Down in trenches at Blanche Moore's field

The aisles at the bookstore were blocked by mothers with infants in strollers. On a good day, all babies are cute. Of course, all mothers think their babies are the most adorable. Even aardvarks, I read somewhere, probably think their offspring are beautiful.

I guess it is this mechanism that keeps the species going; otherwise, if parents thought their offspring were ugly, they would give up the endeavor of populating the earth, except for those who enjoy the endeavor more than the result.

But this was not a good day and these were not cute babies.

Usually, I see more people my age at the bookstore than I do of the young, parents or otherwise. I have always heard that old people are sitting around waiting for more bingo halls to be built; but no, they are at the bookstore, browsing, buying books. Old people (and this term is not pejorative) are great readers.

They are also great newspaper readers. As their ranks thin, the number of subscribers dwindles. The problem for newspapers is that the charm of reading (and paying for) a daily newspaper has not caught on with the younger generation. But that's another story.

Editorial writing -- which consists of upholding the pillars of civilization, the rule of law, and the rights of man -- is hard work. It leaves you with a general eagerness to relax. So, to relax, I decided to venture out to what used to be Blanche Moore's sorghum grain field, now Moore Plaza, and go to the bookstore to look for light reading material.

Going to Blanche Moore's field was a mistake, it being the wrong time of the year to go there. For someone with a touch of claustrophobia, the thought of Moore Plaza can bring on a cold sweat. Dante's classification of hell has three divisions, but he would have added a fourth division if he had been to Moore Plaza on a December evening in the panic of Christmas shopping. My claustrophobia always gets a little worse this time of the year; I guess it's a Christmas claustrophia.

But I thought: We are in a recession -- hard times -- people are staying home and putting their few extra dollars under the mattress in case they need to buy apples to sell on street corners when the country goes from rack to ruin. And I recalled the logic of an old joke -- Nobody goes to Moore Plaza anymore, it's too crowded.

But no. They were all out spending gobs of their money at the emporiums, pushing, talking on cell phones, materialists weighted down with plunder. No wonder the country is in trouble following an ethic of "who grabs the most is the most deserving." But they were not having fun.

This is supposed to be the season of joy, so why was it that all the faces I saw looked like troops coming back from a battle? Why did they all look as if they had been down in the trenches at Target or Wal-Mart? The horror! The horror!

Like any sane person with a touch of Christmas claustrophia, I tried to avoid the armies of shoppers to make my way to the bookstore. In the space of minutes, I saw two almost collisions caused by people who didn't want to yield. Gertrude Stein wrote that in this country "there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is." She was not talking about the parking lots at Blanche Moore's field, where everybody is. And each of them wants to be in the very same spot where you happen to be.

Some people overflow whatever amount of space they occupy and encroach on yours. A woman talking into her cell phone, wearing a black coat that looked like it was fitted around a 50-gallon oil drum, pushed me aside without uttering an apology or even looking at me -- she was after some display item.

I took a deep breath and moved away. So did another elderly man with a small white wedge of a beard. He looked like another reader, rather than Christmas shopper, and so was without the emotional charge of the plundering materialists. The man with the white beard and I were both cowards on the battlefield.

So this is what comes from all those parents who think their offspring are cute -- this is what comes from putting too many people in too small a space -- this is what comes from the world's overpopulation that has spilled over onto Moore Plaza. I could see in my mind's eye, traveling in the future: All those cute babies in their strollers will grow up to pluck their eyebrows and grow beards and become shoppers themselves, going from store to store, carrying tote bags, talking in their cell phones, looking frazzled among the displays of commercial ecstasy, pushing claustrophobic old codgers aside who should have stayed home waiting for the bingo halls to be built.

The bad thing about this whole mall end of town is that you can get there, with some difficulty, but once there you can't get out. My trip to the bookstore took an eternity, and, as Woody Allen once said, eternity lasts a very long time, especially toward the end.


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