The New, Perhaps More Narrowly Defined Normal

It's a couple of weeks before my birthday. I have no expectations, good or bad. Jo and I have made it so far without catching the Coronavirus, or Covid-19. I have no expectations there, either, except a dim hope that someday there will be a vaccine for it and we can all return to something that reminds us of normalcy at a time when it might just be that there is no such thing anymore. 

For lunch we drove to a Wendy's and got take-out. At the drive-through, the disembodied voice from the speaker belonged to a young woman, I think. She was little help in clarifying the usual cryptic billboard that seemed to only reluctantly reveal the various ordering options. Did "small," "medium," and "large" refer to the combo's drink size, french-fry size, or both? There was no clue, so I mumbled something and let the young lady follow her heart. 

We then drove to a park to eat in the car. South of the Truman Presidential Library is a park with a playground, tennis courts, and trees and some pleasant scenery, so we opted for the latter and I parked my car accordingly. My thought as we sat there and looked around at the neighboring tree lined streets and small, well-kept houses, was that Independence might be one of those places where being "poor" doesn't mean you are white trash. Everybody's poor. (hyperbolic statement) It makes a difference. I explained to Jo that possibly the reason for this was that Independence has been here for a very long time, and has experience only very slow growth. Nowadays, there is really nowhere for it to grow anymore, except to its east where development only occurs when there is farmland for sale, and then, again, only slowly. 

After we ate we walked around the Independence Courthouse Square, which is a modest, barely-alive business district around an old, stately courthouse building that looks much like it did when Harry Truman returned from Washington D.C. for good and took walks in the afternoons. The square was a little more vital, back then. Nowadays over half the stores are closed, since the only activity around seems to be those few things involved in county government, some courthouse activity and associated lawyers. Shops that are still in business are run sporadically--meaning when you arrive they may or may not be open. Maybe business was so slow that day so they closed up and went home. Restaurants seemed to be still cautiously closed due to the Corona virus. To be fair, we were there around 2:30 in the afternoon, a slow time in any era. 

The most striking thing to me was that even though I first arrived in Independence when I drove out here from California in 1968, the year when Americans had just learned how to send a manned spacecraft around the moon and back, Sixty Minutes first aired on television and the Tet Offensive was launched in Viet Nam, little has changed.