Do You Have A Dollar....?

Many of us have that discount store just a couple of neighborhoods our of our way, that maintains those particular household products we need at just the right price.  I made the periodic pilgrimage over to mine a few days ago.  About twenty minutes away on the train, but worth it every time.  Even in winter slush.

It’s a couple of zip codes south of my own.  I used to live nearer to that province, but since that time it became a little more barren and dangerous.  Even the well-populated urban area I veered into where the store lives is generally more crime-heavy, the socio-economic status is lower, and since I’m not a socio-economist, I’m not going to define anything with the term “ghetto”, since I don’t scientifically know what qualifies as that.  I’d imagine the real-estate brokers representing the area are doing just fine.

But as I dashed into the store, down the aisle, a young man with a charming little bundled-up girl of about six or seven suddenly turned to me, while his daughter studied some coloring book on the shelf, and asked me very politely if I had a dollar to help him and his daughter.  Somewhat unready for this confrontation, I just as politely shrugged and walked away.   But within a moment, I resolved to respond.  I’d furtively whip out a buck and find him before I left.  I did just that, quietly, and said to the fellow….here…if this helps.   He took it graciously, and said back ‘’I appreciate you”.  I nodded silently, and not to be maudlin, I did not respond my thought: “I admire you”.

The display I witnessed was bravery.   Not on the Ron Howard-drama Hollywood trailer level, with the swells of John Williams orchestration and me played by a middle-aged Tom Hanks.  Rather a more silent, grim, black-&-white Frederick Wiseman documentary kind of scene, a very real and undirected depiction.  

Before I cite the solicitor in the story a Grand American Hero (or his endowing one-dollar benefactor, for that matter..), I’ll disclaim the above account with the lack of knowledge I had about that somewhat haggard looking young man with the innocent little girl.  For all I know, the guy could be on the lam from the Feds, crossing state lines with the daughter he kidnapped from the custody of his ex-girlfriend.  The possibilities are endless.  Especially if you watch online documentaries and Netflix crime dramas, which I don’t.  But at the same time, this obviously destitute fellow was not afraid to make his plea within the confines of a busy store, where any creeped-out patron might react by calling security and having this guy hauled off and interrogated by Child Protective Services.  I didn’t.  I respected his plight and responded like a person. Doing so within store confines appeared safe enough.  After the fact, my whole day had me wondering, just what could that one-hundred cents have done for him…? Even in that store you couldn’t get anything for less than a few bucks. Anywhere else the dollar is practically worth less than a bottle cap.  The man must know how to make every single cent work.  I thought I was pretty good with that, but this guy must be one of the experts.

He’d have to be, with a small daughter in tow.  And the fact is, you don’t have to read too many papers today to recognize that the very sort of encounter I faced that morning is actually one talking place in food and discount stores all across America.  You won’t encounter it in the Food Emporium on 86^th off Lexington.  But you very likely might in a Dollar General upstate or anywhere outside the “One Percent” galaxy.  That galaxy is getting smaller, even if some of us less than eligible are relegated to living just a little too close to it.

There are more personal accounts in human interest stories, of moms of all ages shopping with their children, as the kids mull over some cereals in the aisle and the mom quietly approaches the kindest looking stranger for a few dollars help. These are single-mom families with homes and a car, but barely any money to shop, barely any medical coverage or care, and a recurring dice roll over scrounging up the monthly rent or car payment.

If social media and all its sharing force is any kind of indication or adhesive element in this isolated culture of ours, is it possible that a new paradigm in acceptable human interaction could be establishing..?  The Act of Giving.

Of course, many will still define it unpleasantly as the Crime Of Soliciting.  As I see it, it’s a very delicate act, to be cultivated as such.  It’s contingent upon the when and where.  Any sales expert will tell you that.  In an environment like the NYC subway, generally you don’t stand a chance as any kind of a panhandler.  The street, same thing.  Outdoors is just too menacing an environment for that, especially at night. Within the confines of a civilized environment, like a general store or supermarket, it’s a different story. The approach of a young, tired-looking woman nearing tears, with a wagon surrounded by four little ones a yard away bears an entirely different framework, one more sympathetic.  And often one that will yield some wallet or purse help from the solicited.  It doesn’t resolve or cure that mom’s life or her plight.  But it gets her and her children far enough through that day to see the next one.  They’d certainly live anyway. But a direct contribution from Patrons Like You, as the perpetually solicitous PBS would put it, helps that mom and her children live just a little better.  If their day can foreseeably draw to a close just a little bit more as predictably as yours, then you’ve made a difference.

And more people are doing just that.  More bravery, more sympathy.  The dirge of panhandling by some designs is soon to be replaced by the trend of Applied Giving.  Not to some charity can or jar at the counter, but to the direct solicitor, who makes his or her case effectively, to the patron of hoped sympathy, and broadness of mind.  It was the late author Barbara Ehrenreich in her immortal diatribe Nickel and Dimed, who, at story’s end, made the bold suggestion that to move our society into one that turns toward, and not away from one another, is liable to make our world a better place to live in. In fact, it just might be this society’s best shot at remaining one.

