Monday, July 28, 2025

Banquo's Ghost

I'm a couple of days late and more than a few sawbucks short on a memory I offered in this space fifteen years ago that showed up on my timeline earlier this week. When I re-read it, hoping it had been overtaken by events, I realized it's the same movie, with perhaps different characters, all these years on. Submitted for your approval:

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Picture Postcards from Near Prosperity

Coming out of the local market the other afternoon, I encountered a fellow standing alongside a Toyota Corolla, not the newest model, but one that was well-maintained. In front of the car, in a display mode of sorts, was a table with a handwritten sign that said "$40." It was a coffee table, a very white wooden table that came nearly to my knees and was about three feet or so long.

I measure the heights of many things in terms of my knees. I've had three operations to replace one and a half kneecaps, making me nearly bionic but still moronic.
 He wasn't interested in assaulting me with the table, but in selling it.

Dave (I didn't ask if that was his real name. Situation reversed, I wouldn't have given me mine either) was doing what he had to do to keep his family from sleeping in that Corolla. He has a job, okay HAD a job, working for a car dealership in the auto body shop. 

He was especially good, he told me, in frame straightening and cold steel reconfiguration (all I know about cars, for the most part, is where the gas goes. Almost everything he said was in English I don't speak).

He started coming to the parking lot about eight months ago, he said, looking to chat up people after they'd bought groceries to see if they needed their sidewalks shoveled free of snow, or pathways cleared to their garages.

We had a reasonable amount of snow during the winter, though I didn't get the impression he'd made enough money to get the front tires on the Corolla replaced, as they were looking a little like the top of my head, if you follow my drift and he probably doesn't have the 'discretionary' cash to pay to get them rotated to the rear (I didn't think to look if he had perhaps done that. 
Maybe he did already). 

Dave's already sold off most of his living room. And when he shows up out here every couple of weeks or so, someone calls the local police to report him. He certainly doesn't have a license to sell furniture in the parking lot of a mall, and it's just easier to move along, working the circuit and eventually coming back. 

He's got two kids, almost ready for middle school, and no illusions they'll be going anywhere near a college or any other post-secondary educational institution unless they win the lottery.

It's the kind of scene my mom's father, 
Grampy, used to tell me about when I was a small kid. During the Great Depression, grown men selling apples in front of skyscrapers in Manhattan and families, like his, learning to not want so they weren't disappointed when they didn't get

Every generation of Americans since we got started has done better than our parents before us, so that our children will have it better than we did. In a way, it's the promise of that dream that joins us as a nation, no matter our color, gender, religion, or politics.

I walked back to my car. I didn't need a coffee table and I couldn't persuade Dave to take ten bucks 'just in case' he ran into somebody who only had thirty, and drove off pondering how 
if we can't figure out what's wrong with us in the next couple of years, we may not be around to do any more figuring.
-bill kenny

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