The Tune-In Factor

It was in my formative years that the commonly grumbled phrase was “generation gap”.  Even after all that violence and turbulence of the late 60s and early 1970s gave way to some resigned, inflammatory apathy, too many people beyond the threshold of middle age, respectful of youth or not, claimed some inability to relate to the popular culture of youth today.  What was once an irreparable crevice though has undeniably become an ocean.

It’s probably no one’s fault. Parents interested in relating, or more likely forced to relate to the socioculture of their teens will effectively do so.  I doubt however that someone unforced, like myself, will ever bear any type of connective lexicon with that of modern youth.  While it doesn’t really concern me, I am sometimes led to wonder just what this means for the future of generational connectivity.

Invariably, there I’d be, a boy of ten or eleven, the lone and outstood child at high noon on a Sunday, in an apartment full of kibbutzing, arguing, eating, coffee drinking grownups, me seated hospitably one bedroom away, before the portable Trinitron TV throughout the visit, understandably unable to engage with the towering elders, those who roared with great fervor, argumentation, laughter, over subject matter no less than foreign to me.

TV back then was still, even in itself, a more collective medium.  You didn’t watch what you wanted, you watched what was on. Multiple channels, digital services, platforms, or viewing devices did not exist in the spring of 1978.  What’s more, that which was on the six-channel smorgasboard was limited to what television stations, independent ones in particular, deemed most cost-effective.  If King World’s re-processed, re-packaged, re-edited (and to film purists, abomination of the) Hal Roach Our Gang series, re-dubbed The Little Rascals, proved a winner in key cities, then it was the reigning kid-vid Sunday staple for a good long time. It’s what was for breakfast.

Original syndicated programming on the commercial dial for formidable youth was not quite yet the cottage industry it would soon become.  In the late 1970s, “live-action” programs, or shows featuring a host or talent of sorts was no longer a very common format, certainly not to the extent that it was in the prior decades.  By this time, with cartoons and animation efforts largely targeted by interest groups over violent themes, the mainstay for the independents flickering on the cathode-ray tube on America’s day off was off-network re-runs and old, old movies.

The so-called staple that something like The Little Rascals became was a very strange kind of intimate belonging in one’s daily or Sunday life. It wasn’t something you tuned into with great anticipation because you haven’t yet seen it, like the next episode of some long-running decade-old digital TV series from some other platform that you haven’t seen all twelve seasons of yet. This was basically wallpaper.  It was the equivalent of songs or music videos you know only too well, who does or sings what, and what happens when.  The jokes really aren’t funny, but the visuals are more or less iconic.  I don’t think any kid my age who’s eyes and TV dial gravitated towards it each Sunday would’ve been capable of explaining why he wanted to watch it, other than a cursory admission of “I always do..”  It somehow wasn’t 11:30 on Sunday morning without a TV screen branding a grainy, sound-muffled, black-&-white image of a pom-pom capped Spanky and Pete The Dog, something produced for the big screen by Hal Roach for little folks forty years prior.  This stuff composed that piously denounced image of “junk” us children grazed on, preferenced to homework, reading, or going out and getting some exercise.  If anything though, for a kid too-intelligent like myself, those familiar, foolish flickers were just a common admonishing over a lack of better initiative.  It wasn’t even the kind of offering you could ever rationalize as something you “just want to see the end of….” before getting to the book report.  It almost kind of helped to bring closure to the awareness of television as a finite entity, a containable “box” one needn’t allow oneself to indulge in like a sack of sugary, nutritionless, and mostly stale donuts.

And all this is just what would render such as uncomfortable to a kid seated before it in some stranger’s home, where you’d rather not share your more intimate, embarrassing habits, akin to eating in your pajamas, or singing some ubiquitous commercial jingle aloud as a silly parody only you and your mom might get or appreciate.  

And in spite of all your awkward alienation, you weren’t alone.