 

Noah F.   

 

How Dare You Call Those Prophets 'Beasts'.......

 

1986 was a banner year for a lot of nineteen-year olds.  Not this one. I spent much of it alienated, inside and out.  Probably many shared that experience as well.  I had no concept of “going out with friends and enjoying myself”.  I had no actual friends to go out and do that with.  That’s because I cultivated none.

My ability to even appreciate and enjoy music was eroding as well.  It was difficult. My enjoyment and indulgence in wood-crated used record stores had faded away, mainly because in the Midwood neighborhood to which my mother and I had just migrated from Queens, I’d no sense of the landscape, or knowledge of what was where.  You certainly couldn’t “Google” something unknown back then, and phone books made for an arcane hunt.

Somehow, life became a pronounced, uphill struggle.  And yet nothing about mine seemed to support such frame.  My mother was out of work, on disability payment, as she’d been for probably a decade or more.  I was attending classes at nearby Brooklyn College, but had yet to obtain any part-time work in the neighborhood.  In one’s teen years, the inclination toward part-time employment isn’t always just a matter of scraping up a few bucks, but it’s also in many ways a move toward social engagement, a way of getting to know your new town, make new friends, connect with your peers.  I was a little too disinterested and encumbered for that.  Why and with what I did not know.  That was my problem.

There was an overwhelming fear between my mother and I. You’d have to be Harold Pinter or Eugene O’Neill to understand probably, but that’s what was asphyxiating us.  For one, we could not afford to live in our new flat.  There was some money saved, but a personal medical emergency drained it.  Now we were in many ways stranded.  My mom at age fifty-five had intentions of finally getting up off her duff and back to work in the secretarial pools that she long tolerated and despised.  But a fearful depression kept her down.  We were in much more trouble than even I cared to acknowledge.  It was good preparation for life, whether I knew it or not.

It taught me one very basic postulate.  If you’re not worrying and miserable, you’re doing it wrong.  If you are, you can’t possibly be doing it wrong. This was that all-purpose steel compass that never lies.  I focused on doing as right as I could.  It wasn’t that hard.  I had plenty of practice.

In the middle of everything, I’d noticed parenthetically that music had changed its design.  The melodic sound of what was once known as Rock had given way to the pop-embraced “Rap”, and now the message adopted by that genre was not altogether a friendly one.

Violent uprisings, ones not known to nightly newscasts for more than twenty years in the metropolitan area, were starting to sprout once more. Racial attacks, violence upon authority, distrust and fear of authority were all in the headlines.  Young people weren’t getting busted for holding pot and having long hair anymore.  They were being hauled in for accidently killing each other with rough sex outside preppy bars, white boys with shaved heads chasing down and fatally assaulting young men of color, and in many cases attacking and using firearms against law enforcers.  It was not a peace movement.  Our cities lived in a pronounced age of war, one to rival and perhaps outviolent earlier times of uprisings abroad.

And the popular sound was no deterrent to this.  While some rap artists were in fact composing sonnets of a desperate cry for inner and outer peace, they were drowned out by the more top-gold-selling sounds of hate and destruction.  Anger sells, no two ways about it.  But amidst this dangerous tirade was this riotous little number by these frustrated young fellows about simply wanting to have a good time in a world where grownups won’t let them:

You gotta fight….for your right……to paaaar-taay..!!

For one thing, I never knew “party” was a verb.  I thought it was a gathering with streamers, paper hats and cake.

Turns out, no.  It means “to celebrate….indulge in enjoyment, have a good time, free of despair or worry”.  Is one beyond early childhood capable of such a thing…?  Not since I was nine did I maintain that capacity. 

A good time for me was not the sort of thing shared with more than one human at a time.  A friend in my teen years, an entertaining comic sort whose company I relied upon largely for respite back then would show me a good time, no matter where or when.  My mom and I could almost always enjoy a good late night movie or sitcom together and have some laughs.  But hanging out with friends was alien to me.  How did one “hang out”..?

It would be several years of fear and economic struggle, and perhaps some inner and outer destitution before I’d see some semblance of stable independence in my mid-twenties. I lived and functioned in many ways alone, and was quite silently content.  I lived without the choke of family drama and inter-relationship emotional turbulence, for the most part, at least in my most intimate life, and it was just the Canyon Ranch retreat I needed.   I embraced music and the Arts once more, perhaps now for the first time.   I learned how to stand and walk erect.  It was a rehabilitation that would ultimately, after too many years, see some corrosion and healing, but strength nonetheless.  Two decades of unmindful escape would lead me to awareness, an appreciative relationship for the first time, and something I never thought possible, matrimony.

It was really all part of a life-restructuring design that would require me more than a decade to embrace, comprehend and begin to fully acquiesce to.  The blessing is a daily one, and I’ve no capability to repay such debt.  That, in itself is part of the middle-age struggle.

