Did You Hear The One About....?

 I can remember looking out my bedroom window when I was very young and seeing our milkman, having finished making his early morning delivery to our front steps, he was busily rinsing our empty milk bottles on our front lawn. With our hose! What impertinence. What cheek. What a clever solution to what was essentially a recycling project. Those great thick bottles would be taken back to the dairy to be sanitized and filled up again. The idea that milk would come in cartons was something I only experienced through chocolate milk and this newfangled "skim" milk. 

What sticks with me now is the level of intimacy we allowed way back when. There really were such a thing as travelling salesmen. These were men, primarily, who made their living knocking on doors and ringing doorbells in hopes of gaining entrée into living rooms and kitchens across this great land ours in the hopes of selling encyclopedias, vacuum cleaners, laundry soap and any number of clever devices or implements for which your average housewife would simply not have the time to leave her home to go shopping. So pervasive was this profession that an entire school of humor was eventually constructed around them. These jokes have gone the way of the farmer's daughter, but they remind us that there was a time when, even though that opportunity to make your pitch didn't get past the front porch, there were still enough folks willing to open the door and invite them in that this vocation persisted. For decades. 

My mother would regularly entertain the Jewel Tea man in our kitchen. He would lug in his great basket full of all manner of products that would now constitute a run to Target. Like the milkman mentioned previously, there was not a worry or concern about what sort of danger we might all be courting by allowing strange men into our homes and access to our hoses. 

Every so often, I open the door to face a young man or woman who is eager to tell me about some fantastic opportunity that I must certainly take advantage of from my front porch because they cared enough to walk up our front steps. Not very often, however. Even the Girl Scouts seem to have gotten the message that soliciting is not the wave of the future, unless you can do it via a website. Even that route is now protected by spam filters, and if someone is lucky enough to slip our home phone's screening process, the conversation is more about stringing them along unnecessarily while I waste their time with silly questions and idle chatter. 

What I am suggesting here is that things have changed. And while I am grateful that I don't have to maintain relationships with itinerant salesmen, I feel that we may have lost some of the trust and innocence of a bygone age. Maybe I'll start inviting strangers into my yard to use my hose on occasion.