Invariably, I’d be sitting there, politely, that obligatory child in the room, trapped before the monochrome Alfafa, Buckwheat, Farina, Chubby and Jackie Cooper, in a way I would not be ordinarily, soon upon which some transient adult on the way back from the bathroom would look in on the boy in the bedroom with the TV as a brief respite from the dining room circus.  Characteristically, the visitor was some tall, overweight gentleman of urban Depression-era descent, some walking revival of W.C. Fields in his own right.  But well meant enough..

“Eh….is that Jackie Cooper…?? Ah, we used to see him at the movies all the time…….Ha..! There’s Spanky..! You know about Spanky…?”, the old coot would mutter, fixated suddenly on the screen, breaking into a grin……..”Eh, these people are all old now……..” He’d gaze for another moment before addressing the viewer.  “Ya’ like these kids..?? We saw ‘em in the movies….”  He’d chuckle wistfully and walk off.  What just happened there…?

In spite of all my staunch, pre-adolescent iconoclasm, in a world where grownups just wouldn't understand kids, this unlikely figure of a time, an era and a sociology long prior, joined me in some abridged moment of common understanding. Perhaps no other circumstance could have furnished that.

It’s a bridge more impressive in that time than likely any chronological one constructible today.  The common lexicon is somehow just less likely or less readily established.  Those rotating dozen or so little crackly two-reelers were unmistakably just those, the originals.  Not re-makes, re-boots, re-casted, or re-done.  They were not one of a massive series of offshoots or spinoffs, with endless plot or premise changes.  The little films each bore their own iconic immortality, like the runaway jalopy, or the kid tossing the cake out the window, landing on the blustery policeman’s head.

Making that connection with one’s elders over, say, feature films would already be a more involved and mature effort.  Indeed, I spent plenty of afternoon TV matinee moments with some unknown WB classic flashing onto the screen mid-feature, my uncle muttering….”Jimmy Cagney…….Paul Muni..”, recognizing them aloud while channel surfing.  For a ten-year old though, too boring.  

So the next question is, in a world where families of young and old continue to gather on occasion, the impressionable youth left to their own devices whilst the adult folk gather to ostensibly convene as the grownups, is that very connective moment, opportunity, or the existence of it even sociologically possible..?

To put it in TV terms, first you’d need some kind of common ground. Are the kids watching anything “old” on TV anymore..?  Anything you, the reader, a contemporary of mine perhaps would recall thriving on videologically at their age..?

Very possibly not.  Again, it’s no one’s fault.  Movements in the entertainment and personal-electronic “platform” industry have mandated the need for more constantly changing forms and styles of entertainment.  There is no available time for some television series to “trend” nowadays, by way of exposure.  No one cooks anymore.  The smash hits of the 1970s and 80s became so as a result of failed launches, and the determination of network programmers to give the show a good, hard try. Now, it’s not about the show, its content or quality.  It’s all about the pre-trending efforts and external on-line and social media hype.  And in more ways than one, the hype takes precedence over the show.

Some years ago, my cousin’s teenage daughter, whom I got to spend a few moments in a room with after dinner at a family occasion was busy texting her friend some image of TV’s Gomez Addams, the great John Astin in some unmissable black-&-white frame from the The Addams Family.  I thought that encouraging, at first.  The photo though had Gomez with some superimposed red hat of some sort on his head.  I had no idea what it was about, but it was obviously some short-lived on-line gag.  Unaffected by that addendum, I offered “Hey, you remember The Addams Family..?? That was a great show….I used to watch it….”

“What….?”, the girl looked up, quite obviously puzzled by my reference, no clue as to who the fellow in the trending photo was….

“He’s an old actor…..”, I dismissed.

The common absence of such immediate lexicon from one generation to the next may not seem relevant or important in a world too absorbed with greater strife.  But the question begged here remains, is there indeed the threat of a generation gap even greater than the one lamented more than fifty years ago, one that deems threat in different ways, one even more alienating and divisive between populations each more intelligent than ever before...?  It seems that before even more serious points of history can be understood in relation to today’s or future worlds, the first hand understandings of those having lived those events need in some way to convey that understanding to those of today’s generation, never having known the past in it’s very context.  It’s about the dangers, the violence, the misanthropy of today’s world.  And it’s not about an absence of Spanky, Buckwheat and Alfafa.