Then, there’s the other part.  The terrestrial part.  Financial insecurity, the fear of future, the unknown.  All the things us Gen-Xers loved to get existential and gloomy about in 1994 are now the white elephants we cleaned out of our closets at age forty-five for the scary stuff we never even learned how to worry about for real at age fifty-seven.  You would think all that indulged misery back then would have fortified us for this.  But in fact it didn’t.  It was, in fact, our ‘party’. 

Misery was indeed the layer cake.  Whether shared amongst friends or alone in one’s room, it was delectable.  That and a headset full of vintage Neil Young and Ani DeFranco, and you’ve got yourself a late-night good time.  Nearly every night.   Thirty years later, I don’t know what a “good time” is.

Or am I in fact eligible for one..?  Maybe it’s not necessary to qualify.  No one ever defined these things.  Friends tell me it’s now more than ever, in this fearful day and age, to be as grateful and endearing of every peaceful and artful interval you can encounter.  It’s those roses you have to stop and smell on your way to a long day at work, instead of waiting until your day off, when you’re too idle, exhausted and guilt-ridden over your failures to mindfully get out and do so.

Only now, despite life’s expressway of unknown threats and demons, of all the challenges of the collective human race that loom ahead, in contrast to the movie trailer fantasies that entertained our dark-themed twenty-somethinghoods, am I finding liberty in challenging my insecurities just enough daily, to find those spare moments to indulge critically in a level of artful peace, through music, literature, a gym workout, or a quiet walk and momentary conversation with a forest squirrel, a fellow adult faced with his own daily struggles.  No one tells him how important it is to find peace every day.  But somehow, in a way us humans can’t, this fellow knows and practices it every day.

But for us human mammals, the inspirational message is the one put forth by those once-violent visionaries of a prior century.  As a roamed into my nearby gym for my daily rituals, I arrived during “Eighties Hour”, and blaring above were those familiar, once-threatening Beastie Boys intoning the need to fight…for your right….to paaar-taay…! 

And forty years later…?  To someone who never needed to pick up that sword..?  It’s no longer an option.  It’s a fight to be won.  Every day.  Praise for those who can win.

 

Noah F.

Get Away From Me With Your Anonymity...

 

A friend of mine is in “recovery”.

Pardon me, strike that.  I mean Recovery.  Disregard the dubious air quotes.

She’s in recovery for the volatile life she’d lived in her childhood and adolescence, contending with two addicted parents, one alcoholic, the other obese and dangerously food-addicted.  It all went down and ended about thirty years ago, and she’s made it along just fine ever since, but in the past decade, she’s made it to her long-needed path of Recovery.

It’s great to in fact live within an enlightened culture that will define this process as such.  I can actually recall a time when there was no such thing as Recovery for the emotional odyssey bore by people young and old, having to live with substance addicts, rage addicts and general $%*s, and the ensuing life process was known as “living with the s--- life dealt you”.  But of course, that was a very different time.  America was deep in recession, there were no smoke-free zones, and Real People was a smash-hit NBC prime-time hour.

Even back then, there did historically exist what they called “Family Groups”, where those painfully affected and without recourse would turn in the effort to find solace and reasoning, when it came to dealing with irrational and mad behavior in the confines of one’s home.  But in those days, such fellowship meetings were rare and hard to find, and attendance bore a stigma too great.

Say what you will about our emotionally frail society, but advancement has prevailed in the process.  The Twelve-Step Meeting has caught on like a cherished, time-honored board game that almost anyone can play.  And if it’s not thoroughly in line with the design of the game, the players can always set a few modifications as needed.  Game on.

Recovery, as it would come to be known in these United States began early in the twentieth century, at least officially as history has it.  We’ve all heard, read and seen on TV the depiction of the immortal Bill Wilson and his founding partner Dr. Bob Smith, in the historic creation of Alcoholics Anonymous, to find some positive and more effective resource for the incurable drunk than simply incarceration and eternal lockup in some insane asylum until death, for the convenience of the neighborhood. Lo and behold, it worked.

It worked because the drunk finally had some possible route to functional and legal existence once more, freedom in almost every sense of the word against their addiction.  But only if they remained in attendance, and Lived By The Program.

That’s the Twelve Steps.  Admitting that the wrong of your life begins with you, and how you have to work on yourself before you can re-build your life.  An alcoholic moving to the Coast to get away from all the damage New York has done to her life will only find her consistently drunk with no subways to throw up and pass out in.

In other words, it works for those in immediate, desperate need, and those who try it and indignantly don’t think so will very well reach their proper  relationship with it in time, if their fate lets them.

There’s an old joke about an AA convention of several hundred men checking into a grand hotel lobby.  A spectator asks the desk clerk, “Hey do you think that program really works…?”.  The clerk’s honest response: “Man, I hope so..!:

And in fact, those sorts of conventions and advancements wouldn’t be possible in the realm of group addiction recovery if it didn’t.  But it’s all about the devout adherence of the participant, whose life hangs in the balance. 

Not long after the AA movement took off though, a neighboring fellowship saw formation, when meeting founder Bill W was forming get-togethers in living rooms for alcoholic men, and all the wives were relegated to the kitchen with Bill’s wife Lois.  There was nothing to do but talk about what ended them up together in that kitchen, and Al-Anon was born.

