Gluten Crisis

 

         I got a letter from my Uncle Barlow the other day. It had been a while since he wrote, and he said he just wanted to catch me up on things. Here's what he had to say.

Dear Nephew,
     Well, out here in Barlow County things have been pretty routine, except for one. Well, maybe two, if you count the dust-up between the Widow Cumbee and Floyd over at the grain elevator, hardware store and auto repair. He had run out of lids for canning jars, and I guess she had some tomatoes and okra ready to go, and she started yelling at him about causing her to waste food.     

      Now, Floyd has been mighty careful around the Widow Cumbee ever since she accused him of making amorous advances.  He long ago gave up on reminding her that it was the other way around, because that riled her up even worse, since he had spurned her, as Millie over at the library puts it. The Widow Cumbee has  stayed on the warpath with Floyd no matter what he says, so he just hunkers down and waits for her to blow herself out.

     Anyhow, Floyd has a cousin Rufus over in Wendell who's a big canner, and Floyd called over there and worked out borrowing some extra lids, and he got the Widow Cumbee settled down pretty much overnight, so that wasn't really the big to-do around here.

     No, the big one was between Ida and Scooter over at the cafe. They are having marital troubles again. 

It always starts when Ida gets hold of a notion and won't let go. Millie says she goes through phases, and this causes them to have what she calls a stormy relationship. I guess that's a high-toned way of saying that Ida's a shouter and Scooter is stubborn as a post. 

     Anyhow, it always begins when Ida gets a notion. There was the time she decided they needed to like opera, and went around trying to get people to call her Dulcinea. She overheard Scooter telling Floyd he'd sooner have the green apple quickstep than listen to an opera, and she didn't speak to him for weeks.

     Then there was the time she insisted on adding Mexican food to their menu over at the cafe. Scooter got in hot water for poking fun at that one, too. They eventually got around to kissing and making up, but I guess they got kind of carried away with that part after hours at the cafe. They made such a ruckus that  the sheriff dropped in to check, and there they were, naked as newborns and getting on toward the main event right on the cafe floor.

     Idea dove behind a steam table and started screaming that the sheriff was a voyeur. Millie says that is a high-toned way of saying he's a peeper. I never thought that was quite fair to the sheriff, because he didn't know what they were up to, and anyhow when Ida is in a room you don't have to peep. She's a big old girl and pretty hard to miss, naked or otherwise.

     Well, this time it was the menu again. Ida decided they ought to aim it over toward healthier food. Scooter, who is not what you'd call a quick learner, started digging in his heels again. He said she wasn't making good business sense, as their three top sellers were batter-fried chicken, pork skin cracklin's and white cream gravy over buttermilk biscuits.

     Well, Ida said, that kind of showed her point. And she wanted to put in some gluten-free stuff while they were at it. Well, Scooter said, he'd read where that gluten-free diet business was aimed a disease that almost nobody's got. It was mostly just a fad, he said.  Why, down at the Shop-Good market, he'd seen gluten-free labels on stuff that never had gluten in it in the first place.

     Well, Ida said, Shop-Good was keeping in tune with the tenor of the times. Millie says that's a high-toned way of saying they were just going along with things.  Anyhow, Ida kept changing the menu, and Scooter kept grumbling. 

     Then, one day, she caught him out behind the dumpster sneaking an RC Cola and a Moon Pie. Well, the roof just about came right off the cafe. She said he was not being respectful of a sharing spirit in  their enterprise.  He said he had always made a point of trying not to share in downright foolishness. She said he was being supercilious. (Millie says that means he was being uppity.)  He said he didn't like being called silly.

     Well, Ida said, he was just going to have to learn to embrace healthier life decisions. He said no, he didn't. He said he had read where the Supreme Court says you don't have to do things you don't like if they get you crossways with sincerely held religious beliefs. He said he sincerely believes the Lord never meant for people to eat grass.

