Yesterday shopping, we saw the most bizarre pickup–if that’s what it was–ever.
I was opening our trunk in the no parking zone right outside of the posh grocery store in a glitzy strip mall when from behind me into my periphery vision came what I at first thought was a shiny black roll-back tow truck hauling a shiny black pickup truck. I soon realized that it was all one vehicle, on top a pickup truck, on the bottom a row of big-rig fuel tanks. It circled the parking lot and again rumbled past us as I whooped and hollered for M to look. Its face was a semi tractor’s huge grill; its posterior was a head-height tailgate.
Its every move defied the economic recession.
M wondered, “What are the people in that thing thinking? That they’re really cool?”
Probably, I thought. If it were me, I would feel on top of the world.
Which I’m not, right now, feeling. My district’s superintendent has taken to emailing cautionary messages to her employees, assuring us of her concern for each and every one of us but warning of necessary salary, benefits, and even staff cuts.
And we close on our new house on Tuesday!
I try to make myself feel better by noting profound pieces of wisdom, like, “Whenever one door closes, another opens,” or, “The light you see at the end of the tunnel is the headlamp of a fast-approaching train.” You can see why I’m not really soaring these days.
Hoping to spark a socialist revolution here on the home front, I responded to the superintendent’s invitation for input from teachers about how the district can save money by writing to her:
“I’m sure you’ve been receiving countless suggestions about dealing with the budget; please accept my humble contribution to the fray! In a wage-cutting scenario, it makes most equitable sense to me not to make a flat percentage cut for everyone, but instead to make graduated cuts. For example, a person earning $10,000 could receive just a 1% cut, while a person earning $50,000 could receive a 5% cut. The ‘fairness logic’ behind this is that in a flat wage cut scenario of, say, 2%, it is more difficult for a person earning $10,000 to lose $200 (leaving $9,800) than it is for a person earning $50,000 to lose $1,000 (since they still are left with $49,000). Graduated wage cuts allow earners of lesser salaries a little more breathing room for basic necessities without stifling that same breathing room for higher earners.”
Now, you might think that my previous attempts at attracting Obama’s attention through this blog, roughly the equivalent of peeing into a networked toilet in hopes of shifting the tides of both of the U.S.’s adjacent oceans, would have taught me that my advice is best dispensed in a more fruitful manner than direction towards public leaders. I would be better off, say, just emptying my composting toilet’s contents into a corn patch on the old home place. Nevertheless, I eagerly emailed my wage cutting suggestion to the superintendent, who wrote back rather quickly and without full comprehension of run-on sentences:
“Thanks for your thoughts, C, we are working diligently to impact people as little as possible. At this time, we await the real numbers for our revenue from the state to be able to put our budget together. Have a good day.”
A good day full of worry, perhaps, about vague possibilities and hypothetical run-throughs and trying to convince myself that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
On our shopping trip yesterday, less than an hour before we saw the ludicrous truck, N did some of her own cruising around her parking lot of clothing store shiny floors, jarring to a halt whenever she approached the reflections of lights, momentarily afraid of falling through the apparently vanished tile.
But only momentarily.
Cool.
