Anachronism

Gotta' love this. 

A friend sent it to me, along with some other oldies. I think you could study it all day and not have a clue. If you're wondering, she's an alarm clock, heavy-set maybe, but, I'm guessing, accurate. Long before your and my domiciles got wired, she'd go up and down streets with that single-shot pea-shooter, cracking peas off your window to wake those she must have been contracted to so do. Don't know what the job paid, but this professional doesn't look to be suffering. So long as you didn't have to shake the sleepers by hand, you could stay a long ways away from any untoward contact. Just had to be on time. Just had to smack the window

Got me to thinking about professions; and when I did, I couldn't help thinking that I'm descended from a long line of anachronisms.

My great-grandpa Schaap was a sailor in Holland and a farmer in America, but then, he reasoned (as did thousands of others), "who couldn't farm?" Well, he couldn't. But he didn't know that when he came. He simply assumed that if he had some land somewhere in America, he could live well. Farmers aren't rare in my neighborhood; we have a lot of them today, but his kind are long gone. Old McDonald is long gone. My great-grandpa had some trouble making it with subsistence farming; he'd have been marched off the land by agribusiness.

Ended up just down the road, owning a clothing store. Could have as well been a tailor--no more work for tailors either. I have no reason to believe he died a pauper, either in coin or in spirit; but there was no way he wintered in Florida. Do you know anyone who owns a mens clothing store these days?

My great-grandpa on my mother's side, was, like his father before him, a blacksmith. We've got a 106-year old picture up on our library wall, one of those long wonderful wide-angled shots of an entire city park full of people lined up for a portrait.




Let me bring you in closer to see who these folks are.




Among them are my great-grandparents, as well as my grandparents. They're horseshoers, a word the spell-check doesn't even recognize. They don't call themselves blacksmiths; they're horseshoers. Look at them all--a couple hundred at least. I'm guessing Sheboygan County is lucky if there's one today. If there's no farmwork, horses don't do much but look pretty and eat a bale of hay a day. No horses, no shoes.

Can't help but think that someday some great-great-grandchild of mine will look at a picture of an odd-looking gent standing in front of a blackboard--"what is that?"-- and asking some ancient grandma what this guy was doing exactly. "He was a teacher," I hope someone will answer.

"And what did he teach?"

"Literature."

"What's 'literature'?

Last year, a college down the road gutted its English department for what the administration understood to be a good reason--there were no majors. The high cost of higher education pushes students into professional training these days, and who, pray tell, ever repaid a loan on the money earned from writing a poem? "The written word is a poor sluggish traveler in a high-velocity time, an ancient clumsy makeshift tool, invented by people who worked in clay and moved at the speed of a camel," or so says Robert Coover in The American Scholar. He's right.

Like pea shooters, all things must pass, I guess. Me too.

Sigh.