The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  You, the Kabul businessman, expected some raunch and strangeness but not this—this Victoria Falls of dirty water! You are not a philosopher of media, but you know that when a culture descends to the lowest common denominator, it does not reach the broad base at the bottom, it lowers the broad base at the bottom. This “Jersey Shore” doesn’t reach the Jersey Shore, it creates the Jersey Shore. It makes America the Jersey Shore.

  You surf on, hoping for a cleansing wave of old gangster movies. Or cowboys. Anything old! But you don’t find TMC. You look at a local paper. Headline: New York has a 41% abortion rate. Forty-four percent of births are to unmarried women and girls.

  You think: Something’s wrong in this place, something has become disordered.

  The next morning you take Amtrak for your first meeting, in Washington. You pass through the utilitarian ugliness, the abjuration of all elegance that is Penn Station. On the trip south, past Philadelphia, you see the physical deterioration that echoes what you saw on the TV—broken neighborhoods, abandoned factories with shattered windows, graffiti-covered abutments. It looks like old films of the Depression!

  By the time you reach Washington—at least Union Station is august and beautiful—you are amazed to find yourself thinking: “Good thing America is coming to save us. But it’s funny she doesn’t want to save herself!”

  * * *

  My small point: Remember during the riots of the 1960s when they said “the whole world is watching”? Well, now the whole world really is. Everyone is traveling everywhere. We’re all on the move. Cultures can’t keep their secrets.

  The whole world is in the Hilton, channel-surfing. The whole world is on the train, in the airport, judging what it sees and likely, in some serious ways, finding us wanting.

  And, being human, they may be judging us with a small, extra edge of harshness for judging them and looking down on them.

  We have work to do at home, on our culture and in our country. A beautiful Easter to St. Mary’s Church of Charleston and happy Passover to Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim.

  CHAPTER 5

  Having Fun

  Not all of life is serious. Some of it is fun, some of it sheer pleasure. Here are some moments of pleasure—in memory, in being in a new place and in being on a snowy day in Brooklyn.

  * * *

  American Diversity and the Wild West

  The Wall Street Journal: August 28, 2014

  Moran, Wyo.

  Tenderfoot is in big sky country. On the drive from the airport to the ranch, the Tetons, a range of great splendor and dignity that Tenderfoot had thought were two mountains called Grand, are spread before her. It is dusk. To the left the Snake River curls softly against the road. To the right, open fields, working ranches, herds of buffalo. In the air the scent of sage. The sky is huge, a dome of softening blue. All this is expected—this is how the West looks—yet the real thing startles and overwhelms. You stare dumbly at the wonder of it.

  “God’s country,” her host says, not as a brag but with awe still in his voice after more than 20 years here.

  Tenderfoot’s host, a friend of many years, a substantial and numeric man, tells her Wyoming facts. There are fewer people in this state than any other. (“They must be lonely,” she thinks.)

  Tenderfoot doesn’t really like to be in a place where there aren’t a lot of… witnesses. She’s from the city and knows the canyons of downtown, the watering holes of the theater district. She knows her Brooklyn, her Long Island, her Jersey, is a walker in the city and a lost rube in the country. She is here because she loves her friends and will go far to see them. She does have a relationship with the American West and does in fact love it, but it is the West as mediated by John Ford, Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry. She doesn’t really know the real one.

  “I’ll fill you in on the bears,” her host says. They’ve been coming in closer, charging hikers down hills and sauntering across property. Tenderfoot nods in a way she hopes looks offhand, like someone who knows the facts on the ground, the lay of the land, the curve of the bend. In that tone, she asks which are worse, the black bears or the brown ones, and, um, which have the claws. “The grizzlies can kill you,” she is told. She receives this with equanimity. “I will never leave my room,” she thinks.

  The next day the conversation again turns to bears, and her host reminds everyone: “You go for a hike, just bring your bear spray.”

  “Um,” says Tenderfoot, “do you spray it on yourself like bug spray? Or do you spray it on the bear?”

