Small

Someone told me once that small may not be good but big is always bad. I don't know who originally said it but I’ve never forgotten it.

You all may deserve these soulless barns of commerce like Wal-Mart but I don’t. I have not abandoned Millers Grocery Store in order to save 10 cents on four rolls of paper towels. The best small grocery store in the world, they even carry organic and gluten free products now. I was faithful to Manchester Pharmacy, local, independent, where if prescriptions were a little higher, it was worth it. I could sit at the counter while waiting for pills, and for the price of medication and lunch, I could get a dose of mothering thrown in for free. It made my pills work better. Emma would talk to you while she made your grilled cheese, tomato and mustard sandwich just the way you liked it. I’m talking real milkshakes too. CVS took out the counter so there would be more room to sell cheap plastic stuff. Then they moved too. The building is now unoccupied.
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Red with exertion and frustration I used to trail into the local hardware store, dragging my weed whacker behind me, and announce that the **^!*##! thing wouldn’t start again and they would address the issue. With that long and pitying look I loved so well, Pat would hoist it into the back room, slap on a 59 cent part, start it, show me how to start it and add $.59 to my bill. Gone, rolled over by Wal-Mart. Oh, how I miss you Manchester Supply! There’s a Curves there now, if you’re interested.

The alcoholics in town used to be able to monitor their addiction gracefully with a stop at the drugstore for a ‘miniature’ several times a day. Now they have to go into the liquor store on the corner to do that and there’s just no dissembling possible. Don’t get me wrong. I love the local liquor store too. The East Indians who run it are on top of things and always keep a few bottles of Freixenet Extra Dry cold for me. But when Doc had liquor at the Manchester Pharmacy even members of the Worship Team at the Assembly of God could buy alcohol in town. They can't take a chance being seen in the local liquor store. I’m sure some of them are using a lot more gas these days.

The Manchester Auto Parts still sells full serve gas although now there’s a Sheetz as well. So you have a choice. You can pull next to the pumps at MAP, get full serve, tell the attendant to put it on your bill and sail off again, paying, as of today, $3.85.99 per gallon, or you can go to Sheetz, pump your own smelly gas, deal with the machines that are incomprehensible, truck yourself inside through rain, snow or hot melting asphalt, and pay 2 cents more per gallon for the privilege.

Of course those of us who love MAP realize that Doug takes Saturday night and Sunday off and they get their gas on Friday. If you’re cruising through town on Sunday and want gas, it’s Sheetz for you. Maybe while you’re inside you’ll feel like standing in line to slide your finger over the greasy public touch screen and order a sandwich. You can eat it in the car if you're still hungry after that.

I heard last week that Kopps Lumber has just closed. Why, God? Why do bad things happen to great small businesses? I was sick. They were just 3 miles away down a country road from me and they delivered for free. They had been there forever. Where will those talented cabinet makers go to find work? Where will I go when I need a board cut in an odd shape that won't fit in the back of my Legacy? Where will I get a new board made for my dining room table? Nowhere good. Nowhere close. Nowhere I want to shop

You would think when more people move into an area it would follow that soon there would be more places to shop and more variety to choose from. But instead, what a larger population does is make prey for big business. When they move in, the commercial soul of the area dies.

The only good change we've had lately is the opening of a small Mexican Food Shop, Tienda La Jarochita. Not middle class, tarted up 'quaint' but true quaint, as you can see. I am delighted to be able to buy South American food from South Americans. This lovely seniorita behind the counter was happy to help me.

I had my most recent meltdown in Wal-Mart on Friday. It was my daughter’s birthday and I was compiling a book of photos of her life for her. I spent over an hour at a machine waiting to make copies and then making copies. When I went to pay, the clerk confiscated all but about a half dozen of them. Fear of lawsuits over copyright laws, I deduced . You can’t get a copy of your kid’s 1st grade school picture even when your kid is 39 years old. Big stores, big lawsuits, big fears and the quest for ‘big’ savings have given us a life of walking where we don’t want to walk, dealing with people who do not want to deal with us and vistas that have been obstructed by ugliness. Why can't we have the self-control to ignore them to death as they do us?

