September 4, 2020: Mini-Gifts in the Garbage* -

Portland traffic volume dropped precipitously in the early Stay Home Time, and is now (in some areas) back to 90% of its pre-pandemic level. 

To this I say: 90% is still WAY better than 100% (and I think my neighborhood is well below that 90%). It’s delightful to have fewer cars on the road.

In what may be a related phenomenon, I’m seeing way more free-range kids than I used to. Specifically, there are more free-range boys between maybe 9 and 12  years old.  All summer, I saw them in twos and threes, on their bikes or walking, going someplace purposefully.  I didn’t see them very often, before this summer, but they are out there now, and they make me happy. Once, I even saw a free-range girl of 10 or so, riding her bike around Ladd. I’d begun to wonder if the girls were getting out too. Answer: at least one is. (Teenage girl gaggles were always plentiful, and still are.)

I have a theory that this pre-teen freedom is related to the pandemic, to parents working from home and kids not being off at summer camp (or now, off at school), to parents saying OKAY, okay, go for a ride, but turn on that  location-tracking thing, and be back in an hour and answer that phone if I call, or else! But I think, too, that the drop in car traffic means the kids are truly safer, out and about.

Other changes:  There’s an immigration attorney in northern Washington State who now has a side gig as a wedding planner. His Canadian/American dating-couple clients were having trouble getting back and forth across the border, but if they just stopped dating and got married already, life would get significantly easier. So he is arranging weddings at the Blaine Peace Arch Park, which straddles the border.

I know, assuming that people getting married is a “gift” is probably just me being romantic, or maybe literary (you know the rule:  if it ends in a death, it’s a tragedy; if it ends in a wedding, it’s a comedy), but I do like the idea. 

And another small change. It used to be that all the ice cream trucks in Portland played Scott Joplin’s ragtime classic, The Entertainer. When the recent Confederate-statue-toppling-craze was at its height, I read somebody saying that we have to change the ice cream truck song, as Joplin’s music hearkened back to (even more than today) racist times. 

I thought, Wait, what? Scott Joplin was Black and deservedly famous, the King of Ragtime. Is switching out his song really progress? 

But nobody asked me, and it has happened. The Entertainer is either gone, or it’s in a much slower rotation.

(A brief aside: my New Jersey friend once told me that in his state, all the ice cream trucks played the theme from The Godfather. And I bought it. I said, REALLY?!?!, but I said it not in an “I know you are teasing me” sort of way, more a “Wow, that’s amazing” way. Sigh.)

In the past two weeks, I have heard ice cream trucks playing “Turkey in the Hay,” and “La Cucaracha.” I am not sure either of these songs has brought us leaps and bounds, culturally, beyond The Entertainer, but the wonderful thing is: the ice cream trucks are back! I didn’t realize they were missing, until they reappeared, here as summer is waning. It’s good to hear them.

(* I don't like "silver lining" for the pandemic, so "gift in the garbage" is as far as I'll go.)