The Value Of Ex-

 

“Not at all..??”

“Nope…..never have…”

“You don’t mean that………”

“Yeah I do…..”

“That would kill me….”

My friend Krista refused to accept the fact that I had no determination to find, meet, or even try to locate my real father.  As I’d go on to explain to her, the structure of my life thus far kind of defied the need.  I had a large surrounding family, and there were in fact, throughout my formidable years, a significant few grownup male figures.  One of them in fact held the title of “Father” on my birth certificate.  That was Hirsch.

Hirsch was my mother’s one and only marriage. In her late twenties, in 1959 New York, the height of the straight-edge Mad Men era, my mother, an attractive model-worthy figure with cover girl features, the final product of a five-kid Depression-era Coney Island family was sorely intent upon flipping the bird to society’s caste system.  Rather than ease into a union with some big, handsome jerk with a power job, a great financial future and plans to screw, procreate and live in a house in the suburbs, this young woman with an office job and an apartment rental on Hudson Street in the Village handed herself over to the fellow who entertained her the most, a forty-year old odd-job hopper who looked pretty official in a suit, and sought a future as a standup comedian.  In a world of Tom, Dick and Harrys, my mom chose Hirsch.

Hirsch was going places with his standup career.  He and his brother Klein, (an abbreviation of some unrecallable Yiddish name..) shared the spotlight as a team, kind of a “Sunshine Boys’.  Their act was a unique one, combining expressions with human-made sound effects, very Ernie Kovacs for it’s time. Audiences went crazy for it, and they were a solid opener in clubs.  Their friend base was an army of New York club entertainers and agents, the Broadway Danny Rose cast of it’s time. They’d all fast become the cast members of my mom’s life in that marriage. The duplex apartment the couple rented in Brooklyn was host to late-night parties on Saturday night and uproarious bagel brunches on Sundays. They were also the bonding factor of the marriage.

Hirsch and Klein were adopted by a top agent, and were this close to playing the Tonight show, when it all stopped cold.  My mom found Hirsch sitting in the living room, staring at the TV on rehearsal night.  What happened..?

Much like the tale of The Sunshine Boys, they called it quits. Toward one another, the brothers were characteristically mute.  Now their act was gone.  My mother was apoplectic, and fearful.  She’d soon learn from her sister-in-law, all about their true profiles.  Think Jonathan Winters or Robin Williams.  And they were successful versions.  These guys were not victors.

My mom would respond to the situation by insisting this man, ten years her senior and mostly unemployable, go back to school and get a teaching license.  This had to be easier in 1962 than today, because by simply attending classes, struggling through math exams, and handing in ghostwritten term papers for which my mom happily served the ghost role, She would vicariously win him the license of an English teacher. 

From there, her ensuing Judy Garland-esque struggle with the bottle would begin to end their domestic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf union. They split, and the divorce was finalized a few years later, south of the border, hours before I arrived in a Brooklyn hospital, and not in the traffic-stalled cab ride over.

Mom had other reasons to cite for their breakup, as she’d begin to share with me as I matured into my teens. “He couldn’t perform..” was the headline issue.  That can probably break up a passionate relationship, but decades of mulling it over would have me concluding that a woman who was so uncomfortable with her body, and “good-girl” complexes of the generaton, and all kinds of other psychological barricades, ending in the need to be well beyond inebriated for anything to commence, probably had just as much of a role in the incompatibility.

Not only did the divorce not end their association.  It strengthened it.  One or two quickly truncated relationships in my own distant past led to some fine, communicative friendships for awhile, in which I’d categorize our bond as “divorced ex’s”.  It led me to understand what made my mom and Hirsch such an item. 

The ink hadn’t dried on the divorce form before the two could rejoice and indulge in an intimate friendship, spending hours either together or over the phone, analyzing their lives, their friends, or that Bergman movie on Channel 13 the other night.  Their conversations were the soundtrack of my childhood.  Even after Hirsch’s second ill-fated two-year marriage ended, all through which time he was on the phone with my mom, they were an intellectual “one”.

But it was somewhere after the split when my mom, in all her frustration, sought some kind of vindication, which she did through a series of brief, and mostly rewarding late 1960s encounters, like that chap Brock who she always talked dreamingly about.  He was reportedly some hunk with a hip sense of humor, rode a motorcycle, held the image of Michal Parks on Along Came Bronson, and after a year, rode out of her life tacitly, like Jack Palance in Shane.

That booze-fueled night in the Miami motel was, according to urban legend, my ticket to the mortal universe.

While some of my relatives would long corroborate entirely with the Legend of Brock, claiming to have known him, citing him as a wonderful fellow, to me it’s still all urban legend.  If it’s true that he’s my seed, great.  If not, to whom do I appeal..?

Meanwhile, Hirsch would soon become a prominent and fairly enjoyable figure in the cast of my childhood.  The three of us, he and my mom would meet up on weekends as I turned nine and ten, after my mom would move us out of her brother’s home and into our own spare pad. Hirsch, who’d by then advanced in the TWU game to become an astoundingly high paid NYC English teacher held a slick, shag-floored pad in the heart of the Village, where we visited often.  Then we’d go back to our dusty, wood-floored little flat in Forest Hills.  I dug my home a whole lot.  My mom despised Hirsch for it.

Hirsch lent his name to the document, and agreeably issued child support, but for every reason, my mother would hate this man she forever loved.