Come to think of it, just as powerfully memorable to the likes of myself from the time of my irreverent-humored youth is the once trend-heavy explosion of comic Eddie Murphy, and the hilarity he so brilliantly mined from that ancient, anything-but-politically-acceptable 1930’s image of little Buckwheat.  Murphy was clearly firing a comic bazooka at the outrageous creation of such figure. It was an irreverent, well-defined attitude and attack we all, of every race, appreciated and seemed to share.  And that effort seemed by contrast to outscore the fearful, witch-hunting instincts of today’s so-called, thought-eschewing “cancel culture”, one in which clearly no expressed thought as such would be permissible by anyone’s admission.  Except on social media, the most vocal platform possible, where the ugliest mental synapses rage without apology.  Or in probably any case, not even a shred of humor.

And is that in fact the frustrated connective ground to which our modern-day culture is reduced..?  The war on alienation can only be fought and better resolved with a connectivity, a communication, and in some ways perhaps a level of self-admission that needs to be taught, and learned.  And shared. Enough of a little more of that, and dare I say there’s every chance that that’s one less automatic weapon picked up and handled by a civilian hand younger than twenty-five.

Noah F.

Common Ether

Social media may have its critics.  Everyone’s a critic.  It’s their endowed right.  But the medium’s finest defense just might be its most significant offense.

It doesn’t discriminate.

If it did of course, it would not nearly be the fertile ground of commercial harvest known to its founders and financiers.  Their job is to constantly monitor, analyze and arrive at sectored determinations on their product markets and consumers.  No better way of doing this than gaining as intimate exposure as possible into the private lives of proudly shared egos, and as many as possible.

It’s the most powerful advancement in commerce yet.  Retro-head that I am, I find nothing more captivating than a trip down the Memory Lane of forty or fifty years ago, and all those highly serious and sophisticated diatribes on the social dangers of television.  Plenty of media critics and sociologists went in both directions on the social dangers and rewards.  One of the recurring attributes however, was in television's ability to unite so many co-existing cultures.  Two men, one upscale from the suburbs, and a ghetto struggler can both, for just one moment, meet in pleasurable unity over a punch line heard on Sanford And Son last night on TV.  Any medium that can provide that in such a scattered, sectored and separative world is certainly worth the highest admiration, according to some.

By contrast, it was the detractors who concluded over the years that the medium bears no such honorable social intent other than to indoctrinate innocent eyes and ears young and old into deep consumership, and a sense of self-inadequacy over any inertia or indecisiveness toward such at any moment.  Their point was no less valid, and still very much so.

The difference between now and fifty years ago however, is this brand new thing that has fast left the controversial frontier of television in the dust, and that's this new invention called Social Media.   It wasn't invented or introduced as such all at once.  Much of it began with the earliest underpinnings of the Internet.  Then, by the time Y2K rolled around, you really weren't anywhere unless you were there.  The author of this diatribe in fact was not agreeable enough to crack open his wallet for such until he genuinely deemed himself enough of a clinical outcast, five or six years into the millennium.  Even then, it took some getting used to.

Wrong as I might be, it somehow seemed that I got onto the entrance ramp of the Facebook Expressway just around the time all the other superhighway motorists did.  That was kind of encouraging.  Nothing makes arrival into a new neighborhood easier than the shared experience of such.  And before long, we'd all start absorbing the art of becoming highly sophisticated junior sociologists, standing back and watching the various toxic personalities vent themselves quite predictably in word, online, the written equivalent of their loud and incorrigible selves.  We'd see the sociopathic side of the traditionally meek and polite.  We'd see the odd, inexplicable passive-aggressive side of famous beasts sharing greeting-card memes and kitten videos with little red heart emojis.  