     Now, I have to say, I think Scooter's got a point about this gluten thing being a big fad. Any day now I expect to see that television woman -- the one they sent to prison -- telling people how to make gluten-free water.

     Anyhow, the whole thing has become a big, sad mess. Ida has thrown Scooter out of the house. He is sleeping on croaker sacks of pig feed  over at the elevator.

     And Ida has got so loud about this health food notion that people are beginning to take sides. You take the Hopgood family. Joe and Maybelle had sent their son Arliss to school up in Chapel Hill. Those professors up there convinced him they had a monopoly on everything worth knowing, and he came home looking down his nose at anything you could name in Barlow County.

     Well, Arliss got wind of Ida's notion about healthy eating, and he decided he wanted to be part of that movement. That's what he called it: a movement. Every time his father slapped some butter on a piece of cornbread, the boy commenced to snort and cluck. When Joe finally asked him what was wrong, the boy jumped into a lecture about unhealthy eating habits. 

     Joe pointed out that old man Pruner next door was still slapping butter on cornbread at the age of 92. The boy said old man Pruner was a Philistine.  Joe asked him what the hell Samson and Delilah had to do with cornbread, and things have been frosty at the Hopgood house ever since.

     I just don't know where all this is headed. They don't have a shower over at the elevator, so Scooter has begun to smell like pig feed. People kind of move away a step or two when he shows up.

     If any of the rest of us want a good plate of white gravy on buttermilk biscuits, we have to go all the way out to the Sip 'n Snack on the bypass. The food Ida is serving at the cafe is so bad that business has fallen way off. Ida says she is glad to make an economic sacrifice for the sake of social conscience. Scooter says they can't eat her social conscience, and nobody else can, either.

     There is one little bit of hope. The sheriff has got a little group of people together to try to find a way to trick Scooter and Ida into kissing and making up. The sheriff promises to keep away, no matter how loud it might get. We'll see.

      I hope things are going good for you up there in the city. 

                                                                                             Sincerely

                                                                                             Your Uncle Barlow

     

    

The Faces Of Evil

     From The True Believer by Eric Hoffer:

     "Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. 

     " ... When Hitler was asked whether he thought the Jew must be destroyed, he answered: 'No ... we should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.'  F.A. Voigt tells of a Japanese mission that arrived in Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist movement.  Voigt asked a member of the mission what he thought of the movement. He replied: 'It is magnificent. I wish we could have something like it in Japan, only we can't, because we haven't got any Jews.'

     " ... Finally, it seems, the ideal devil is a foreigner. To qualify as a devil, a domestic enemy must be given foreign ancestry. Hitler found it easy to brand the German Jews as foreigners. The Russian revolutionary agitators emphasized the foreign origin ... of the Russian aristocracy. ..."

     The parallels and implications for contemporary American polity are clear -- though often neglected in the gales of commentary from and about Washington. Punditry is preoccupied with handicapping Republicans' decision to cling to Donald Trump. Is it shrewd or foolish? Will cohesion in the Trump base be a decisive asset? Will disaffected moderates counter loyal Trumpsters? Will priorities of the larger public defeat a narrowly partisan strategy?

     These arid calculations are suitable for  appraising  the vested interests of the Republican Party.  Certainly they suit the Republican leaders who have for years placed party above country. But as they venture now to place party above common decency, the nation comes to a larger reckoning.

     The plain truth is that the moral depravity of the Trump administration was calculated. That administration was the government. Our government. And the question now placed before us by the behavior of senior Republicans is this:   What  responsibility will we accept  -- and what accountability demand -- for a government that demonized minorities,  opened concentration camps for children and, in an onslaught of disease, countenanced extra deaths by the  thousands to further a  self-serving pose?

     Republican leaders are deservedly faulted for being hyper-partisan, but their true common denominator is a venal craving for power. They wink at bigotry, cruelty, deceit, violence, incompetence and breathtaking corruption. Why? Well, they say, to regain dominance for their party's principles of governance.  Allusion to principle is made straight-faced. This is a classic case of idealizing ends to justify vile means.