Some fifty or sixty years later, an umbrella organization known as Intergroup would be established, with the responsibility of commissioning regulation group recovery meetings across the U.S., with main offices in central areas.  With all the pamphlets, books, public-service TV and radio ads, Sunday morning television dramatizations and the like, the road was paved for a New World of Recovery.  Those bearing significant aspects of harsh affliction in their lives due to close encounters or perhaps a twenty-four hour-per-day life with and alcoholic or drug addict would ultimately have meeting groups of their own, with matching individuals who can share their story and strength, and hence bring vision and strength to those convinced their lives have no choice but to end.  Advancements like the more complex Narcotics Anonymous and Narc-Anon would come out of this movement.  Then, the discovery and founding of other fellowships like Overeaters Anonymous, Overspenders Anonymous, Underearners Anonymous, and by now no doubt there are fellowships for the struggle with internet and social media addiction.  Some of them are even conducted online.  Advancement is everywhere.

That goes for the contenders of life with these addicts as well.  In the last fifty years, we’ve seen no less than a cottage industry farmed out from the challenge of life’s struggle in dealing not just with alcohol or substance addicts, but the behaviorally distorted of all sorts.  Your family or long-gone elders included, and how that life, whether you know it or not, adversely affected you. 

In the labyrinth of bookstore aisles forming a Masada of self-help expert publications, it might be just too daunting to try and be your own D-I-Y therapist.  But most often, although you won’t really know where best to begin, you’ll know when.  And even in the less-than-arguably correct place, the use of those Twelve life-saving Steps will work for you.

I didn’t make it to my first Al-Anon meeting until maybe a decade after my frequently drunk mom’s passing.  It might not have happened if it weren’t suggested in a therapy pre-screening one day.  “You mean I’d be eligible to attend one of those…?” was my response.  The director said, “Oh, of course….lots of affected people do, no matter when..”.  Therapy fizzled out quick, but the meetings were the winning discovery.

Soon, I’d learn of groups like “Families Anonymous”, for those trapped in dysfunctional behavior environments, and “Adult Children Of Alcoholics”, sorting out their lives’ derailments in view of how their drunk-parented lives misguided them.

What an oasis.  I can pretty much assess that I’d stayed away from this adventure in the interest of initially not wanting to fall victim to my prior life’s train wrecks, or even walking around branding myself a Wreck Survivor.  Certainly not when there are many other, more legitimately heroic survivors worthy of respect and honor in our world.

But when I sat down in my life’s first -Anon meeting, it felt like Elvin Jones playing with John Coltrane for the first time.  A perfect fit.  Listening to these people sharing their stories and their inner emotional struggles was like Carvel in the arid desert.  Much as I was prepared to speak my own, well-articulated diatribe, I almost never had to.

I sure could have used these fellowships when I was seven, eight, ten, eleven, up front with the alcoholic driving my life’s rig.  I was a pretty advanced thinking talker back then, and likely could have held my own with these articulate grownups.  Fact is though, it’s a no-children environment, and even branch fellowships like Ala-teen don’t always make for effective group meetings.  In her lengthy recovery hiatus, my mom recommended I attend an Ala-teen meeting in town.  At fourteen, I thought why not..?  I geared up prepared to offer a lot of intellectual reflection upon my childhood repressions, but showed up to a room of rowdy kids resembling a school lunchroom before whistled silent.  No dice.

But ineffective as that formation was, I’d get my just desserts a couple decades later, within my Al-Anon involvement. 

One thing I’d learn in the several-year attendance was that indeed the fellowship was open not just to the immediate struggler with the active raging, destructive drunk in their lives, leaving them to drive around town afraid to go home after the meeting.  The gathering is also wide open to those whose qualifying demon has long gone from their wounded lives, those who can offer the wide, intellectual insight they couldn’t begin to observe or absorb when they themselves were roaming the streets at night in 1987.  They get to go home to dinner and a movie.

It renders the immediacy and efficiency of these meetings just slightly questionable at times, if entirely well-meant.  Trouble is, meaning well doesn’t always serve well.  Sometimes, a picture of kittens and a “You Are Special” mug just won’t cover it.

That’s kind of the misguided effect of the extended -Anon phenomenon.  It’s an empowering and pain-relieving environment, certainly a safe space for the hour you’re there, and indeed a place to make contacts and friends to be at your immediate aid if things get dangerous, inside or out.

But there is in fact a ‘Use Only As Directed” aspect to these holistic, self-insightful wellness approaches.  Meeting groups are called upon to be self-managing, or autonomous.  The Intergroup people can’t audit each and every one.  Meeting groups are “on their honor”.  Despite every adhered measure though, welcoming means openness to those sometimes too verbose, too intellectual, or sometimes too emotionally locked up to serve and be served best.

At the same time, some of these folks are the most likely to have a good time and become long-time cast members.  Who’s gonna turn them away…?  Meeting groups need volunteers and keepers.  Too many of us are just too encumbered, and we’re grateful.

