Summer of The Sign-Off

That first breeze of late August was a reminder of something I was for the first time in my life genuinely anticipating: The new school year.  In 1979, I'd be entering Junior High School, and based on a tour my sixth-grade class was treated to months before, I was more than ready for this.  It looked like the academic proscenium was finally stepping up to my sophisticated standards.  In a post-war-era-founded schoolhouse a block away from the grammar one of the same vintage, genuine interiors that would render no Norman Rockwell portrait all that impressive, I saw the image of upperclassman maturity.  Hallway lockers, individual desks, a front lobby with a pay phone and men's and women's restrooms. Not "girls" and "boys", mind you.  This place meant business.  It was my kind of scene.  For a kid of eleven, I was just as much an alien from Ork amongst my peers.  I wanted to hang with the grownups.  Those people knew how to have a good conversation.

Good conversation was the most significant, and maybe the healthiest part of my diet when I was growing up.  I was surrounded by it constantly and at times encouraged to engage in it.  My mother always had an opinion and the need to express it.  And she wasn't afraid to secretly share with her son her acerbic disdain for interpersonal environments unconducive.  If the family was getting together at her niece's place or my aunt's on a Sunday afternoon, she'd try and toss out a thought about some article she just read in the Times magazine. It would fall flat in a room of resigned visitors, met only with the roar of the NFL crowd on the Trinitron.  She would look at me with that sinister glow and whisper to me....."they don't read books..."

Those were family Sundays.  The other kind were ones spent with her friends, far away from the Great Neck suburbs.  The Village.  Mercer Street.  In some ways, the geographic was all you needed to know.

It was in a fantasically expensive one-bedroom that my mom's ex-husband lived.  I never knew this man during their marriage, which existed and expired well before my arrival on Earth.  I was the product of something less lasting, a relationship my mom shared with a younger man around the time of her separation.  The mid-1960s was no time for this kind of personal liberation. Popular media would not sympathetically endorse that kind of departure beyond a potboiler like Kazan's The Arrangment, which meant that if you're going to have that kind of relationship acceptably, it had better contain Mia Farrow.  During a borough traffic jam, I was almost born in the cab on the way home from the divorce.

Needless to say, the stranger and I never met.  I'd grow up hearing affectionate things about him, but he was little more than something akin to Alan Ladd in Shane..  He and my mom, reportedly on very tacit terms parted ways.  He was never heard from or sought by my mother again.

In stark contrast, her most prized compatriots remained the people to whom she gravitated and, for better or worse, spent her life around in her late twenties and early thirties.  They were the comics, the fellow entertainers of the New York club circuits, those who would pave the way for the age of Catch A Rising Star and Dangerfield's.  She married one and hung with the rest, their friends, their brethren, and stayed on 'til their show-biz pipe-dream sleigh rides fast faded.  

Rather than waiting around for her husband to free-fall, she commandeered him into an adult education curriculum, a G.E.D, a teaching degree, and a job in the public school system.  She worked and ghost-wrote his assignments. He went on years later to score one of the highest-paying gigs the Board would allow.  He'd ultimately reside in a mod-furnished suite off Eighth Street.  My mom and I would visit frequently from our one-roomer in Rego Park. While she subsided off heart-attack disability and the child support he'd long and respectfully agreed to pay, she never stopped hating him for their marriage.  She loved the guy.

A relationship design such as this is not, as many will reflect in hindsight, unique.  My mother remained hurt most by no one other than herself, but was not in the process averse to cultivating a grudge that would distance her from the one man with whom she was only really compatible.  Ditto for him.  They had a conventional marriage wrecked by impotence on his part and alcoholism on hers.  Where the marriage failed, their intellectual relationship flourished, and was the strongest co-dependency on record.

There was a lot of intellectualism in the air all over the place in the 1970s, to be accurate about it.  Throughout the latter part of the decade, I grew up in the din of all this brain traffic.  I may have been way too young at ten or eleven to grasp the subject matter of all the academic stuff these two, and for that matter much of the well-educated world was going on about at the time, but it might explain why, at an age slightly past theirs back then, I now mull through the used bookstores like a stray animal­­­­, voracious for vintage publications, those luscious treats of almost any sociopolitical subject matter that say home to me.  For some reason, in an indifferent world such as ours, nothing seems to feel better than some hardcover David Halberstam or Kenneth Tynan from 1977 on the E train at day's end.

