Smartz...

I've learned over time to do away with more and more "prized possessions".  When you're younger, the thrilling gift of having any kind of living space of your own is commemorated by your ability to furnish and decorate it, as elaborately as you can in even the smallest space, in what you might even perceive the sparsest way.   Years later, to your astonishment, you're just an episode away from Hoarders.

After just upwards of twenty years of residence in a charmingly rustic, single-occupancy flat, a home that ushered me from ambivalent youth to insecure middle age, it was my decision to move, upon a relationship successfully turned domestic, that sent me into the future shock of excavating my buried life.  Most often, it's upon a sad passing that a loved one's belongings and possessions are suddenly unearthed and sorted out, a round of violent, psychological dodgeball commencing, met by the brusque trashing of belongings unobserved or recalled.  I incurred the very same, with one unique difference.  I was very much alive.  Had been and still was.

The takeaway was that my new life would bear no trace of hoardership.   Clutter-proofing would not wait for spring.  In our new abode, my wife of several years and I have generally made good on that, or would have to in our small space.  My music collection, still maintained on compact disc, is mindfully not a closet's worth, but rather a small storage box and minor shelf space.  Obscure books are my treasure, but they are thankfully not quite so exorbitant as acquisitions, and once I'm done with one, I make a point of gifting it rewardingly to one who will enjoy it the same, save for the dozen I'm savoring for long commutes.  Clothing always calls for a requisite amount of excavation, and forming donations of any size are a rewarding ritual.  My narrowed-down library of twentieth-century TV Guides remains as such, as those have kept their place in my existence as a sort of compass, one to which I'll comfortably return often to put my existence on Earth in agreeable perspective.  Were I beamed for any reason onto the deck of Starship Voyager, I'd make out just fine so long as I'm equipped with those.

Beyond all that, there remains one singular possession of questionable necessity that I have not yet seen fit to discard.  And it seems to unavoidably be taking up more and more space in most obtrusive way.  That's my cherished intellect.

Growth is just a fact of a human organism's life.  Growth in height discontinues at a young age, but then other parts and portions expand, which then call for the mindful effort at maintenance as necessary.  It's been said that any extraneous effort to "keep the brain active" is always a good thing.   Puzzles, strategy games, and things of that sort.  Then, there's those of us who are challenged enough to that end professionally each day to know we've got that preventative end covered.  The brain is pretty important.

But just how important is "intellect", or the capacity to function as an "intellectual"..?  A cousin of mine is in digital hardware sales.  The last time I visited his palatial home, it was futuristically furnished with a widescreen monitor, large or small, fitted onto the central wall of no less than any room in that winding house.  I took note of it, and he sheepishly admitted...."Nature of the business...."

Intellectuality is indeed the nature of many businesses and professions.  It's not just a capacity, but rather it's more of an elite uniform, worn by an immensely sophisticated order.  I can't name them all here, but probably anything highly academic, scholars, history authors, attorneys, M.D.s, PhD's, entertainment critics, perhaps those who care to prove themselves greater than their dollar worth, as my mother's one-time outspoken brother-in-law sought to during one of his many unemployments.  His sister would counter him with "you're unemployed, you're not entitled to an opinion.."

I may not be interested in trying to disguise my worth to others in any way.  Other than myself, of course (and probably in-turn to others in some inflated self-image)

 But as we all learn in our upbringing, your dollar worth is not your human worth.  You get older and learn the other side of that quadratic equation which is, "yeah, but your dollar worth is what pays for your human dignity.."  Once you learn how to more-or-less balance that mental see-saw, you're in business.  My immediate form of living does not require any sort of intellectual bent.  It requires a responsible, reasoning mind.  I'm grateful to maintain one of those.  The job, and the mind.  There are times though, much as I love, cherish and nurture it to this day, I could use a little less of the intellect.

My mother, rest her soul, was what one might call a "pseudo-intellectual".  Maybe.  I don't even know what qualifies one as a legitimate intellectual, beyond a master's degree and maybe a PBS talk show.  But for someone who's daily grind consisted for nearly thirty five years of "administrative assistantry", a role more traditionally defined as "secretary", a conversation with her at any interval might have proven her capable of marching into a lecture hall at City College and delivering the history of eighteenth-century literature.