For those lonely and socially disjointed after years of reclusion after the intimate alcoholic’s departure, these -Anon get-togethers can be your new life..!  And you’re ready to share, educate and lecture like never before, bearing the PhD of your life’s experience.  The Class Will Come To Order.

For six solid years, once a week or more, I found catharsis in sharing my kaleidoscopic autobiography in five minutes or less in rooms of up to thirty folks among whom I could only hope were gaining something from my insights.  When my act was done, another stepped up to the pageant stage and unloaded.  It sure felt good to do so, regardless of who in that room was rendered bored, annoyed or kind of miffed over the fact that tonight’s meeting, presumably given to the share of immediate struggle is a lecture series on the Aristotelian philosophies of post-alcoholic-cohabitation survival, by some fairly smug pseudo-intellectuals leading carefree lives.

I recognized this before long, and though conscious of it, when a room full of intimidated people were offered the chance to speak and couldn’t bear to volunteer, here I was, prepared to keynote the room to oblivion, in Sunrise Semester fashion.

To some careful extent, you do in fact have to be somewhat full of yourself to share and offer sermonistic guidance to those in like struggle.  But it won’t work all the time.  At an AA gathering of long-time recovered alcoholics addressed by itinerant founder and lecturer Bill W., sure enough a fellow recoveree approached him and called him out for becoming a “dry drunk”.  Something to do with his holier-than-thou demeanor and detached nature in what was a founded interest-gone-industrially-bad.  In recovery, BW evidently was forced to assume a certain posture that eroded an integral sincerity, or visceral element of compassion.  It probably also couldn’t have been helped.

And that’s part of the puzzle of recovery.  While a room full of those in need of healing are pitted against half a room of those in need of speaking it out, the net result may not be too many changed lives.  But you will see an evening of much needed respite.  Recovery meetings are clearly a matter of The Medium Is The Message. 

The origins of the suffix -Anon and the label “Anonymous” are long derived from the understanding that civilians not bearing any substance addiction, nor dealing with addicts in their lives, are simply not equipped to understand, and hence likely to judge the character of one bearing such delicate vulnerability.  It’s best kept “amongst the tribe”.

There’s other reasons too, as I’d come to figure out.  Sharing your life’s spoken odyssey, in a format much the way Homer probably did under the spotlights in Greek improv clubs in the B.C. 600s, in the intimate company of a partner or willing-eared friend is not always a welcome showcase.  Despite their kindness, they have their unspoken baggage too, except they’re just a little too polite or reserved to unbutton their sleeves the same way.   That’s where self-published books, YouTube videos and podcasts take over.  The determination to get your story heard will.  That’s if you have anything to say about it.

And once it makes it to the take-it-or-leave-it shelf, you’ve arrived knowing that the world is a better place for the message you’ve brandished out there.  Let the Anonymous reign forth and conquer.

And stay that way.

 

Noah F.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If This Were 1968, I'd Be In Tears Right Now....

 

It’s well known that nothing disturbs or easily distracts a New Yorker, or any life-long urbanite in a busy, crowded environment.  Sirens, cars, subway car entertainers and acrobatic acts no one invited, loud smartphones and people conversing on them, train conductor announcements of things we all know too well already, they all combine to compose the rhythm of city life.  The expressway below one’s flat is the white noise that instills our sleep.  On a visit to the country some time back for a much-needed getaway, I was kept madly awake all night by the blessed silence.

But there does remain one sound that for many remain too piercing, enough to break the deepest concentration.  That’s the sound of an infant’s incessant cry.

There’s been enough published and established studies on just why that’s the case, and all the neurological human links and synapses that support that, to have to bring them all up here.  But the point is, all those studies and tests prove that we’re indeed not a bunch of holograms or AI software components.  Being disturbed by a child’s cry makes you human.

Parents bearing infants or very small children at their side are in many situations well-aware of just how disconcerting the explosive wail of their child can be to a docile room, and might even be inclined to dash out with their young when they suddenly erupt.  Sometimes though, given the place and the situation, they can’t.  Like on transportation.  Mass transit is famous for this, and riders won’t be too deterred by the annoyance.  But sometimes it’s just a little easier to be affected.  I couldn’t help noticing the plight of an eighteen-month-old boy and his young parents one night on the E train. He was planted in a deluxe stroller, completely boxed in by transparent plastic-cover walls, looking something like the Popemobile. The caged-in kid was in a tearful rage.  Despite whatever his mama did on the outside to entertain him visually, he would not be placated.   At one point his foot became free of the cage and she zipped open just enough to squash him back in, upon which he really kicked and screamed.  A great finale as they reached their stop and departed.

That was an endurance enough for this spectator.  And I’m pretty sure any veteran parent, old or young will laugh at this and care to attack with, “You think that’s bad…?  You haven’t raised a child…”

Well, touche, I guess.  Accepting the challenge is probably what immunizes you to the emotional effect driven by all those studied neurological synapses that end up distracting a subway rider when four young swinging, kicking acrobats don’t.  The question however remains, is that branch of human survival necessarily an entirely good one…?

Again, too much question, long and deeply investigated by others and not enough space here.  But the fact remains, by human design, babies cry.

