The Great Walmart Christmas Tree
I don’t really believe there is all that much new under the sun. Lately this obsession with the new is looking more like a fetish, something about as old as humanity, than anything else. But that is not the same as saying that nothing is new. When you are as old as I am, the new is nothing more than an admission that you don’t understand, and more to the point, don’t want to. So I came across something that struck me as something new the other day, and I certainly don’t understand it.
My daughter was driving me to a medical appointment at Brigham and Women’s in Boston. We needed to decide if I wanted some procedure or another done. The doctor told me that I would be laid up for months, and probably wouldn’t feel too good about it. I asked him how long I had if I didn’t do it. He said, Frankie your 92 years old; how long do you think you have? Well, that was good enough for me. But it was a nice ride down the highway anyway. It was during the drive, while taking in the wonderful fall scenery of the woods on both sides of the road that we turned this bend only to see what looked like a not so artful Walmart Christmas tree in the middle of the forest there towering over everything else. I asked my daughter what bright light decided to stick such a homely thing right smack in the middle of all those perfectly fine real trees? She told me it was a cell tower, a communications tower that relays cell phone calls from one tower to another. She told me that they were unsightly things and that no doubt the upscale community in which this particular tower resided dressed it up that way for aesthetic reasons.
Well, while I was thinking that one over we came across another tower that must have resided in a community that couldn’t afford aesthetic considerations, because it was as bare as a new born, a shiny sleek structure that made me think of star wars. Now I am not going to claim this thing would have won any beauty pageants, but it was no Walmart Christmas tree either. That is to say I felt it had a certain dignity in being just what it was.
Here is what struck me as being fundamentally new. I remember as a child riding a bicycle with my cousin Sara on this residential street that paralleled a railroad banking with the tracks far below. And as the train past we were engulfed in this cloud of steam and soot. The mighty engine that created that cloud had a magical hold over us. People sang songs to those otherwise loud, unsightly machines. The great jazz age that was only just beginning would more often than not mimic its rhythms. Given that we were Vaudevillians, and travelled the country from one end to the other, I never slept as well as when I was an infant and child in the cocoon of the rail’s vibrations. In the "Wreck of the 97" a verse says how the engineer was found in the wreck with his hand on the throttle. It wasn’t just the train. We had merry Oldsmobiles and bicycles built for two. We sang, played to, and honored these things and didn’t give a thought to aesthetics.
When I was a child it would have been considered a miraculous thing to walk down the street and talk to someone on the other end of town, let along the other side of the world. Yet we are so ashamed of what brings us this miracle that we humiliate it in the costume of a fake Christmas tree from a store of ill repute. I don’t understand it. If we are ashamed of what brings us what we are able to do every day, then in the end we are ashamed of ourselves.
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