She was born and raised during those lean FDR years, youngest in a Coney Island family of five. Jewish both in origin and in practice.  Her eldest brother was highly devout in his prayer and religious study.  He would go on to become a successful C.P.A, and co-founder of his neighborhood's temple.  My mother's exploits were not the same, for reasons of design and fate.  She had the wounded soul and gift of a writer, like those mid-century contemporaries whose works she would devour.  Yet no half-ended creations on her part would ever see completion or publication. College would not be an option for her in the late 1940s.  She needed to leave home, and establish her freedom.  No high-school graduating female back then was less than encouraged by her guidance counselor to seek full-time office work after the diploma.  She did.  

But in the young, voracious woman's hunger for knowledge, and envy of the collegiate fantasy land, later shameful of her lack of official academia, her resolve came in acquiring every and any enticing bound piece of literature there was, and maintaining in mind the best, to sharpen her game at early socio-political intellectual nok-hockey with the most outspoken surrounders of the early 1950s.  Conversationalists loved her.  Through her many years of failed marriage, de-railed business venture, alcoholism and truncated recovery, precarious health, and the trepidatious vigil of the next federal aid check in the mailbox, no one left a visit with this woman any less than thoroughly entertained.  

Among her last words to me before her blessed, sudden death at age sixty-five:  "This fucking gift is all I've ever had..."

It must have been a pretty deluxe one.  She had to be out of my life entirely for at least twenty years before I could genuinely acknowledge the growth of my own.  Certainly nothing astonishing, given the genealogy.  And hardly do I take it for granted.  Having attended college in the 1900s, put to laborious "liberal arts" curriculums of text that seemed to have zero applicable purpose in preparation for one's functional paycheck life of almost any sort (today a lamented pandemic, put to constant "Liberal Arts-shaming" by noted economists..), my guiltiest pleasure now is not a bucket of double-fudge Ben & Jerry's, but in the same vein a tome of sociological theory in historical view, the vintage publications amongst some I'd been put to back then.  Except now my tastes have been acquired.  No exam.  No interminable lecture to stay awake through.  No grade points.  Just the fulfillment of finally absorbing the stuff I once thought might be interesting one day when there's no exam next week.  

In the last few years alone, I've sought out non-fiction of vintage rarity that beckons suddenly, like an Alice down-the-rabbit-hole into the awareness of the greatest, richest library ever.  My prayer often focuses on the gift of my eyesight.  And more than a couple pair of reading specs at all times, lest I end up a broken Burgess Meredith at the end of a Twilight Zone.

When my ride is done, however, my daily radio production chores fitfully accomplished, and the march home from the train commences, I bring my assets into question.  Does the nourishment of a vaster intellect bear greater wealth to one's narrow life..?  Or is it merely a space-hoarding, unnecessary appliance better kept in the corner of one's closet.  Can one in fact commit such an act of deprivation rightfully in the name of one's mental health and well being..?  Even physical for that matter...?  After all, I lived without the gym during a year of COVID shutdown, and kept in shape miraculously well.  But I wouldn't even think of or know how to do anything like this.

I never forgot that moment in the Steve Martin drama Pennies From Heaven, in which he steps out of  a movie theater and notes the stark exit from a world of heavenly fantasy back into a dark world of grim exhuast.   Quite often, that's me stepping out of the subway, and out of my trip through literary time, a voyage through an overwrought, over-written, over-published academic ocean of text and articles on media criticism, social theory, television history, film dialectics and half of what I don't even know what Judith Crist was talking about in 1968, ascending onto a nighttime boulevard I prefer to pretend is still in 1970, sleek Pontiacs and choking tailpipes, hissing GMC "fishbowl" buses, drugstores and neon luncheonettes where "bodegas" live today.  Am I overloaded on strictly decorative knowledge...?

Probably. But most likely, as a wife-loving and invariably alienated man of center-age, some distracted Walter Mitty who may or may not have time left to write that book, novel, column or anything else of dollar-worthy release to justify his extracurricular brain engagement, it's just my current trend, as was my precious "discovery" and embrace of post-war jazz at age fifty.  You can love it always, but you never forget your first romance.  And if my romantic conquests as such are the product of what I might rightly or wrongly diagnose as any kind of famished "intellect", then I can rejoice in the possession of something only a teenager can take for granted:  A very healthy libido.

