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Friday, April 30, 2004
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Observations Along Strathmore Avenue, Maryland
The oral iconography of the cig in the shuttered Chevy has been replaced in America by the cell phone in the Saab convertible - a kind of progress. The lowest circle of cultural symbolics though - in the middle of which my ass is planted at the moment - is the bus stop. I'm at my town's main intersection, on a nice wooden bench shaded by an elm tree, waiting for a ride to the Metro station (careful readers will recall that I do not drive). Needless to say, it fails to compute, among my also-affluent neighbors (it's a small town - they all know me), that I take buses. Buses are for the addled oldies who've had their licenses impounded by the state. Buses are for the Costa Rican girls who babysit the working mothers' children, and for the Guatemalans who mow their lawns. Buses are for the bums who blow into town looking for bibelots discarded along the curbs. They are no place for a Ph.D. Which is why I'm often rescued from them. A neighbor in a Navigator sees me and screeches to a halt. "Margaret [high-pitched incredulity on the last syllable of the name]? Get in." Their voice is grim. This is serious business. They'll take me anywhere, no questions asked. But my Bobo butt must be swept up from this...this...exposure. The number of car fatalities in America - an enormous sum, around 45,000 a year - is up again. The number of injuries is greater still. A couple of weeks ago a local kid got his leg broken by a car that plowed into him a few yards from where I'm sitting. The drivers who now move past me at a sluggish pace are hot, aggressive. Half of them blast angry bass notes out of their windows; the other half would like to kill the blasters. But anyway I'm not supposed to be here. I'm supposed to be inside an airconditioned SUV calming myself down with Clementi. Professors are supposed to do...supposed to be... There's a wonderful scene in Don DeLillo's novel White Noise in which its main character, a professor, explains to his daughter that no natural disaster will ever occur in the vicinity of their family: "These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it's the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters. People in low-lying areas get the floods, people in shanties get the hurricanes and tornados. I'm a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods? We live in a neat and pleasant town near a college with a quaint name. These things don't happen in places like Blacksmith." No professor will ever give up tenure; no professor will ever teach anyone under eighteen. But professors - like Erin O'Connor, who is about to do these things - will sometimes surprise you. A socially insecure, sinecure-dependent lot, we some of us nevertheless will mix things up a bit. |