What’ll you do
When the people go home?
And what’ll you do
When the show is all done?
— Melanie Safka, “Leftover Wine”
Why are we all making lists? It feels like the end of something.
For Americans born between the bombing of Hiroshima and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, it feels like the end of a party. It wasn’t even a particularly good party, though at times it almost lived up to its potential. But it was also a lot of work to maintain, and there was always conflict about who was invited and who was not, and who got to sit where and do what. The music was good, at least.
Little Richard was the last of the original rock stars. He was three years older than Elvis Presley, who died in 1977. I came to the party too late to catch their sets. I first heard “Good Golly Miss Molly” from Credence Clearwater Revival.
Ringo Starr canceled his concert tour that would have brought him back to Bangor this June. I worked his Cross Center show as an usher in 2016. It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever been star-struck. Needless to say, I lost that job to the virus. Ringo plans to do the tour in 2021, but he will be eighty this summer, and one wonders how many choruses of “Yellow Submarine” he’s got left.
But even in these trying times, we must have better things to do than make lists of influential albums or books or films, or reminisce about great concerts, or re-debate whether or not the Beatles were better than the Stones. Surely other artists will rise to take their places. I can’t believe that the great books have all been written or the great songs have all been sung.
Perhaps this is an old person’s perspective. I was already old when I went off to spend a year in Eastern Europe. When will I next be able to ride a crowded bus to a small Greek beach town with the guy in the seat beside me falling asleep against my shoulder? Right now I can’t even ride a bus from Bangor to Rockland. In the best of times, it was easy to social distance on that lightly used route. It’s going to be awhile before I can get on an airplane. Maine is a fine place to be in May. But since last May, I haven’t been anywhere else.
I haven’t even been on a local bus in two months, though I’m glad to see they’re still running. I presume that plans for Bangor’s downtown bus hub, approved just before the onset of the pandemic, are still on schedule. But I fear for the future of public transportation. Many potential passengers were germ-phobic about getting on a bus in the good old days, and I’m afraid that politicians will see plummeting ridership numbers as a reason to pull the plug on funding. I hope this doesn’t happen.
A silver lining in all this is that automobile traffic has declined, too. Rockland has already decided to close its Main Street to cars this summer to allow businesses to expand into the street. Portland, Bangor, and other Maine communities may soon follow suit. This is already standard practice in Europe, where any community of any size has a central, pedestrian-oriented outdoor shopping area. Studies have repeatedly shown that restricting access to cars improves commerce.
That aside, it’s just nicer to see fewer cars on the road. I’ve been advocating for fewer cars on the road for years. Who could have guessed that an illness would achieve what walking, bicycling, and public transportation could not?
The air hasn’t been this clean in my lifetime. On a clear day, you can see Mount Everest from Kathmandu. Los Angeles, with its majestic mountain backdrop, looks like its name: the city of angels. Penobscot Bay sparkles in the spring sun.
Much of this is because people aren’t driving to work, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. People need jobs. But maybe it’s a signal that we ought to reimagine the way we move ourselves around. I’ve lived in the Southern California commuter culture, and I’ve seen the everpresent layer of haze on the horizon. Would it be such a bad thing if half of those drivers didn’t have to commute? What if more of us could work from home, most of the time?
The thing is, though, people like to go to work, whether they realized it before the coronavirus or not. My partner and I are fortunate to be able to work on-line, but we both miss the routine and community of our jobs. Hers is more 9 to 5 than mine. But though neither job has to be done entirely at the workplace, we both admit that we get more done there than at home. I suspect that many people are discovering this.
We Americans lead such frantic lives. It’s palpable when you return from overseas after any length of time. We’ve been whooping it up ever since we won the Second World War. We obsess over work (“What do you do?” is a standard introductory question), and when we’re not working, we’ve just got to be doing something. God forbid we ever sit quietly and contemplate. For relaxation, we yahoo about on jet skis and snowmobiles. When all of that comes to a screeching halt, we don’t know what to do with ourselves.
One might think this might be a good time to write. But there’s that expectation to produce again, to justify one’s existence with some sort of activity. I’m as guilty of it as anyone else. Does the world really need more words? Or more cars? Or more… anything? I look around and see a landscape littered with self-storage units, proof positive that people have too much stuff. What if you were only allowed to store unused possessions for a year? After that, you would have to take them home or give them away. Which option would people choose?
It’s taken me six days to write these thousand words, and another six days to publish them. I should have just posted a picture – of tables in an empty ballroom, and crumpled paper cups amid half-filled bottles of leftover wine.
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