We were strolling one of the prettiest neighborhoods in Central Pennsylvania when we heard a child hawking her wares from a table across the street.
I was taught, possibly by a poster in my dentist’s office, that one should always buy lemonade from a kid with a lemonade stand, so I reflexively stuck my hand in my pocket and groped for change.
When we approached the table, though, we saw that the little street vendor was not selling lemonade and brownies. She was flogging rocks for 25 cents and ‘leavs’ for 5 cents. There was also a little pile of sticks on her table but these did not seem to be on offer.
The rocks were not the polished or multifaceted specimens one might find in a rock-and-mineral shop. Nor were the leaves brilliant exemplars of peak autumn foliage. They were perfectly ordinary gray rocks and perfectly ordinary green leaves, the kind you would never stoop to gather, free for nothing, if they lay in your path.
An unkind appraiser might have said that our little entrepreneur was trying to sell us debris. Or that she might as well have been peddling eggshells and grapefruit rinds from her family’s Sunday breakfast.
But who can make an unkind appraisal when it’s a lovely October afternoon and the entrepreneur is a perfect angel child? I bought one leaf and one rock. So did we all.
By the time we had walked another block, though, clouds had eclipsed the sun and our thoughts, in this season of creepy clowns, darkened commensurately.
We imagined our angel rock-and-leaf supplier as the little girl in the scary movie who can make objects spontaneously combust by giving them the hairy eyeball.
We wondered if her parents were snickering behind the curtains like the sushi chefs in a long-ago Robin Williams routine who have snookered the gringos into consuming raw fish: “Look,” they marvel, “they’re eating it!”
We postulated that there are two kinds of people in TrumpWorld, the Trumps and the Chumps, or the people who sell worthless rocks and leaves and the people who buy them. We wondered if at any other time than during the Year of Trump an enterprising kid would come up with such a rackety business plan.
Then the clouds parted, the sun’s rays beamed down and Little Miss Trump again became the angel child who saw the singular, miraculous beauty in every rock and leaf and whose mission it was to make us see it too.
That night, my three fellow chumps and I gathered ‘round my fuzzy old TV to watch the second Clinton-Trump debate. Within five minutes Josh was yelling at the screen. Yelling wasn’t so bad. He had warned me he might throw things.
Within 10 minutes I was alone. The bailers wanted to know how I could stand it.
Cinchy, I said. When it comes to presidential politics, I don’t expect high-minded discussions of “the issues.” I expect theatre of the grotesque. I try to enjoy the spectacle.
If that doesn’t work I go into social scientist mode: Let us observe how 21st Americans elect their leaders.
Hillary invoked Michelle Obama’s “when they go low, we go high” prescription in Round 2, but I didn’t think she went high enough. When the moon was out, I wanted her to treat her opponent as if he were already out of the picture, no longer worth talking to or about.
Instead of attacking his past actions or defending her own, she ought to have focused exclusively on the future – on what she intended to do once she took office.
But then, when the good, kind moon was smothered by a cloud, I wanted Hillary to go lower – to have come out with her hands protecting her crotch, say, and to counter Trump’s “Hillary for Prison” sloganeering with “Castrate Trump.”
Thus has this endless campaign infected our brains. Just this morning, a guy doing work on my house asked me if I thought President Obama would declare martial law if Trump won. He wasn’t kidding.
I told him I didn’t think there was the remotest chance of that happening. “Well,” he said, “there are rumors…”
If there is one thing upon which we can all agree is that our exhaustion with this election cycle exceeds the exhaustion of any electorate in the history of the republic. One of my companions from Round 2 has vowed not to watch tonight’s Round 3 or read any more news coverage about the campaign.
I, however, glutton for punishment, will be at my election monitor’s post this evening. If I hurl something at my low-def TV it will be because I need an excuse to go hi-def.
And if I need something to throw I have the rock I purchased from an angel child for two bits.