We’d meet up around midday Saturday for a day in the city.  We’d usually be in upper midtown, for a trip through the MOMA.  She was deeply into the history and background on the arts.  She’d read plenty about all the artists.  Hirsch knew little but followed her lead. Anyway, he looked and sounded good.

Hirsch was this slender rail of a silver-haired fellow, with the standard crop-duster mustache and aviator-styled, silver-rimmed specs, along with the tweed sport coat and knit tie. When would I get to look that good..?!  My life was all about turtlenecks and pants that didn’t fit me.  I was a ten-year-old fat kid with no romance in my future. 

Sometimes I’d daydream about what it would be like.  What if that girl I silently crushed on in my fifth-grade class were my girlfriend, and we shared a fabulous rapport, and went out to the museum exhibit together one day when we’re grownups..? Would I wear a shirt and tie or a turtleneck with the tweed jacket..?  Would my rat’s nest of a mullet have shape and style..?  Would I be something I could be proud of and appreciate..?   It was kind of up there with wondering if California would ever slide into the ocean.

Hirsh would pass in his late fifties.  That chain-smoking he never quit couldn’t have helped, but even in his final days, he lit up.

No, my mother was not a recipient of any sort upon his departure.  They all met in the bedroom of the Village pad for the reading of the will, bed-bound Hirsch, now feeble, the centerpiece.  I was in the barren living room, staring at an old episode of I Love Lucy on the Trinitron.

My mother emerged stunned and horrified.  Betrayed is more like it.  For some reason though, the outcome did not shock me in the least.

In any event, I never saw the Village pad, Hirsch or Klein ever again.  Her closest companions were suddenly her darkest enemies. Mine too, by command.  I didn’t care.  We may have needed that beneficiary windfall, but what killed her the most was the betrayal.  Her lifetime trust in others was now trash.  I got it.

Getting it though, wouldn’t turn me off the recollections of those fine childhood meetups with Hirsch in the city. We’d all sachet through midtown like real New Yorkers, well-dressed and all.  We’d hit the museum exhibit, roam through Brentanoes, and if I was lucky, we’d duck down into my favorite gallery the Little Old New York concourse at the McGraw-Hill.  They had the big, popular reproduction Wurlitzer jukebox, with all the 1950s reissues.  The conversations and laughter over my head were the ultimate canopy.  I hoped to one day be smart enough, well-read enough, slender enough to look good in a suit and clever enough, to be that grownup. 

It was recently, decades after giving up and just getting through the day that I was stopped in my tracks on the way to work.  It was mid-afternoon, as I dashed past a mirror in a huge display window in midtown.

I spotted Hirsch.

In that Twilight Zone moment,  I stepped back, into the mirror, and gazed at this astounding image, a sharp, relatively handsome one I’ll admit, of my land-colored bucket hat and my handlebar mustache, above the tweed sport coat, shirt and tie that I’ve long adopted in a long-departed Oscar Madison city style. From a distance, unmistakably, there was Hirsch, features and all.  Right smack in the middle of the land of my childhood sojourns.  It was a healthier, more youthful looking Hirsch.  One that looked some years beneath the Hirsch I knew when he was a few years younger than current me.

The resemblance led me to the recurring curiosity of just whether or not the divorced couple ever in fact properly consummated at any time. I’ve long decided to not care to know.  They’re all gone now, and while I bear none of the accrued financial stability, success, failure, or life experience that he, my uncle, his son, or any other man of my origin who’s features I bear, I didn’t mind the sight of that mirror just a few seconds longer, on the exit ramp to the next birthday.  Somehow, the ten-year-old dream happened.  It was a gift worth waiting for.

Noah F.

 

 

 

 

Death Be Not Fooling Around with Someone Else...

 

The iconic Mel Brooks, now known just as much for his longevity as his humor, told interviewer Kenneth Tynan in 1977 at length of his life-long abject fear of death.  A famous Woody Allen quote goes, “I don’t mind dying…….I just don’t want to be there when it happens..”

Fear of death for many is not uncommon. People have a right to their fears.  But it’s never been one of mine.  My own, that is.  There’s two kinds of ways to go, and those of us in the miseried, resigned, sardonic and self-deprecating Al Bundy school of life are beyond seduced by the thought of that sub-machine-gun toting teenager prancing into that room and, among others, blowing you away in a painless instant.  All those fears and responsibilities you’ve come to inherit as a grownup..? Released.  You are exonerated from the crime of life’s journey.

As a Generation X-er, back when that term was underground-trendy, anti-grownup, and the stuff of Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke and Janeane Garofalo on the big screen stomping around in black skirts and electric-red-dyed hair, and Elizabeth “Prozac Nation” Wurtzel lounging about in psych wards, “death” was simply this coveted landing on the game board.  It was an extension of what so many of us high-drama, co-dependent kids had actually grown up crushing on since pre-adolescence.  My own romance with death, after enough movie watching and fiction-reading, was probably cultivated around age ten or so.  If you’re unpopular enough, alienated enough amongst your peer group, bullied enough (the pre-internet grammar-school hallway physical threat kind..), and consequently depressed enough, you’ve got yourself a budding romance..!  No artistic soul could likely come of age without this shot of Cupid’s arrow.  Many were the nights, before math tests, intervals following scream-outs from my mother or a winless encounter with my frustrating younger cousin who aggravated me to no end, or maybe a day’s end after a promising threat of assault by the class bully, I’d treat myself to an extended mind fantasy about how everyone around me would react to the sudden report of my tragic death, often one self-inflicted.  It was usually better than any Movie Of The Week. 

