Old So What

  When you live in a house with lots of people and pets, and you walk into a room that’s a total mess, you might ask the question: “What happened here?”   I was strolling through a cable channel video with no particular place to go. The subject was ghost or near-ghost towns, based on stories without happy endings. The town I zeroed in on was literally being swallowed up by its own vegetation. Sometimes a porch or a roof would stick out in protest. (You could look at a clump and think: Is there a “there” there under all that ugly, non-specific greenery?) Sometimes someone had seemed to sneak back into town to plant a few flowers or mow a lawn (showing that relatives of the original residents, or more than likely, other residents were still around), but you could see that this was a very sad place in a very sad situation, in the aftermath of some unhappy happenings.   Some place you don’t want to think about. Some place you don’t want to be.   A place you don’t e...