But beyond all the zoological exhibits we're mostly careful not to step up and hand-feed, there's us, the mentally responsible adult participants, moderating our tempers and self-monitoring our words and reactions.  Next step..? Make some friends.

Pretty soon, you're in a very friendly neighborhood of shared likenesses.....people who also get up in the middle of the night.......people who hate running late in the morning.......people who treasure Sunday brunch at home in their affectionately decorated kitchen.  People who go on vacations.   People who are grateful to God for the care their sick child got at the clinic or hospital.  People reveling proudly in their hard-labored, newly re-decorated kitchens. 

Well, perhaps I can't vacation in Rome or spend Sunday at a rented villa in Fire Island like my treasured Facebook compatriots.  But I can just as easily share the sophistication of my own, economy-sized world with some artfully conceived and just-as-exquisite phone camera-snapped images of my kitchen wall-hung art, my pet snoozing peacefully in a sunlit corner, and maybe a clever caption and music link to accentuate just how we're elegantly spending our well-deserved down time together.  See..? We can be some pretty impressive self-advertisers, too..!

It's a great, and often very positive and supportive way of asserting one's self-confidence.  Among well-meant friends its nothing but well-received.  Matters of socioeconomic division need not be a separative factor amidst this online interactive ocean liner cruise, one that transcends the barricades of COVID isolation and many other of life's unfriendly strongholds.  But as one relies more and more upon such social existence, among the kindest and most genuine of the faraway strangers, as legitimately intimate as the emotional co-dependency becomes, and amidst all its invaluable daily treasure, the stark and divisive factors ultimately emerge.  And whether or not we choose to bear effect reigns upon these so-called friendships.

There are no socioeconomic "barricades" on Facebook.  A young mother of three, situated in a NYCHA apartment in the Bronx can quite easily find close kinship with a young Carrie Bradshaw on the Upper East Side, after a blessed encounter where the young mom helps Carrie off the ground with great concern after she fell off her Manolo heels and dropped her new Apple phone to the ground.  Next thing, they're friending it up on FB.  Young Mom and Carrie have virtually zero in common beyond same biology, same birth year, and the same shows they saw on TV as kids, the same sugar cereals they ate, the same songs they heard at their prom, and same kind of irrational tempers that flare at the same ugly behaviors they see every day.  Ah, the unity the World Wide Web can provide..!

Down the spectrum somewhat, you'll encounter others of slightly better economic struggle-status in happy friendship with those Finzi-Continis of the higher tennis-courters. Friendships that prove that you don't need money to share the appreciation of a flowered garden.  Perhaps the only insignificant difference remains whether you can appreciate it from behind the gate you pass along the Botanical Garden on the way home to your complex from the bodega, or in the garden you own and have tended by your hired gardener, in the backyard of your four-bedroom home in East Islip, with the newly finished deck, all set for the summer holiday.  But to recognize and self-discriminate on such obvious basis remains uncouthedly trite.  Is the object of the game to disparage yourself or others based on such blatant economic disparity..?  Or is the better reminder that of exercising mindful adulthood, and owning up to one's position in the world, and learning to embrace it proudly, within this mall of online citizens, each in rightful possession of a sense of artful and joyful appreciation on the most visceral levels.

In the eyes of many, such co-existence is simply "where we are now", and the social atmosphere to which we're behaviorally expected to acclimate.  To some, the grind of such is really no different from the way their mom or dad had to wait on line at the bank in 1972 just to cash a check, and in the process endure a friendly conversation with some lady or fellow they know from somewhere, who can't help but regale them with tales of woe over their golf or tennis game, and wallet photos of their grandchildren and their beaming parents, degreed physicians residing in the Douglaston Hills.  Meanwhile Mom or Dad is more absorbed with how badly the cost of that blown carburetor or the kid's sudden trip to the ENT is going to kill them.

The difference now is that these passing and more prominent social media "relationships" are more elusively and conveniently both selective, and at the same time insidiously invasive, often in ways we're not going to realize or accept until we're forced.  I could insert a "Heaven Forbid" next to "forced", but the truth is that Heaven will not forbid inevitability.