It didn’t end at childhood.  The one free, legal and plentiful joy that was my best friend growing up would remain my pal as life’s march progressed.  The movie only got better.  Better dialogue, better cinematography.  Sometimes, a black-and-white imaging a la Cassavettes.. or Frederick Wiseman.  But it was always the best movie in town.

What allowed for that available, stellar entertainment for so long..?  The freedom to enjoy it came only from the advantageous minibar indulgence of taking life’s provisions for granted.  Specifically, the people.  More specifically, the grown-ups that controlled the world that showed us no respect, and were very much the floor, ceiling and walls within which we lived.  They were life’s owners.  We were the pets. 

For some of us, that would hold until well into our forties or more.  Some of us would be fifty years old before we really would begin to learn what the death of others near enough to us would actually mean in the framework of our own lives.

Life all of us, I’d lost relatives in my life.  My own mother, who had been more or less “dying for years” was gently ushered out by God in one tender, attacking moment no one could have anticipated.  My surviving, closest elders would within several years also meet their ends.   The closure on their odysseys were by no means shocking, and I was surrounded by enough surviving family to bear the shared emotional weight of it all, which in my case, amounted to a very polite, small denomination. 

Those lost were those who led full lives before I knew them.  As an adult however, as I’ve spent more years knowing folks some years above me even longer, I’m for the first time recognizing a passage in the human labyrinth unfamiliar thus far:  Age.

Yes, we are all aging, and in one way or another, we’re showing it.  Some, those of us a little more health conscious and less dangerous in endeavor, weather it better than others, but here we all are nonetheless, elder cats amongst a population of kittens.  And now we have to figure out how to continue to be ourselves.

Just coming into work each day and nailing it is not the confident birthright it once was.  An awkwardness about age disparity begins to harbor, even in the most welcoming environments. Every time you log onto the internet, a home page of sorts tabloids you in the face with grim stories about the desperate and economically debilitating horrors of mandatory retirement.  Logging on for some getaway pleasure on your day off means shielding your eyes until you make to YouTube, where you can crank up an old full-length 1979 Game Of The Week with Joe Garagiola, just to wallpaper the room with some nostalgic comfort food for the ears, the old JC Penney and AC Delco commercials that decorated our lives before prostate health and cancer treatment videos began pirating on-line entertainment at every turn.

That precious décor, like the grownups from our pre-teen lives, was the noise we once took for granted, and is now a resurrected memory, a memory that often brings us back to the company of those annoying elders, who’d never be able to understand that we’re a lot more mature than they realize.

Now we are genuinely mature.  And we’re in one way or another facing it.

Generation X-ers had mostly no stencil for this sort of graduation in life, at least many didn’t  That’s what’s got us licking the on-line containers desperately for nostalgic fragments all the time.  Just a glimpse of a still photo of your neighborhood block from 1983 might be the most pain-relieving moment you’ve had all week. 

If you’re lucky and crafty enough to put all those audio and video fragments together and live vicariously in the time of your middle-school-hood, hoping to strategically endure these economically depressed, inflation-threatening times of decaying Social Security promises and disintegrating health care availabilities the way our elders did back then, it probably won’t work. We need to forge our own march through the Inferno, and it’ll be a dangerous one either way.

And that includes the survival of those who pass.

For some reason, though I never found jokes about any kind of death “funny”, I’m frightened by them now.  A mere drama involving a character’s death is suddenly not something I can watch, unless maybe something Shakesperean or something gothic.  Or maybe the news. Death reports in the news are emotionally harmless.  That’s one immunity endowed upon us by the media.

At what might be termed just past middle age, a place I am, in my current health-aware state more grateful to be feeling less than more than ever, with the majority of my original parts and mechanisms all prayably in working condition, I give thanks to God every few hours for the blessed few hours I’ve just been granted. And I visit my inner therapist daily to work on this cultivated fear, the fear of recognizing what is naturally inevitable to those I know and cherish who are not quite so many years beyond me anymore, some not so well, and some I know I will one day no longer see all the time.

For many years, maybe the first ten years we lived in our neighborhood, a presumably homeless senior woman held court outside a public building.  She was as much a fixture in our town lives as Norm or Cliff were on Cheers. She’d be shouting comically in her mountain of blankets and boxes on the corner, and bore no threat to anyone.  Somewhat theatrical at best. No police or services could remove her at any time, for whatever reason.  And although passing her every day and night in and out of the subway was always at least minimally awkward, it became difficult to envision our daily lives without her, this now elderly and louder-than-ever sprite little woman with a voice to match Ethel Merman in It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad World.  One day, about ten months ago, she became absent permanently.  Finally I asked a public officer in the area who had some information on this elusive character.  She died.

If nothing else, her departure serves towards my own life education, the awareness that unlike that childish belief in death as the escape, the object of the game is, within any one’s means to simply appreciate rather than struggle to survive any given day, to pray thanks for the presence of those in our lives who we still don’t get to see and talk to enough, the presence of those who drive us up the wall, the gift of the health that we maintain, the ability to sleep, wake and meet the day, regardless of any of life’s blessed dramas, and precious thanks for being able to see, hear, walk through and breathe this very day, one we will never get to see again.  In this world, it’s still the best deal around.

 

Noah F.

