Jinks

Back then folks left front doors unlocked, car keys in cars, carried cash in the open, trusted their children to be left alone outside whilst they went shopping, and did favors for strangers. The storekeepers kept accounts in their heads and the commercial boats weighed their own catch when they came in.

But that's all changed now as the world has leaked itself into everybody's life, is what Grandy says...leaked itself into everybody's life. Human crime and devilment follow people, she says, and the only safe place is where no people are. The North & South pole maybe, and wherever the hottest place on earth is on its hottest day. When there are only two people left in the world, one will find a way to abuse the other and when only one is left, he will abuse himself, Grandy says.

Between the first time I showed up starved for a hunk of stale bread and met her at the diner that rainy day...between then and now the people in town have changed, the feel of the town changed with them, yet watching it all, Grandy stayed the same. She will still save drowned cats & dogs like me and spend more of herself than she's got in the bank...'My life is overdrawn,' she said more than once...and never an eye on the risk. Like I already told you, in the morning paper she will read the bad news from everywhere out loud and make grief in herself for folks she never met.

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I been going back to those old days in my head. When you are young, your troubles last a day. They look like serious troubles to you because you can't see anything but what's standing right in front, and they must pass to make room for what is waiting tomorrow...something else standing in front. When you grow up, trouble is an ocean with things in it that pull you to deep water and then push you under. Nothing stands in front, nothing stands clear alone for you to see and then you know that all the days you live and things you do are connected to each other. Nothing passes, and tomorrow only dumps more ballast on. Life is chains, webs & nooses. It is the reason grownups call the 'old days' simple. Is it because horse & wagon is simpler than jet planes? Or because jet planes dragged a net through factories and wars and politicians and the dirt they make on the way to be jet planes? No; I decided it is grownups who were simple in the old days because they did not grow up yet. Now they are grown up and don't like the mess they carried in with them.