The annual recreational vehicle show held at Pomona’s Fairplex is among the largest in the world. However, the selection of the pocketbook-friendly smaller, lighter and more economical RVs is gradually shrinking. Despite the shredded national economy, small manufacturers cannot hang on against larger companies that crank out huge vehicles with enormous profit margins. Especially in a “down” economy, wealthier folks wanting large RVs tend to have money left over for such indulgences while the fiscal reserves of many average recreational campers continue shrinking.
Since the overall size of the RV shows contracts with each passing year, the quandary is how to bring in more new potential buyers.
Unexpectedly, I spied this display, doubtless intended to gain attention and thereby assist the RV market turn the corner towards recovery. Be-speckled and be-nippled, this Halloween-inspired gorilla ballerina contraption beckoned me, clumsily lurching to and fro, apparently powered by erratic hidden robotic servomotors. (The sight of it was enough to make me look for the exit, but I hadn’t yet visited the Airstream RV exhibit.)
What inspired this crackpot contraption? Maybe it was an artist’s conception of the perfect customer who would be looking to purchase that “gotta have it” gargantuan-sized RV – the biggest, baddest, most ostentatious RV at the show. Or perhaps it was, in fact, a bankrupt salesman of small and sensible RVs from a previous year’s show, who had finally run out of his 99 weeks of unemployment benefits, donned a lime green tutu and a leopard-print Cat Woman mask, stuffed himself into a gorilla suit, and was now working for tips.
This is the last picture I have of her, taken on the final day that I saw her. She had dangled below a light fixture on an invisible trapeze of spun web. Each morning, she was there as I trudged to meet my Monday to Friday train to work. I chose to greet her from a short distance.
I have other pictures of her, but I prefer this one because it displays the bright hour glass on her abdomen warning unsuspecting bugs: “Your time is up!”
In human years, our relationship was brief. But in spider years—black widows can live up to 1-½ years—she would consider our association lengthy, if not intimate.
I knew nothing of her mate, the black widower. I doubt that she ate him. The fearsome reputation of a black widow dining at her mate’s ultimate expense is generally undeserved. More likely, she consumed most of her recent offspring, 750 eggs laid in a sack. Cannibalism thrives, allowing only one or two of the baby spiders to survive.
Now she is gone, and she has no memory of our daily rendezvous—no memory of me, even when I blew on her web, seeing which way she would scurry. It was always up, up into the safety of the light fixture.
It was dusk, and in the landscape of cold concrete, a bright yellow bike, and four cheerfully-painted hoops intended for chaining bicycles jumped out of the dull gray surroundings. The bright oval hoops resembled the iconic rings of the Olympic competitions. Someone rested their bicycle on a trip to the store, or perhaps on an appointment to meet a friend. What story could this bicycle tell?
As a kid growing up in Germany, I rode a green three-speed bicycle with a whirring generator pressed against the wheel to power its lights at night. It was a 9-mile bike trip from my house along the Rhine River to my elementary school, and it was my brother’s and my favorite weekend expedition to spend time with our friends.
My green bicycle also served me well when my mother sent me to the next village to purchase small amounts of groceries. I would inevitably treat myself with gummi bears at the store, so I particularly savored these expeditions. On one occasion, coming home with a loaf of bread strapped to the rack on the back wheel’s fender, suddenly my bicycle squealed to an abrupt halt; the back wheel suddenly froze in place, leaving a long skid mark, and me very nearly dismounting into thin air over the handlebars. As I barely controlled my near-disastrous dismount, I was pelted with bits of who-knows-what, flying in every direction. It was bread. A bump in the road had dislodged my cargo – the loaf of bread – and flipped it into the air and launched it into my spokes, where it was effectively shredded, pieces propelled in all 360 degrees. My pride bruised, but spokes unbent, I hastened to the bakery to replace the load—and refresh my stash of gummi bears for my second ride home to my waiting mother.
A few years ago, I saw a tangle of bicycles on a street in Amsterdam, heaped together and temporarily discarded by their owners, who were rendezvousing with friends or completing essential errands. A strange scene, I thought, bikes piled up like that. I stepped closer, quietly, cautiously sneaking up on their cold frames, worn seats and spindly tires.