Shop on-line if you’re strapped for cash. Do without the junk. Support real businesses where real people are earning their living, not corporations. Big is not your friend. Big is not even really cheap when you consider what constant anonymity does to your psyche, what obfuscation of issues and waiting in lines does to your guts, what buying from people who have absolutely no interest in your consumer satisfaction does to your quality of life. Big is bad.

In Manchester, we still have the Vac and Sew repair shop. They fix vacuum cleaners and sewing machines. Can you believe it? We still have Gino’s barber shop. He has a real barber pole. You can find a jeweler and clockmaker. We still have beautiful Manchester Bank (now BBT) where the personnel have been there a long time and will cheerfully help you figure out your bank balance if you are mathematically challenged. We still have the Dutch Corner Restaurant. Come back Family Pharmacy. Come back Manchester Supply. Come back Kopps. The four-way clock on top of the firehouse has just been repaired. But time for sane living is running out.

Trying On Wealth

The word ‘July’ makes jewels in my mind. There is the green, gold and red of first vegetables. There is the deep glow of roadside berries catching shafts of sun. The big pearl moon floats in the kindest air and you can be comfortable lying around looking at it for hours. You can make music or listen to music by starlight. Hundreds of fireflies spark up the dark valley.

There for the taking are a few moments as good as the best moments of childhood if we want to snatch them for ourselves.

Friday evening, end of the week, Ray and I were so tired we thought we couldn’t move. If we hadn’t been really really hungry and too tired to cook we would probably have fallen asleep on the sofa watching Coneheads for the fifth time. Instead we threw ourselves in the car, opened the sunroof and all the windows and went in search of nourishment. The end-of-day sun trickled gold through the car and the green bosomy fields rolled by with glimpses from time to time of blue mountains in the distance. The radio was playing old rock and roll and the car hugged the curves like water in a spinning bucket.

Coming home there was a sheer red moon floating up in a haze. We drove just a little fast through the reservoir and kept time to the music. He smoked a Swisher Sweet and my hair was flying in my face, both expressions of the sudden and surprising joy we were feeling. The words to a song were floating through my head. ‘Whatever happened to Saturday night. Finding a sweetheart and holding her tight. She said tell me, tell me, was I all right. What ever happened to Saturday night.’

Saturday night I hosted the monthly ‘Sing.’ At one point I slipped away from the music and sought the quiet of the porch swing. Will and Daphne were there. Is there anything more delicious than the sound of a creaking porch swing, the laconic intermittent remarks of old friends? Terrance brought a drum out and quietly drummed up the moon.

Ray told me once he thinks we are swimming in miracles all the time. How could you not love a man capable of a remark like that? But I think it’s more like we’re flying through miracles focused on all the wrong things most of our time.

I have a headache, a stiff neck and a painful cut thumb. I have $1.47 bank balance. Arthritis is making me walk funny. I need to spray for bugs and the car needs rear shocks. The roof leaks in five places but I think I’m having the summer of my life. I’m pretty sure we can’t always tell when we are in the middle of the best of our own times. So for the rest of July I’m looking for the edge of beauty in the ordinary and I am trying on wealth. I’m sucking it up with the butter on sweet corn. I’m letting it dazzle me from the reflecting wings of bugs.

Spirit Storehouse: water element

I sank into my recliner this Sunday evening properly tired from two days of mowing, weeding and cleaning, like the good granddaughter of a farmer that I am.

I don’t attend church these days but I wandered for an hour this morning in prayer and meditation. I don’t know how my Banka would have viewed that. I do know his favorite hymn was Sweet Hour of Prayer. As a teenager I would sing it, examining the words, searching for clues about Banka’s relationship with God. I could identify with a lot of it; ‘Sweet hour of prayer that calls me from a world of care. . .’ I solemnly empathized with every image until I came to the phrase ‘and shout while passing through the air, farewell, farewell sweet hour of prayer.’ The picture it evoked of my wrinkled, skinny grandfather with his huge ears that stuck out from the sides of his head like side view mirrors, flying through the air, like maybe on a rope swing, shouting a regretful good bye to his prayer time, always undid my better self.

