It’s Been A Card Day’s Night

“Cash or card?” smiled the cheerful middle-aged women at the pay station in my local Supervalu, redundantly, as I aimed my golden bank card chip at the machine that goes ‘ping’ — shades of the hospital scene in Month Python’s The Meaning Of Life.

I just had my bank card, so no Loyalty Card to tag on. Disloyal, I guess.

“Do you know what, I actually can’t remember the last time I had cash on me!” I tell her.

“I know what you mean,” she said, “although just this morning I had a run of people with €50 notes, and who needed change. But, you’re right, less and less people carry cash now …”

“I blame the pubs, once they started taking cards for our pints and gin and tonics, that was the end of cash, for me anyway,” I offered, and she laughed.

And it’s kind of true …the main reason I used to have a tenner or a twenty in my wallet was for the very odd thing that called for cash, but mainly to give the kids a few quid liquid as regularly required — but sure now I’m Revoluting them that.

Must be a nightmare for the poor characters with their battered Starbucks cups touching people for a few bob … ’Sorry, I don’t have any cash on me’. And it’s often true now.

Good or bad, I don’t know, but all this automatic for the people … tag here, ‘ping’ there or the panic scroll for that phone app the other, it really has changed things. Changed us …

I’d be wondering what’s coming next … probably soon be cash machines that work off your fingerprints, or your eyeball … or, before you know it, by thought transference.

‘Beam me out a few hundred there, dad’. Or they will be beaming it to me in my old folks home, run by AI — with more personality than some. 

— At least that  swanky new coffee robot does an excellently personalised macchiato, and the adjustable accent is a hoot, altogether: ‘Would ya like that with synthetic sweetener or without’ in a Cork city twang would have me weakly tapping my hover zimmer frame and wheezing gleefully into my self-regulating nebuliser … not bad for 126 —

The woman who served me at the till in Supervalu was standing bravely on her own, just her, across from the row of shiny self-service tills — the ‘ping’ chorus — ready for all the busy people pinging in and out.

The contrary in me leads me always to a cash desk with a person on it, maybe for the contact, even if my pay card, or app wants to be contactless. Just as the old banks are shutting down offices, and people, in villages, towns and cities everywhere.

Did I mention my wallet there? Sure I haven’t been carrying that either, not since I slid my plastic lifelines into the handy slots on my phone cover. And the same phone has all my loyalty cards, shopping and banking apps and the rest.

I just didn’t have it this morning with me because it was charging at home while I nipped out for the milk I had just pinged — I mean paid — for.

Now that was the beginning and end of my interaction with this friendly woman at a pay desk in a big supermarket, but it was nice. Just like that little exchange of hellos at a toll kiosk desk feels better than another Visa interface ‘ping’ with an eFlow slot machine.

But sure that’s the way that the world goes round, as the late, great John Prine sang. Now there’s a dude who knew the value of human contact.

And what a loss he was, early in the pandemic, fairly shook after a couple of close encounters with cancer, but seemingly indomitable and not so long after releasing his most successful album in years, The Tree Of Forgiveness.

I love his serious stuff, like Sam Stone — voted the eighth saddest song of all time in a Rolling Stone readers’ poll, did you know? — and Hello In There (“Ya’ know that old trees just grow stronger/ And old rivers grow wilder ev’ry day /Old people just grow lonesome /Waiting for someone to say, ‘Hello in there, hello”).

But for me, one of the greatest things about John Prine was he was never afraid to be daffy or wonderfully silly, with lines like ‘That easter egg ain’t got a leg to stand on’ (Summer’s End), or, from Jesus, The Missing Years:

“Wine was flowing so were beers.

So Jesus found his missing years

He went to a dance and said, ‘This don’t move me’

So he hiked up his pants and he went to a movie”

But the real clincher for me is that matchless John Prine thing, where he moves from dotty to sharp to gut-wrenching in the same couplet, as only the greatest writers can carry off, like that bit in Souvenirs :

“Broken hearts and dirty windows 

Make life difficult to see 

That’s why last night and this mornin’ 

Always look the same to me”.

 A first cousin of Paul Simon’s wonderful lines in Graceland:

 “Losing love is like a window in your heart

Everybody sees you’re blown apart

Everybody sees the wind blow”

But why am I thinking of John Prine just now? As many will know, he was a US mailman for four years or so before he got his record deal break. And as many will also know, if you check out his gigs or interviews online, he was the most charming individual, benign, funny and the most wonderful raconteur.

And it was real. A work colleague — back when I was still in the office — stepped out for a break one evening, and who did he run into only John Prine. A reserved individual, this colleague, he was a Prine fan, and went for it, going up to the great man to say hello and thanks. As our starry-eyed colleague told us after coming back, Prine was just as gracious and charming as you would expect.

And I imagine myself, or the lucky people on his mail route who would encounter him, and the impression he would make. The kind of meeting that would put a smile in your step as you left him, like that nice woman in Supervalu. 

There’s a great story about comedian Bill Murray, much given, especially when younger, to dark moods and the glums. Himself and Prine were contemporaries on the Chicago entertainment scene, Prine in a little songwriters place, and Murray cutting his comedic chops across the way in a comedy venue.

One night, after a bad gig, and doubting everything … himself, his talent, this comedic thing … everything … Murray set off walking. He walked for miles. 

Stayed away from comedy for months, until, as he put it, he had lived a little and actually had something to talk about on stage.

But what he actually credits as the beginning of the way back to comedy for him, and ultimately on to the success he has had, was a Prine song that embedded itself in his head.

 It was that wonderfully goofy country-swing number “Linda Goes to Mars,” in which a clueless husband assumes his wife’s vacant expression is proof of interplanetary travel rather than maybe actually finding him boring.

“I just found out yesterday that Linda goes to Mars

Every time I sit and look at pictures of used cars

She’ll turn on her radio and sit down in her chair

And look at me across the room as if I wasn’t there

(Chorus)

Oh, my stars, my Linda’s gone to Mars

Well, I wish she wouldn’t leave me here alone

Oh, my stars, my Linda’s gone to Mars

Well, I wonder if she’d bring me something home.”

According to Murray, it was not that he found it hilarious, but the zany optimism and sly profundity contained within Prine’s deceptively simple verse was a signal from the universe that the dark clouds that had been hanging over him would disperse.

It was yet another ‘Hello In There, Hello’ moment of contact. 

Sure it can be anything, can’t it? Doesn’t have to be a song, or a movie or anything big. Sometimes a chirpy few words with the woman at the pay station in Supervalu can do the trick.

Oh my stars, they are everywhere.