Should one's barely-afforded lodging be destroyed in a local flood one fine day, should one's loved one or self be pitted against injury or illness for which treatment is undeniably unaffordable, or should one be put to any kind of crisis for which their previously livable economic situation finds them tragically unprepared, suddenly, the value of nearly all those well-meant, affectionate Facebook "relationships" with all those on the economic upper balconies immediately becomes, to no fault of anyone, confederate currency.  The best anyone can offer to anyone in those once-fantastical, joyful, picture-sharing, day-off-I'm-enjoying portraits that compose our fragile social existences is now reduced to an illustrated smiling cat-face emoji, the extent of what some far-extended well-wisher can offer, a friendly wave from the curb.  No one can come forth to save the life or even the day of the tragic struggler.  And they're not really supposed to.  Even the struggler might not bear resentment against her fair-weather Facebook friends.

Especially since there's really nothing "fair-weather" about them at all.  Social media is just what those words denote: A media providing the capacity to be social.  Nothing more.  Whether or not we, as responsible participants decide to see ourselves bearing any unreal socioeconomic connection with our "friends", greater or less, is part of our "God-Given Right To Life".  And at the same time, it calls upon the need for mindful, responsible "Choice".

And indeed, amidst this social crowd, bigger than any blanket-to-blanket beach population on the hottest Fourth of July, there is, fascinatingly enough, a level of social order, a Geneva Convention of sorts, one that no Group Administrator needs to post, articulate or remind.  One that transcends angry rants, political talk on retro-memory pages, homophobic talk on collectible antique pages, and the misanthropy that will find welcome nowhere.

Should one find themselves unable to care for a loved one, when one has to in any way bid farewell to their parent, sibling, child or even beloved pet, forced strictly by dire economic condition, where conditions held by perhaps any or more of one's Facebook "friends" would never, Heaven Forbid, incomprehensibly see them, an understanding somehow politely exists.  When divisive conditions become inarticulately clear, on line, for all to see, civilian "friends" and commerce kingpins alike, it's all well wishes, extensions of prayer, and red heart emojis.  No questions asked.  

And it's not, as prior eras and in-person acquaintanceships might suggest, an insensitive distancing or alienation.  In such case as this, it's a level of shared respect.  It's the humility that reminds that rich or poor, we are valuing shared ground together at all times.  And none of us bear the right to judge the struggle of another.  For one thing, we've no right. And for another, we've no desire.   Everyone has their own cross to bear.  Even if a greater population helps us carry that weight every day.  "For The Grace of God Go I" is more than ever just as much a secular prayer.  And if we had to log off our social media page each day or night with some type of serenity prayer known to twelve-step fellowships, that certainly would be the disclaimer at the end of the broadcast day.  

Yes, the internet, commerce-commanded social media and the like are hijacking our minds, our brains and our behaviors every day, every minute.  But it's still worth it for the relationships and what we discover they really can mean.  Because as living, breathing humans, we still know better.

Noah F.

I'm Sorry, I Can't Help You......

Not long ago, I was surfing the Facebook waves one day, where an old acquaintance shared one of those widespread, silly little "memes", one that said something to the liking of "How can I tell you're being sarcastic...?"  With all candor, I responded, "At this point in my life, even I can't tell anymore.  And even worse, I'm not too concerned..."

Fact of the matter though, is that indeed it was an evaded concern haunting me in more recent times.  Despite this acclaimed, life-long, exterior veneer of adorable, cherubic innocence, somehow over the years, in ways genuinely unbeknownst to myself, there emerged this counterbalanced, razor-edged, sardonic and brilliantly-just-as-subtle beast, one that would send the humor of Albert Brooks and Martin Mull to the borscht-belt woodshed.  

With a life-long commitment against morphing into anything even remotely cliche, my young adulthood was certainly cautious enough not to become a T-shirt clone of the renown MTV's Daria, the pop-culture comic House Representative of the morose, Gen-X 1990s.  As I recently channeled the spirit of the immortal Rodney Dangerfield and his "no respect" act, my quote was "When I was a kid...? Depression was somethin' we did for fun...!"  When it comes to the 1990s, that's no hyperbole.

