Fannie Flagg - Standing in the Rainbow

Just another displaced stranger trying to pretend that a get-together at the complex clubhouse was just like home only better.

Aunt Elner was making so many new friends her own age that she was loving Florida but Norma had problems with Macky. She came in after one of her flower-arranging classes and said, "Macky, I talked to my friend Ethel and she said that Arve went through the same thing and his doctor identified it as a male identity problem. And that what you need to do is to connect with your inner male."

"Oh good God, Norma, what did you tell her?"

"Nothing bad, I just said that you were depressed, having a hard time adjusting to being retired. It's not anything to be ashamed of, evidently a lot of men go through it. Anyhow, she talked it over with Arve and he went for help and she says it really helped him."

"Norma, Arve is an idiot. Do you really think that wearing gold chains and sticking a curly black wig on your head at seventy-five is adjusting? He's a joke."

"All right, so he may be a little silly but he's happy and isn't that the point, to be happy? Anyhow I'm not going to argue about Arve; the point is she gave me this brochure for you to look at." Macky took it and read where once a week, groups of men organized by Jon Avnet, Ph.D." gather to "reconnect with the warrior within, to drum, talk, weep, and tell their stories in a safe place."

He looked up at Norma and said nothing.

Macky wandered over to Ocean Park, sat on a concrete bench, and stared out at the blue water. The world he had known was gone. Not only was he living in an alien place, but while he had been busy all these years making a living, someone had changed all the rules. For all he knew, he might as well have gone to sleep and awakened on the moon.

When he'd grown up, everybody had more or less agreed to a certain way of living. A certain standard. You didn't lie, you didn't cheat or steal, you honored your parents, your word was your bond. You didn't try to weasel your way out of things. You married the girl. You paid your bills. You took care of your children. You didn't cuss around girls. You didn't hit women. You played by the rules and it was expected that you would be a good sport if you lost. You kept your house, yard, and yourself clean.

Norma said you have to just swing with it and try not to let it bother you so much. He wished he could but somehow it seemed this new world was easier for the women to accept and adjust to. What bothered him and other men his age and older was that the things they had been willing to die for were no longer appreciated. Everything he had believed in was now the butt of jokes made by a bunch of smarty-assed late-night TV so-called comedians making a salary you could support a small country with. All he heard was people saying how bad we were, how corrupt we had been, and how terrible white men were. He had not felt like a bad person. But just the fact that he was a white man of a certain age, a lot of people he did not know hated him. He had never knowingly been mean or unfair to another human being in his life. Now it seems he was the oppressor, responsible for every bad thing that had ever happened in the history of the world. War, slavery, racism, sexism he was the enemy and all he had tried to do was live a good and decent life. History was being rewritten by the minute. All of his childhood heroes were now being viewed as villains, their lives judged in hindsight by the current fad of political correctness. Hell, now they were even taking Huckleberry Finn out of libraries, for God's sake. It was all too confusing.

You never saw people anymore, everything was self-service, everybody behind glass windows. And you could not get a real person on the phone. Everywhere you called, a recorded message connected you to another recorded message and then hung up on you. And everybody was mad and screaming about something. He did not know which was worse, the radical right or the radical left. It seemed nobody was in the middle anymore. We used to be on the right track and then we took a wrong turn but he did not know where. Was it the dope or television?

Was it having too much that did it? He had tried to read what the experts thought but they did not know any more than he did. All he knew for sure was that after the '40s and '50s, when he had been raised, the world had flipped over like a giant pancake and everything was backward. When he was a kid everyone had wanted to be Tarzan; now they all want to be the natives. People were sticking rings in their nose seven pretty little girls were running around with green hair, their bodies pierced everywhere.

And nobody answered a direct question anymore with a simple yes or no.

Everything was answered with some kind of rhetoric. And he knew far more than he wanted to know about perfect strangers. Things people used to be ashamed to talk about now sold books and got them on television. Murderers were being asked for their autographs and turned into celebrities. Football, basketball, and baseball players could beat up their wives, take drugs, go to jail, and still stay on the team and make millions.

It didn't matter what kind of a person you were anymore. He remembered when a professional athlete was someone to look up to; now the sports page read more like a police blotter.

And never in a million years would he have dreamed that one day baseball players would be wearing earrings. Or that some girl would be singing on television in her brassiere. Life was all so different, with this one having two mommies and another one two daddies.

He did not know what to think anymore. The way it looked to him, the world was not getting better; it was getting worse. He sat there for about an hour and gazed out at the water, wondering where and when it was all going to end.

He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees and stared down at the sandy ground, as if looking for an answer. After a few minutes he noticed a tiny ant that walked underneath him, struggling to carry what looked like a large piece of potato chip. It was much too big for him to eat, but he was headed somewhere with it anyhow. He watched the ant as it kept going and banged into another concrete bench, went around it, crawling over rocks and other obstacles, determined to get back home with his treasure. It was much too big for him to carry but he did not seem to know it.

Macky sat there and watched the ant struggle along until it was out of sight and he smiled for the first time in weeks. "Who knows?" he thought. "If he keeps on going, the little son of a bitch might just make it."

The next day Norma marched in the door and said, "I have made a decision. Since you won't go to any of the groups, I have taken the bull by the horns. Come out to the car and help me bring it in."

When they got to the car there it was, in a box that looked like the hide of a black-and-white cow. Norma had bought him a computer.

"Norma, I don't know how to use that thing."

"Neither do I but we are going to learn. I've signed us up for lessons over at Comp World. It can't be hard; they say now that even first graders can do it. Besides, Linda said if we got one we could E-mail each other."

"Norma, I'll help you set it up but I'm not going to any classes over at Comp World. You go if you like."

Five months later, after much cussing, he let Norma show him how to get on the Internet. One day while she was gone, Macky was pleasantly surprised that after a few tries he was able to get into a chat room.

"Hey, any old guys out there remember the Hardy Boys?" Within two minutes Marvin from Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, answered.

"Hey, good buddy, affirmative. I just found three old copies The Tower Treasure, The Missing Chums, The Clue of the Broken Blade. Have two copies of Missing Chums would be happy to send on."