Milk and Cookies

While reading a somewhat tedious 18th Century English novel, I was reminded that modes of transportation have evolved greatly in the last 200 years. In a time before automobiles or even bicycles, it evidently was common to get around town in a chair balanced on rails and spirited about by two husky gents. Like the rickshaw, this was a common method of transportation for those who could not afford a carriage but still were not about to be seen on foot, leap-frogging over the open sewers of the town.

I stopped to think.

When I was growing up in Southern California lack of a car was not the tragedy as it would be today. I was about four years old before my father got his first car. Looking back on this it’s a little funny (ironic?) since my Dad spent three years in the Army motor pool and was putting himself through college working nights at a gas station doing tune-ups and lube-jobs.

Yet, even after moving out to the suburbs, we weren’t stranded when the family car went off with Dad to sit all day in the company parking lot. Back then most of life’s necessities came to us. First, the mailman delivered to the porch twice a day. Then there was the milk man who actually came in the backdoor to check what dairy products were running low in the icebox (he delivered orange juice too). Dry cleaning was picked up and delivered fresh and clean as was, if apropos, baby diapers. We had two ice cream vendors who would snake around the neighborhood several times a day (Good Humor and Eskimo Pie). If you craved a cookie. the bakery truck had many slide-out glass trays full of cookies, pastries, cakes, and pies, and they also brought the daily bread or specialty orders. There were more, some regular, some occasional.

You knew these vendors and looked forward to seeing them. They knew you too: it was a gentler time.

But my question is: How many jobs were lost when we modernized our lives and stuffed it all into a big building which we could only reach by driving a car big enough to bring home the groceries?

We traded in a gentler, simpler life for a fast-paced, exciting future. Was it a good deal?

Enough! Next time I’ll tell you the story of the amber necking-knob on my ’51 Chevy. But first, the February Reading List.

1. Open Season — C. J. Box
2. Neon Rain — James Lee Burke
3. The Manchurian Candidate — Richard Condon
4. What Girls Learn — Karin Cook
5. A Boy and His Dog — Harlan Ellison
6. Final Jeopardy — Linda Fairstein
7. The Motherfucker with the Hat — Stephen Adly Guirgis
8. The Midnight Library — Matt Haig
9. Starship Troopers — Robert A. Heinlein
10. A Field Guide to Reality — Joanna Kavenna
11. Alien Rice — Ichiro Kawasaki
12. Joseph and His Brothers — Thomas Mann
13. Teeth — Hannah Moskowitz
14. Lemprière’s Dictionary – Lawrence Norfolk
15. Owen Glendower — John Cowper Powys
16. Slag Attack — Anderson Prunty
17. Betrayed by Rita Hayworth — Manuel Puig
18. Joshua Then and Now — Mordecai Richler
19. The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle — Tobias Smollett
20. Cane — Jean Toomer