And humans placate them.  And in their nurturing, growing children are generally taught not to, as a default. 

Our sociological structure is one that makes no room whatsoever for such emotional frailty.  Even if specialists, counselors and TV doctors are showing up all over the place in the 21^st century, informing us of the value of crying, excoriating us for teaching boys not to cry, and trying desperately to educate us on coming to terms with embracing and accepting our human sensitivities that make life occasionally inconvenient, the world around us just won’t have it.  A room full of people won’t put their lives on “pause” for those who have to finally just bury the rag in their face when it’s time for their tears.  Especially since, in a good many cases, people just might.

In almost any high-pitched, and sometimes hostile encounter of dispute, maybe a work situation or at some public facility, things can chug forward in an almost boringly predictable fashion.  The boss won’t relent, co-worker or client won’t cooperate, people at the front desk won’t accept my ID or form that’s supposed to get me what I desperately need and rode three hours on the train here to accomplish.  Argument ensues.  Things get loud. Ultimately the disillusioned, troubled party marches out of the room with stoic indignance.  But what if he or she doesn’t..?  What if that showdown is resolved suddenly in a flood of desperate sobs..?

While one’s collapse into tears can in fact diffuse an angered stalemate like the symbolic thunderstorm in Sidney Lumet’s famed adaptation of Twelve Angry Men, all too often, it will lead many parties in the room to suddenly judge and dismiss the crier as less-than-capable of playing this game.

The Judeo-Christian ethic as we’ve come to know it in the post-Depression-Era, war and crime-scarred world, decrees that crying remains a form of correctable weakness.  If there’s one thing we’re effectively taught as cubs, it’s to obliterate and beat that foolish desire to cry. It’s a behavior reserved for infants, unwelcome on the part of an adult in any mixed or social situation, and what’s more, you just might end up tempering an entire room with it.

That’s bad.

The sudden display of that kind of desperate, uncontrollable collapse on the part of a sober adult can bear a very manipulative effect on a room full of strangers, at least.  Ones that don’t uncomfortably bolt from the room might be inclined to approach and try and comfort and communicate with the crier.  Maybe support or rally to their cause, try to help them immediately alleviate their crisis. Mainly because people don’t ordinarily, under any healthy circumstance, behave this way, and maybe it’s up to us to help this injured party, the way we’d want and need were we the victim.

You just can’t have humanity playing out like that all over the place. Three or four more people letting it all hang out and crying wolf like that, and no one’s ever gonna get anything done. A trend like that could put society out of business for good.  At least that’s how us cubs are taught.  If you’re not careful about that, you could make some enemies you didn’t know you had.

I knew an extremely dear young lady once, who reportedly lost more than three office jobs, despite her steel efficiency.  A mystery until a friend of hers candidly explained:  The young woman had this tendency, upon any “must-work-well-under-stress” situation, to melt down into a pile of tears, not unlike Holly Hunter in Broadcast News.  Of course, in the movie, Holly made a point of breaking down privately, where she wouldn’t scare anyone.  This young lady wasn’t afraid to scare anybody.  Her fearlessness made her the bane of the polite, kind, caring team’s existence.  In three different outfits.

So what do us full-grown lions do, living by these rules and consequences..?  If we don’t antagonize and terrorize others, we internalize.  That’s a great way to get along.  It’s a gateway to sleep loss, depression and a life of metabolic dysfunction and illness.  But it’s also what sells products, dreams, bolsters the Faith Movement, and keeps this commercial orbit spinning.  Do you really want to be the one to genuinely stop the world by bursting into tears in the middle of the room..?

There’s certainly a plethora of more dignified and impressive ways to vent one’s frustration or depression, on any level, clinical or sub.  People old and young are resorting to them in these United States more than ever, with weaponry more attainable in ways that will not, for too many reasons, see blockade.  Would these potential perpetrators in fact be able to seek and receive the help they need before their violent intentions become action..?

Those of us not so mentally disturbed or neurologically impaired remain the strong, the brave.  The ultimately normal Hawkeye Pierces in the M*A*S*H series that is our daily lives.

As I recall, I cried too much as a boy, reputedly after an infanthood not known for tearful departures.  I was raised by my sensitive, single mother in the 1970s, which probably explains it thoroughly.  But even she on occasion almost veered toward encouraging me to beat the inclination. I never disputed that, and thankfully never shed a tear again until I was nineteen and woke up late one night to find her drunk, after eight sober years, in the kitchen threatening to take her life.  I didn’t really know how to respond to this other than some Movie-Of-The-Week-styled emotional outburst, so I feigned a pile of petrified tears, until help arrived in the form of phone-woken relatives, who’d come over and scream it out ‘til everyone got tired and passed out.  Not ‘til a couple decades later would, sure enough, some suppressed metabolic and emotional depression send me into what I didn’t yet realize was a much needed corrective and cathartic drown in my own tears.  Nothing to be treated, or medicated.  Just damn well enjoyed.  And whether I knew it or not, I did.  I had to shelter in place for a few days.  Dashed out of rooms into phone booths and bathroom stalls when I had to.  But the onslaughts cleared up.  I just wish I could have understood and appreciated them more back when they were unpredictable.

