For Better Or Worse

By Kevin Boyle

I know the world’s going to hell in a handbasket — a phrase that never made sense to me. Why a handbasket? Why not a backpack or a wheelbarrow? It sounds like we’re going on a picnic to eternal damnation. But anyway…

The world is doomed and getting worse all the time. I got off Facebook because that place makes it seem like we just have 20 minutes to live. I’d rather stretch out the doom and rely on gossip and read Sean McVeigh.

As hard as I try to wallow in the gloomy forecast, I’m often reminded things can get better.

Look at where we were and look where we are now. In the good old days when there was actual snow in the winter and school was uphill both ways, we had to make tough decisions about hangers. They weren’t a dime a dozen.

We didn’t need hangers for our hand-me-downs, but they came in handy if you needed an antenna on the old TV set. Sometimes it was a toss-up — you could use the hanger for better reception or untwist and extend it long enough to use to fish out balls from sewer storm drains.

Choices like these marked our childhood. And there were physical challenges as well.

Anybody who grew up in the days when a stereo was fancy furniture cannot cross city owned grass — even a street median — without thinking it’s a dog poop mine field. We were all traumatized by what old people back then called dog dirt or doody.

You couldn’t jump in a pile of leaves without knowing there was a 50/50 chance you’d come up smelling like a dog’s deuce.

The signs said Curb Your Dog. I still don’t know what that meant.  Make sure your dog craps in the street — not on the sidewalk, I guess. Or did it mean aim for the curb? I don’t know.

The end of blocks seemed to be the popular dumping ground. God, what a mosaic. And here’s one of the physical challenges I mentioned a moment ago. You couldn’t get off a city bus without a broad jump or a tiptoe through the tulips left by somebody’s Mastiff. You had to be Carl Lewis or Fred Astaire.

I had the dog doody flashback when I jaywalked across Beach Channel Drive and stepped through the patch of grass on the median — a place where no dog has probably ever set paw. But that didn’t stop me from hop scotching across out of habit.

The pooper scooper law changed everything. Fines helped modify behavior and pretty soon you were seen as a borderline criminal if you didn’t scoop. Things got better.

I was thinking about how this law changed everything and how another enforcement attempt utterly failed.

I’m talking about jaywalking. I know Lazer Louie keeps us informed about travels to the Big City, so I apologize for the encroachment, but during a recent stroll on the east side of Manhattan, things felt weird. People were waiting for the Walk Sign and the lights to change before crossing the street.

The maniacs on scooters using bike lanes and weaving across lanes and sometimes down the wrong way on a street, left pedestrians no choice but to obey the law.

So maybe not everything is getting worse. At least we’re not stepping into a canine calling card on every street corner, and for once, people in Manhattan are actually following the jaywalking rules.

Oh, those maniacs?  Yeah, the world’s going to hell on a Suzuki.