4 November 2023

At 2 pm yesterday GBH newscaster Henry Santoro reminded listeners that we return to Standard Time tonight, “moving from sunshine and happiness to darkness and misery.”  As I type this at 6.20 pm, I’m hearing some fireworks—early Guy Fawkes reveling?  Or just someone protesting this tipping of too-delicately-balanced psyches toward Seasonal Affective Disorder?  Tomorrow night, 5 November, the sun will set in Madbury NH at 4.31.   Oy.

I’m wondering if you, Dear Readers, also find this time of year a trial.  The news remains debilitatingly oppressive, and since I last posted about “the helpers” on whom I try to focus, Robert Card killed 18 people in Lewiston, Maine and then himself, despite repeated alerts from all who knew him that he was mentally unstable, armed, and dangerous.  The morning after he was discovered dead but before I’d heard the news that he’d been found, the first thing I saw out my bedroom window was a man in camouflage holding a rifle walking along the edge of our woods to the west.  It took a skipped heartbeat before I recalled it was hunting season.  And ever since, I’ve tried to avoid too much news of children in Gaza writing their names on their arms so that they can be identified, and local moms taking photos of their kids each morning before school to record what they are wearing—just in case.

And then yesterday I went to the Fox Run Mall in Newington NH for the first time in years, pursuing a futile quest for martini glasses to replace my chipped ones.  Even though I find my constitution no longer up to any but the teeniest of martinis, guests are coming soon who are, I suspect, heartier than I am.  Sears, one of the Mall’s anchor stores, closed there in 2019 about the time that original big box store declared bankruptcy after 130 years in business, and the Mall now is a mostly deserted, depressing husk of its former self evidencing another retail era gone by.

When I was a child in the late ‘50’s and early 60’s, my mother and I dressed up (crinolines and gloves!) to go to downtown St. Petersburg’s Maas Brothers, or, when visiting the grandparents in Ohio, downtown Dayton’s Rike’s, where she had once frugally, piece-by-piece, purchased with her IBM secretarial salary her 1947 trousseau.  My off-to-college clothes in 1970 all came from either J. C. Penney’s or Sears, which I then thought a significant step up from anything my mother had sewn for me.  But Penney’s and Sears’s much ritzier relatives, the grand emporia established at the end of the 19^th century, even then could not long endure.  By the time I got to grad school at Tulane and worked in the summer of 1977 as a waitress at D. H. Holmes in New Orleans, one of the first department stores in the country opened on Canal Street in 1849, that Grand Dame was already in decline.  Patrons at the in-store restaurant Potpourri most evenings were widows living in the Quarter taking advantage of wonderful cooking at budget prices.  I didn’t make much money there, but boy, did I eat well!  I can taste the red beans and rice, bread pudding, and Peacemaker sandwiches (buttered French bread and fried oysters) in my mind’s palate now.

With the passing of the department stores, those magnificent cathedrals of commerce, came the malls.  When I taught summer school at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter NH in the summer of 1985, I thought Newington’s Fox Run the nonpareil, certainly without rival in my new Kentucky home.  Foxy no more, that mall is now a rather creepy ghost of its former self, its affect made all the more grotesque by the early intrusion of Christmas trimmings juxtaposed with marked down Halloween crap.

Falling back indeed.

So how is it that in lieu of martini glasses of appropriate proportion (not the impossibly capacious ones that seem to be all that’s on offer these days), finding a clever cabbage-leaf platter for a coming cocktail party marked down at Target from $20 to $2 can, however briefly, lift my spirits?

Actually, I think it was less that bargain purchase that perked me up than it was the overheard half of a phone conversation entertaining me as I waited in line to pick up my new leaf blower at the Home Depot customer service desk:  “You want to return a kitchen?  We don’t have $12,000 on hand to refund.  Wait, l think I remember you.  Let me speak to the manager.”  At which point, the HD associate on the phone and I exchanged eye rolls, a shrug, and a silent laugh.  Once she hung up, she clued me in:  “They came in with credit cards and buckets of cash; he used a card, but she used the cash.  I’m really hoping to learn the rest of the story!”  Ah, capitalism in these latter days.

Maybe all I need is more such encounters with mysterious absurdities connecting strangers.   And that extra hour of sleep.

Set the clocks back and enjoy.

Pleasant dreams!