Dear Editor:
On a recent afternoon, sitting in the park with a cup of espresso (carried from a nearby cafe with no outside tables), I was reminded, as leaves fluttered around me, of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets: “That time of year thou mayest in me behold, When yellow leaves, or none, or few, Do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang”, when… goddamit! A leaf blower! Forget the sweet birds. A flock of raucous crows could not make themselves heard above that shattering racket, and then I smelled the exhaust of the gasoline that powered that invention, surely the worst that mankind has ever devised. Oh, what was wrong with a man and a rake? Or, why do leaves have to be blown around anyway? Why not leave them until they’ve all fallen, then rake them up? It’s great to give people jobs, but this insane instrument, while ruining a beautiful autumn afternoon and stinking up the crisp air, is a job-stealer. One leaf-blower puts two men with rakes out of work. And it begs another question. Everybody hates these things, and yet, there they are, from Maine to California. Why can’t we get rid of them? Why do we allow them? Why don’t we ban them? Are our politicians in the pocket of the leaf-blower lobby? That must be the answer. So why can’t we control our elected officials? Instead, we let them control us. People hate war, and yet we’re constantly at war. People don’t get us into war. Politicians do. There must be something in it for them.
While I sat there, resolving to shoot the next politician I saw, two women walked by, speaking Japanese, or maybe Chinese, carrying beverage cups. What did they learn, by coming to the Land of the Setting Sun? How to walk and drink their tea at the same time? Will they go back and spread that message? Next came a couple, also carrying beverage cups, speaking French. French! The country that welcomed and nourished America’s greatest generation of writers, Hemingway, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Henry Miller, and many others, and taught them the pleasure of the sidewalk cafe, where one sat to drink one’s coffee or aperitif, one did not walk around with it taking hurried sips like a slave harried by a whip-cracking master. Hurry up! Back to work!
When did this walking and drinking begin? It isn’t as if there aren’t places to sit: benches on Washington St., or in the park, where I was. It has become the fashion, and sitting down is old-fashioned. Walk down Washington Street. Every other person is walking along holding a cup.
It’s been a decade or more since I’ve been to France, or Spain, or Italy, or Greece, places where I have “wasted” more than a few hours just sitting at a table on the sidewalk watching the world go by. Wasted? Depends on the definition of that word. Walt Whitman invited us to “loaf, and invite our souls”; in other words, to reflect, to think.
“What’s the rush!” gasped one lemming to another as he struggled to keep up with the others in the headlong rush to the cliff, but got no answer.
T. Weed