Edward
Hopper: South Truro Post Office, I, 1930
Isn’t
the original Truro in Cornwall,
A
broad peninsula of craggy ports and harbors,
And
coves that tempted pirates and smugglers,
And
spies from the continent?
This
place looks a lot more peaceful,
Though
awfully isolated. The few locals
Couldn’t
have generated much work for
The
skeleton crew, but Hopper wouldn’t
That
year have wasted much effort on them
If
the field had been ‘full of folk.”
And
now we may be about to eliminate,
Or
drastically reduce, the number of postal employees
In
our own era of the smart phone, and the dumbed down
Communications.
Even our greeting cards—our Valentines,
for
God’s sake—are exchanged online.
Our
most intimate connections with each other
Are
like, for instance, when the woman roaring up to me
As
I sat waiting for a light to change at an intersection,
Looked up from texting, in my rear-view
mirror,
Too
late to avoid skidding, unbraked, into my modest
Ford
Focus: “Shiver Me Timbers, lads,”
indeed.
As
an educator, I’m pretty sure our eloquence—if not
Even
our literacy—has fallen off a cliff since we gave up
On
the English language about the same time we also
Abandoned
foreign and classical language study
In
favor of the social “sciences” and cranial purification
Fifty-five
years ago. As Ring Lardner would have
said,
“You
can look it up!” Yes, R-I-N-G . . . oh,
never mind!
During
his impressionistic period, Edward Hopper
Was
more interested in isolated, unoccupied,
Brick
buildings than windows with companionless
Women
staring out of them anyway.
As
for books, even after the last one is burned,
Forests
will still morph into hard copies.
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