The Grandparents Among Us

Within the last week, moving vans have twice lumbered down our sleepy street. In one case to move a grandma into a family's home; in the other, to move a family with a resident grandma out to a roomier place west of town. 

The disruptions of the pandemic, including virtual school, have put a new spin on resident grandparents, on their helpfulness and the value they add to nuclear family functioning. 

I wonder if some of these changes will become permanent, if we will move back to an older way of living, one where three generations living under one roof was the rule rather than the exception.

Now that I'm a grandparent, I wonder more about these things. 

(The old Vale Schoolhouse, which itself harkens back to an older era.)  

Little Women

We were at least 20 or 30 minutes into the new film version of "Little Women" before Jo uttered the famous first line: "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents." But the disjointed telling of Louisa May Alcott's tale is one of my few quibbles with this lovely new movie.

What a moral world Louisa May Alcott has created for us in Little Women, and what a fulsome rendition of it director Greta Gerwig has brought to life in this new adaptation. Seeing it with one of my own "little women," I thought about the world it evokes and the world she and her sisters inhabit — a world where personal sacrifices seem as out of place as dance cards and turned collars.

I devoured Alcott books as a girl and took their lessons to heart. They are simple and old-fashioned — be kind, work hard, think of others and not just yourself — but as difficult to follow now as they were then. It's not as if the modern world doesn't celebrate these virtues too, but the concept of self-improvement, that we are pilgrims on a moral journey, often seems lost in bits and bytes and likes.

Being immersed in an earlier time for two hours, albeit glamorized and spit-polished, made me realize what we have lost. It is much indeed.

(Photo: "Little Women," Sony Pictures)

Changing Places

For some reason the management company that owns my office building has set out furniture and plants, set up a coffee bar, a wine bar, hung fabric sculptures on the wall and set potted plants in the corners. When I left last night, a singer was crooning in the lobby.

We're not sure what's behind this sudden show of largesse, though some of us suspect rental fees will be rising soon. Is it to build community? To advertise art (some of those fabric sculptures are for sale)? To humanize?

I had the idea for this post before I heard the news from Florida. Seventeen dead in another school shooting. Can we trade this world for another? Because I'm not sure I want to live in this one anymore. Can I put chairs in my lobby and art on my walls? Can I pretend I live somewhere that I do not?

In the Open

A missing headphone set means that when I listen to music through my phone lately, I do it in the open — not through earbuds. This is a strange yet strangely familiar activity.

It's strange because for years now the tunes I listen to are only for my ears. A feedback loop of one, a solitary bubble, like all the solitary bubbles around me.

But it's familiar because I grew up pre i-Pod and pre-Walkman. When I think of summer afternoons at the pool it's not my playlist I remember (there were no personal playlists in those days!), but Top 40 hits piped through someone else's portable radio. You could always hold a transistor up to your ear or use those early earbuds (there was only ever one, which was just fine since these radios produced no stereophonic sound), but for the most part, music was out in the open.

In fact, it was a musical free-for-all, and you heard what you heard. You adjusted. I tapped my feet to soft rock, cringed at country crooners. But I came to enjoy tunes I would never have heard otherwise — and I learned that listening can be a communal experience.

Now when I walk past a neighbor I quickly mute my Bach or Rachmaninoff. I don't want to impose my choices on them. For all I know they wouldn't mind. But it's different now. Dogs don't run free and neither does music. These are small changes, true, but put enough of them together and you have another world.

Final Farewell

First, it was the elephants. Then it was the clowns. Turns out, there was a good reason to feel sorry for the circus.

These are the final days of the Ringing Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Its last performances are in May, and the last ones here are next week.

I've never been a circus fanatic but there's something so sad about the end of this tradition. I know, it's kinda creepy and the opposite of PC. But it was a big deal before the advent of continual palm-held entertainment, something that linked the generations: my parents went, they took us and then they took my kids.

I wondered in my last circus post if this institution would be around in 20 years. I was off by 18. In little more than a month, it will be the end of the Greatest Show on Earth.