More About Improvements

I sometimes flirt with an odd notion:  that there are so many innovative people out there, each wanting To Make Changes, each with a view of How Things Can Be Done Better that they sometimes come in conflict with how things should be.  Some things are just fine the way they are.  Or the way they were.  Maybe we don't need those changes. Or quite so many.

Let me take my last winter's visit to Santa Barbara as an example.  When we lived there many years ago, State Street was a wide enough street that you could fit in two lanes of traffic plus parallel parking.  Today it's wide enough for two lanes but now the old (and very handy) parking space is planted with quite handsome trees.  Rather than what I might call useful stores, those have been edged out by the more glitzy that attract not the local residents so much as the now-plethora of tourists.  Gone is the dry-goods--a wonderful place with pneumatic tubes that whizzed off your payment and whizzed back your change.  My mother and I went there regularly to buy yardage and patterns with which to sew our clothes.  The candy store.  Gone.  The children's clothing shop.  The hardware store.  The incense-scented store with goods from China.   The splendid family style cafeteria where my mother, grandmother, and I lunched on chicken pot pie with blackberry pie for dessert.

Santa Fe is similar.  Almost all the nice little local shops that lined the Plaza are now selling touristy items so that residents now retreat to outlying malls. One friend said he even thought people would soon be charged simply to enter the Plaza area.  I doubt that ... but you never know.

May I be allowed to paraphrase from Alexander McCall Smith's recent book, The Handsome Man's DeLuxe Cafe, when one of his characters--when told that moving forward was the modern way--says that he is not modern and does not want to be.  There are many people, he says, who "want to stay exactly where we are, because there is nothing wrong with that place."  He likes where he is (geographically, emotionally, etc) so why be told that it's the modern way to "move forwards."

Improvements come in so many forms--yet another leadership workshop, another governmental regulation/decision, more town planning ideas, another tax hike. Let's just all go out and lie in the sun for awhile and let improvements take a coffee break.  We could also give our laptops, smart phones, emails, twitters, and tweets a vacation.  I think there is great glory in going off into the "wilds" and being incommunicado. Or living in a place where you don't speak the language and have no idea what the nightly reporters are talking about so can come up with your own summation of things.

I know when I lived Away, it felt splendid.  A bit like Marco Polo, off someplace in the wilds of the world. Well, anyway, those are thoughts I play with sometimes.