To be in the presence of my mom and her ex- over the course of a weekend spent at their flat was one of fascinating Rennaisance.  Those two would start the conversation when we arrived, and on they went practically all night.  Discourse was their intercourse, and no one left undersexed. Towards evening, it would take on the form of argument.  They'd raise their voices.  I'd be tucked in bed in the master bedroom at some point, listening like a visitor to a David Susskind panel.  The two kept in fine form, raging their distinct viewpoints.  At some point, they'd unfold the couch, go to their respective sides and peacefully crash 'til well into daylight.   Ultimately, we'd all be up, break our fast with some bagels and cream cheese from the high-price deli on the corner ("the gonniff", he'd growl..), and amidst a later stroll down Eighth and a tour through Brentanoes, the  talk-a-thon continued.  Y'know, for some people, it's skiing, for some, it's stock car races.  For me..?  This was my kind of weekend. They decorated my late 1970s.   Skip the symposiums and events.  The best discourse was the kind you knew how to make at home.

Where does a dog go when his master dies..?  How does his heart and mind deal with the whole thing..?  Does he get angry, the way people do..?  Does he growl outward and turn it inward..?  When this middle-aged ex of hers turned ill and died, my mother was the stray dog.  

It might not have been so starkly alienating, beyond what became a challenged question over the beneficiary in the man's will.  He had a brief subsequent marriage after the divorce.  This led to significant will-based plot twists, and suddenly the long friendship between my mother and her ex's sibling immediately turned to war.  It was an all-Jewish version of The Little Foxes.  While I knew it all for just what it was, it wasn't really about the legalities.  It was about the betrayal.

Not only did I hold no active animosity toward the offenders.  I honestly never expected anything from them.  Of course I was eleven, I was never married, and I never lived with the social or legal expectation of the rewards of enduring such prior wreckage.  But very truthfully.?  This particular bomb that exploded at the reading of the will, nearing the finally incoherent, fatally ill man's passing, somehow stunned me none.  

The greatest wound my mother bore was not in fact the absence of posthumous bounty, promised or not.  It was the stark disappearance of that intimate partner, the one who gave her everything she deeply craved day and night: Shared intellect.  For long as she continued to live, I would never see her fitfully matched again with any such human.  But it did teach me about the greatest kind of intimacy;  The intellectual kind.  For all the talk about sex and relationships out there, intellectual eroticism on the full time scale is a jackpot a lonely dweller will spend his or her life wishing for.  They don't make medical treatments for that, and when they do, I'll be inclined to run the other way.

The summer of '79 was the time of our Six Day War.  It was in that spring that my mother faced the betrayal of "her people", the ones we knew and liked the best and spent time with the most, the man who became more ill and aged by the day, who everyone congregated in imperative concern of, over coffee, talk, dinners, book and movie discussion and the reflexive hard laughter they all needed.  Now it was all gone, and replaced with return phone calls from attorneys.

With us in possession of little cash that summer, my aunt and uncle, a man falling ill himself, took us in for a few weeks at their newly leased condo house in Miami.  If this place didn't look like the set of an Aaron Spelling nighttime series, nothing did.  It was exquisite.  The sale of that Bayside house couldn't have gone that badly.  It was from that remote end my mom got word over the phone that the case was lost.  Our final net result was zero.  It didn't even take six days.  Fixing her anger upon the sibling opponent, she talked to her eleven-year-old son about the possibility of his residing in Florida with his aunt and uncle permanently, while she tracked him down and committed murder.  Somebody, I thought, was watching too many Movies Of The Week.

No one murdered anybody.  We came home to our little dusty-floored Queens abode, and spent our days doing laundry, maybe browsing at Queens Center, a good few trips to the Social Security office in Jackson Heights to square a few things that evidently couldn't be squared, amidst the wild-multicolored and coordinated sets of luxury cars and young fellows' suits along the avenues.  Not too many guys paraded around in athletic gear and flannel shirts back then.  They still dressed to go out.  Maroon was the color of one's car and sport jacket.  The print shirts glowed like gardens.

It was on no uncertain terms, a vacation.  I indulged permissively and affordably in something I just wouldn't be able to do in the school year: The TV I never got to see.  Stuff well after midnight.  I was basically that cat that only wants to see what's in the hallway closet, while no one understands why he's so fascinated with it. The Marcus Welby M.D. re-runs I'd never care for by day were stuff I got turned onto at 2am, amidst a dial of old movies, nightclub and electronics-store commercials, bad public service announcements and The Joe Franklin Show.   It was a carnival of it's own accord.  You didn't need cable, or rock videos.  There was something commanding about local television very late in the pre-dawn hours.  It was somehow more intimate, more humanizing.  It spoke to the alienation of the soul.  

