In "On the Morning After the Sixties," one of the last essays in The White Album, Didion writes about college life in the early 1950s, when she studied at Berkeley, and "the extent to which the narrative on which many of us grew up no longer applies." I remember reading, a long time ago, something about hand-washing wool sweaters and blocking them on Turkish towels. I think this might have been part of Jacqueline Kennedy's famous Prix de Paris essay, which I cannot find online (Joan Didion was also a Prix de Paris winner); or maybe it was advice from one of the characters in The Group. I didn't know what it meant to "block" a sweater; though I assumed that it meant simply to reshape it so that it dries neatly; and I also didn't know what was special about a Turkish towel versus any other variety.
The point is that Joan Didion, born in the 1930s and educated in the 1950s, is a member of the last generation of American women who would have known how to block a sweater, and who would have been able to identify a towel as Turkish without looking at the label.
I was thinking about this as I sat at a table at Chadwick's Restaurant in Audobon, PA, with my husband and sons and my sister and brother-in-law and nephews. It was December 28, a weeknight, still early enough in the holiday week that you can revel in several more days of leisured Christmas coziness, but late enough that you're already thinking about the return to work, and school, and daily routines. Chadwick's is a nice place, so I found it odd that there wasn't a convenient coat rack to be found, and we had to hang our bulky coats and sweaters and scarves on the backs of our chairs. This would have annoyed Joan Didion, I thought; enough that she might even have written about the sad decline in standards that has made it perfectly acceptable for nice restaurants to offer paper napkins and paper packets of sugar and paper-wrapped straws, and no place to hang your coat.
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The live musician was just starting a break when we arrived, so the restaurant played recorded music. In the Philadelphia suburbs, you can switch stations on your car radio all day long, and never hear anything recorded after 1985 or so, and the recorded music selection at Chadwick's did not vary from local custom. The first track we heard was England Dan and John Ford Coley's Light of the World.
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You know, sometimes I lose the thread on these things. I start with an idea, but I forget details. And sometimes, I remember every detail, but have no idea why they're relevant. I think I had a point when I started this, but I can't remember to save my life what it was. Something about Chicago? But it's too late to abandon it now. I'm too far in.
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Oh, I know why I was thinking about Chicago! It was the band Chicago, and not the city! Because of the Gateway Pharmacy. That's it.
Yes, I see that I need to back things up a bit. I'll begin (yes, I know--too late) by saying that I'm not particularly nostalgic about most things. Time marches on, and all that. Things change. But like any other almost-old person, there are things about my childhood and youth that I miss. One of those things is old-fashioned neighborhood pharmacies. No, not the kind with the soda fountains, because I'm old, not ancient. I'm talking about the kind of neighborhood pharmacy where you could buy candy and gift items and greeting cards and perfume and I suppose you can buy all of that at Rite-Aid, but it's different. The Gateway Pharmacy is like the 1978-1983 Tardis stop. And I'm not nostalgic for that particular period of time at all, but drugstores were definitely better then. I didn't know that they still made Alyssa Ashley Musk, or Vitabath, or Fa, but apparently they do, and the shelves full of vintage toiletries aren't just nostalgia props. I thought about the extent to which so much of the narrative on which I grew up no longer applies, and smelled the Charlie tester, and sang along to Chicago's "Make Me Smile."
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And once again, I don't remember how I was going to finish this now way-off-the-rails post. Joan Didion would probably be horrified at this rambling mess. I'm reading Fire and Fury now, because of course I'm reading Fire and Fury. And although I can't resist "stable genius" jokes (which are never going to get old), I'm actually sorrier for Trump now than I am angry at him, because I believe that he might be well on his way to losing his mind, and it's never funny to see the deterioration of a human person. But I'm plenty angry at the sycophants who are loyal to Trump at the expense of loyalty to right over wrong; and even angrier at the cynical politicians who are willing to use this falling-apart mess of a man as a tool toward their own ends. The narrative on which I grew up no longer applies; and the narrative on which my children are growing up gets crazier every day. And love is still the answer, and always was, and always will be.
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