Small changes, big losses
McCarthy, Abigail
OF SEVERAL MINDS Abigail McCarthy SMALL CHANGES, BIG LOSSES BUTCHER, BAKER, DRESSMAKER The receptionist at the dentist has told me that she is retiring and I feel suddenly bereft. Lois has...
...There was Nelson, the neighborhood handyman...
...She talked of school plays, games, and dances, and of family picnics when they took the streetcar to the end of the line laden with baskets of fried chicken and biscuits and jars of lemonade...
...There were editors, agents, fellow club members, members of prayer groups and study groups and boards...so many people...
...Given opportunity, Nelson could have been a landscape designer or an engineer...
...A warm interest in us and our children was soothing...
...One person with whom I discussed this aspect of our lives was certain that it was evidence of our interdependence, testimony to the unity of humanity in the Teilhardian sense...
...Eventually her neighborhood became too dangerous and she moved away...
...Each is there for a time only as part of the web of exchange between givers of services and the recipients...
...Yet changes, great and small, assault and discomfort us...
...It may well be...
...We adjust to these changes, to people coming and going over a lifetime: household helpers, baby-sitters, the teller and manager at the hank, the friendly man at the gas station, the neighborhood pharmacist, the newspaper carrier, doormen, and janitors...
...Our relatives, friends, and co-workers make demands of a sort on us...
...There are, over a lifetime, an increasing number of once-loved places to which we can never return...
...And yet their going causes a kind of dislocation in our lives...
...But change in places once important to us affects us, too...
...He was on call to cut the grass, fix the balky lawn mower or broken toy, get the leaves out of the gutter, deal with blown fuses, rescue the kitten stranded in a tree—what have you...
...I realize there were those to whom I was the person of service and they, the recipients...
...They knew each other...
...They knew that Annie, head of alterations, would do everything she could to fit them into clothes they liked...
...There were high school and college students, important to me and challenging for a year or two and then on their way (although connections with some of these have held over the years...
...Gone now...
...As I think of these things, people have come back into my mind who appeared and mattered in my life and then disappeared...
...We often know little about them...
...It was a venerable Washington institution...
...So he, too, was gone...
...It is an axiom that change is the law of life...
...He came into the neighborhood before most of us were up and made his headquarters in the kitchen of a neighbor down the street who was his original employer...
...Suddenly all that was gone and, a bit disoriented, those of us who were regular customers had to look for what we needed in other, less welcoming places...
...Visits to Ethel were a pleasure...
...Longtime residents were at home in the branch nearest us...
...These exchange connections worked the other way, too...
...12: 13 March 1992 Commonweal...
...Her reminiscences of her girlhood in middle-class black Washington were a delight...
...When we moved he came to help us a few times but he wasn't comfortable in a new neighborhood...
...Is it because, as another friend suggests, that we came forth from the fixed and unchanging and ache for its surety until we return...
...Many of the sales clerks had worked no place else and many of the customers shopped no place else...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS Abigail McCarthy SMALL CHANGES, BIG LOSSES BUTCHER, BAKER, DRESSMAKER The receptionist at the dentist has told me that she is retiring and I feel suddenly bereft...
...When a friend and I came across Annie at work in another store, the glad cries of mutual rediscovery startled other shoppers...
...We are expected to share their lives in a greater or smaller measure and to respond to their needs in proportion to the depths of our relationships with them...
...Her immediate departure has set me to ruminating about the many people who play these small supportive parts in our lives, who ease us through the years without demanding involvement...
...I think of the neighborhood grocery where the meat man kept track and called to remind us when it was time to order our home-raised, fresh Thanksgiving turkey...
...They knew they were safe there from the "hard sell" and the "pushing" of unsuitable merchandise...
...The younger generation of owners are running an upscale deli in the suburbs...
...Even, at times, a comforting presence...
...And gone the owners and clerks who recognized the faces and voices of frequent customers...
...Lois has been a presence in my life for so many years—a small and occasional presence, to be sure, but a familiar, pleasant, reassuring presence as she patiently juggled appointments and cancellations, doing her best to reconcile the doctor's schedule with mine...
...Some loomed large for a time—the principal I admired and the principal for whom I had little respect...
...These others require no more than the acknowledgment of acquaintanceship and small talk, if that...
...There was, for example, Ethel, the motherly dressmaker who designed and remodeled dresses for women with many obligations and limited budgets...
...He encouraged us to launch projects he hankered to carry out—to build a terrace or a wall, to plant a hedge—sometimes successful, sometimes disastrous...
...I think of the department store that closed here recently (a casualty of the Canadian Campeau's rampage through our retail world...
...This succession of connection and change over the years takes its toll, I think...
...None, perhaps, was meant to be permanently in our lives...
...They knew where everything was...
...And the bakery where we ordered birthday cakes and hand-packed ice cream is gone, too...
Vol. 119 • March 1992 • No. 5
