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.

The Inedible Cassette...

 

When I was a kid, it was about windows and floor wax.  Now, it’s strictly about business.

Transparency.

In the last fifteen years at least, the word has become the most indispensible ornament to any workplace populated by humans, office furniture, fluorescent lights and Keurig machines.

Transparency, by one definition, means that you can see right through it.

In nearly any corporate environment, the very imperative mandate for transparency accomplishes just that.  You can’t avoid the tendency to see right through it.  

What’s the imperative mandate about, anyway…?  Just what went on before transparency became the mantra prayer among the devout compound..?

It was probably the inescapable revolution of litigations, claims and accusations within the confines of so many of those white-collar, khaki-trousered, office-supplied high-rise settings in the last few decades that have had C.E.O.s at their Howard Beale wits’ end.  They’re mad as hell, both angry and sanity-wise, they’re not gonna take it anymore, and they’ll fix it with the ultimate lock on the door.  We Will All Pledge Allegiance to Transparency.

I do seem to remember this word called “honesty” as a kid, and how that was the best policy.  But transparency defines it further in practice.  It’s the policy requiring all relevant information and exchange thereof to be at all times “cc”d and shared amongst all relative parties.

That doesn’t sound like a bad idea, really.  It almost sounds like the sort of thing so many people in the stapler-and-water cooler shrines march out of mandatory diagnostic meetings furious about, the lack of that elusive thing called communication.   But unquestionably, a mandate policy on transparency will eradicate that age-old problem, post-haste.

To really understand whether or not an edict on transparency is going to do any good, we need to first figure out why, in a office building full of technology, with teams of people smarter than the room, communication, the simple-sugar building block of transparency, just doesn’t, despite every best concentrated intention, work.

A team-based work environment of any sort is the direct equivalent to a family.  While one’s work family environment may (hopefully) not be nearly as toxic as that within one’s domestic family, the template still exists.  So does the disorder.

And much like a functional family, the main ingredients that keep it running each and every day will be firmly and indestructibly in place.  Rationale is one of those.  The visibly blue sky will forever be green, until the patriarchs change their minds.  Then, there’s double standards.  They’re like those blank tiles in Scrabble.  Any interoffice ruling at large can be deemed null and void for any individual for any reason, without definition.  Or, for a transparently flimsy one, the blatantly obvious nature of which is never to be articulated in transparent form.  If you want to keep your job.

And why wouldn’t you..?!  Nothing has prepared us more for our interoffice tenures in our lives than growing up in the dysfunctional family household.  No financial-aid-available business school is going to teach this most critical component of employment foundation.  Game winners of all sorts come directly from those threatening, defeating, and emotionally exhausting family environments that many of us go home to daily when the scale-model version at work is done.  Just what are some of the tenets learned to us in the school no one pays to attend..?

There’s actually many, but maybe the most valuable and significant for personal survival regards the practice of silence.  Keeping your mouth shut often will avert the most unnecessary drama and upheaval within the family walls.  That which must be said, family survivors have long decreed, must remain unspoken if we all need to get to bed tonight and get up and go to work tomorrow.

Within that policy falls a level of discretion.  Sometimes, something needs to be addressed.  But to whom, and to whom it ought not be presented, for purposes of damage control, therein lies the acquired scientific knowledge.

This wonderful new practice called transparency sure does sound innovative, but it will only meet eyes and ears that are willing. When claims of “too technical”, “I can’t follow all that stuff..”, and “I just need you to answer my question..” abound, you know you’ve followed the transparency mandate a little too closely to the letter. 

Transparency as a policy of course, implies the desire for full visibility upon a situation.  But no one wants to see anything they don’t want to.  So, if you’ve got a mess on your hands..?  Play it up, turn the good points into something invaluable, let ‘em know how you’ve got the bad points cornered, count the blessings, curse none, and you’ve just authored a model work of transparency…!

It’s almost a shame when the chiefs corner you in the hallway months later wanting to know about that problem three months earlier that they’re first recognizing, and you proudly remind them about your highly transparent report which you e-mailed them at the time.

The answer..? “If anything like that happens again, just call us.  E-mails take too long to read, and we just want to get it fixed..”

Transparency fortunately isn’t something you can hear through.  Praise the Lord for voice mail.

I’m putting my old Phone-Mate machine up for sale. The ad describes it as “State Of The Art, Fully Transparent”.

 

Noah F.

 

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.