     And among the complicit are none other than religious leaders. This is a ghastly, wretched thing. The lure of political influence has adulterated values on the Christian right, where citation of scripture can now be highly selective. Thus we need not expect references to the fourth chapter of the gospel of Matthew. There, in his final wilderness attempt to subvert Jesus, Satan tries to induce Him to covet secular power.  

     Protected by two oceans and national affluence, Americans have been spared some of the harder realities of life elsewhere. This colors our reading of history. It conditions our perspective on those junctures when governing authority in another country has been infected with what can only be called evil.

     We are tempted to think: It can't happen here.  But it can. And it has. And high officials are now conniving to carry it forward.

     Though some Republican figures have begun to display a functioning gag reflex, party leadership remains dominated by those who choose to ignore the difference between public attitude and the mood of a mob. In the face of cynically energized bigotry and deceit, they have chosen to lead from behind. They have turned the Congress of the United States into a place where principles perish. They have countenanced rhetoric whose consequence could be predicted by any sentient person above the age of 10:  Individuals may now be attacked in the public streets because of their ethnicity.

     As Washington accepts lower and lower standards for business as usual, the rest of us should remain alert to the fact that evil may wear an everyday face.

     

     

School? Why?

 

     My job once made me the luncheon guest of an internationally known cleric and scholar of classical literature. He was charming in conversation, gracious in hospitality, gentle in demeanor. Also, he displayed a precision of mind that I had previously associated with technical or scientific education.

     I confessed my surprise, and he explained. His vocation required his being able to discern nuances of meaning in language, and to preserve them as he translated  from a first language forward  through two or three more.  Precision of thought was essential. Achieving it had required of him as a student arduous work and mental discipline. 

     At this point  -- even though we were in the dining hall of a monastery -- he raised his voice and pounded the table so hard the silverware jumped. "This modern idea that learning can be fun is hooey!  The only way to learn is to break your ass!"

     He is many years gone, but I think he might agree that related questions for today are: Learn what? And, Why?

     Lawmakers in my state undertook to answer aggressively. Election cycles had installed people who viewed themselves as new brooms. They shuffled governance and administration of the state university system. They called for greater "efficiency" in the university's operation. They declared disdain for "frills." They declaimed on equipping students to find jobs.

     Their precept?  The value of education is measured in its near-term economic utility.

     We can be glad this view was not shared by the progenitors of western civilization. We should regret that it is not peculiar to my state or wholly focused on college.  It represents an elemental departure from any fully formed concept of education.

     Dorothy Sayers, the mystery writer who was also an accomplished  classical scholar, said as early as the 1940's that foundational concepts of schooling had already been compromised. I would paraphrase her argument this way:

     The first function of education is to teach people to think, and to communicate accurately. As words are our means of delineating ideas, precision in one requires precision in the other. Or, in the obverse: Muddy thinking and muddy language both shape and reflect each other.

     Students are not drilled in the logic that properly links words to words and creates sentences with exact meaning. They are not experienced in dialectic argument as an exercise -- word used advisedly -- in reasoning. They are permitted to consume facts without synthesis and to recite them without understanding.

     The result? People no longer fully understand how to read or to express themselves.  They are hobbled in thinking and communication.

     Anecdotal evidence can be pertinent, and mine has the virtue of being consistent over many years. In a career of supervising writers, I encountered with dismal regularity some who could not reliably distinguish an expression of opinion from a statement of fact. 

     Despite their  having reputable educations. 

     Even when they had written the sentences themselves.

     They did not fully understand how to take accurate meaning from an English sentence. 

    When  schooling shapes people to know more than they understand, what consequences ensue? (Not least in some quarters of academe, where cataloging may pass for scholarship.)

