CUL-DE-SAC

Sometimes you lose stuff and it’s like you weren’t even there. I was at the City Heights farmers market and one minute my wallet was in my pocket and the next minute it wasn’t. I retraced my steps and searched though the box of eggplant the Vietnamese sell. I checked the tables covered with chard where I bought two bunches from the Africans and then, of course, the watermelons at the Mexican stand.

City Heights Farmers Market. Photo by Sam Hodgson

I made a scene. By the end of it everyone knew I was looking for my wallet and the vendors asked me if I’d found it as I walked by them the third or fourth time. The pretty African girl I see at their stand every week — maybe she’s not African; talks like she goes to Hoover High — told me to talk to the market manager. Maybe it’ll turn up.

I had already picked out some stuff from the Mexican stand and couldn’t pay for it, but they told me to just take it home and pay them next week. I come by pretty much every week and they figure I’m good for it.

I left my name and phone number with the manager and, as I was headed home, I got a call on my cell. They found it. I returned, and saw all of the credit cards and ID’s were still there but the cash was gone. It was close to a hundred bucks. Still, I was grateful the thief didn’t make my life more complicated than he could have.

“Well, they probably needed the money,” some lady said to me.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean they were entitled to it,” I said to her.

It was an expensive trip to the farmer’s market and I still owe the Mexicans twelve dollars. But the strawberries were good, as usual. The green beans look real fresh and I think the watermelon will be sweet.

As usual.

We just heard that the great comic Robin Williams died, likely by his own hand in the hands of depression. Lots has been said about him. Here’s my story.

A former co-worker of mine was a hobby cyclist who went to France one year to take in the Tour de France. He was there with a number of friends, and one of them was a buddy of Robin Williams, who hooked up with the group as they took their own bike rides into the countryside after the Tour had passed by. These were serious cyclists who set a fast pace, and on at least one ride Williams joined them.

One of the guys was asked to fall back if Robin, who was older and not as fit, couldn’t keep up. This did happen, and the designated cyclist reduced his speed so Robin would have at least one person to bike with.

What followed, as they peddled along the road, was a non-stop comedy routine by Williams for an audience of one. He made fun of the French. He told jokes about the Tour and the absurdity of climbing hills with two wheels and no engine. You name it.

We can all play amateur psychiatrist and guess at what really caused Robin to end his life. But prior to his death, he was a guy who lived to make people laugh, even when he was pumping up a hill in the presence of nothing but grass, maybe some sheep and one other guy on a bike.

About a month ago I finally got glasses. Not just reading glasses to correct my middle-age vision but glasses you wear all the time. I got glasses with black frames, just like the ones everyone else wears.

Of course I didn’t realize then that everyone else wore them. That occurred to me later, when I walked through my workplace and noticed how many people had black-framed glasses… both women and men. I also noticed this at the convalescent clinic where my mom is staying after her bad fall. She even pointed it out, telling a male nurse, “You have the same kind of glasses my son has!”

But it wasn’t just him. It seemed like all of the nurses who wore glasses had black frames.

About four years ago my wife and I were shopping for a car, and we were seriously considering a Subaru Outback. I soon took a walk in my neighborhood and was surprised to see an awful lot of Subaru Outbacks. I shouldn’t have been surprised. And I shouldn’t have been surprised a few months after my son was born, when I took him to the pediatrician. A nurse came into the lobby and said the doctor was ready to see “Nicholas,” and three sets parents with babies or toddlers — including me — stood up in response. She finally gave the last name and most of us sat down again.

There are things that are important to me that I do differently from other people. But when it comes to most things, I now realize that I’m just a part of the herd.

There’s a book lying around the house that came home from the library. It’s called The New American Dream: Living Well in Small Houses. It shows how architects have creatively designed homes that are under 2,000 square feet. But there aren’t many pictures of people in these houses and nothing, typically, that tells how many people live in them.

Judging by the tastes and income levels shown by these houses, I’m guessing the couples who live in these homes have either one child or none at all.

Here’s another interesting book: It’s the memoir, Call the Midwife, from which came the popular British TV series about the women who delivered babies on London’s East End in the 1950s.

In the introduction, the author wrote about the coming of “the pill” in the early sixties, saying that her troop of midwives had 80 to 100 deliveries a month in the late ‘50s and only about four-a-month in 1963.

My vacation to the UK last month showed the same thing. Children are highly guarded, small in number and seldom seen. It’s a lot like it is here.

I have wondered, along with others my age, why parents these days are so protective of their kids compared to the days of my childhood, when you wandered the streets and biked many blocks to visit your friends. All your parents cared about was that you come home for dinner on time.

It hadn’t occurred to me that it comes back to falling birthrates.

When children went out the front door of their houses after school 50 years ago, they joined a gang of kids already on the street. They probably took a brother or a sister with them, and there is safety in numbers. Compare that to today, when the streetscape is empty except for some guy walking his dog whom you may or may not know. Do you want your kid hanging around a place like that?

Parents prize their children so much today because there are so few of them. Low birthrates brought us the helicopter parent. It brought us gay marriage, which is the logical conclusion to having so many childless couples. I guess having kids is no longer reason we tie the knot.

There are still a lot of people populating the planet, so we’re in no immediate danger of the human race dying out. But there’s a simple arithmetic to only having one child per couple. You’re halving the population, and not just once but generation after generation. Maybe the human race won’t die out. But what about the German race or the Italian race? This could be the end of white people!

I remember my dad a long time ago talking about having two kids, my brother and me. He said he and my mom were “replacing” themselves. This made people, having families in the 60’s, seem very logical. It was zero population growth. No more. No less. And maybe it’s possible that people in the coming decades will be logical too.

“OK. We’ve not been having a lot of kids lately and we’ve brought down a dangerously high birth rate (remember those broods you saw in Call the Midwife). But now it’s time to start reproducing again, so let’s go!”

Even if that’s possible, I wonder what it would look like. I suppose we could fashion a whole new culture where having manageable families is our reason for being. Maybe big families will become cool again, and that will encourage at least some people to have them. Maybe women (and men) will stop seeing a career as the thing that fulfills them.

I’m a modern kind of guy. I work full time but so does my wife. Yet we have two kids, and I’m not sure how it happened. There was no plan to have children. My wife was between jobs and could take some time off to get pregnant, nurse and watch babies. My parents lived in town so babysitting was cheap and plentiful.

But even if all of those things fall into place for other couples, the question remains. Why have kids at all in the age of the pill? Do you do it so there are young family members to take care of you when you’re old and frail? Do you do it with the high-minded goal of replacing yourself? Do you do it to continue the family name and family history?

My children are wonderful gifts and they’re also a lot of work. We can hope people of the future will look at that tradeoff and come to a conclusion that our civilization should carry on with a new generation.