"Shit Happens" & "Whatever" decades

I was in the Uptown area, going to the hardware store, and had been listening to a program on President Reagan's advice not to be concerned about being out of work. Just take whatever money you have and go into business, the great American way ... free enterprise, the American dream of working for yourself. The week before he and the Congress had succeeded in doing away with some anti-capitalist legislation enacted in the thirties, to enable business to succeed better it was assumed.

As I parked I saw an old, beat up pickup truck with a bumpersticker which read "Shit Happens" (the first of many sightings over the years), and it brought up the political situation real quick. I greeted the father and daughters who ran the hardware store and they quickly gave me the news. Seems their lease was not being renewed, they were soon to be out of business, and a boutique would soon take their place. Their years of experience and huge knowledge was pushed aside for the shit happens decade. The boutique didn't last of course, nor did the trendy furniture store which replaced it. Now that whole end of the building is gone, and another series of businesses are on the horizon.

"Whatever." a close relative to "Shit Happens" is now the reining word, and is undoubtedly on bumpers as well. I think of the word when Bill Clinton comes up, but the "Gitmo" ethos of Bush and Cheney bring the shit happens ethic back with a vengence now and again. Obama is embroiled in an Orwellian word of war and peace and high finance & unemployment, duking it out with generals and the Pentagon, the Tea Party, Wall Street and the banks. What his primary bumper sticker will be is anyone's guess, whatever.

Mrs. B

I met Mrs. B. in the neighborhood, at my Father's automotive garage. She was a person with authority, which I was later to find out about, both in and out of class. It took me a few years to catch up with her at the local high school, both in physiology class and around the school grounds and buildings. She was highly respected, tough but fair and intensly human. The most unusual thing she did was to invite athletes to offer her the opportunity to wear their letterman's sweater on Thursdays, the usual (but not for teachers, of course) practice between boys and girls. And, she taught an elective course for senior boys called "Boys Foods," which ultimately I was priviledged to take part in. Also, boys would offer to wash her black, classic car, a Lincoln as I recall; & I did that one time.

The most ibiding memory was the day in class when she lectured on germs, and then had us look through a microscope at flies and maggots. It was the big eye opener of the decade in a sense, a memory now that comes back to haunt me, expecially when I am at an outside (farm) dinner and there are flies crawling all over the food. She did things like dissolve metal in Coca Cola as well, with the accompanying talk about the hazards of soft drinks, sugar. She was no evangelist, no prude, but there were some health issues which she delivered on with no mercy. I can see her as clear as day walking down the hall with an enormous letterman's sweater on, way big, her hands doing their best to push out of the cuffs. I hope that students now and in the future will have at least one Mrs. B in their lives.