Thoughts on a Monday (Can You Tell It Rained Yesterday?)

I like to think that had I been a woman in 1970something I would have been this woman, all flaunt and heel with the bitchin'est car I ever did see. That in the 20's I would have been a flapper, in the 30's a member of The Lost Generation, that in the 50's I would've been first in line to buy Howl, obscene or not, the coolest chick smack dab in the middle of whatever time, an iconoclastic poster child of something avant and slightly scary. But of course I am not that woman, not then and not now, me in my sensible flats and dependable Toyota.

For most of the twentieth century, doctors routinely operated on babies without anesthesia, believing them exempt from pain. I wonder, sometimes, what modern day norm will seem horrific to us in the future. Remember when we actually ate preservatives while pregnant? we might say to one another in the old folk's home, or for that matter remember when we used to put people in old folk's homes? Shaking our heads, how could anyone have possibly denied two people in love the right to marry, a 5-point harness the lap belt of can you believe, our children admonishing us for not putting them in helmets every time we turned the ignition.

What am I doing right this very second that will one day seem at best cutely antiquated, at worst ghastly and inhumane? What is going on to which I am not privvy? A movement, a scene? A way of thinking like an optical illusion, after which you can never not see the old lady?

But the car, yes--the car is freaking beautiful.