Somewhere past 2am, at least one or two of the few stations that hadn't yet signed off would offer a serving of News Headlines.  Nothing fancy, just some branded logos and that familiar announcer, known for only a few words by day, now intoning the stories of the day.  It was interesting to hear these guys speak at length.   When the station signed off for the night a short time later, that very announcer would, for half a sentence, get personal with the viewer.  He'd say, "on behalf of the entire staff....have a good day..".  How about that.  A human being.

More than a few times, I'd be gazing at the final moments of whatever was on the Channel 2 Late Show at 5:45 in the morning as the sun met the summer horizon.  I'd already caught the rare Channel 5 re-run of The Jack Benny Program and heard Tom Gregory put us all to bed with their newscast and sign-off, complete with that "Feeling Good" public service announcment about physical fitness, scored by that all-too-familiar Chuck Mangione hit.  It played underneath a twelve-year old kid reading a teleprompter message about staying in shape.  As an overweight adolescent looking forward to his next malted at Carvel, all I could dig was the score.  

When life in that Junior High began, all hopes of distingushed collegiate-style life were instantly dashed.  I'd be introduced promptly to a life of threats in hallways, locker rooms, cafeteria lines, on school grounds and off, and a self image I never thought could corrode further.  If Channel 5 hadn't rolled out that nightly hour of M*A*S*H and All In The Family that fall, I swear I'd have killed myself.  You just don't forget a summer that good.

Noah F.

A Mind Is a Terrible Thing To Take Too Seriously

Lots of new common phrases have made their way into the vernacular over the decades, but only one has truly begun to concern me.  Growing up, I'd hear terms like "vis-a-vis", "part and parcel", "so forth", and all the other little condiments that made active discussion what it was.   But then a new one got introduced and became our conversational anthem. It's the phrase "at the end of the day".

If you really think about what that signifies, it bears a decaying despondence. It refers to "all that matters when it's all said and done".  But it's an illustration of something more futile.

"The end of the day" is when we generally take stock of what's most and immediately significant or important in front of us.  Metaphorically, it implies a consideration of the significance of the day's matters at hand, and whether or not each truly bears the need for primary fear, concern, or anger.  Or does it not matter..? Perhaps it's not important at all, and in the reality of life isn't worthy of one's mental absorption.   It's certainly important and necessary to take that kind of inventory at the end of one's day, and truly most of us at the end of most days will. But the common employment of the phrase "at the end of the day" has somehow exacerbated that need to simplify our every moment, and race at 9am to that lights-out finish line.

The ability to sort out immediacy from irrational fear or emotion is critical. No one's without that need.  But need we minimize or negate our desire or passion for any kind of analysis with it..?  I've often found the "end of the day" phrase as one too often used as kind of like a fire extinguisher upon any mental analytic outbreak even slightly too intellectual.

Can you imagine the likes of Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, or for that matter any of the figures made famous in those collegiate studies of the Greek Classics, those eternal rounds of translated analytic converstion delving into life's most insolvable philosophies, promptly ending a talk by saying, "look.....at the end of the day...", in the effort to clear one's cluttered mind and think about just going home and eating dinner..?  As I recall, some of those historically depicted discussions in those translations reportedly took place at dinners held at one's home.  I was about eighteen when I read one of them in Freshman Classics.  I wanted to know what menu they sat down to and when.  Apparently, they never did.  They just talked all night. No reference at all was made to the cuisine.  And you wonder why those Mediterranean folks kept so trim.  They dined on discourse.

It seems fewer and fewer are able to do that now.  Yes, there's occasions, venues, social events, parties, that allow folks to congregate and chat at length about their favorite topics, curiosities, the Arts, and such.  I've been known in my time to hold court with some such conversations with like spirits.  But too many times have I politely led myself back to the reminder that this is merely discussion.  No passion for literally any stagnant topic is enough to warrant the need for two people to interrupt a productive day or evening by simply standing and acknowledging a point of sorts. In other words, there is little to be gained from the rather less-than-nutritive guilty pleasure of discussion for discussion's sake.  Will the discussion partner with whom you share that impromptu discourse be truly seduced by the brilliance of the way in which you articulate your pedestrian point..?  Why need you do so...?  What hollow egos are being fed by this fairly indulgent social act, and need we really, as better minded adults, feed into it..?  What greater intellectual hunger is truly being satiated with an analysis of Paul Newman's acting genius in the 1960s, or Trump or Hunter Biden's criminal guilt in the last four years, than that achieved with a silent personal round with an X-Box game, headset and joystick for an hour and a half..?  If anything, intensive gaming of sorts is a better and more rewarding exercise in analytic thinking and active response.  It's the kind of useful analytic sharpening we could all use, as opposed to a useless pile of chatter designed to treat us to our own glorious, unheard voices in this overheard world.