Until my ears adjusted, I mistook the sound for birds twittering. Gradually I could make it out—the sound of joking, of laughter, of stories coming from the bicycles themselves, about their usual mounted riders: the owner whose backside had so overgrown its throne that the embarrassed bicycle seat shuddered to feel his royal rear descend upon it. The gears gushed in howls of laughter over retelling their own story of the chain pulling loose from the sprockets just at the moment its rider pulled up to an attractive maiden’s bicycle, upending him and launching him upon his bottom, effectively removing the seat of his pants. And then the most tender story–a woman’s battered purple bike, at the top of the heap of partying bikes, who admitted her fear on being hastily discarded at the hospital door by her owner – the rider – a woman about to give birth. Her owner possessed no other means of transport to medical care. The protracted hours had ground by with no news of the pregnant woman. Finally, worried over her well-being, the old purple bike heard the triumphant howls from the husband who had arrived late. His wife had delivered a baby girl. Carefully, the new father had then loaded the purple bike into the car, tenderly touching spokes and handlebars while affirming, “Good bike. Faithful bike….”
Like a tear on a child’s cheek, a drop of rain fell on the purple bicycle’s worn frame and slowly worked its way down, until it fell on the other bicycles below.
This 1959 Cadillac was in the parking lot of my local Best Buy store. I was 8 years old when these 2.5 ton, nearly 19 feet long vehicles rolled off Detroit’s assembly line and occasionally spilled onto the streets in Germany, where I lived. They were a shocking contrast to the tiny VWs, Goggomobils and Isettas that filled the streets.
The early automobile started out as a basic gadget to get folks from “here” to “there.” It seemed straightforward to Henry Ford, who in 1909 famously said of his Model T, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”
How did we get from “there,” when Ford uttered those words in 1909, to “here,” the 1959 Cadillac, 50 years later? Early, nimble and efficient vehicles had morphed into bloated gargantuan rocket ships resting on their sides, floating toward the horizon, spewing mega-doses of chemical toxins.
This comparison belongs to the world of Reverse Evolution. Instead of evolution’s survival of the fittest axiom, Reverse Evolution yields to the flourishing of the un-fittest – succumbing to the allure of gratuitous pleasure, dysfunctional ambition and wasted resources.
Of course, 1959 was a long time ago. We have now passed nearly 60 more years since then. Certainly we have learned our lessons well. Society has evolved – no more big-finned Caddys. No more squandering of resources on real or virtual pleasures.
Maybe we’re not quite all the way there yet. Bug-eyed fins are replaced by today’s version of ostentatious gadgetry, the microchip, powering a digital generations of self-serving, hedonistic electronic games, gizmos and apps. On the iPhone alone, at least 65 percent of the 2 billion downloaded apps are games. Add to that the smorgasbord of fatuous gaming choices on the PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Wii, and the combined capacity for gaming self-indulgence melts the brain.
Another 50 years will further morph the culture of extravagance. By then, today’s electronic playthings will be quaint museum relics. We don’t yet know what the next iteration of the Cadillac fins will be. But we can be quite confident that, whatever they are, they will have the capacity to fully absorb the avalanche of wasted resources and mental energies we will throw their way.
I regularly walk by this couple, who are interminably celebrating dance together. Statues create a moment – feelings, emotions, activities that the sculptor suspends in time. Daily these two appear to enjoy their frozen, sculpted moment.
One day, the sculpture changed. A passer-by aficionado evidently believed that even statuaries have feelings. So to cover the nakedness of one of the dancers, a belt was draped around the figure in just the right place. Now, tastefully, the figure can dance endlessly, ashamed no longer.
How proper! How polite!
However, this act of kindness created an inequity. Now the dancer’s partner alone will have to dance on, immodest and unclothed. It will be the subject of staring eyes, while its partner no longer needs to dance, and cringe, unclothed, before the world’s eye.
The wanton act of injustice ruffles my ethical feathers.
I have only one choice; as I pass by, during cover of fall-lengthening night darkness, I’ll bring another belt.