Early youth in the late 70s and early 1980s had me garnering no respect for my peer culture.  If a kid in my high school bio class were to develop a cure for cancer, I'd have likely concluded that he was probably on drugs, and just being a trophy for his rich parents.  I gave short if no shrift to the pop music of the period, and MJ's white glove.  Instead, I spent plenty of headset time late Saturday nights with my mom's old Dylan Blonde On Blonde LPs, studying the musicianship of the arrangements. My mother was in fact my best friend during my altogether blacklisted pre-adolescent peerhood, the innocent, sweet little rotund boy.  At age twelve, I thought the term "jerking off" referred to some kind of sports penalty.  Needless to say, my innocence of the world's avarice and my generalized belief against any such thing as a "bad kid" got me injured, robbed and death-threatened in the far corners of some the borough's finest public schools.  

At the same time, my mother even more viciously infuriated than I, there was a stern teaching, that to turn vigilante, and act against their violence or anger with mine would only render me something worse than those troubled and injured souls, both inside and out.  It was a good reminder.  It served well in an adult future where you'd need to remember one thing:  Standing up for yourself in victimhood will at best end you up a courtroom defendant.  The best revenge is somber defeat.

As I leaned into my mid-twenties at the time, despite a lifetime of alienation from the peer culture in general, I couldn't help taking note of how the hair-flipped pastel aerobicizing of the Reagan era had starkly turned dark-flannel, black matted-haired, dark, coffee-slurping inertia.  For those whose young, presumed  "Wonder Years" and "Happy Days" were spent on the dateless, friendless, disconnected, misunderstood sidelines, this was the spiritual revenge your whole life had resisted suicide for.  And somehow, you ultimately ended up questioning whether this is in fact what you wished for.  In some ways, I found myself bearing an even greater sense of violation at the time.  Seemed like everyone was suddenly stealing my act..!

And that was a good thing. Even if was going to take myself too seriously, I wasn't going to expect to impress anyone in the process. But even still, my exterior always remained that of the quiet, innocent, respectful lad that bore no irreverence.  Or at least displayed none outwardly.  It was my professional passkey in life.  I don't know how many doors it opened for me necessarily, but it certainly didn't keep me locked out and kicking them when my hands were full.

That didn't stop me from adopting the world's best weapon against the intolerable and inescapable injustices of generalized disrespect, ineptitude and stupidity to which I'd be forced to acclimate in this world.  And I found it in nature's best source: Humor.  

Not the volatile or brazen insult kind of humor, much less the sociopathic grime of the immensely popular "Jerky Boys", or the smirking punk arrogance of Kevin Smith's beloved Clerks protagonists.  Like the figures cited earlier, I took my cue from such enlightened luminaries as the writers acquired discriminately by creator Norman Lear, in his efforts to use humor as a tool, to see our human flaws in the mirror before us, to "check us", in effect.  

To do that on a one-to-one basis in sardonic capacity however, is a dangerous knife-throwing act.  People at large, no matter how cynical you are about human intelligence, are still way smarter than you think.   And if you have any doubts about that, you're just the violence-embracing kid who's no better than his hallway harrassers.

My own deep-rooted sardonicism has rarely, if ever been used as a one-on-one weapon, with the exception of confrontations that might send others into some heated, self-defensive shouting match.  My defense, in contrast, has been that of polite, quiet and curious response, an unassuming padlock that only the intelligent stranger requiring his just desserts will detect the combination.

Somewhere along the line, maturing as I, and many have into a culture who's anthem has long been the revenge of the underdog, Michael Douglas in Falling Down, Joe Don Baker in Walking Tall, or maybe Charles Bronson in Death Wish, my prized recipe for personal-insight-humor-coated social balance lost it's eminence.  