The self-consciousness we are nowadays so fast likely to accrue in social settings disrupted by attention deficits, technological distractions, and an egocentric culture have not however detracted us from our mission of making our voices desperately heard over the din.  Podcasts are the remedy.

What an invention.  Not only are they incredibly simple to acquire and distribute for public display in today's tech environment, but there's no reason not to afford creating and having one, no matter what you've got to say.  

When I was fourteen years old, I listened to the radio.  TV was of course a huge part of my life in the 1970s and 80s of my adolescence, but radio played a part in my intimate world.  As a teen, I gravitated toward lots of eclectic music shows on the FM dial, but I grew up in a household with elders who were some of the greatest roasters of valueless conversational passion.  My uncle, a life long accountant and his occasionally employed sister, an old-school liberalist political science addict, would fight violently, like a couple of NHL opponents, over their socio-political differences, Watergate, Vietnam, the Israeli conflict, to points of near physical debilitation.  As a child, it unnerved me, and filled me with some of the greatest respect and awe of the ability to speak one's mind.   And when these intellects needed a break from voicing off, they went silent and listened to others do so, on the radio.  In the suburbs of Queens, the grownups bedside radios all purred the discussionary voices of AM's WMCA, Sterling, Grant, McCourt, Nebel. and others.  As a seven-year-old insomniac in my extended family's home, I'd step out of bed at 2AM and tiptoe through the outer hallway, the night tied together by the unison sound of Long John and wife Candy Jones chattering the night away on those clock radios.  What on dear Earth could be of discussive importance at two-o-clock in the morning, I wondered...?  Something, obviously.  There were people just as awake at that moment as I was, ready to talk and listen.

As an adolescent, I began leafing through Radio Shack sale flyers, glancing at the recording microphone selection.  I'd give thought to how I would conduct my talk radio monologue and delivery when I had the forum.  From childhood, I always had a little voice tape recorder of some sort, to get all the little verbal bits and sketches out of my system.  But with one of these formal pro microphones and desk stand, I could be a real, serious Dick Cavett, and try myself out as a broadcaster with something to say, or more significantly, a handsome way of saying it.

We were generally without much disposable dough when I was an impressionable teen.  I once expressed to my usually indulgent mom my interest in acquiring one of these pricey microphones.  She said, rather impatiently, "....Have you something interesting you wanted to say on it..??"  Clearly this kind of response wasn't even in character for her.  She was known to support my intellectual interests.  But I got her at a bad moment. And her rather disspiriting observation brought me suddenly to take stock of the unnecessity of this sudden interest of mine.

Fact is, I had enough gadgetry in my possession at that time anyway to invent my own little radio-show monologue, and didn't need some expensive, hot looking acoutrement, which I could have won for a birthday gift at some point anyway.  The point was, if I really wanted to flaunt my voice, no absence of any added gadget needed to stop me.  It was then and there, at age fourteen, well on the reflective spot that I realized something.

I didn't really have anything worthy to speak at length about.   It didn't mean that I wasn't able to.  Truth is, my mom, who shot me down about that Radio Shack microphone craving, spent my entire upbringing drilling me about the critical importance of being able to verbally express myself in crystallized form at any and every given moment.  On this matter, I was Gomer Pyle to her Sergeant Carter.  Regardless of anything, it's that Olympic training I to this day cherish.  Even if my school-age peers wanted to do nothing but mutter, mumble and leer and jeer at this dweeby nerd who wanted to discuss movies and the new prime-time TV season, I found myself much more at home from age ten and forward in the company of like adults, who could hold their own in such enjoyable conversation in visits and get togethers.  My mom knew enough of those to keep me in good company.