  Another guest, sympathetically: “You spray it toward the bear. Like Mace.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Tenderfoot says.

  She is game for riding and asks for a horse that is short, lame and stupid. They give her an Appaloosa named Grumpy. He is huge and gray and looks like something the conquistadors rode. Tenderfoot is ready to love him. She pats his thick neck and says sweet things like, “You and me, Grump.” They go forward and it is beautiful—the stately lope, the soft, intelligent snorting—and she is barely offended when he tries to wipe her off on the side of a barn.

  Later, loping slowly up a trail by a creek, past aspen and cottonwood, sage and pine trees, past spruce and willows and Indian paintbrush, she sees something on the ground.

  She is now already speaking economically, like a Westerner.

  “Big twig,” she says.

  “Actually that’s a rattlesnake,” says her guide. This happens in Tenderfoot’s imagination but might as well be real.

  Grumpy is in charge and knows his trails, barely stumbles. She likes the easy sway. It is mesmeric. “This is how the cowboys did it,” she thinks, “this is how they put up with the boredom and peace.” She looks down at Grumpy’s massive neck and thinks of… Cole Porter. “If Grumpy falls down here I’ll shoot from the stirrups with a flick of the foot and tumble in the opposite direction.” Being a writer, she knows she will write of the fall and need the names of things. “Is that a ravine or a valley?” she calls out to her friends. Silence. “It’s a stream bed,” somebody says.

  In the coming days she would hike, mostly because she doesn’t want her friends to call her Tenderfoot Lazybones. She will announce one night that she went on a 7.2-mile hike up a mountain and saw a blurry furry thing 10 feet tall and scared it away with a sound and a stick. It is perhaps closer to the truth that it was a half-mile amble on a hill and she saw a squirrel, but nobody presses her. And anyway that squirrel was big.

  In between walking, staring at the stream and the sunflowers, walking through the tack room and staring at horses, Tenderfoot reads a wonderful book called “Wyoming Folklore,” a collection of oral histories from old-timers who, in the 1930s, were asked for their memories of the wild Wyoming in which they’d grown up. Their stories were gathered by young writers working for the Federal Writers Project. It was a brilliant use of tax dollars because it was an act of real conservation: If these histories hadn’t been written, they’d have been lost to us all forever.

  The stories, told by nongarrulous people in old age, tell of a lost, brute, beautiful world and the tough, hardy, crazy people who lived in it: cowboys, miners, French peddlers, Irish railway men, German surveyors, desperadoes, drunken soldiers. Parents fleeing disappointment who couldn’t settle down and dragged their hungry children through the wilderness looking for the perfect spot. Indian medicine men, mad prospectors, loggers, serial killers. The storms that bore down from nowhere and left 15 feet of snow. The Cheyenne on the warpath, the U.S. Army on the warpath, towns that rose up against soldiers and their rough ways. Cattle everywhere. Flash floods turning creeks into raging rivers. “It really rained in those days,” said an old cowboy. Lightning made cattle panic and stampede over cliffs.

  The legends of buried treasures, of lost mines, of gold nuggets large as wheat kernels. The sudden, raging wildfires. “Just as far as we could see east and west, just one inferno of flames,” said one pioneer. A change in the wind was death to all. No firefighters; only a stream or
a river could check a blaze.

  The cold and privation, the sheer endurance it took to live in old Wyoming, in the wild, wild West.

  At meals Tenderfoot tells stories of what she’s read, but her friends already know them. Still, they are beautiful and powerful to her, and give rise to a thought she’d had before.

  People say Americans are by nature isolationists, an odd thing to say of a people who came from everywhere on earth and stay in touch with everywhere. Maybe the truth is that America is so vast, so varied, contains so many different cultures and histories, which in turn give rise to different assumptions and even ways of being, that it has been the work of more than two centuries for America just to know itself. Europe is all bunched together, of course they know each other. We are spread out on a vast continent. It takes a while to take it all in. We’re not uninterested in other countries, we just have so many nations right here.

