Winter solstice. A time to think back on summer, a summer 45 years ago.
I was working as a floating vacation replacement in an office in Port Chester, New York. One week I filled in for Jimmy, who did a daily mid-morning run to the central Post Office to pick up the mail. He showed me the route, and explained that I was to park somewhere and take a twenty or thirty minute break after getting the mail. He used that time to run personal errands and put down his daily bet with the local numbers runner and didn’t want me showing everyone that the mail run could be done in half the time he spent on it. (Actually they knew, but no-one was going to complain to the management and cause him trouble.)
One day the next week after I picked up the mail I parked the van on a tree-lined street, got out my book and sat reading across from an imposing two-story building with half a dozen wide steps leading up to a landing in front of a large front door with columns on each side. As I sat there two elderly men came out the door identically dressed in immaculate creamy white suits with matching Panama hats. I had never seen people actually dressed like that before, and as I stared at them they carefully looked up and down the street, which seemed strange since they were not even at the sidewalk yet. There was no traffic on the street and no pedestrians in sight. Then they both got down on their hands and knees and crawled sidewise down the steps to the sidewalk. They got up, brushed themselves off, adjusted their hats and walked slowly down the street on their mid-morning walk, looking incredibly elegant in their matching white suits.
I believe the building was a home for the elderly. It was twenty years before the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Today there would be two men in immaculate white suits and Panama hats walking slowly down a ramp, no stairs to climb, dignity intact.