1974
Old people at the supermarket make you feel what’s the use.
Staring at 90-cent peanut butter. Taking down an orange, looking for its price, putting it back.
Old turn-of-the-century babies with 1965 dollars, who remember Teddy bears, Teddy himself, Woodrow Wilson, Kaiser Bill, Arrow collar man, flaming youth, wandering among $7 ribs, pausing at sugar that is 60 cents a pound and rising.
They shop like sappers going through a mine field, like Onassis looking at new corporations for sale.
Old people dress up to go to the supermarket, but their money becomes shabbier every day, and how do you put a gloss on those old 1965 dollars they dig out of their purses for the checkout clerk?
It is sad watching them fumble through antique old dollars, and hearing the clerk call for more.
“These ancient dollars, madam, have been heavily discounted since you were last in circulation and are quite worthless except in great bulk.”
Clerks do not utter this advice aloud to old people. It is simply implied thunderously by everybody in the country and every mouthful of food in the supermarket. Old people have a way of laboriously counting their change at the cash register and trying to engage the clerk in sociable conversation, as though asserting a bit too defensively their right to be there despite their shabby old out-of-date dollars.
Maybe only because they have no place to arrive at in a hurry to pick up a batch of the new 1974 90-cent-peanut-butter dollars.
Do old people at the supermarket care about Henry Kissinger’s latest flight for peace? Does it matter to them that Republicans and Democrats are quarreling about whether the Democrats have a mandate?
And the latest economic program for ending inflation by 1977, is it of any interest to them at all?
Do they think of President Ford’s meetings with Soviet leaders as news?
Perhaps so. News nowadays is largely an entertainment of flying professors, pointless quarreling among telegenic careerists, posturing theorists and presidential travelogues, and old people rely heavily on television for entertainment.
Perhaps they would turn it off if the news switched from entertainment to reality and dealt with the pain of not being able to afford an orange or the embarrassment of delaying the checkout line to take back the crackers 1965 dollars can no longer buy.
Old people at the supermarket make you wonder about all those middle-aged people you see jogging the streets to preserve their vascular systems for another fifty years.
And about all the people of all ages all over the country who are eating less, drinking less, smoking less, driving safer and in general looking for a death-proof safety suit to get them over the peak years and down into the valley of old age fit to enjoy the fruits of their abstention and labor.
Will anyone care when they get there?
Will they be able to afford an orange?
And if not, will professors quit flying for peace, politicians cease thumping their clavicles, theorists stop forecasting millennia for the next generation and Presidents forgo red-carpet arrivals at distant airports long enough to say, “Hey, old people in this country still have a hell of a problem: let’s close the circus long enough to do something about it”?
Old people at the supermarket are being crushed and nobody is even screaming.
Old people at the supermarket make you feel what’s the use.