Penny Portraits in the Crowd

“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.”  That Dickens had a way with words.  He could turn a phrase that people are still using a century and a half later.  And the characters he created; Ebenezer Scrooge, Fagin, Mr. Micawber, The Ghost of Christmas Present, Uriah Heep, Wackford Squeers, Jacob Marley and all the rest.  Some fully fleshed out and some mere pencil sketches but all highly evocative of the world that Dickens created from his London and the world view he imagined within it.

I could really use his gifts right now.  I have about three days of awfulness ahead of me and really nothing to write about.  Or rather my brains are too scrambled to produce a coherent essay from the experiences I’m immersed in.  And there are all kinds of characters.  Some would make fine character sketches, with their stereotypical behavior and odd tics.

Today I briefly met people of all stripes.  Young and old; rich and poor; Left and Right; apparently normal and obviously insane.  Like a kaleidoscope, they flashed by with just enough time to reveal some small facet of their personalities.  And consistently, the most interesting people are in the middle.  They’re not the weirdest or the best dressed.  But they’re always the easiest to talk to.  They’re the most American.  And they’re the easiest to deal with.  The elites are always disconcerted when they have to deal with other people one on one.  It’s all such a bore.  They just want to pay someone else, “to take care of all that.”  And the opposite pole; the broken people are all over the field.  They’re angry or crazy or just too confused to be understood.  You can pity them and wish they could be helped but at this point we can barely help our own.

Probably the most pleasant moment was when a young woman with two children came in.  A boy and a girl, respectively six and five years old.  The kids were engaged in a low-level battle that you could tell must have been their continuous state.  The mom just grabbed each of them with one of her arms and carried them along like two bundles of firewood as they still tried to reach each other to battle.  I said to her, “Those are both good ages.”  And she laughed but nodded her head and said, “Yeah they make my day fun.”

A little while later a very well-dressed man came in pushing some kind of very expensive looking wagon that contained two little boys.  They were somewhere in the age range of four to six years old.  The two boys spent every minute throwing things out of the wagon onto the ground.  And the father dutifully retrieved this jetsam almost continuously.  Finally in utter exasperation he started yelling and threatening to withhold their toys.  But they ignored his threats and continued to toss these items overboard.  And completely defeated he handed back the ejected items with an expression of utter resignation.

And then there was the freak show.  Blue hair, large metal rings drooping down from the nose and various other facial piercings.  There was a lot of weird squawking and involuntary noises along with strangely discordant singing.  There were parents with grown children who seemed to just accept whatever weirdness escaped from their progeny.  And then there were even cases of multi-generational weirdness.

When you look at a cross-section of our society it’s easy to see that things have changed for the worse.  But it’s also clear who will survive and who isn’t going to make it.  What Dickens could have done with this crew.