We snaked our way through fall colors, liquid sun in our mirrors, tracing the morainal hills along Dragoon Trail near Marian High School. Ahead of me a slate gray four-door Civic, and ahead of the Civic a big green garbage truck moving at its own torpid, commercial vehicle pace.
Dragoon is a narrow and winding, shoulderless road with no passing zones and so we were stuck behind the truck. I backed off but the driver of the Civic did not. Instead, for a couple miles, she haphazardly tailgated the garbage truck – forward and back, throttle and brake, seesaw and accordion. There were four people in the Civic, including a couple kids in child seats in the back. Everyone aboard to and fro, fore and aft – the car a sloppy yo-yo, like a water skier on a slack tow rope.
It was incredible. I mean, I wish it was incredible.
We got to a light and I pulled alongside the Civic and looked over. The driver was early 30s, the front-seat passenger about the same. No one seemed agitated. They looked totally normal.
Just everyday stuff.
***
My colleague’s in-laws celebrated Christmas last Saturday, November 9, and everybody got Loud Cups. Loud Cups are plastic drink tumblers with lids that include a blowhole for what sounds like a toy store foghorn. They are marketed to sports fans for game day and cost $25 on Amazon.
Loud Cups are not yet available at Costco but Costco Connection magazine has a monthly circulation of more than 15.5 million copies, making it the third-largest magazine in the country. The other two are AARP publications. These facts are from The New York Times, which has 11 million digital subscribers and about 300,000 print subscribers still somehow taking the paper.
The billionaire owner of X has 200 million followers. His platform is mostly videos now. The Times’ website has gone hard for video, too. Their election coverage featured limitless video round-tables, reporters jawing with reporters and charting the political Zodiac.
We enjoyed watching the Yankees flop to a new and richer Evil Empire but forever honor the Yanks’ great and unreproducible king of aphorism, Yogi Berra. A quirky figure of the postwar monoculture, the world of my grandparents and parents and my youth, Yogi once quipped, “The future ain’t what it used to be,” and people laughed.
I read that again during the Series, before the election, and laughed too.
Now it clangs in my head like a gong.
***
I buy a lot of books from the Friends of the Library Store in South Bend. Their selection is happenstance in a way that rewards regular visits and their prices are like stealing. They’ve sold me books by Mark Strand, Wallace Stegner, Stephen Dunn, Colson Whitehead, John Dos Passos, George Saunders and Michael Ondaatje, including a first edition of his that sat on the shelves for more than 35 years! They’ve sold me Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, Mary Chestnut’s Diary, and a collection of Vaclav Havel’s dissident writing.
They’ve also sold me several dictionaries, including a copy of Webster’s Third Unabridged that weighs about 13 pounds. This beastly tome was last updated in 2002 and is a direct and final descendant of Noah Webster’s first American dictionary of 1828. My copy sat in library reference for almost two decades and was withdrawn last summer. I bought it for $15. The last of its kind. Who would make another?
From the preface: “A dictionary opens the way to both formal learning and to the daily self-instruction that modern living requires.”
Self-instruction for modern living.
The word is ravening.
The inherited world
unraveling.
Music: “Death Trip” by The Stooges