     We have leaders who can't muster language of leadership. Ideas religious, moral, ethical and political are presented in the form of slogans. Discourse is shallow -- and here consequences may be especially severe. One inescapable implication of America's distemper in recent years is that many people don't recognize propaganda when they hear it.

     My state has a history of endemic rural poverty. The farmers and laborers who were willing to pay taxes for our university wanted their children to be freed from a future behind the plow. Yes. But not merely by getting better jobs. 

     They wanted their children equipped to be full-strength participants in an emerging society; to discern a variety of life choices and to make them well; to contribute to  shaping  the climate of attitude and opportunity in which their own children would live.

    Of course education can improve employment prospects. But its proper purpose, fully realized, is not merely to make better earners. It is to make better minds.

Thoughts From The Grocery Checkout Line

     

     My friend Harry has reached a certain age. No longer does he reliably recognize the names of celebrities or the models of automobiles.

     Harry has not lost his marbles. He still reads his mail and pays his bills correctly. He greets friends and family by right names. He does not grocery shop in his bathrobe. He has never worn a tinfoil hat.

        In a sense, Harry has simply been left behind. As he completed the daily orbits of his own life, the rest of life marched ahead.  Familiar public figures retired or died. Norms changed in cultural vocabulary, even in the pervasive vernacular of marketing.  Eventually, in a moment of epiphany, it dawned on Harry that the larger world had a name for his world: Yesterday.

     This does not greatly discomfit him. By and large, he liked yesterday well enough. However, he does have to deal with moments of nuisance.

     Some of these come to in the grocery store checkout line.  We've all waited there,  while the person ahead disputes a sale price or searches endlessly for the only credit card that will do.  And we've all passed this time by glancing over the tabloid sheets and personality magazines.

     From them we learn who is pregnant and who wants to be. We learn who is making a giddy commitment to marriage and who is departing it broken-hearted or righteously outraged. 

     We are invited to consider a singer's political opinions. We are offered an actor's definition of social responsibility.

     The pictures and stories are predicated, presumably, on assumptions that we care about the people featured. Harry, however, does not. Rather, he leaves the grocery line with a feeling he's been hectored by post-adolescent strangers.

     He is colorful in annoyance: Some millionaire rocker who looks like he slept in a dumpster is plagued by existential ennui?  Give me a break!

     Harry's episodic issues with mavens of marketing involve tone-deafness.

     Theirs.

     As usual, he is colorful: Look what they've done with the models of cars. The names ought to suggest something about style and juice. Impala. Charger. I saw one the other day called a Tucson.  Know what that makes me think of? Cactus. Why the hell should I want a car that reminds me of cactus?

     Harry says age gives him license to be cranky. And he enjoys it. He admits as much in moments of candor. He calls it therapeutic as well: Grumbling about stuff that doesn't really matter diverts him from brooding about things he can't change.

     Thus he doesn't rail against the diminishment that creeps steadily in with the years. It comes to everything alive, he says. I saw a guy say it once on TV: "Everything has a shelf life, except Velveeta cheese." Another guy -- a writer -- said being born is the most dangerous thing there is. The eventual mortality rate is 100 percent.

     Harry and I enjoy meeting over beer from time to time. When he's had a couple, he becomes downright philosophical.

     Know why writers call aging a journey? It's because, when you reach a spot way down the road, you can see things you wouldn't see if you hadn't made the trip. And of course stuff happens to you as you travel. One of the things I can see better now? Prejudice. Because it happens to me. I experience it personally. Some people look at me and see old white guy, and they think they know everything they need to. They don't mean me any harm, particularly, but it's like I'm not really there as far as they are concerned. Just some image  they brought along with them.

     Harry says this is a symptom of a societal mistake. He says that with the modern convention of labeling generations, we've institutionalized prejudice. Actually legitimized it.

     You hear it all the time. Generation X does this. Generation Y does that. People who wouldn't dream of stereotyping by race pigeonhole millions of others with a phrase.  And you know what else? If you take a real look at the labels, there's a wide streak of unkindness in them.

