There's a cozy feeling of the past I get when the heater kicks in, blowing dry, warm air over the beige metal filing cabinets and orange-y varnished 1980s-era desk set of my office here at the church, the scent of copy paper, pencil shavings, and Scotch Tape filling the room and taking me back to more placid days. Solidity. Sureness. Do you remember how permanent and eternal the high, monolithic office towers of Midtown Manhattan felt, long ago, before the turn of the millennium? And the working life within them? We thought the days of pantyhose and leather briefcases would last forever.
We certainly never thought that soon, so soon, the towers would fall, the cubicles would empty of their armies of administrative assistants and middle managers, and instead of mimeographing memos and then correcting them with Paper Mate Liquid Paper Correction Fluid, we'd be asking ChatGPT to compose the memo for us and flow it into a PowerPoint utilizing A.I.-generated clipart of passably decent aesthetic taste.
Sometimes I have these memory visions in which I recapture for a moment very clearly the feeling of stability and permanence of American life in the late 20th century. How everything felt solid and immutable, secure as the stout granite foundation of the Equitable Building on lower Broadway. The heating system blew air, the hours and minutes on the desktop digital clock glowed red. The retirement account accrued and if the boss missed the 5:20 from Grand Central Station back to Darien, swallowing bivalves and Beefeater Gin in the noisy cavern of the basement Oyster Bar, there would be another train in half an hour.
One fleeting sensory memory that fairly frequently comes back to me — and for a long time I wasn't quite sure why — is of a few seconds in a car in 1988. I was being driven in the back seat of a car beside my college boyfriend, Todd, his father at the wheel, after being picked up at the Long Island Rail Road station in Massapequa Park. The family were of Swedish extraction and lived in a neighborhood called Plainedge wedged in a comfortable commuter corner between Bethpage, Seaford, and Farmingdale. We were driving to Todd's parents' house from the station past the low-slung shopping centers built for the families of returning G.I.s in the 1950s. There was some wintry combination of hail and rain hitting the windshield as the windshield wipers beat their rhythm and the colors of the neon storefronts blurred in a slush of red, blue, and green outside the warmth of the car. Todd's father was the nicest man you can imagine, who rode the train in to work each day at the telephone company — Ma Bell, I think? — and, unless my memory has added this as embellishment, wore an actual trilby with his overcoat. He definitely wore overcoats, the heavy, warm kind in November weather, with a shearling-lined collar, and a London Fog Mackintosh when it rained.
I've had this moment stuck in the gears of my memory for nearly 40 years and it didn't make sense for the longest time, why, but now I find this brief and extremely banal small moment fits like a puzzle piece into the story I've constructed to explain to myself what's happened to America and to the human experience of being alive in these strange decades we're living through, while we're transitioning (most uncomfortably) from the physical world and the world of the physical senses into the virtual world, and from the years of certitude to years of sheer confusion and topsy-turvy.
Another moment that comes back to me in this way, another few seconds I keep replaying for little damn good reason, happened when I worked briefly during college as a temp at the McGraw-Hill publishing company, in the textbook division on the Avenue of the Americas. I sat opposite a very earthy receptionist from Bensonhurst who wore her brown hair high, high, high, hairspraying it into foamy peaks with an aerosol can she pulled from her pocketbook ("pock-a-book," she pronounced it). I've forgotten her name. She was the girl who walked from the subway each morning wearing her white puffy sneakers and then exchanged them for pumps as soon as she reached her desk. It was this receptionist who showed me the underground dining concourse below Rockefeller Center at lunch. She was at her desk and I was, indeed, at the Xerox machine, when she slammed the black desktop phone down into the receiver and, tossing her head, turned to me and said. "Phyllis. Phyllis! Like her shit don't stink."
These moments of permanent memory (or memory of a sensation of permanence) weren't all about the burr and buzz of the IBM Selectic, and jelly doughnuts, and a bulging Rolodex. Another moment of this sort that has lodged in my neocortex — evoking more than just safety but a lost sense of American solidity, or mass, or the weight of existence — is of drinking sugary iced tea from a green plastic tumbler while hanging by my elbows from the side of the swimming pool at the Paxtons' house on Egypt Close, peddling my feet as I treaded water, a July sensation of water and blue light that lasted an eternity. Rhododendrons.
None of these things or moments proved permanent or immutable.
We are in a destabilized world. I don't just mean politically, no, not hardly. We all know, now, that anything is possible. Literally anything.
In my opinion this isn't specifically to do with the pandemic, although that certainly became part of the disorienting new head space. What I'm talking about is, basically, the internet, which has, obviously, upended absolutely everything. It turns out the internet can unite people in a whole lot of fantasy foolishness, unleashing movements of scant rationality but pure energy, driven by id and "hive mind." The internet has sent rioters and a wrecking ball to the White House and, as part of the beautification campaign ("beautification" being the word offered by a White House spokesman named David Ingle), given us gold-cursive signage indicating the addition of "the Presidential Walk of Fame."
In this destabilized world, nothing is permanent, no outcome is obvious, and absolutely anything, however radical, is possible.
Have you, for example, been following the voyage of that intergalactic comet 31/Atlas? It certainly seemed within the realm of possibility — at least to some of us, for a few weeks there — that it was not actually a natural comet but a vessel carrying a more advanced, more intelligent, alien species on a mission to Earth to save us from ourselves. The very idea that this seemed on even the outer fringes of the possible is surely a symptom of how the solid belief systems we used to take for granted have been knocked over like a vertical pile of alphabet blocks.
Remember in our childhood when the scientists and elementary school science teachers kept insisting there was absolutely, definitely, positively no such thing as alien life? No little green men? That insistence never made sense to me, mind you: How could it both have been true that the galaxies were infinite and that we were all alone in them, the only sentient beings among infinite stars? But despite the illogic of the science teachers' confidence, it felt better, I think, to live within an external societal structure of certitude.
Nightly news anchors, where have you gone? We thought the MetLife tower, the Daily News, and Snoopy pajamas were forever, but it turns out we were wrong.