  Next Year Stay Home, America

  The Wall Street Journal: November 29, 2013

  I had a lot of jobs in a somewhat knockabout youth—waitress, clerk, temporary secretary, counter girl in a bakery (nice—no one’s ever sad in a bakery) and in a flower shop (hard—for hours I removed the thorns from the tough, gnarly roses we sold, which left my hands nicked and bloodied). All the jobs of my teens and early 20s were wonderful in the sense that I was lucky to have a job. Unskilled baby boomers were crowding into an ailing economy; they took what they could and did their best from there. I could earn a salary to buy what I needed—clothes, food, money to go to college at night, then during the day. But the jobs were most wonderful in that they contributed to the experience hoard we all keep in our heads.

  The best was waitressing. That’s hard work, too, eight or 10 hours on your feet, but you get to know the customers. People will tell you their life stories over coffee. There’s something personal, even intimate, in serving people food, and regulars would come in at 6 or 7 a.m. and in time you’d find you were appointments in each other’s lives. At the Holiday Inn on Route 3 in New Jersey, long-haul truckers on their way to New York would stop for breakfast. They hadn’t talked to anyone in hours. I’d pour coffee and they would start to talk about anything—the boss, the family, politics.

  I learned from them what a TSA agent told me many years later: “Everyone’s carrying the same things.” I had asked the agent what she’d learned about people from years of opening their bags and seeing what was inside. She meant her answer literally: Everybody’s carrying the same change of clothes, the same toiletries. But at the moment she said it we both understood that she was speaking metaphorically, too: Everyone’s carrying the same burdens, the same woes one way or another. We have more in common than we know.

  Once when I was 18 my friends and I ran away. We pooled our cash, bought a broken-down car for $200 and aimlessly drove south. We wound up in Miami Beach, in what was then a fallen-down, beat-up area and is now probably a millionaire’s row. I worked at a restaurant whose name I remember as the Lincoln Lanes. Jackie Gleason did his TV show nearby, and the June Taylor dancers used to come in for lunch. They were so great—young and beautiful and full of tales about the show and about Jackie, who once drove by in his car. I thought of him when I first saw Chris Christie, years later. Mr. Christie on YouTube confronting an aggrieved constituent was sheer Gleason: “To the moon, Alice!”

  The hardest job I had was working the floor at a women’s clothing store on Park Avenue in Rutherford, N.J. It was part of a chain. It was boring when traffic was light—clocks go slow in retail when no one’s there. There’s no stool to sit on during your shift: You’re working the floor so that’s where they want you, walking around, folding sweaters, rearranging hangers. You don’t have the same conversations with a harried woman trying on a skirt that you do with a tired trucker on his way to the city who decides to give you his philosophy of life.

  One thing all these jobs had in common was something so common, so expected, that it was unremarked upon. You got holidays off. You were nonessential personnel. You worked at a place that didn’t have to be open, so it wasn’t. You got this gift, a day off, sometimes paid and sometimes not, but a break, an easement of responsibility.

  I suppose the shops I worked at were unthinkingly following tradition. Thanksgiving, Christmas—these are days to be with friends and family and have a feast. Maybe if you pressed them they’d say something like: “This is what we do. We’re Americans. Thanksgiving is a holiday. We’re supposed to give thanks, together.” They’d never trespass on a national day of commonality, solidarity and respect.

  You know where we’re going, because you’ve seen the news stories about the big retailers that decided to open on Thanksgiving evening, to cram a few extra hours in before the so-called Black Friday sales. About a million Wal-Mart workers had to be in by 5 p.m. for a 6 p.m. opening, so I guess they had to eat quickly with family, then bolt. Kmart opened on Thanksgiving, too, along with Target, Sears, Best Buy and Macy’s, among others.

  The conversation has tended to revolve around the question of whether it’s good for Americans to leave their gatherings to go buy things on Thanksgiving. In a societal sense, no—honor the day best you can and shop tomorrow. But that’s not even the question. At least shoppers were being given a choice. They could decide whether or not they wanted to leave and go somewhere else. But the workers who had to haul in to work the floor didn’t have a choice. They had been scheduled. They had jobs they want to keep.