     Harry says aging also has taught him to pay better attention to the people who matter in his life -- the ones he'd miss if they were gone. He means friends and family, of course. But he also specifies the kind of people you never meet but who nonetheless make a difference in the way you see the world.

     You know one of the people I miss? Mother Teresa. I never thought about her much, but she was always there, sort of at the corner of your eye, with her example of courage and reverence. You don't see a lot of those in daily life, especially reverence. It's good for there to be someone who reminds us about the best that human beings are capable of.

     And I say that without being a churchgoing type. I think religion would have a lot more success with people if it weren't for the damn churches. Half of them want to control you, and all of them want your money. I'd take 'em a lot more seriously if they sold all their fancy buildings, gave the money to poor people, and set up shop in pole barns.

     Now, all that being said, there's something to think about if you try to look past the churches and see into the heart of the thing. There's some pretty special moral wisdom in the Bible. If you want to get the notion of it, just consider turning the ten commandments upside down: You must lie. You must steal. You must murder. 

     The world wouldn't work. Life wouldn't work. The human race wouldn't work. See?

     I once asked Harry about the people who say that Christianity is the only right road. What about all the perfectly good people who are on a different one?

     He snorted: If God wants to whisper in Buddhist ears, too, seems to me that's up to Him. Some windbag preacher in a thousand-dollar suit's not gonna make me think ill of it.

     Even after a couple of beers, Harry's appetite for deep thinking is finite. He is apt to wind up with another riff on grocery lines or car models.

    I was at a stoplight, and the car in front of me was called a Yaris. Yaris!  Sounds like a Tibetan cow. Ever see a picture of one of those things? They're ugly as hell. Of course, so are a lot of the cars these days. I saw one, looked like they put wheels on a Kleenex box...

     Harry's wife says she can't decide if she should describe him as a grouchy optimist or a cheerful realist.

     Depends on the day, she says ...

     And whether he's been to the grocery store.

      

Lindsey Graham From Across The Pond

 

      My friend Nigel is  Brit. We met while traveling years ago and hit it off. He stays in touch by phone now and then.
     He called the other day to check on my welfare during the pandemic.  And then he moved on to other matters. The conversation went this way.

     Nigel: "I say old friend, I know that we usually avoid discussing politics, but I have a question that cries out to be answered."

     Me: "About what?"

     Nigel: "That senator of yours, Lindsey Graham."

     Me: "What about him?"

     Nigel: "Is he barking mad?"

     Me: "Well, I can understand how you might wonder."

     Nigel: "Damn straight. He spend years denouncing and ridiculing Trump, and now he's all but kissing the orange cretin on the lips."

     Me: "I think the kiss might land on the other side of his anatomy, but I take your point."

     Nigel: "So, what is the bloke up to?"

     Me: "Well, Trump has political clout inside the Republican Party, and Graham argues that he's just being realistic. He says he wants to remain relevant."

     Nigel: "Relevant to what? With values of that sort, a fellow would justify being relevant in a two-dollar whorehouse."

     Me: "I agree. But of course Graham is not the only politician aiming to court the Trump loyalists."

     Nigel: "I'll say. There is that woman from Georgia who says aliens planted transmitters in her molars or some such thing. And then there is that young ruffian from Missouri."

     Me: "Senator Hawley went to Yale."

     Nigel: "And the Unabomber went to Harvard. God's teeth, man, you've got fruitcakes and thugs running your country."

     Me: "Well, they aren't exactly running it. And anyhow, Trump energized them, and there they are."

     Nigel: "Why did you elect him? He's a thief. He's fleecing his own supporters. He does it openly. Don't send your money to the Republican Party. Send it to me."

     Me: "He's got a lot of legal trouble. My guess is he'll say the actions against him are politically motivated and use the donations to pay lawyers.  And, in a technical manner of speaking, you could say that we didn't actually choose him."