 

 

Day Of The Truant

 

I shouldn’t be awake, I thought. It can only mean one thing.  My mom overslept.

I was eleven, plodding along in the sixth grade, more or less.  But if this sudden overlay were to become what I’d hoped, it could, if cards were played correctly, mean a day off.  But there was no way yet of knowing.  The game was on.

Mom always woke me up at 7am.  I was usually asleep sooner than midnight, but even if I slept the whole night through, which sometimes I actually did, you needed car alarms in the house to get me up and out of bed on a weekday.

Our home was a fine little piece of rustic interior.  A wood-floored, paint-peeling little 1950s studio flat in a unit complex in Forest Hills.  You say "Forest Hills" to a person and certainly, in 1979 anyway, that conjured up images of opulence, perhaps a grand suite in one of those 1920s residential apartment buildings, complete with a lobby and doorman straight out of a 1930s Preston Sturges comedy.  That was the polar opposite of us.

My mother’s famous heart attack four years earlier trapped her on disability indefinitely, and any work she’d try to attain in any office setting would not be attainable unless some kind and willing employer could pay “off the books’, income unreportable.  Not too common, and neither was legitimate work.  So outside of the few writing and typing jobs that came her way informally, she was on the dole. Just her and her boy.

There had been, at one time, a shred of child support.  That came from The Ex.  I actually knew the guy, his brother, and some of his family and friends.  Although my mom and this one-time husband of hers did enjoy a badly conceived marriage for which both and neither could be blamed, I was not an official product.  The union ended five years before I began.  The divorce was final just 24 hours before I plopped to Earth at Brooklyn Heights Hospital.  I was actually the culmination of a mostly inebriated affair my mother had desperately enjoyed, with a suitor I never would in my lifetime meet, or have the urge to.  I’d heard he was a nice guy.  The ex agreed to offer child support, subsequently.   The two always remained on some sort of deeply affectionate terms.  She would hate the guy and love him forever.  Even posthumously.

Only that kind of love could move a brilliant, alcoholic young woman to spend her every last cent and work two office jobs just to fund and support her unemployable husband through a GED, a college diploma and a masters in Education in 1960, just so he could within ten years become one of New York City’s highest paid English and Drama teachers at the O’Henry School, and move into some six-figure condo on Mercer Street in the late 70s.  We lived in a bare flat with horse-size waterbugs in Queens.  I often wondered, despite all these adoring relationships, if my mother didn’t bear some kind of anger or sense of affront against her ex for all this.  The more she’d imply no, the more she implied “yes”.

It was now 8:40am.  Ordinarily, I’d be off to school, ten blocks away.  But I’m in bed, trying not to breathe.  Of course, I was breathing, but my constant morning sniffles were acting up and if I didn’t get up and blow my nose, I’d have a pillow full of snot.  Looks like currently, that was the only option.  No way could I stir and awaken my mom, fast asleep on the couch, ten feet away, her all-night talk-station clock radio quietly jabbering away.  The later it got, the better my shot at a day off.

Would showing up to school late have destroyed me..?  School that particular year hadn’t really been the prison yard it was the year prior.  Decent classmates, a fine teacher, school work wasn’t exactly a brick wall.  So what..?  Maybe it was just the grind.  Or maybe I had become accustomed to skipping out.

When The Ex took ill months earlier, everyone worried. He became more and more debilitated.  My mom had us spending more and more time at his place in the Village.  Before long, she and his brother and friends decided he needed to visit the Mayo Clinic up in Minnesota for experimental treatments.  Doing so meant a month-long pilgrimage, and my mom didn’t really have any willing or able parties near home with whom I could bunk and go to school daily.  So I tagged along.  My mom explained the hiatus to my schoolteacher, who complied.

But once we returned, we still kept vigil with the ailing Ex at his apartment.  Late Sunday nights meant there was no way to get me to school in Rego Park in the morning. My mother was in no condition to accompany me there on the subway.  It meant more arbitrary days off.

Before long, or shortly before term’s end, a very disturbing official notice arrived in our mailbox at home, threatening my inability to graduate to Grade Seven, the result of overt inattendance.  That shocking letter was just one month away.  I sure had no inclination to expect it.

This morning was like any other, among the growingly common, of pre-emptive situations.  But at 9:10am, I would absolutely not move or breath a muscle.  It’s as if I were playing a corpse on live television in the 1950s.  I loved all those stories about TV in the early 50s, and wished I could see more of that stuff.  If you couldn’t make it to the Museum Of Broadcasting on 53^rd street in those days, you could just forget it.  But there were plenty of books about it getting published, and I think I read them all.  This play I was in at the moment was getting pretty climactic.

My mother awoke and cough-hacked herself awake.  She looked at the clock.

“Shit, it’s almost nine thirty.  Are you up..?!?”

I did my best wake-up impression.  “What…??”

“We overslept…..I don’t think you can go to school today…”

“No..?” No challenge out of me…

“What would your late excuse be..? You’d only get in more trouble.  You can go in tomorrow and I can say you were sick…”

“Well, okay…”

I won.

“I have to blow my nose..”  I jauntily darted off to the bathroom.  In a victorious mood, I lightly offered, “My nose feels like a bowl of oatmeal…”

My mom didn’t respond.  She was having her morning bedside cigarette.

Clearly, there’d of course be nothing to celebrate about this sudden vacation day.  In some ways, it would inarguably function as kind of a semi-legal “Yom Kippur”, or day of atonement of some sort.  Or at the very least, a forced inception of guilt observance.