None of that now. But that eighteen-month-old subway prisoner with no right to be upset, and I the same, shared one very common bond.  We were tired, angry, lonely, fearful, and just needed to screech our heads off.  Thanks to that benevolent young man the other night, I lived quite vicariously.  Now there’s a solid citizen.

 

Noah F.

Maybe It's Not All About The Bagels....

 

                             

As a child, in my formative years with my mom, growing up in my uncle’s home, Sunday morning was synonymous with bagels.  That also meant some “bialys”, loaf-shaped onion-egg rolls known as “Miamis”, a fresh vat of pink-labeled Temp-Tee cream cheese, and the Sunday Long Island Press, the weekly bundle garnished with the full-color comics I’d pour over once Wonderama with Bob McAllister was over on Channel 5.  Additionally, there’d be the Sunday New York Times, complete with the Sunday Times Magazine, and the weekly Crossword Puzzle, made of elite clues that kept my studious mom, uncle and anyone else in the room guessing.

You wouldn’t recognize it as Sunday without those fixtures…..the cuisine, the TV programs, the publications. I certainly wouldn’t have. Without all that, it just would have been some boring, weird, creepy day with no school.  That’s not to imply that there weren’t a few demure Sundays in my childhood nonetheless.  But the framework was provided.

Sundays actually had a little more to them than that.  A kid raised in an early 1970s semi-affluent (but what was more self-consciously termed in those days “middle-class”) home just might connect with some of this.  For some reason, when you’re a child of six or seven (me, anyway…), waking for school at 7am renders you incapable of anything except wanting to roll back into bed.  Weekends however find you invariably wide awake and ready for anything at 7am, while the grownups are conversely still fast asleep.  Typical pattern.  If you were equipped with a bedroom portable Panasonic b&w TV as I gratefully was, you had a friend to hang with until the place came to life.  I got to know my friends at the TV Bar & Grill on those early Sunday mornings.

In those days, local New York TV on Sunday mornings during the Sunday closed-retail establishment-era maintained what was known on the air as the “Public Affairs Ghetto”.  Elitist media critics would denounce television for restricting mostly anything artistically uplifting or educational, if ecumenical, to Sunday mornings before 11am.  The KidVid casino known to Saturday morning network television come 8am on Saturdays did not hold court on Sundays.  Sundays were a very quiet, sophisticated local zone, of religious presentations, a few anthology dramas, interviews and perhaps the one feature a kid my age could at least appreciate for fifteen minutes, re-runs of a 1960 Art Clokey stop-motion series called Davey & Goliath.  I had no idea where the title came from or why this was only seen on Sunday mornings.  But it was quite a nice act.  A little preachy, but nothing beyond the likes of PBS fare.  

It was a curiosity shop of fascination to a cub raised inside a Jewish pride, where Catholicism, Protestantism, Christianity nor any other denomination was readily discussed.   A lot of these TV shows involved references to attending Church on Sundays.   Of course, that wasn’t us, but other than my uncle making it to temple once every couple of Friday nights or Saturday mornings, we weren’t all there weekly.   I only tagged along sporadically myself, and never really picked up on what the Hebrew lyrics in those sing-alongs were all about in the service.

I probably ended up identifying more with the TV shows I’d gaze at on Sunday morning, like Davey & Goliath, with their sound moral themes.  The little feature always opened with this handsome image of the Cross. Being all of six and not really asking too many questions about things I’d see, or stuff no one was awake on Sunday morning to watch with me and explain, I was a little stunted one evening when we were all dashing through an airport corridor to meet a friend at the gate. As we passed the display window of a little religious shop, a gold cross necklace in the display, I stopped and gazed, asking my mom if I could ever have one of those.  She gasped in unanticipated shock.  I was just eager to acquire a promotional item of one of my favorite TV shows.

What eluded me about those now half-century-old times is that despite all or any family drama or comedy that ensued, it wasn’t just some but all of the above that made those times and those memories what they were and are.  And Sundays were just part of it.

Holidays were just as significant.  Residing in the hub of the family circle, our home was always host to the dinners and events.  Even when a shiva arrived.  You had Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and the frequent Sunday dinners that were preceded by loudly-spoken living room afternoons, serenated by either an old Spencer Tracy film or CBS NFL Sunday on the Zenith.   

As a family, we were certainly all together, not unlike a predictable D.C. House Session.  Cousins older and younger, moms, dads, the little ones I’d be navigating my way through.  But in many ways, those holiday surroundings meant something even more. 

As far as Thanksgiving, the one remaining universal such occasion still held by my cousins for surrounding family, my own held image of the holiday is a general fondness, certainly with regard to held memories of a four-day weekend and rarely-seen animated releases on The 4:30 Movie. Oddly however, in my time on Earth hence, I’ve not always seen the pressing need to flock to the holiday congregation with my fine relatives for the social gathering annually.