     Nigel: "Whatever do you mean?"

     Me: "He lost the popular vote in both presidential elections. And in the Republican primaries, back where it all started, there were so many candidates in the field that the vote was splintered. He could win a primary by getting more votes than any other single candidate without actually winning a majority of the votes cast."

     Nigel: "I don't understand your system."

     Me: "Unfortunately, many of us don't, either."

     Nigel: "Which brings us back to that fellow Graham. He seems to keep himself in the news a lot."

     Me: "Yes, he does."

     Nigel: "That would appear to be the behavior of an ambitious man."

     Me:  "I think he aspires to have a long career in politics, yes."

     Nigel: "And he aims to succeed in this by proving that his word is worthless and he's half a bubble off plumb?  Did he actually say that Trump is 'magic' ?" 

     Me: "Words of that sort, yes."

     Nigel: "And these other politicians who want a bigger lick of the ice cream. If a bloc of voters said the moon is made of green cheese, they would agree?"

     Me: "In a manner of speaking, some would, yes."

     Nigel: "They would propagate an extravagant lie!"

     Me: "Among some, it appears to be a tactic nowadays."

     Nigel: "But you wouldn't call it leadership, would you?"

     Once again I had to agree. Then it was time to wind up the call. Ordinarily one would finish by inviting a friend to visit, but Nigel refuses to travel to the United States. 

     He says he's afraid of being shot by one of the "gun-toters" -- which by Nigel's estimate includes just about everyone between Canada and Mexico.  He is one of those Europeans who feel down deep that Americans are upstarts in the civilization business.  When we talk, I can't resist twitting him just a little.

     Me: "Nigel, it's always good talking to you. Fun and food for thought. And about this subject of zaniness and extremes in political maneuver, I'll offer two words to you."

     Nigel: "What's are they?"

     Me: "Boris Johnson."

     Nigel did chuckle. He's really an all right bloke.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

Got Loot? Guilt? Scruples?

    

       He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday school, except perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.

     The Maker of the universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was interested, furious and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.
                                             

                                     Sinclair Lewis in Elmer Gantry

     If fear of eternal damnation is the only thing keeping you from being a crappy person, you're already a crappy person. 

                                   

                                                            Anonymous

     As a boy I hoped to avoid Sundays with one pair of grandparents. Sundays meant I would be doomed to go with them to church.

     Theirs was an-old line protestant congregation.  They met in a somber brick-pile of a building and were led by a monotonic old fellow who believed that length was a cardinal virtue in sermons. The pews were hard. The boredom was agony.

    The experience did produce in me a formative effect: Churchgoers appeared to allow themselves distance between preachment and practice.  I resolved that adulthood would let me nod to preachment but adopt a practice of spending Sunday mornings elsewhere.

     Later experience moderated this view.  But memories of being put off by church do recur nowadays, as celebrity preachers tell me I must vote their way or head straight for perdition.

     They make a crowd over at the right-wing end of things.  Their styles are diverse, and I remain at sixes and sevens about them. Would a desert island be better with a coiffed smoothie or a fire-and-brimstone pulpit-pounder?  Rum choice, as the British might say.

      Meanwhile, they often display like views of certain matters: In the pursuit of secular political clout, there are few limits on rendering unto Caesar.  In the pursuit of contributions, modesty is not virtue. In a church edifice -- well, size does matter.

     Billy Graham's renegade son Franklin is a particularly enterprising one of the bunch. He gets himself heard above the clamor, if only by dint of sheer brass. (He has been known to say that people with views unlike his are shaking their fists at God.) 

     And he has managed his own reconciliation of that Biblical business about God and mammon. A while back he simultaneously collected tidy, full-time salaries from two large non-profit organizations. Queried on how be could be full-time on two jobs at once, he dropped the second salary. Later,  he quietly picked it up again. Quite the multi-tasker, he.