At some predictable level, where the victims would out-populate the antagonists, youth violence would erupt nationwide, onto peers and others.  The desperate plea for a "kinder, gentler nation", the once-famously misguided mission statement famously coined by the war-abiding Republican George H.W. Bush, was now the outcry of a United States in siege.  A new renaissance of enlightenment was illuminating our despaired culture, imploring each and every individual to see not themselves exclusively, but the needs, wants, and deprivations of that creature before them, human, animal or otherwise.   Walking home one night, I let a scurrying waterbug cross my path.  I was too intimidated to squash him.  Or her.  It could have been a "her".

Sure enough, after years of enduring my own oppression, the still-no-less-than-oppressive culture now also saw fit to view themselves as eternally persecuted.  Translated into my social currency, this meant that any curiously kind, polite response I'd offer to anything that might otherwise be deemed inapproachable or objectionable by some would immediately be deemed viciously and inappropriately insulting.  In the most extreme circumstances, to meet a curt, or insidiously malicious comment with a most innocent "hey, thanks so much...." would meet with a departured "Don't talk to me like I'm a fucking idiot...!!!"  To respond with, "Well, I think you asked for it" would certainly, I'd find, be an insult to the both of us intellectually.  So, I'd just lumber off in silence, invisible trophy in arms.

That's the successful working version.  Trouble is, there's the unchecked, unperfected, dangerous version.  Still working on that, and I'm unfortunately not so sure the algorithm for success is in fact attainable.

The whole science here is based on nothing more or less than the science of human dynamics. But in lieu of the unapproachable factors, I have educated myself towards a few modifications, as my trunk has cultivated its rings of time.

For starters, humor is generally unwelcome as an approachable technique.  To try to institute yourself commonly as the brilliantly clever final box of a daily Doonesbury or Calvin & Hobbes strip, in the effort to provoke cluster-wide, situation-enlightened, irony-observant laughter is about as entertaining as "pretending" to be a knife-wielding, death-threatening Martin Sheen in The Incident.  An ungotten joke can be socially and interpersonally fatal.  You might have the urge to take pride in being "hipper than the room", until one day you realize:  There's actually in fact no room hip enough for you, except the one you're in all alone.  Is that where you want to spend your life..?

Have you ever watched Star Trek: Voyager..? Since I'm no enthusiast of the genre, I never would, until my Trekkie-wife introduced me to the 11PM strip reruns years later.  It's magnificent.  For me, it's picked up where my teenage 11PM M*A*S*H viewing ritual left off.  Of all the Trek re-constitutions over time, I'd put this one on top, and not for it's related sci-fi association.  With it's stellar cast and writing, it's primarily about interpersonal experiences, trust, emotion, betrayal.  All the things that make us the human machines we are. Nothing says it better than Jeri Ryan's brilliant portrayal of the ice-cold, stoic Seven Of Nine trying a concerted effort at embracing humanity. There's a reason a show like this remains popular well beyond the Trekkies in the living room.  It's about the struggle of every human to relate properly to one another and themselves.

I could easily define myself over time as "Vulcan", but they're just not as complicated as us desperate and confused humans.  They're relatively comfortable in their emotional isolation.  No chance of that here.  Weaponry becomes necessary, and for those in this category, it's a matter of intellectual cynicism, sardonicism, and overall incomprehensibility.  My response to that meme was the most truthful self-assessment I've admitted in years.  To myself.

In the effort to follow Seven Of Nine's admirable intentions, I've in fact sought to consciously ditch the crutch ironic-commentary humor, and respond to people and situations with merely direct and sincere straight answers.  No smackdown punch lines are needed to make my way into a room filled with private jokes.  No need to slather on some artificial Peter Brady-esque "Ya like my new personality..??" charm.  Expression of kindness and concern is always best and universally embraced before anything.  The late, great Edith Bunker in her lifetime was never known for making instant enemies.