I was not supposed to be at home today.  There would be no margin for what might be deemed enjoyment, at least not by my incitement.

“I’m gonna make coffee…”, my mother groaned on the way to the kitchen.  I’d fix myself a king-size chocolate milk to get the day started.  Mom made us some toast.

Back in the everything room, the radio was still on, mumbling away.  My mom seated herself at the table, gazing out the window, the typical creative writer’s post.  She’d long sought to become a writer of many sorts, fiction, non-fiction, commentary, screenwriting, television writing. But despite any efforts, her quest for ultimate sobriety seemed in the last five years to be her most overwhelming challenge, freezing all others.  It does not however, stop a writer from writing, or processing thoughts or words like one.  I grew up in an environment of half-filled notebooks and collegiate lectures on the lives and writings of Joyce, Bronte, James, O’Neill and Woody Allen.  Had I never climbed higher than Grade Five, I’d be smarter than a kid attending it.

I joined her at the table, and knew that some pensive, poetic filibuster was on the way.  In her guilt-covered mental state, I knew we would not be sharing an intellectual Cavett-style discussion about the comic genius of Mel Brooks, like the one we had last Saturday night.

“It’s too depressing in here………..Why don’t you put on the stereo…?”

She’s cold sober and saying this…??  Hell, okay, I’ll go along with it.  It certainly wasn’t the design I was used to.  Music was something reserved for enjoyable occasions.  It was something I couldn’t really listen to while doing something else. For me, music was serious stuff.  Even If I knew the song, I had to listen to it.  But, she wanted background score, so….roll with it..

“What should I put on..?”, as I clicked off the radio.

“I don’t know……Put on some Beatles…”

I opted for the most inobtrusive Beatles I could find:  The UA A Hard Day’s Night Original Soundtrack Album.

While the Fab Four draped the room like a muffled bar-corner Seeburg, Mom drifted into her inspired soliloquy…

“There’s a great deal to know about survival in this world………..and a tremendous part of it is showing up, and doing the work…… ..Doing the work and applying yourself is what gets you places in this world…..It gets you noticed…….I always did the work.  You know that..?? I was always the one doing the work…..in the office………..in my marriage…….If I was one minute late on the clock for Heitz and Rosenblatz in the Flatiron Building…..they would have fired me..! And I was the one secretary they couldn’t live without….”

No matter how many times I’d hear that stirring replay of her life in 1954, I knew this one would never be the last.  Today, it’s biblical application lent itself to a reminder of my errant truancy.  Kind of a “Sermonette”.  But longer than the one you’d get on Channel 4 at 4am.  And with a Beatles album behind it.

Not entirely though.  This album had plenty of instrumental orchestral jazz score, lots of jaunty early 60s black-n-white Room At The Top-era stuff, conducted by George Martin.  Perfect for imposed self-drama.  With little indication of the scene to come, I nailed the score.

My mom was deep into the climax of her impassioned diatribe.  “You’re gonna have to do the work…….you’re gonna have to take school seriously, and you’re gonna have to do the work….”, she cadenced as Martin’s jazz arrangement of “A Hard Day’s Night” hit it’s final bars.  The scene couldn’t have hit better if it were mixed in a Panavision film lab on Tenth Avenue.

“Why don’t you put on side two…?”, she said, breaking her gaze.

“I did….that was side two..”

“Oh………then put on something else…..that didn’t even sound like the Beatles”

I went over and found the White Album.  This was going to be a precarious day.  If mom didn’t have it in her to bravely sneak us out to the movies in an hour, then we’d have to be house prisoners until after 3PM.  I’d likely be with my TV reference books, Mad Magazines and Archie Comics until we could amble out to 108^th Street together.  I might mess around with my Fisher-Price Adventure figures, create a new little action drama or sitcom.  While mom slept off her anxiety.

I came and sat back down as “Back In The U.S.S.R” exploded on the house jukebox…

“Now this…”, mom said, “sounds more like the Beatles….”  

-Noah F.

 

No One Remembers the Ending, Anyway....

You’ll have to excuse us those of us in the middle-age-plus population. We’re all a little collectively confused right now.  It seems that just recently we were tossing six bucks in the ticket window to go inside and watch Winona Ryder and friends face up to the challenges of adulthood in Reality Bites, a tale of rich-kid college goof-offs now pitted against the isolation of making choices and responsibly fending for themselves, and a young woman’s shock of realizing how mentally unprepared she was.

No sooner have many of us somehow survived that traumatic blast, than we’re pitted against this next unwelcome frontier known as “retirement”.  It’s a word uncommon to our cool, young Generation-X lexicon, one reserved for the more dignified, clueless aged, like “arthritis”, “shuffleboard”, or “The Lawrence Welk Show”.

But according to economists, sociologists and even some numerologists, this is one of those things categorically arrived at and dealt with in life, not like taxes and what the next generation prefers to refer to as “becoming unalived”.

The real matter for most of us U.S. citizens just trying to affordably exist through the end of the week at our tender middle-ages really is, what’s our plan to continuously afford to be able to do so..?  For so many of us, it’s just not about “hanging it up”.  Of course, if you’re a pension-equipped civil service worker or teacher with forty years of daily work behind you, you’re on the retirement clock, and after a grueling several decades, you’ve earned your departure.  For many, that alone is traumatic, and for many even equipped financially with presumably enough money to “outlive their lives”, many of these people have only a week or two of blessed commemoration before they can start beginning to fear the financial scare of outliving their life’s assets in the next five years.

