AS INDIGENOUS AS CAN BE

15. AS INDIGENOUS AS CAN BE:

So much for the Wife of Bath and all the rest (thought I) for without withholding information I couldn’t be asked for anything more and the older woman who walks along beside me – she says to me “have you any idea of the world we’re about to experience?” and I ask (foolishly) “what do you mean?” and she says “these people everywhere – all of them about us – they seem no longer to know anything but instead they just go upon their stupid ways – rudely and without any class – I swear sometimes I think all of the old world has crumbled and fallen around us and there’s really nothing anymore I even care to do” and I nodded an assent but felt enough to reply “you know what – you’re probably making too much of it – they don’t even SEE you let alone set out to disrupt what you’re doing and if it is true that everyone’s fallen apart then the best you can do is stand out from it and shine” and she smiled a little old-lady smile and said “never you mind about that – I can make waves if I have to and I’ve lived right here for fifty-five years and they’re not going to stop me now and I could take a notion someday to just swat someone right up the side of their head as if they were my own son - evidently NO ONE has ever cared about them before and that’s their problem” and I could tell she meant her words and was intent on what she said but also I thought - in the way of so many others - old folks get a mindset wherein they can’t see clearly anymore the modern world around them and they begin living in their own version of a past which no longer fits and I could see that everywhere if I tried - the old guys still wearing hats and cloth coats the women who still insisted upon dressing impeccably for even the smallest of tasks (I’d see them especially walking around alone and singular all across any of the streets and avenues along the upper east 60’s as they seemed each to be survivors – alone and widowed or whatever – having outlasted a mate or a husband and they survived on guile and wits and some bit of family or inherited money still left and the old world had (indeed) fallen all around them and they then wandered (‘lonely as a cloud’?) through whatever left was given to them - porcelain faces overly made up with dresses and pins of another era and colors and posture too) in a world of their own TOTALLY without device and bereft of current meaning yet no one wrote tales of them no exploits of the aged men or tales of the Dowager at ninety - all of that had passed away with the idle thrift of some mid-century graft after World War II and truly (truly) this was rubble and this was trash and a crowd of people alone could make for nothing - no stories no tales no conversation worth repeating at all and it was as if the apocalypse everyone once had been waiting for had actually arrived but no one had noticed - some time ago - and all we had left to live on was rubble and its post-modern woes.