I refer you to Pa Meloney’s perfect, funny video, “EXECUTIVE DAY LABOR” …

In remembrance of the countless hundreds of men who waited on the town square every morning, years ago—meaning, before gentrification, before the truly wealthy laid a jet landing strip and killed off everything that wasn’t pretentious—from whose pleading-eyes numbers my then-husband would pick the labor we needed; work on the ranch was never-ending.

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The amazing thing, to me, is … this could be any of a thousand places in Dry Creek Valley. (Do I miss it? No. Does that landscape still resonate in my skull? Oh yeah.)But this* beautiful, haunting work is by Dean Allen— that patron saint of weimaraners—and Dean lives in Bagnols-sur-Cèze, France.

*Not loading for you? By all means, go here.

Doug posts: “I got up this morning to discover that it had rained during the night. Real rain, not just an exaggerated fog. I’m not sure I remember it ever raining in July in the Bay Area, so this is something pretty special. Nice for my garden too, and the cats had gotten really dusty so this has cleaned them right up.”

Au contraire, mon ami. If you had the weather engraved into your soul such as only an unhappy woman stuck in the boonies will have, forever after, you’d know it always rains once in July. I kid Doug, he works here, taking care of such house and grounds as there are. We both live in Berkeley … but the country town of which I write isn’t far away, maybe sixty miles …

In time, however, and in the lumpy bag of space that time drags along behind, rough edges becoming smooth, harsh lines gently blurring …Oh, dear, we are slipping into novel time … where it is long ago but not so very far away after all …

(from The Last Time Anyone Was Happy)

By July, the buildings and roofs and fields and even hearts and hopes had so thoroughly shrunken and dried in the heat— as if we were all some ghostly extension of the prune industry, only it was the sun and the air which dried us, daily, at high temperature, never mind that it felt as hot as the prune driers when they ran—that any thought of rain, the soaking, flooding winter rainstorms, the river cresting at 41 feet, had long since been driven from the feeble collective unconscious of Venada.

Until the July thunderstorm. There always was one, and it always came as a surprise, people saying We don’t have thunderstorms! which we mostly did not, and It doesn’t rain in summer, which it always did, at least once. And there was so much work, in those days, to farm life, to summer. Keeping prune orchards watered and your workers from disappearing after their first paycheck. Dragging out rusty prune harvest equipment with the prayer that it last another year.

In town, the businesses around the plaza were quiet, which made Mama’s tour the more delightful,when their ceilings began to leak. And leak they would. The Bank of America building with its columns in front, its certain undeniable grandeur, set out as homely a collection of buckets and pans as anyone, the redwood planking of their high, vaulted ceiling especially prone to shrinkage in the heat. Plink, plonk. She watched for a while in fascination. We had to make a thorough tour of the plaza, that her inspection might be complete. Not that I blame her. Attractions, then, were simpler, both more enjoyable and hellishly sparse. Boredom so integral to country life that people made no bones about the least excitement. I know Mama’s pleasure in these things reached, touched levels that may no longer exist, in the modern heart.

Mama knew we were good for at minimum one colossal thunderstorm per summer; her deepest pleasure came in watching the spectacle from the safety of her high old bed, where I would climb up beside her—after having unplugged, as per ordered, every cord from every socket, house and barn, her excuse for sending a child nothing more than that handy enfeeblement that appeared on demand and was otherwise forgot.

The Electric—her name for the beast that lived within our walls, I had brought home a chart in third grade that explained it, which she admired, tacked up and ignored—taken care of, we settled in the darkness, surveying from our perch if not the entire universe, then certainly all relevant parts. I hardly knew what fear was, in those days; it disappeared in the company of that old woman. Who not old, to me, not at all. Had no age. For all I knew, that’s what a mother was, and so it is that I remain linked to Mama’s reactions and Mama’s beliefs. Her amusement when everyone else forgot: it always rains once, in summer.

Margaret Cho “I don’t know where sorrow is anymore . . .”