It’s those very folks that will accept only a brief sabbatical before returning somehow to a paying job of some sort, whether advanced and industrial or small and menial. Many will not do so in the pursuit of their life’s longtime wants, hopes and dreams.  They’ll do it to pay the rent.

The word retirement bears a definition, but not the connotation it once did, the universal one we as teenagers long associated with the effective image of that white-maned portly chap, standing in front of his two-story, twelve-room, immaculately white-decked mansion on a gorgeous southern field against a majestic sunset in that financial brokerage commercial in the middle of CBS NFL Sunday.  That was our 1980s, and a good many folks of that white-maned chap’s age back then were the first to correct any misapprehensions about the fact that under the Reagan Administration, what was then the imposed Mandatory Retirement meant a sparse fixed income and an occasional dinner of the cheapest shelf pet food. The strength emerging at senior age back then was in refusing to stand down one’s pride in enduring this new strip of one’s so-called dignity, one now almost fully relinquished.  One of those folks might have even been the actor playing that fictional guy in the commercial.  The agency producing the spot probably got the faux mansion-front on loan from some movie studio.

Even those who proudly in discussion, upon “what do you do.?”, will offer “Oh, I’m retired”, are not likely “comfortable” for life.  There is a tidal wave of clarity abundance over the fact that with age comes invariable health challenges, need for conventional medical attention, unmeetable costs, minimal healthcare on absolutely any level and the realization that if you are not the President of the U.S. with trillions in a backlife of personal wealth, you can forget about the freedom to be treated to a full analytic physical exam by twenty-two physicians, even in two lifetimes.  Need we remember that around the time of the Obamacare laws, a good many citizens of this country opted to face the tax burden and live uninsured, due to costs, and in many cases, due to unemployment.

Depending upon how your last four decades have gone since turning legal age, this so-called “retirement” thing may not be something you’re not only not ready to embrace, but not interested in actually embracing.  Burgers and hot dogs on the grill on July 4^th are a trendy, All-American, succulent thing.  But with all due respect, maybe not everyone has an appetite for those.

In the same vein, not everyone is necessarily willing or ready, for more than just immediate financial reasons (but primarily those..) to walk off the treadmill of their daily lives and jobs and just “retire”.  For many, more than we realize, our jobs, these so-called yolks, these harnesses we complainably bear for so long in our daily lives, are in fact the nucleus of our lives.  While my own “X” generation was told in the 1980s that the old paradigm of going to work for one employer for two or three decades or more is now thoroughly extinct, there is, among this very generation a considerable body of people who have, almost unbeknownst to themselves, found themselves gratefully employed by the same employer, complaints, warts and all, for decades, amidst life changes, loss, relationships, endeavor, survival and visibility of the sixty-yard line.  Throughout it all, not a day of work missed, not a deadline met late, and not even every vacation day or sick day claimed.  And they’ve no intention of relinquishing their responsibility, if their employer is willing to continue to hold them in their trust. 

These are not folks, mind you, of immense salary of any sort.  If there’s one unattractive factor leading an employee to the sack heap, it’s an overpriced salary. If one’s salary is truly far overpriced in the face of some company’s all-new economic design, then the sack is kind of a foregone conclusion.  But if that employee is one whose stipend is actually scalable enough to meet that company’s ledger, and the work output continuously reliable, effective and well-received enough to help turn profit and generate positive outward image for the company, almost no employer in this day and age is going to pass that up.

The fact is, the “X” generation is likely the first to embody a kind of agelessness, a type not really known to the one-time draft-protest and Vietnam-vet baby-boomers, the war-veteran, government-mortgaged, homeowning grandparents we knew as white-haired Dinah Shore-watchers, or even ones a few years younger, who came up during the Great Depression and read the earliest Marvel Comics and attended CCNY in the 1950s.  All those folks lived more than one action-packed, death-defying life before we even knew them, and between war service, jobs in what was then high-paying U.S. industry and solid investments cooked in the go-go 1980s, they had no financial qualms about easing on down the road.   Many of us aimless college moneyspenders of the 80s didn’t live such full lives.  Some of us emerged from those concealing campus book forests to a world of barren cost, debt and unemployment, and simply clawed onto what we could when we could.   And now, decades later, here we are, things gratefully for the moment okay, maybe for the first time ever.  And now we’re told, we’ve got to plan on giving it all up.

Those of us who have not made too many bad choices ever since Reagan left the White House, those of us who have maintained much of our physical and mental well-being, have preserved a base amount of whatever we’ve earned and managed to squirrel away and invest moderately since Millenium’s end may not be ready to leave a more enjoyable resort to which we’ve only in our mind just arrived:  A liveable life. One that begins our day with the challenge of having to get up, work out, change into our outfits, check our e-mail for the day’s gripes ahead, and board the train into the office for our predictable stack of responsibilities, a relay race that awards us that invisible trophy each day.  The challenge ahead for this generation is largely not that of racing toward the finish line, but recognizing the endorphin boost and creation owed directly to that race. It’s not just income, albeit a huge overriding factor  And those who have chided us long ago about defining yourself by what you do for a living just might want to re-consider the definitions of that.

