speculating

Monday the 13th.  The last 13th was that Friday in March when I was slapping backs at the Ten Cat with only a nagging worry on my mind.  We've had the lowest rate of deaths in about a week, and there does seem to be a plateauing, which is good news, now if we can see it start dropping a bit.  Too soon to be loosening anything, but maybe it's light at the end of the tunnel.  At the end of the month we may be reassessing. 

October 29th, 1929 was Black Tuesday.  Fortunes were lost, and the accounts of stockbrokers jumping off ledges is probably way overblown, but it's a nice metaphor, so let it stay.  My dad graduated from college and was lucky to get a job digging ditches.  Digging ditches, the phrase loomed through my childhood.  When I wanted some little plastic bauble I would be reminded of the depression when my dad had a job digging ditches.  And right now I have to wonder what ditches where and how long.  Why did I never ask my mother when she was in the assisted living. and I'd come by Fridays around suppertime and wheel her from one end of the building to the other, and stop before some floor to ceiling windows that looked out on a little park, and we'd have a little chat, why didn't I ever ask her about that?  My story and Old Dog's story will go down with us, but Beagles has at least two generations to come after him.  Do they ever ask him about his past?  Will they sit still while he tells them? 

Well I've gone far afield again, maybe something to take up later.  Didn't we recently take up the issue of earliest memories?  I think maybe we dropped it too soon.

When I brought up the subject of Black Tuesday, I meant to contrast it with the day before when folks had a nice breakfast and Dad went to his nice job while Mom tended to her nice house and the kiddies, and then Dad drove his Model T home and they had a nice supper and at night asked the good lord for nothing more than another day just like the one that had just passed.  Those golden waves of grain, those sprawling factories, and the raw materials in the mines still existed on September 30th, much as they had on the 28th, so what is wrong here.?  This was the real stuff. Money, as we all know, is just voodoo stuff, so how come the stuff that was real didn't mean anything and the unreal stuff that had just went poof was all that mattered? 

Surely some revelation was at hand, not the second coming, as the poet contended, but the New
Deal, grinning Franklin Delano with the jaunty cigarette holder and the hidden braces.  Our gimcrack economic system where all the dough goes to guys who fiddle with money while Joe Sixpack is struggling with minimum wage, did not cause the corona, but corona is shining a light on it, and now that so many are dependent on the government maybe it is time for an, ahem, rearrangement.  Well just the purest speculation, but these days on the precipice are the time for speculation.