Noah F.

The Play's The Thing

WS wasn't kidding when he proclaimed "All The World's A Stage".  Life's a night at the theater, alright.  But you don't get to keep your seat.

You start out with the best seats in the house, front and center in the orchestra section.  Then, you move back one.  You do this annually, and sometimes the view gets even better.  Later on though, as you're settling into row 54, you begin to wonder just what it is that keeps you coming back to this show, despite the seating.

Sometimes, the show's just not that great.  But if you're going to have a night out at the theater, you're going to enjoy it no matter what.  And truthfully, there's plenty to enjoy in attending the theater, well beyond what's on the stage.  I would doubt that the theater district would be the Stonehenge that it is to this day, after milleniums of theater, were it not for that capability on the part of the patron.

The same principle applies quite applicably to life.  If it didn't suck in a litany of ways predictable and unexpected, it wouldn't be a genuine life.  But it's the great in-between that's going to dress it up to livable ends.  My own theater has long excelled in design.  

I was not a friend-maker as a child.  Fairly withdrawn, I was not much one to "put myself out there", as some were.  As you turn a few years older, that quiet withdrawal goes from peaceful asset to dangerous deficit, as classmates and kids around you are stunted and maybe offended by what seems like your dismissive behavior.  Then you're an outcast.  Like I was.  At a very formidable age, I discovered a recipe to make it work.

Imagination is not a foreign tool to children.  In my tool box, it was critical.  Fantasy depictions of semi-realism decorated my dull days.  I would sit in my second-grade grammar school class during a math lesson picturing three or four classmates I knew, along with myself, in a comedy sketch much like ones on The Carol Burnett Show, played on our auditorium stage, to thunderous applause.  In reality of course, these were only classmates I saw each day, and did not personally know.

When I finally did get around to making some friends amongst them, interacting with them daily was not nearly as fulfilling as the embellishments my imagination would add.  Craig was this kid who asked me to hold his notebook once while he got up at the plate for softball.  I ran with that as a great show-business anecdote about an excited actor who worked in a movie I was producing.  He asked me to hold his bag while he went up and shot the scene, and though I really had no patience for this, I knew how badly we needed this scene shot, so I complied. What a great show-biz industry story for my fantasy memoir...!   Anyway, it took the grim out of the school day.

If something works this well for free, you're not going to give up on it.  Walter Mitty certainly didn't.  A grownup employing a childhood-strength imagination was apparently weird enough for James Thurber to become poetic about.   It sure worked for me.  My internal reflex had it's winning recipe. 

In my youngest childhood, I was oft paired up with my younger cousin for play.  He was usually not nearly as amenable as I was and his behavior toward me could swerve badly for any reason at any time.   I was used to it, but as much as it would upset me on the spot, I was usually not about to bear enemy intent.  For one thing, practical matters wouldn't allow it.  I just had to suck it up.  Meanwhile, he was my only social contemporary.  But I could not afford to allow my one weekly retreat on my precious Saturdays off from P.S. 203 to go south on that account.  As miserable as visit's end could well become, I turned the trip to my cousin's house (or his to mine) into the best movie on Hollywood's Finest  I could conjure.  Our play adventures in the backyards of the adjoined garden apartments I viewed in black-&-white noir, directed by Richard Lester.  I don't know what my cousin was imagining, but it didn't matter.

Before arrival even, I'd envision the talk we'd have, myself as demanding director, he as temperamental actor, and the technical discussion we'd be locked into.  Once I was there of course, none of this was possible.  He shared no concept of mine.  I certainly couldn't have expected him to.

In a way, despite my mental and ideological distance, I somehow preferred it that way.  To have him take up residence in my own dream sequence would have been too invasive somehow.  Some thoughts are better left simply thought.  And sometimes, elaborately.