One thing I recall as a kid that’s gone away almost entirely is a term used to define “what you do”.  People didn’t call it a “job”, or “what you do for a living”.  They called it your occupation.  That’s really a beautiful term.  There’s lots of new, soft terms for unpleasant realities, like “unalived”.  Maybe it’s time to reboot this old and very respectable term for “what you do”.  Because much in the way You Are What You Eat, the truth is, whether you know it or not, by inner values, what you do is in fact who and what you are. Be it a shirt folder, a grocery bagger, a broadcast producer, an office administrator, or a ticket clerk, your excellence in performance defines you, and your embrace of that task helps you to be the best you are.  There is often no one prouder than a life-long stay-at-home parent.

There’s no such thing as “done”. If anything, this generation is ready. Let’s try and stay that way.  This soap-opera we’re living has long to go.  We’re not about to be written out. 

Noah F.

 

 

 

 

They Have Nice Oranges...

 

I don’t know how to say “Good Morning”.  I don’t think I ever have, nor do I even recall in my lifetime ever even using that phrase to greet someone. Really.  I’ve long come up with various all-purpose greetings to my fellow humans of all sorts, like “Good day”, or “How are ya’..”, or “Howdy”, or anything politely friendly.  But I do not acknowledge the day’s proud launch and the sun’s noble emergence.  There are not too many common habits from which I’m blocked on the basis of sheer principle, but this is affordably one of them.  Perhaps proudly the only one.

There’s this term called “swing shifts”, and many in this world live by them and are put to them. They are the livelihood of a population in which indeed only the strong survive. It’s an adorable little verbal description, like “wintry mix”, which does not nearly depict the near-fatal dangers of black ice, that invisible trap that on a good day can permanently cripple a pedestrian with an injury point blank, with a mere walk to the convenience store.  “Swing Shifts” denote the sometimes extra-long and enduring stretches at work closely held by workers in need, shifts separated by only less than ten hours of downtime between night and daybreak.  The recess does not allow for the proper inclusion of moderate travel, down-time, proper meal, a night’s sleep, a morning’s wake and preparation, and return trip.  And these shifts are a cornerstone of any given portion of someone’s week in the span of their regularized calendar life.

For reasons only my banker and psychologist will be able to spend a few volumes breaking down and explaining, to room-evacuating boredom, that’s been the shape of my life for much of it thus far. An adolescence of drug experimentation, a set of beers in concert parking lots on Friday nights and joy rides is not at all the profile of my own youth, and has gratefully allowed me to maintain much of my founding structure.  The deterioration I’ve incurred has been the result of the swing shifts that have defined my life.  Much like a World War II veteran, it’s a badge I hold with pride.

People who work in the broadcast industry are very often creatures of stealth.  There’s really no reason why they ought to be, and for all kinds of arcane and sometimes viable reasons, they are. It doesn’t lend a great deal of prestige to how they spend their lives, but it fulfills them in ways that self-help pronouncers are always advocating.  It’s been said that if your occupation, that thing you do every day that has you buried in commitment and activity which actually serves to pay your inflating rent to some end, actually provides you with a sense of personal accomplishment and pride almost every day, then you never have to retire.   That’s a pretty good survival arrangement for those of us who will never have the affordability in our lifetimes to do so. 

I’m one of them.  There is also the urban legend regarding the financial stability and income of those who work in anything bearing the connotation held by the title “broadcast industry”, that handsome and alluring phrase that conjures up iconic images of expansive sunny poolsides, Tudor houses or Upper West Side six-room apartment dwellings in classic pre-war residential buildings.  That’s actually one of the reasons for the common stealth.  It’s not the one-percent in hiding. It’s the Shame of the 99-ers.  There are too many positions gratefully, grippingly and very scavengeristically held by industry survivors, that while not by any means lucrative, maybe even loss-incurring, are ones long held, nurtured and long protected by those skilled enough to know how, ones that fulfill beyond bank account, and while definable enough in words, can’t really be conveyed, even sometimes to industrial brethren.  How do you explain the voluntary sacrifice of half a week’s sleep every week over the course of your adult life..?

You don’t.  You just function with it politely in a world innocently apathetic.  That includes paying no mind to those who greet at day’s start under a blazing eastern sun with “Good Morning”.  Like some others, I’ve learned how to contend with phrase intolerances.

Those intolerances include the metabolic challenges of functioning upright at day’s beginning.  Only the held nobility of one’s professional commitments can charge one’s batteries on a Saturday morning at 7:30am.  All those M*A*S*H episodes I watched at 7pm on Channel 5 as a kid each night definitely paid off.  I couldn’t do all this otherwise.  I’d have no template for existence.  At 7:30, after an hour or so of getting a few preparatory chores done on the floor, I’ll head downstairs to the takeout deli, just one oasis of many that still, after more than seventy years powers New York City. 

By that time, they’re usually open and doing business.  They’re probably at it even earlier on weekdays, but gratefully my own weekdays don’t begin until afternoon, so with any luck I won’t need to know. But on this Saturday I ambled outdoors, still bundled in my wool cap and heavy windbreaker.  It’s the first week of a brisk June.  I’ve just emerged from an industrial suite of electronics that’s for various reasons kept at fifty-nine degrees at all times.  The early morning frost of outdoors isn’t exactly a stunning blow.  I walk two doors down into the already-busy deli shop.  Yes, life persists even on a Saturday morning in New York.