Such a lovely, haunting line, makes a person want to draw out the novel behind those words. Oh, yeah, that’s what it’s like, you hear a title—in the world, in your head—and if you can catch the end of that string—not easy—and have learned the patient art of holding—pulling—it’s rather like giving birth, in that you are an essential part of the process but not exactly in control. It’s a whole lot like a birth. I had to deliver a baby alpaca once when her exceptionally dimwitted mother kept spinning around to see what in god’s name was happening to her behind, the feeb. Fortunately she was a smallish animal—alpaca are not as large as llamas, nor do they spit as much. In fact, they reminded me, in style and personality, of nothing so much as cats.

So I had to brace her and work with the incredible power of the contraction. She certainly needed help—but you can only help in rhythm to the contractions. Which are expulsions. A series of expulsions, and she’s whirling around, and somehow I got the baby out and the cord cut. But I’ll tell you, if you’ve never been on the other end of a birth, you haven’t touched the Power. And when you do, you will know forever that you have touched something bigger than words can tell. Are supposed to tell. The really fine things remain nameless.

We tied the cord with a piece of string. In two places, and cut it between. I seemed to be the only person involved who wasn’t afraid. Afraid? Hell, been through it twice myself. I held still.

Now I could have this all wrong—though offhand, I don’t recall that ever happening—but it sure looks like normal people will never again be able to afford a second home, a cabin in the woods, a pile of dirt, at Tahoe. The Rich have descended, that swarm of wealthy locusts, and the price for even a pile of dirt, well, dream on. The thing about being one of the Not-Rich is, you cannot imagine how far money goes, its vastness all out of proportion to human life. Which Karl Marx said, but no, you wouldn’t listen. And now you can drive around the lake, but don’t touch. None of it will ever be yours. Maybe a motel room in Manteca. Those’ll be the family memories.

Make no mistake, when The Rich buy up the land and homes where ordinary people used to live and play, they buy up great chunks of your experience. Your past and your potential future. They make your life smaller, more guarded, more fretful. And you pay taxes so they can! Is this a great country or what!

I think we all know capitalism sucks, in theory. But did you ever imagine that its truth would arrive on your doorstep, come into your house, sit down and change the channel this way?

Anyone, any single being among the Not-Rich who votes Republican ought to have his or her head extensively and professionally examined. It’s unfortunate that the political parties are divided quite so sharply, but there you are. You could drive up to Tahoe and directly hand the money to a Rich Person. Same thing, though I think they’d prefer the indirect route.

The valley I lived in for twenty years, in a county north of San Francisco, used to be so much further away. Folks there were safe to be as backwards and out of step as they liked. Which was, believe me, a much easier life. Chasing after style is a neverending source of exhaustion and bad mood. All in all, the Rich are a testy lot, which is why they put many pictures in the paper looking jolly.

In time, as life and driving speeded up, even country people wanted, as people will, more. And the Eighties gave it to them. If you went into the Eighties with a little money, any fool could come out with a whole huge lot. There were tax loopholes you could drive a Mercedes through. Fleets of Mercedes Benz. And then some wise-ass farmer tore out his prune orchard—okay, maybe there wasn’t a driving demand for prunes—and planted the first fateful vineyard.

Now there is a jet airport in that valley—for private jets—and I don’t know where all the families went who had farmed that land for generations. I don’t want to know—I left. The town square is four sides of boutique—christ, the town is boutique.

You have to buy stylish thing things.

You have to keep on buying them.

Those are the two main rules.

Though there are an awful lot of rules to being Rich, which is what makes it such a tiring life. But this one is central to the whole endeavor: We shall never think or speak of the family we displaced.

And really, why should they.

The sense of entitlement that comes with money … is a wonderment. Money begets the sense of entitlement to more money, pretty soon those with less begin to look like so many chickens, there for the plucking, the chickens of course come to think of themselves as a bunch of dumb clucks—I mean, look, if you can buy and sell me, I must be worth shit. As Marx so famously said.

Viva la revolucion? Not gonna happen. Better the dwindling middle class get down on its knees and pray the economy keeps trickling on down.