Family members of our own didn't always match those types of personalities.  In our own confines, my mom was not afraid to point out the inabilities of some of our family's own growup cast members to well express themselves in discussion, and how poor they came across in social environments.   Somehow, that didn't stop these grownup young men and women, late-twentysomethings in the fashion-heavy 1970s world, from being out, about, and socially successful.  How'd they do it if they couldn't rock the room with conversation, I wondered at age eleven.  What got them through...?  Something other than the ability to charm someone with their intellectual brilliance, I guess.  What else was there..??

Never until the day she left the Earth would my mother run out of points and observations to make in any intellectual conversation she could join or generate.  She was an inveterate reader, having cultivated an apartment-sized library of books that had it's start in the late 1940s.  Walls of political readers, anthologies, fiction, classics and English and foreign literature.  Professionally she held secretarial and a couple of administrative assistant roles in her life.  Never a corporate advancement in her life's resume.  But put her in a room on the Upper East Side  with a cocktail party and no one could miss her.  Like any animal, she knew how to gravitate to her habitat.

As troubled and withdrawn as I was during my somewhat ambivalent years of higher academics and Liberal Arts, even I wasn't without the need or fearlessness to indulge in some intellectual discourse.  Even at my quietest times, in our most desolate confines, my mother and I were each other's best discussion partners.  We were oft known to stay up literally until 6am, sleeplessly, after watching an old Bogart film on the late show, deconstructing the cinematic sciences of it's brilliance.  

I leaped into my twenties, finally upright with a job and a little (very little, but cozy) batchelor pad to reside in, ready to sparkle at length in conversations with all kinds of acquaintences, professional and more.  I honed my wit and presentational skill to become the valued team player known to my employers and colleagues.  I was not unpleased with myself.

But it was in my mother's final days, even during her advanced illness when the only thing that could ease her immediate burden was an afternoon of companionship, and our lengthy indulgence of a conversation about some literature or film, that one very uncomfortable reality became too evident:

It's all just words.

These verbal and hieroglyphic equations mean little more than the pleasure of their articulation.  Beyond the need to state one's desire for food or need to go to the bathroom, words, the meaning, and the so-called art of sharing remains pure, unnecessary decoration, a celebration of one's egocentric voice.

For that matter, it's the root of all that radio I'd hear all my life.  TV talk, too. An agenda and purpose sits behind all of it, mostly financial.  We may, as intellectual creatures bear the neurological impulse that craves the sound and sight of conversation.  But is it not simply, as Marshall McLuhan defined, the medium that holds the sole message..?

I stood amongst some friends after one of those group support community talk meetings years ago, when they did me some good.  We were in one of our little shoot-the-breeze chatter circles, and a friend of mine and I got into a passionate little exchange about some old John Cassavettes film with both loved.  We were topping each other with great recollections and observations about the movie, and suddenly, there, amidst the dark, cool night in that parking lot, I was abruptly chilled to a halt in my fire-of-bullets conversation.  I was hit with that meteoric reality that is the obsolesence of mere talk. We were nothing but two civilians in our quiet, unimportant, unnoticed lives, sharing a moment of unified, almost addictive passion, that would climax and fade in the next moment.  And leave each of us to the grey of our common existence.  Somehow, that loomed larger than any manufacturable moment possible.

If it weren'f for the thrill of conversation however, there'd likely be no such thing as social gathering.  Saloons and bars would be nothing but the desolate places haunted by Steve Buscemi in Trees Lounge.  But they're not.  Our culture would not have it, thankfully.  People like myself, who bear no passion or awareness of sports, or for that matter political fervor are at a vast disadvantage in our advanced culture. There is no such thing in our society as a two block radius without a sports bar, where men and maybe some women will likely talk and argue the night away in speculation and analysis of the current state of gaming affairs.  Those people are focusing on matters that exist in real time, and bear a shared relevance throughout the world.   It's levels of greater philisophical venture that are pointless, migraine inducing and demeaning to the matters that are imperative to the fast setting sun and darkness ascending as the day invariably and rapidly ends:  Dinner, TV on the couch, and bedtime.  If anything else is more important in this world, the resounding message is abundantly clear:  It's this world you don't belong in.  

In a world too loud, too shared, too aggravated and too podcasted, there's just one recourse.  Shut up, eat your supper, send the wife and kids into the living room to watch TV, wash the dishes, clean up the kitchen and see them off to bed. That's what the Bible calls for.  We don't need to discuss it.  It's already been written. Keep your mind to yourself.  It'll still be there tomorrow.

Noah F.