While not nearly the “floor of the NYSE” this tiny interior could be on a weekday morning, it’s still pretty busy. The grill and chefs are hard at it in their white uniforms, barking away to one-another in Espanol.  Handsome and trendy-looking early risers are all placing their orders.  They are the people for whom our city stands.  They are the economic structures that wouldn’t be caught dead looking like anything less than that Polo ad on page four of the New York Sunday Times Magazine.

And here, wending his path through this cool-kid mob, is this dweeb in a Michael Nesmith wool hat, making his way over to the fruit bin for one of those huge sour apples and one of those king-size navel oranges.  For a place that thrives on grill orders, this little shop’s best kept secret is its navel oranges.  You couldn’t get one of these at Key Food in-season.  But you can get one here in January.  It’s remarkable. 

I’m not a grill-cuisine kind of guy. I’m the more Mediterranean-menu type who can live off fruits, nuts and some carrots for a long day or two, and with any luck not too much of anything else. But surrounding me is a World’s Fair of people about to chow down on some of New York’s best-prepared grease.

I’ve got my orange, apple, dollar sack of assorted nuts and simply turn to face the counter.  The shop is that small.  In front of me is a woman nearly my height, topped by a haystack of platinum-blonde hair, not quite portly in her duck-yellow T-shirt and blue-denim shorts, Timberland moccassins.  The high-end assembly-line ensemble. She’s up at the counter clarifying her order to the minimally-English speaking chef over the roar of the grill.  It’s a classic Jane Curtain-John Belushi “Olympia Diner” bit.  The conversation is a no-win challenge for this woman, trying to ascertain the complex list of selections for her and her accompanying family, her portlier husband near the window, a taller, stouter gray-haired fellow in handsome turtle-shell frames, probably ten years my junior, the vision of an award-winning L.L. Bean ad, the corporate exec on holiday, just a few feet away from his pre-adolescent son and daughter, a pair equally as handsome, all probably shuttled in on the PATH for a fun Saturday in The Big Apple.

Would I ever in theory deny these good folks such pleasure..? Never.  At one time I was in fact one of those blessed youngsters a few feet away.  Even younger.  Living with my mom in my uncle’s home in Bayside, my mom, my aunt and I would on occasion venture out on a Saturday for a city voyage, to the MOMA, and a tour through Brentanoes, a book-and-music emporium that will never hold a candle to the remaining Barnes And Noble structures of today.  Best conjure I can find today is an excursion through the Strand.  Those city visits into that broken-down metropolis of the 1970s remain a treasure.  My mom probably had visions of her son as one of those preppified-looking children in their Saturday Bean-togs and feathered-hair styles.  But I was rather a fat little nine-year-old with an untameable rats’ nest on top and a crew-neck pullover from Murray’s Husky Wholesalers on Northern Blvd.  A visit to Brentanoes often meant a new great Judy Blume paperback and maybe a cassette of a Dylan album I hadn’t yet heard.  Usually, the pick was a full-length winner.

The woman in front of me was getting somewhere with her translative struggle.  She turned to call to her husband, “Did you say bacon…?  You want bacon..??”  I wondered if bacon was quite so important to that fellow who apparently wasn’t about to even sit down to a traditional breakfast with his family in a regulation diner.  Was bacon on his fifteen-dollar egg sandwich quite the critical hinge on the whole day these folks planned, one for which they re-scheduled their lives, hired the dog-sitter, gave up soccer practice and re-scheduled that online Zoom-corporate strategy meeting…? Who am I to question the flowchart of what makes this little restaurant, this small engine powering this superpower island run, the ecosystem that allows this weird kid in the wool hat and polar windbreaker in June the privilege of dining on a luscious navel orange and a dollar-sack of almonds in a frosty industrial office-floor chamber in peaceful solace at eight in the morning on a Saturday..?

It was almost a shame, I thought, for what appeared to be only me appreciating the offering of such prime, natural fruit in a venue of preferred fried and grease-heavy traditional American breakfast numbers.  The fruit was probably a big seller with the runners, the twenty-and-thirtysomething digital designers and web developers, the “weekend warriors” in their designer togs and three-figure running shoes, on their passionate quest to run the length of this great borough, in the hope of one day qualifying for the Marathon.  It just looks and feels good to have those healthy, natural treats in your supply bag along with that bottle of brand-name alkaline water Jennifer Aniston’s holding in that digital subway ad, in her workout gear, looking sharper than ever thirty years after her sitcom fame. 

In my hungry and mostly-conscious state, I arrived with my goods at the counter.  The young, black-hoodie-clad, black-haired Latina, looking something like a figure seen in some NBC News report tape from abroad, was actually at a blockade in trying to tabulate the price of an orange.  Unlike the grill orders, where the chef will shout out the price or scribble it on the wrapper, the fruit is not visibly priced.  The young lady had to mount an investigation amongst her colleagues.  The chef did not know.  The counter assistant did not know.  They called the store manager, who did not readily know.  He went over to the basket of oranges, studied a few, to find no listed price anywhere.  He turned and shouted to the young lady, “Doh-lar-feefty..!”

Two-seventy-five altogether.  An embarrassingly small denomination toward such an important fixture in our town. But I also knew that with enough visits from it’s indigenous and visiting patrons, it would do well today.  I’d be upstairs, doing my part as well.  The lady and I finished our business and she kindly said, “have a good day, sweetie..”  I said back, “You have a blessed one, yourself…”, and I meant it.  No references to the time of day were necessary.  In the course of our discussion, it was irrelevant.

Noah F.