My cousin and I drifted apart quite naturally on the horizon of pre-adolescence.  We were too ensconced in our own lives at that point, and nature took it's course. We would maintain little if any immediate contact subsequently.  But I thought of him distinctly nearly thirty years later.  Strictly in character, in a role I conjured up in my fantasy machine one day.  It was a story again of producer and actor, where he was offered a sum of money to write a screenplay, which he did brilliantly in no time flat, but refused to sign off on the rights.  It was quite a potboiler.  At age thirty-eight, I marched off to work one afternoon, raptured by the nostalgia of our harmless, imagination-filled play dates, in the form of some advance story of two completely fictional grownups.   Dorothy Gale had to get whacked into a near coma during a tornado to invent a technicolor romp featuring her life's cast members as a dancing scarecrow and a singing lion.  More than twice her age, I did this fully conscious.  I certainly could not relate this oblique, pleasant departure to my co-star.  I hadn't spoken to him in a good many years, and as I'd been made to understand from family members in more recent times, he'd been having his own bad mental struggles.  No point.

But as far as the well-being of my mind went, still, it effectively "paid the rent and kept the lights on", as it had in many other prosceniums.

I hadn't visited my friend Cray in quite some time.   He lived boroughs away, and although we were once a lot closer, and practically neighbors as young men of twenty, we had not been for long since.  Our earliest kinship was our greatest asset, to each of us, respectively.  But yet not in precisely the same way.   

Much as I knew this very entertaining, budding young singer-songwriter, despite the laughter and friendship he'd share with me in my toughest times, I came soon to know him as someone just slightly impaired.  Psychologically, or behaviorally perhaps.   Something that might keep him from common, effective, self-sufficient interaction with others.  Disturbingly, I was not wrong.  Unremarkably, over a long and gradual span of time, many years, our separation as "best friends" would come.  Sad though, it was a valuable friendship that took me through very many years.  Not through a generous amount of "face time" necessarily.  Mostly, as I'd later recognize, it was through my own "Wizard Of Oz" imagination.  Me as producer, him as comic artist-partner in our own syndicated radio endeavor, one powerfully successful as we dodged corporate executives over content and won no end of faithful sponsors and listeners to massive broadcast legend success.  Those corporate meetings and studio sessions made for some of the best daydreams of the 1990s, on the way to the laundromat.  Spin cycles were never shorter.

It remains to say that a life daydreamed will always be just that.  Regret in the hindsight of decades later bears no value.  Rather, my resourceful inclination becomes that of at least appreciating the artful design instincts of my own life-long inertia.   If you can't have a life of success, maybe you read enough about others and about history to simply dream up your own.  And live in it.   As a safe, free coping mechanism over much of my life, it seems to have worked.  And if I threw away the best parts, they couldn't have been all that good.

There are of course side effects.  There's that "Altered States" experience of suddenly coming to, realizing that your actual life is just you going back and forth to work and the convenience store for over twenty years, doing nothing but dreaming your life virtually.   That was me and my so-called nervous breakdown about ten years before social media graduated to the point of being able to nearly step into a virtual existence of one's distinct choice.  The takeaway is that such isolation is not only in fact too common, but too ready for the escape such technology promises to bring.  Has COVID been a factor..?   For some, very possibly, a divinely convenient permission slip.

I would ultimately choose to seek that to which I best related. My imagination went full force in enjoyable fashion once I'd begun dating a charming young woman I'd met.  Date nights are always a time for dreaming one's best self.  We were who we were, and had stellar times.  But until marriage, I'd yet to learn of my wife's incredible and graceful gift of imagination.  As an avid doll collector, her immediate solace and joy is the appreciation of her collection of beautiful characters, the imagination that turns our living room into a Shari Lewis or Mister Rogers showcase, with riotous inter-character discussions, sub-plots and stories.  gorgeously wardrobed and scenery co-created by a spouse cherishing this gift just as much.  Her characters are as real to her and often now to myself as maybe King Friday or Daniel The Tiger was to Fred Rogers in Pittsburgh long ago.  And from the fifty-fourth row up, somehow the show on stage doesn't even really matter anymore.  It's just a great one.

I'm still plagued by some of my imaginary tendencies.   Late one night, a pop song from my radio-eared childhood reached my ears.  it was "Fernando" by ABBA.  Suddenly, I'm in the fourth-grade schoolyard with that vibrant, friendly girl classmate I knew who chose one day to include me in some make-believe skit of hers.  From there, my mind's got it.  I'm a talk-show host inviting this beloved actress onto my show for a hilarious Letterman-esque discussion.  The song faded, I returned to now, gathered my items and headed for the checkout.

No, it's far from real.  But it's my life.  I'll take it.

Noah F.