Maybe the world has really changed

Has the world changed? Where have all the thoughtful people gone? Is morality a dirty word? 

My husband gleefully said “I told you so.” His harping back to his small town roots where they used to leave the keys in the car because they knew no one would take it, even for a joyride, has been getting on my nerves for the last 53 years. 

I hate people who live in the past. I want to think about today, about tomorrow. I want to live in the moment. The incidents of last few days have begun to change my mind. 

We spent the weekend at John Pennekamp State Park. On the way down, we stopped to try to fix the hitch that was carrying our motor scooter. The road between Florida City and Key Largo consists of two lanes, one in each direction, except for an occasional passing zone. It was built in the Everglades on the swamp and not very stable, with deep dips. 

I guess we should have done better when we engineered the hitch because we watched the bike fly up about three feet and come down, luckily intact and without tearing the mirror from its mooring. So there we were, fixing the connections in the 90 plus degree sunshine on the side of the road—no one, not a soul stopped to offer assistance.

We made it to Pennekamp and  got the thing back to Florida City on its own wheels—our son came down to visit and rode it back. More engineering and welding are on the agenda for this week before we return to Pennekamp. Either that or I’ll have to, heaven forbid, drive a car down there.  A 40 foot bus is a bit cumbersome when it’s your only mode of transportation in the Keys.

We returned to Florida City sans motor scooter, parked the bus, and found that we had new neighbors. Our half hour ritual of plugging and attaching and connecting yielded no satellite service. I plugged and unplugged and couldn’t zero in on this week’s issue (Last time it was a bad connection, but this error message was different.) 

This morning I realized that someone had run into the tripod and bent the leg, knocking the dish out of position. Nice new neighbors. I’d better stay away from them. You can’t hit the thing so hard that you bend it without knowing it. So no TV until Tuesday afternoon when the Dish repair person can come to fix it.

This morning was for errands. I parked in a wide spot away from everyone. When I came back to my car, my white bumper had been scraped beyond repair by a black something. And that was the bumper that was supposed to have been painted after the last Good Samaritan scraped it. Does it pay? Maybe we should all have cars that are scraped and banged and dented and use them for shopping, while we keep the pristine ones parked for driving around and showing off.

My last stop was Walmart. I was too lazy to calculate the number of items in my basket, so I chose a line with someone with a large order, followed by a young man who had only a can of soda. I was about to tell him that if he wasn’t already in front of me, I would let him go ahead, when his wife appeared with her basket filled to the top.

Years ago, when I let someone ahead of me in Walmart, the very senior citizen behind me grumbled so loudly that I asked him “What are you in such a hurry to do, die?”