Images from the weekend come to mind and I realize I’m visualizing them with unusual clarity; two evenings of sitting with friends on darkening patios, watching stars and the half moon and fire flies. A train goes by. The engineer returns our wave as he glides past and beyond our view. Dan’s profile is tall and elegant as he describes a new kind of insulating cinder block. I’m intrigued. Charlie describes his art of poured paint, his arms gesturing. John beams in his ‘other #1 Uncle’ tee shirt, Judy and Garey met on line. He visualized her and met her the next day. Tiny Lisa is expansive with her friends. Chuck, a world traveler, dreads flying to Indiana the next day.

Paul dreams of creating a new musical instrument. Ray thinks we should start production of Alaskan oil. He’s in love with his new series S 1994 BMW. Laura has her long hair up out of the heat. She knows the lyrics to all the songs we can remember and her laugh is music too.

Jenny, my daughter, called to say she’d seen a real dust bunny. A little rabbit had gotten into the house and taken shelter behind the sofa. Rescued, he had cobwebs between his ears, and tufts of hair and dust festooning him. He was released no worse for wear.

It’s going to storm. I welcome the water in a way that people with a leak in the roof usually do not.

On Thursday my acupuncturist needled the points for Spirit Storehouse on my chest. That point, say the professionals, helps balance the water element within us. I don’t know. I walked in there like an old car to a dealer who has promised $1000 trade-in for any car you can drive to the lot. I walked out of there a well-tuned Mercedes. Or think of a muddled and raging sea after being calmed by Christ or the lifting of a friend who was sinking beneath the waves because his terror overcame his faith. Think of reservoirs filling up with clean rain water.

I had been anxious and numb as I lay down on the treatment table. Now look. I am filled up with gratitude for friends. My kitchen sparkles. My wood stove is polished up for the fall season. I have vacuumed, weeded, laundered and mowed. I have smiled with friends and remembered my dear grandfather. My daughter, that good girl, called me and made me laugh. I feel supported. I feel rich and aware and full of hope.

I gathered this bounty from the road side during my walking meditation. I’m passing it on to you.

I Keep Looking

I keep looking, trying to see exactly where the teeth go in. It’s somewhere around the spine but not exactly in the middle. You can tell because the little furry body hangs lop-sided out of the cat’s mouth, more weight toward the tail end.

The question of where on the chipmunk’s spine Floyd clamps down has come to mind because of how his victims move when he releases them. It is always the same; a series of small awkward arcing hops. Are their spines broken? I don’t think so, at least not until he’s ready to kill them, else how could they hop at all? Maybe sprained, I think, bruised, fluids rushing to the area, pain, adrenalin, heart pounding, then miraculous release and another tiny shot at freedom, while the cat lies in the grass, careless, almost bored, letting the chipmunk arc again in broken little hops toward cover. Don’t tell me animals only kill to eat.

This chipmunk made it to a large flower pot on wheels and crawled into the space underneath. Floyd, alert now, crouches, embracing the area beneath it, batting with his right paw, then left and right, swift as a boxer working out, until he’s rousted the critter and caught it again.

I see this chipmunk’s eye scanning for options even as he is carried again to the center of the yard for possible execution. Another stay, another desperate break for cover, flattening under grass borders, resting a second or two behind a car tire and then, against all odds, the wood pile and safety.

I may find him there in a couple of days, dead of heart failure or injuries. He may crawl off to his borough and die there. But maybe not. Maybe he’ll live and produce legions of cat-defying offspring.

There is a reign of terror on my front porch that leaves body parts daily. I’ve learned to live with it. I no longer intervene. Watch a cat eat a fresh kill. His pupils are dilated to the outer edge of his irises in pleasure and receptivity. The high, like a heroin fix, like someone who’s been starving. But I feed my cats every morning. They are far from starved.

Once in awhile they leave a gift for me, the alpha cat, who loves them and loves the creatures they kill and who is looking for the bright shining heart at the center of things in this life. I can almost see that edge. But it is not in the pain, or pleasure. It is not in the fact that reality is layered or deep. I do not know if the love is anywhere, except in me. I don't even really know that.