  It’s not right. The idea that Thanksgiving doesn’t demand special honor marks another erosion of tradition, of ceremony, of a national sense. And this country doesn’t really need more erosion in those areas, does it?

  The rationale for the opening is that this year there are fewer shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and since big retailers make a lot of their profits during that time, something must be done. I suppose something should. But blowing up Thanksgiving isn’t it.

  There has been a nice backlash on the Internet, with petitions and Facebook posts. Some great retailers refused to be part of what this newspaper called Thanksgiving Madness. Nordstrom did not open on Thanksgiving, nor did T.J. Maxx, Costco or Dillard’s. P.C. Richard & Son took out full-page ads protesting. The CEO was quoted last week saying Thanksgiving is “a truly American holiday” and “asking people to be running out to shop, we feel is disrespectful.” Ace Hardware said, simply: “Some things are more important than money.”

  That is the sound of excellent Americans.

  People deserve a day off if what they do is nonessential. Selling a toy, a jacket, even a rose is nonessential.

  Black Friday—that creepy sales bacchanal in which the lost, the lonely, the stupid and the compulsive line up before midnight Friday to crash through the doors, trampling children and frightening clerks along the way—is bad enough, enough of a blight on the holiday.

  But Thanksgiving itself? It is the day the Pilgrims invented to thank God to live in such a place as this, the day Abe Lincoln formally put aside as a national time of gratitude for the sheer fact of our continuance. It’s more important than anyone’s bottom line. That’s a hopelessly corny thing to say, isn’t it? Too bad. It’s true.

  Oh, I hope people didn’t go. I hope when the numbers come in it was a big flop.

  I hope America stayed home.

  And happy Thanksgiving to our beloved country, the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.

  Snow Day

  The Wall Street Journal: December 6, 2002

  “Watch, he’s gonna tax the snow.” We turned toward the TV mounted on the wall. “Gonna pay for it now!” the counter clerk said, and people in line laughed as they paid for their papers. Mayor Mike Bloomberg had just come on to do a live news conference. They had the TV on in the candy store to get updates on the weather. Mr. Bloomberg announced this was “the first big test” of his administration. The guy next to me caught my eye; we smiled and thought: Thanks for the context—we thought th
is was about the storm. We forgot it’s about you! It wasn’t obnoxious, just comic, a pure moment of the inevitable solipsism of a modern mayor in the media age.

  We were extroverting in the candy store yesterday afternoon on Montague Street in Brooklyn. Everyone was talking because it was snowing outside, heavily, with three inches on the ground and three or four more still in the sky. When I walked in, an old man pointed at me and said, “There is snow on your coat,” in the manner of Sherlock Holmes making a discovery.

  “They say it’s snowing outside,” I said in the manner of one sharing primo gossip.

  “That explains it,” he said.

  Strangers smiled at each other as they trudged by on the street. Outside a church they were leaving noon mass, and a woman with an unplaceable accent said, “Nice day!” And we all smiled at that because we were in the middle of a storm but it was true. It was nice. It was beautiful. I came home to emails. One, from a friend in Maryland: “Got weather? We’re under piles and piles of the stuff, predicting 10–12 inches. I love it. It’s so quiet here, and wonderful soft monochromatic hues. This is the best.” Another happy email from a friend who took his three-year-old to a hardware store, bought a cheap sled, and pulled his boy through Brooklyn. “Everyone we passed stopped to talk to us.”

  * * *

  We are loving the snow in New York. Everyone is walking or looking out the windows or talking about how bad it’s going to get. The storm began last night in the South, swept up through Washington, where it may leave eight inches; on through Baltimore and Philly, up to New York yesterday morning, heading later, they said, for Boston.

  For every adult the first day of snow forever brings back memories of old snow days—the radio on and everyone listening, and the announcer saying “.… and public and parochial schools on the South Shore have just announced they will not open.” And from house to house you could almost hear the kids cheer. Freedom, a free day—what a gift from God.