When conditions were all conducive, certainly.  In my singular days, if my odd-houred job wasn’t commandeering me otherwise, I’d make the mass-transit journey, way, way out to the far reaches of The Island, where I’d phone my hosts to come and retrieve me in the chariot and make the forty minute journey to their castle. A great time had, there’d be the obligatory “so, when’s your train pull in..?”, and the necessary “Okay, who wants to take a ride to the station..??” at 9:20pm, bellies full, wine consumed and locals looking to cruise home to bed.  There’d always be some willing party glad to oblige, though.  Even still, I’d find myself just a little out of place upon meeting up with a mostly suburban, relatively affluent set, with often little to bond over and discuss before, during and after the meal.  Great folks, just not a home-run blind date.  We had little in common.  A guy who runs an audio board at a radio station seven nights a week for non-union pay has little to share with a real estate broker, especially if sports is not a shared taste, and the broker hasn’t seen any good vintage Cassavettes films lately.

That’s admittedly a high bar, but not every animal of a species can be entirely at home in a like habitat.  I find now that despite the handsome squalor of my cousins’ nests, those impressive Martha Stewart ranches, to me they just don’t exude the warmth of what my uncle’s mid-to-late 1900s cozy shingler presented.  Obviously, that’s my own warped, self-propelled image, but in many ways that’s the point.  What made the surrounding, the setting, the “sitcom stage” if you will, of that tender portion of my so-called childhood, humor, dramatics, histrionics and all something you can no longer “go home to” on the LIRR, is a gift that only my mind and heart can cherish and cultivate.   I know some of my dear cousins share at least some of that too in their own cranial zones, and that’s in fact what bonds our tempered connections to this day. 

I can’t be sure my younger cousin even realizes just how profoundly grateful I am for his efforts at maintaining a kind of mandatory contact upon the holidays, and hosting the family summit each Thanksgiving.  But I can speak to the remorse I have to contend with when my own immediate work schedule nowadays might pre-empt me from being in attendance that very particular Thursday.  Yes, in this cancel-culture world, some of us still have to meet our grownup responsibilities on collective holidays.  Unconscionable by many, but an inconvenient truth in a world of growing rents, and inflation twice what it was in 1974, when I was too small to know what it was.

Getting married can change a game too.  Sometimes it means uniting with someone who marches in like a state leader, bonding immediately and forcefully with the in-laws and mandating summit attendance throughout the year, on no uncertain terms.   But that’s not who I joined forces with.  I’m with a more independent spirit, who’s glad to join into an instant come-on-over when the coordinates are all aligned.  But if, like her spouse, her work schedule comes calling for an early-morning arrival on Black Friday, late-night commuter transit arrival home, well past midnight just isn’t an option for these non-driving OMNY-carders. 

Ask yourself this very honest question, single or not, parent or not:  Are you always up for an evening of well-dressed small-talk with very kind and welcoming folks with whom you’ll likely have little in common, and bore to tears with your conversation-sparking efforts..?  Is it a little hard to mosh into conversation pits on Trump, the recent Mayor, and the Hamas situation when you don’t really follow politics or watch Fox, CNN or Newsmax..?  Are you sports-illiterate to the point of merely nodding and muttering, “Well, Of Course..!” in a shared circle, like Peter Sellers in Being There..? 

Does the overwhelming Norman Rockwell ascension of the obligatory silver platter and immense, golden-roasted bird, along with endless platters of exquisite side dishes few will consume more than a spoonful of politely, (and most will kindly decline from “doggie-bagging” home) find you kind of overheated in the soft G.E. light, and less than appetized..?

If you answered “No..! What are you talking about..?!”, well you’re a good solid Middle Class American.   But should an answer of “yes” be a source of shame..?

If you asked me that thirty years ago, I’d say it’s no question, and kept my shame to myself.  In today’s just slightly more enlightened world, despite all the ignorant cancel-culturing and obligatory oversensitivity, there is in fact greater insight and acceptance for those of us not always comfortable in every optional setting.

Yes, there are some that still will term one’s aversion to something like Thanksgiving gatherings with people to whom one holds no differences as “anti-social”.  But maybe, much like the bagels, the lox, the cream cheese, the magazines and the puzzles that furnished Sunday mornings, perhaps there’s still more to an appreciation of the principle of Thanksgiving than that.

My wife bears every intent upon our solitary occasions to create our own festive, if portion-smaller holiday spread.  I’ll heat up the browser and uncork a vintage bottle of 1977 CBS NFL Sunday, replete with commercials and prime-time promos.  Not for the game, but for the atmosphere.  It’s a habitat In which I can practice gratitude best.   We’re tired.  We worked late last night.  We have to work early in the morning.  We can always call others and wish a happy Turkey Day on the spot.  But maybe….just maybe, we don’t quite have to. 

The day is about personal gratitude.  We know what we mean to one-another, and one single event day on the calendar and its inaccessability can’t change that.  But we can put our hearts, minds and attitudes in the right place.  That includes self-image.   And on Thanksgiving, at my age, I’m too grateful to compromise mine.

 

“Happy Thanksgiving...” – Robbie Robertson, Winterland Auditoriium, encore, 1976.

 

Noah F.