When I was young, there was always a lump that ran the length of the cabin of a car. It probably housed the drive shaft of the car. Boys sitting in the backseat of the white Plymouth station wagon in which Mom hauled home bags of groceries purchased at Red Owl were separated by this lump, making it more difficult to kick each other in the shins. Of course, no one wore seat belts. Milk came in glass bottles with a bulbous section at the top providing two bottle necks the lower one smaller than the top one. While milk was shipped from the bottling company to our house, the cream settled out so that the first thing we did after ripping off the foil lid was to ladle the cream out of the bottle with a small, especially made plastic - ours was blue - ladle. Smiling Mr. Hair, our milkman, arrived at my childhood home, which we called The Millstone, in a truck he drove pretty much standing up, The sliding doors to his truck were always open and he sauntered in through the front door of our house without even ringing the doorbell, opened the refrigerator - no, we called it an icebox - door, and loaded dairy products onto the shelfs in quantities he didn't even ask about because he knew our family and its consumption patterns. And then there were the grackles. In the spring, the grackles migrated through Rochester, Minnesota. The skies were darkened by their swarms. There were so many that a person standing in our backyard had to shout to be heard by someone standing a few feet away. All was right in the world. So says my memory anyway.
But then, it all went to hell in a hand basket. The order of the world unraveled and demons popped into the world through the cracks. A bald headed, scary man took off a shoe and hammered on the podium at the United Nations. You could buy oleomargarine in plastic bags with a red button you broke open before massaging the oleomargarine into fake butter. There were loud booms coming from the sky, which I later learned were sonic booms, but at the time I heard them as threatening and unknown monsters in the sky, maybe even an atomic blast happening somewhere. A sad president announced that a submarine - the Thresher - had been crushed by the ocean. I imagined the final seconds of the life of boys in the sub, the appalling and brief horror of the steel walls all around collapsing in on them. Inexplicable changes cascaded down on me, like the walls of the submarine had smashed the sailors into pieces. The TV show Discovery 63 changed weirdly into Discovery 64. Not until the name changed did I realize that the number referred to the year. Before then, I thought that it was called Discovery 63 because that was its name. How can something as firm as the name of a TV show be so frail? I watched the upright and virtuous Verne Gagne wrestle Mad Dog Vashon and The Crusher. He was polite and usually won. Much later I learned the he, an old man and demented, murdered another old man in an old folks home by executing a theatrical and lethal body slam, right there in the room where other old people assembled jigsaw puzzles and watched As the World Turns and The Edge of Night. What was becoming of us?
The avalanche of unwelcome changes accelerated. Not only did we elect a clown for president in the eighties, but the Mars Company stopped producing the best M&Ms, the red ones. This was caving into the tree-huggers who scared everybody into thinking that artificial food dyes, especially the infamous Red Dye #2, were not good for you. Red Dye #2 caused cancer, or so they said anyway. Red M&Ms didn't have that particular dye in them, but lawyers will be lawyers and so red M&Ms were replaced with orange ones. Was nothing sacred? I thought that was about as far as Western Civilization could slide downhill, but I was so naive in those days. In 1995, horror of horrors, the atheistic, money-groveling yuppies now in charge of the Mars Company introduced the blue M&M. Why would they do that? There is no such thing as blue food, not that M&Ms were food. The closest thing we have to blue food is blueberries, but they are not really blue, not like blue M&Ms are. Yes, carrots are orange and are reasonable things to eat. Spinach is green. Squash yellow and potatoes brown, but blue? Blue was the color of bubbling liquids in flasks in movies like The Absent Minded Professor with Fred MacMurray. (I hear you, you snickering sticklers. That movie was a black and white movie so there couldn't have been a bubbling blue liquid in a flask, but you know the liquid in at least one of the flasks was blue. Others were red and green. You just knew it and don't tell me otherwise.) Who would intentionally eat a blue thing?
Of course, there is no such thing as resisting change, or decay of community values. I flailed blindly and vainly against the tide of rot briefly. I promoted a rumor I had heard. Yes, there were brainless rumors even before the Internet. I called the customer service number on the back of an M&Ms package and asked them if there was any truth to the rumor that blue M&Ms were in fact Smurf eggs or even worse, Smurf poop. The poor, besieged phone operator couldn't just hang up on me or ask if I was a moron. She - the obnoxious jobs are always done by women - had to play it straight. No, she said. Blue M&Ms were not Smurf eggs or poop. And would I like to receive a complementary package of M&Ms? Not if they have Smurf eggs or poop in them, I said. With just the slightest hint of irritation in her voice, she reassured me that the complementary package of M&Ms would contain no eggs or poop from any person or animal. "Well, if you promise," I said. "I promise," she said. A week later I received the package of M&Ms in the mail, but, despite her promise, there were still blue M&Ms in the bag. Now I was being asked to believe that customer service people are sometimes not completely truthful with me.
I brace myself because I expect to continue to discover that good things are just an illusion. No one strides into the future. We all sneak into the future, as if we were trying to pass through a mine field. TV show names change without warning. Heroes become insane murderers. Unless I am careful, I will eat a cute little Smurf's egg. And I know that beyond the mine field is another mine field. It's mine fields from here on out.
