Like Listening to Golf on the Radio

Yesterday afternoon was a family outing, of sorts, for us. My daughter, whose accomplishing what I think is her last semester as a senior at Eastern Connecticut State University, has moved home from the dorm life of recent years for the final slog. Her full-time return to our hearth and home hasn't changed the Bonnie and Clyde lifestyle of her parents, even if her father now moves and reacts more like Clyde's dog than Clyde himself. She does give my wife a Thelma for her Louise and so it goes.

Anyway, the three of us spent the afternoon at a home show. You've seen the ads for these things on your local cable system, where all the folks who have goods and services for home improvement and remodeling cluster in one location designed to pitch their products not at homeowners or home dwellers like you and me, but the hundreds and thousands of small businesses from whom the former purchase expansions and improvements.

Not surprisingly, in an economy where General Motors has had to let a few auto manufacturing divisions go, times have been tough and money tight.

This isn't the first year we've gone to this home show. It's local and we have tickets from my son, Patrick, who works for a company that, like the other vendors, rents space to set up a booth to pitch its product to potential customers. That the business is cell phones took me aback the first time we went until I realized how ubiquitous cell phones, yes, even in the construction business, have actually become.

This year, to underscore the point that anything can be sold to anyone if the forum is right, was a booth not that far from Pat's that offered teeth whitening. Obviously, such a service is not instead of the gutter helmet booths of which I counted three by different companies, but rather, in addition to for people who might be interested in buying gutter protection but also want to have a big, bright smile because they don't have to dig leaves, or small, dead animals, out of their gutters.

I knew the economy was tight just from the amount of space in the aisles on the floor of the arena where the home show was staged. The last time we went, I think, two years ago, it was jammed and everything and everyone flowed like molasses on an August afternoon. It felt at times that everyone east of the Connecticut River was at the show. But this time, the crowds seemed to be much smaller, though I'd read an article earlier this week suggesting the bottom had been reached nationally in the home sales and home improvement markets. Maybe just not here, or just not yet.

Patrick described the ebb and flow of customers as 'like listening to golf on the radio', an expression that struck me as both descriptive and unquantifiable, simultaneously. As both of our children have grown into adults of their own, I've discovered I understand less and less of the world in which they live. Which, since it was my job as their Dad to prepare them for it, reflects very badly on me and wonderfully well on them for adapting and overcoming anyway. More often than not these days, they shield me as a stranger in a strange land from a lifestyle of calculated coldness whose language is stark and frightening and for which I lack a decoder.

As we walked from one booth to another, I could see, or thought I could, the desperate gleam in the eyes of many of the vendors as the hours since the home show opened raced by and the leads for the next big sale never finalized because this time, the cliches are more than that. Times are tough and the world is a rougher place to make your living than it was a year ago. Not only is virtue its own reward, it's perilously close to becoming its own punishment. And it may get a whole lot worse before it gets a whole better and I'm worried that if that's the case, how will we ever know?

"And it's a battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace,
And a wound that will never heal.
No prima donna, the perfume is on an
Old shirt that is stained with blood and whiskey.
And goodnight to the street sweepers, the night watchmen flame keepers
And goodnight to Mathilda, too."
-bill kenny