Those of us who travel a little have favorite bags that we insist we take with us. They may be roomier or more attractive or more convenient or be part of a matching set we wouldn't do without.
I have a leather duffel bag that I simply love. It looks classy and has inside pockets that allow for extra storage. It has a handy strap that makes it easy to fling over one's shoulder. I think it's perfect.
But trouble arose the other day when I tried to open it. The zipper wouldn't go all the way across the top, as it usually does. It got stuck.
Being a guy, and having been in this situation before, I tried to force the zipper where it was supposed to go. Sometimes that really does work. The teeth on the zipper just aren't aligned quite well enough, and straightening them out and giving it a good yank solves the problem.
Most times. Not this one. You could see it, too. Faulty zippers hide nothing. It shall not pass.
It opened more than halfway, though, so I managed to stuff an appreciable amount of clothes into it. I wasn't flying, thankfully, so my trunk and back seat handled the rest.
When I returned home, though, the issue remained before me: Where do I get such things repaired? Or was it time to throw this, too, into the trash?
Of course I googled it. And found an old ally, one on whom I'd relied before, who'd fixed other bags I thought were lost. It's a you-break-we-fix kind of place with handy people who solve unsolvable problems. When I lived in the area, it was a go-to place for me some 30 years ago. Back then, it had advertised as strictly a handyman's paradise, located in a strip mall tucked off a major street. Now, it had moved, along with other businesses, to another strip mall slightly north. It was now primarily a shipping business, with its original name, listed in diminished lettering, a kind of yeah-we-still-do-that.
Not that the proprietor was particularly cordial back then. I learned he was from Uzbekistan. His accent was thick, his manner gruff: "What do you want?" was his hello. He always seemed to have a two-day beard.
But his skills were nonpareil. He could fix anything. It got so that his face softened when he saw me--not enough to grin, but without his normal, more combatant look: You again? I was thrilled to know that the business was still there. I have no idea exactly what the name--with three initials that represent something of an acronym, I would guess--stands for, but for me, it stood for a solution for my problem. The rest of it wasn't worth quibbling about.
The grizzly-faced one wasn't there, though. His son was. I remembered him, too; larger, friendlier, accent not nearly as thick, but born over there for sure.
He took one look at the bag, almost with a same-old, same-old demeanor. All I wanted to know was one, could he fix it; and two, when I could have it back. He didn't bother with that. "I'll be right back," he said, and disappeared behind a curtain.
In a moment, he came back with a pliers. "Just make sure you don't get the teeth on top like that," he said, in advising me how never to return with this issue. He moved maybe three of them back into place. Then he brought the zipper over. Fixed.
"What do you want for that?" I said, taking out some money, and I meant it. The 'job' had taken, maybe, a minute. For me, its value could last years.
"Nah, no problem," he said. I stared at him. Such a valuable act. He could have charged me twenty bucks, even more. I would have paid it in a heartbeat. This is America, after all.
I wonder what a native-born American, one who sounded pretty much like you or me, would have charged. Would he/she have been so nice?
Never to return? Not so. It had been at least 15 years since I'd been there. Would it be 15 more, I'd make a beeline. If he, and I, were still there.
I wonder if he'd filed for citizenship. Or, not. If the latter, he could, if the incoming thugs were cruel enough, be deported.
Criminal? Yeah, right. Drug dealer? Silly. See one, seen them all? Ridiculous. You never know, though, true? He could be hiding a cache' of drugs. But then, I might be using that classy bag for exactly that reason. Would anybody be searching it? Ever?
Business leaders are already nervous. Why send all the papers-less immigrants away? They fit a perfect role--doing jobs that white citizens won't, or ones they consider beneath them. Will the whites take them when they're vacant? We've already seen by the fallout from Covid: Don't count on it.
For a while, an insipid while, though, we will have to watch it unravel. This is the "mandate" that the incoming president thinks he's received. It isn't. What he really got told was in the response to his overwrought, overhyped scream that the country is getting overrun by gays and trans-people--which, of course, is absurd. People just don't want to hear about that. They don't want a government that prioritizes them.
They wouldn't have had one in any event. But he fooled lots of voters into thinking so, and the Democrats, in an amazing piece of inertia, refused to respond. Thus is the detritus of elections.
But now the cabal is saddled with deciding the scope of the simply overwhelming job it has promised it would do--never mind the damage to our economy and national vitality, which it wrongly believes will revitalize. Beyond the recession it will cause, it will be depressing, debilitating, dejecting. It will deny our very identity.
A year from now, I want he who fixed my bag to be there. I want him to try to fix something else I'm sure I'll wreck. He's the expert, every bit as much as Elon Musk believes himself to be an expert on electric cars, spaceships, and damn near everything else.
But this expert matters. He helps people. Not Musk, who helps only himself. Like someone else we know.
The Uzbekian has nothing to prove, of course. All I want to know is if the purge has or hasn't found him. Word is that it will start soon with a raid on Chicago (NYT). That will tell a few things, either way, about how stupid, how tragic, all this is.
God bless the America I used to know. It's leaving for a while. Dreadfully, something else will replace it. It begins Monday at 11 a.m. Central Time. It'll be up to someone else to fix that massive damage, to the country, to its image, to its posterity. It won't be so simple as twisting a pliers.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
