.
.
DO YOU REMEMBER the Malvina Reynolds song, Little Boxes? And how Pete Seeger sang it in the early 1960s? I sang right along, grieving to see pastures, cornfields and shady groves being swallowed up by unimaginative housing developments. I cringed to drive past treeless rows of little houses. I agreed that, “they’re all made out of ticky-tacky.”
After I met folks who lived in little boxes, the song lost appeal. Soon many ticky-tacky houses started falling apart; some became suburban slums. The boxed in people didn’t all go to the university or drink their martinis dry. Despite my generations’ outward conformity, suburbanites and housing development folks weren’t all the same. Those ill-built little houses were home for folks with joys and sorrows, failures and successes. Dishes got dirty, children practiced violins and guitars, uncles told bad jokes, good smells filled their kitchens and struggling parents were filled with angst over how to buy groceries or pay the mortgage. Babies were born and grandparents died inside their outwardly similar little boxes.
For some illogical and unexamined reason, these computer-composed Variations remind me of Little Boxes. Perhaps it’s in their similar box like linearity and their exuberant differences.
