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

 

                             

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

Noah F.