     Life has long taught that the secular world has no corner on ambition or greed; no monopoly on climbers or con artists.  Still it is a dismal thing to glimpse, in  self-styled pastors, the profile of a classic movie villain who justified victimizing others: "If God did not want them sheared, he would not have made them sheep."

     For someone who has reconsidered his high-horse opinion of church, another prospect also is gloomy.  Mingled among the grifters are those who do actually believe in a message of fear and damnation. Hearing them, one would not guess that the term evangelism comes from a root word meaning good news. 

     As a boy I had not yet learned about the history of conversion at the point of a sword. But I did wonder about the quality of conversion under threat. Might temptation still flourish when no one was looking? Examples came to mind. Sneaking cigarettes behind the garage. Dumping the broccoli when mom left the room.

     Of course sub rosa sin takes adult form if the preachers themselves go astray. Pleasures of the flesh have been notable over the years, when now and then one of them was caught exercising a very personal definition of the laying on of hands. 

     Avarice does not qualify, as it is practiced openly.

     A friend of mine likes word play to emphasize points. When something has been going on for a long time, he says it has lasted "since memory runneth not to the contrary." That sounds about right for celebrity preachers. In this country we've had them since Cotton Mather's folks were hanging witches.  

     They do seem to flourish in cycles. (And nowadays make a much better living.)  Especially when they latch onto politicians, and vice-versa, the fat gets in the fire, to wit: The past few years, when supposed moral exemplars have supported a fellow who would steal pennies off a dead man's eyes.

     In exploiting their sway of the moment, the smoothies and pulpit-pounders are using not only their followers but the rest of us, too. Like bothersome neighbors, they may be within their rights to behave badly, but we can nonetheless wish they wouldn't. And if they push their behavior as a norm for our own, they go too far.

     Thus, when I count my blessings, I include the fact that there is no prospect of my being on a desert island.

     

 

       

Friendly Chickens

 

     

     Two families are moving out of our neighborhood. In suburban life, this ranks with a re-arrangement of international alliances.

     All of us will miss the departing ones. They were agreeably quiet and orderly, friendly without being forward. And they leave us facing The Big Question ...

     Who will move in?

     We don't fret about race, ethnicity, age -- things of that sort. We have long been happily diverse in the 'hood. On other matters we sort ourselves according to yins and yangs of attitude. 

     Some look forward to making new acquaintances. But others worry. Will the newcomers amount to invasive species? Will they bring unruly children? Barking dogs? Will they party late or complain if we do?

     We who've known a few neighborhoods understand that the worriers are not without their reasons. 

      One long-ago neighbor might not only drop by uninvited but walk right in. Once, when he wanted a hand, he appeared in my bathroom  and asked me to get out of the shower. 

     Another undertook to raise chickens, which escaped and began appearing at nearby front doors.    

     Another sold used appliances out of his garage, creating random nuisance in our weekend traffic.

     A champ was the brusque bachelor who tired of his affair with the wife across the street. She, however, had not tired of him.  Usually he had no time for the rest of us. But when she crossed over to pursue him, he would show up at our doors to hide. Just dropping in for a beer, he would announce. He'd offer visibly distracted conversation, ignore responses and bolt when the woman went home. Also, he drank a lot of beer.

     When the new people arrive, our neighborhood will face a test of collective character. Will we snoop from a distance as the moving vans unload? Appraise the furniture? Try to catch the pattern of the drapes? 

    And then, with the prospect of new acquaintances, my petty alter ego will begin muttering to me. He is annoyed by sports chauvinists for teams he dislikes, and  people who won't stop talking about the last place they lived; by those who keep perfect yards without visible effort; by wine snobs ...

    The list goes on, alas.

    But apprehension aside, the odds favor an agreeable outcome. We are a live-and-let-live bunch, for the most part. With the weathering of time and experience, our neighborhood angst threshold has gone up. 

     The appliance salesman was surpassed by a fellow who revved his dune buggy at night.

     And the chicken neighbors graduated to ducks.