2. Where Did All the Community Bulletin Boards Go?

Where Did All the Community Bulletin Boards Go?

All the supermarkets have got rid of their community bulletin boards in my neighborhood, it seems.

I love community bulletin boards. Crude black and white photocopies of pictures of lost dogs. Hand-made advertisements for lawn-care or moving or house-cleaning services with the little hand-scissored fringe of slips with hand-lettered phone numbers hanging down beneath. Real estate and insurance agents smiling desperately out from their thumb-tack-impaled calling cards. Posters heralding upcoming pork and sauerkraut dinners at the local fire hall. Used cars, clothes, tools, furniture for sale.

Recently I went around looking for community bulletin boards, in the course of trying to advertise a hootenanny at the local grange that I was organizing.

Where’d they all go? I wondered, as a traipsed from supermarket to supermarket with my stack of photocopied hootenanny posters, staring forlornly at empty spaces on walls where once home-made ads like prayer-flags fluttered freely in the air-conditioning. Sometimes it seemed like they’d got rid of them right before I got there. Like they saw me coming.

I actually made so bold as to ask a store manager why. “Corporate doesn’t like it,” he said.

Online, I discovered, it said Whole Foods has them. As with everything else, online lies. Whole Foods doesn’t have community bulletin boards. I asked the store manager why not and she said, “Corporate doesn’t like it.”

And so, squelched again, I idly bemoaned my plight to the cashier. She actually wrinkled her nose. I think she may actually have said “eeyoo.” As ever slow on the uptake, I gradually caught on. Though she hadn’t said it in so many words, I think that, to her, community bulletin boards represent a kind of person she doesn’t like. A person she is above. What used to be called a working class person when there was work.

So I told her I had an ulterior motive for wishing Whole Foods had a community bulletin board. I wanted to advertise a shindig I was throwing. So she tries to sell me on running ads on the local NPR station.

“I’m not trying to reach the kind of people who listen to NPR,” I say (a tad frustrated at once more not getting through on this particular theme). “I’m trying to reach the kind of people who read community bulletin boards.” That got me the old fish-eye.

Thus, I come to the speculative part of this investigation. What, I wondered, is the real reason they got rid of community bulletin boards?

It is entirely possible, I think, hard as it is to conceive, that supermarkets consider community bulletin boards competition.

The only real, substantive reason they could come up with, though, when I pressed them for a reason, was that it took too many man-hours to keep bulletin boards shipshape.

Yeah. Check. I bet it took all day to take down a few out-of-date posters.

More sinister reasons might be imagined.

Could it be that the powers that be are trying to stamp out the kind of person and the kind of behavior that community bulletin boards represent?

Could it be that community bulletin boards, from the Masters-of-the-Universe point of view, are too free. Too un-moderated. Too uncontrollable. Too off-the-grid.

The next thing you know, they’ll be posting ads for revolutions. With a little fringe of phone numbers at the bottom.

You’d think that good community bulletin boards would spell good community relations. Certainly their publicity suggests they would like us to know how community-oriented they are.

I mean, people spend half their lives perplexedly wandering those endless aisles. I certainly do. But no. If you’re looking for a surefire way to provoke a blank stare, broach the idea of “good community relations” with store managers. It’s like telling them Mars has many precipitate salts.

Addendum: Widening the ambit of my search, I finally did come across some community bulletin boards. Way out in the country. The farther out, the more bulletin boards.

I figure either A. nobody in management gives a hoot about the boondocks, or B. demographics have identified country-dwellers as “the kind of people” who read community bulletin boards.

Which is fine, I guess. Except I don’t live way out in the country, and I have a dance to publicize.

Is there a moral to the story? The best I can come up with is “You can’t get there from here.”

1. The Meaning of Success

THE MEANING OF SUCCESS

My nephew, Aaron Hood, died at 35 of epilepsy in the summer of 2017.
Many people, I think, would not have considered him a “success.” He mostly worked as a waiter or cook. He changed jobs frequently. He lived at home with his mother. He never married, though he had a devoted girlfriend.

As is true for so many of us, there was no spare money lying around for his funeral. So Aaron’s brother activated his trusty telephone and sent out the call.

The money poured in, much more than enough.
Yes, the money poured in; but drop by drop. There were no rich donors. Each donation was small. But the number of donors was big—mostly the many friends he had made over the years, regular, average working people from the small town he lived in. Several of them were demonstrably indigent. And still they gave twenty bucks.

Moreover, his wake was mobbed.

In a world full of crabby old curmudgeons slogging through their crummy lives, Aaron was a breath of spring. Aaron’s enthusiasm for just about everything in that world seemed limitless. I remember him running into me in a bar. “Wow! My uncle! Sitting here in a bar! With me!” It’s just a bar, I said. This did not deter him. He did the same thing running into an ex of mine somewhere. “Wow! My aunt! Sitting here in a bar! With me!” I remember showing him Seven Samurai when he was young. Instead of growing quickly bored with black-and-white and subtitles, as is to be expected of most contemporary children, he watched intensely, asking questions, shouting in glee at the exciting parts.

I never saw him when he didn’t seem happy to see whomever, or interested in whatever, crossed his path.

No wonder he had so many friends.

That is a success in my book. Being so beloved by so many people. (Somehow I doubt the donations for my funeral will be comparably pouring in. Will they for yours?)

Who cares about the crummy jobs we all have to do? Big-time lawyer, doctor, Indian chief, candlestick-maker, or lowly food service provider, as the case may be. What do they matter? Jobs are jobs.

Moreover, fate is no respecter of persons. Fortuna caeca est, as the Romans used to say, “Fortune is blind.”

What matters, I believe, is how you live. How you treat others. Whether you greet the world each day with a smile or a frown. How often and how well you lighten the load of your fellow travelers. How well you are loved.
And in this, Aaron Hood was a success unequivocal.