Gable starts out with his thumb extended, but nobody stops. Colbert then steps to the roadside, lifts her skirt to show her shapely gams and, of course, hooray for Hollywood, manages to cop a ride for the two. The idea of hitching a ride (and now I think of it…there’s a 1969 song by Vanity Fair…I looked it up…titled “Hitchin A Ride”) was a mainstream part of our culture. The sign of a better, safer-seeming, friendlier time in our country? To some extent, quite possibly so.
Marty
Writing on this space is long overdue, but it’s not always easy to think of something to say, especially when you’re constrained by the need to avoid alienating possible customers. Personally, I’m a devotee of the belief that everybody is equally deserving of being insulted…it’s good for the typically inflated ego. That approach, of course, is not designed to eliciting cooperation, or, more precisely, emptying pockets of their discretionary dollars. (I do hope all dollars that flow into PulversPriorBriar’s coffers are discretionary. It would hang heavy over the head to think that I was responsible for a conversation in the following vein: “Well, honey, Monday is rent day and Tuesday is grocery shopping day. Can I please have the money for them now so I don’t have to ask you later?” “No, I’m sorry, dear. We are plum out of money…but it went to a really good cause. I got a few more pipes from Pulvers…they were very well priced and he does tend to be prompt with fulfillment.”
While that is definitely typed with tongue in cheek (is that a mixed metaphor, so to speak…fingers and tongues doing the same thing?) it is not all that far off the mark. You can almost bet that sentence was delivered very recently in some household, with the only difference being the explanation that the money is gone because the bread winner (a U. of K. alum?) put it all on the 3rd seeded U. of Kentucky, a long time basketball powerhouse, to beat barely known 14th seed Oakland (is that a college? A university? Where is it? Not in Oakland, CA, that’s for sure), except they didn’t. Oakland produced a very unexpected upset and beat Kentucky. All that money is gone, the rent unpaid and the local Feeding America branch being appealed to. Gambling is a huge problem for some. Put it together with its companion alcoholism (and it doesn’t take much to reach my definition of alcoholism…anything that alters behavior in a negative way…such as playing or not playing with the kids at night, after work…or talking to the spouse) and smoking is a minor offense. But I digress.
The intention here was simply to fill up some white space with an idle thought or two and then go back to posting pipes. Income does not derive from typing this drivel. One idle thought: cell phones create stress and stress is perhaps the number one killer. I thought I lost my cell phone last week and drove all around town trying to recover it. Alas, it turned out to be in the laundry basket under the dresser, and thus had a soft and soundless landing. I’m not alone. That same week, a cartoon in The New Yorker depicted two people looking at a graveyard’s tombstone, the two line inscription of which read “50% on the phone, 50% looking for phone.”
In response to that unwanted stress I’ve decided to leave the phone home when I go out. Much less likely to lose it that way, and since Joy is no longer here, calling and asking me to bring home milk or some such, there is no special reason to have one on me. Not being a doctor, if somebody is having an emergency, they are advised to call somebody else.
Then, to close this out, there is the public statement Vlad Putin made regarding the untimely ‘murder’ of his would-be political opponent, Alexei Navalny. Putin proclaimed his death an “unfortunate incident.” Yes, it most certainly was, especially for Mr. Navalny.
OK. Back to something productive, like posting pipes and taking naps.
Marty
P.S. Steve Fallon, The Pipe Stud (self described) revealed to me that Kyle Black is back and once again looking for victims. He scammed a number of pipe and tobacco sellers, almost including me…I got my tins, or money, back; I can’t recall which, but others weren’t so fortunate, and is now maybe onto other items, but don’t be surprised if he surfaces in our hobby again. Try to remember that name. The man is a sociopath and not to be reasoned with. Best to avoid dealing with him. Ask Steve if you don’t believe me.
We’re up to “Prayer in The Portable Curmudgeon
Pray, n. To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy. Ambrose Bierce
Pregnancy
”If pregnancy were a book, they would cut the last two chapters.” Nora Ephron
“Prejudice”
”I am free of all prejudices. I hate everyone equally.” W.C. fields
”I don’t like principles. I prefer prejudice .” George S. Kaufman
“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” William James
”President”
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I’m beginning to believe it.” Clarence Darrow