Discriminating fiction consumer that I am, one of the few contemporary pieces of work I've treasured remains Caren Lissner's Carrie Pilby, a first-person narrative I would embrace as a cautious mirror.  Carrie is a somewhat mis-placed young woman of nineteen, on the borderline between guarded youth and accelerated adulthood, in a struggle to break her force field of life-long cultivated distrust against others, to begin the process of her only option on Earth: relating to others.  As with the best fiction, it's a treasure to know that you're one of the few, and probably the many so well and articulately understood by the author. Lissner's Carrie did it.  On a less intensive, and more elusive level, so can I.

And at the same time, human science being what it is, like a dramatist clueless on the roar that line got, I'll see my innate humor appreciated when I expect it the least.  Like when somebody mentions something miserable, with no possilble rejoinder but silence, and I'll bravely chirp, glaring out the window......."Nice day out, though..." That once met with a quiet individual's hearty, startling, explosive laugh and a handshake .  "You're somethin' else, man...!", and we'd part.   And I'd walk off, quietly but with pride, knowing I brought someone some momentary joy and comfort, in a way no one could.   I'd like to think that's what I'm really here for.

Noah F.

The Big Preview

 

"So whatta ya' think we oughta do...?", my mom beckoned from the living room of our sparse little studio pad, her sprawled on the couch that evening characteristically, me characteristically puttering in the kitchen, all of twelve years old.

"I don't know...", I shot back.  Just one of our sophisticated zig-zag existential loser-take-zero repartees...

"How about suicide..?"  she zinged back

"Let's do it..." - Me, completely deadpan.

Certainly at age twelve, I knew what death was.  We lived within the five boroughs of New York City in the 1970s, where death was reported every moment on any broadcast media. Additionally, I never have recalled in my formidable life the need for any stark education or "talk" on what death was.  After a year and a half of no longer journeying up to my grandmother's palatial home in Connecticut, come the day my mom approached me all dolled up in some dark themed outfit, to tell me she and my uncle would be out for some hours attending my Grandmother's service because she'd died, at age six I just kind of seemed to get it.  A few hours later came my first shiva.  That was something that begged a little explaining.  Boxes, drop cloths, lots of laughs and various cookie assortments. It took me a good while to sort that one out and to establish why we didn't have elaborate get-togethers like this a little more often...

I can only guess that my early youth and life was blessed enough not to have been affected by the untimely or sudden death of an immediately close loved one.  Not the case with all humans. But what I would comprehend very simply was that death was, much like taxes, a matter non-negotiable.  It happens when it happens.  For reasons quite simple, like 'the bullet entered him', or 'her heart attacked her'.

My mother never was a clean bill of health.  But I was always in the confines of family and somehow knew that were her time to suddenly come, we'd all be together to deal with it.  Meanwhile, thanks God, despite a few good scares, despite herself, she made out okay.  Throughout my youth progression, death was, by our joint policy, something not in itself to be feared, but existentially as the Golden Road to Salvation, adopting perhaps the humorously macabre.

If it wasn't necessarily a Jewish thing, it was clearly a "Woody Allen" thing.  Much of his famed repertoire for years revolved around the concept and deep philosophy of death, comically spoofed, Python-istically at every turn.  It was the wallpaper of my life, and my mother all but sealed herself in it.  As I adopted it myself, it was the recurring "one-way-out" joke.  What's the alternative to getting beaten up in the junior high school hallway every single day and being surrounded by an absolutely indifferent faculty..? Vigilantism..? Got anything simpler..?? I'll take it..!  I was little more than a junior Al Bundy.

The concept of death, in my eyes such as it was, seemed less to be scared of and more cherished as the ultimate escape plan.....if things really ever got quite that bad, the general, intellectual understanding of course being that in reality, things would not.  But who doesn't need insurance of some sort at some point in their lives..?

If nothing else, it made for a cathartic dream.  And some of my best kid dreams were themed by it.   When I lived my most horrifying grammar school year, presided by some Leona Helmsley-esque beast of a matron who thought nothing of implying to a fifth-grader that a failed long-division test deemed him learning disabled, aloud to the entire class, your dreams at night were your only recourse..!  Actually my tragic death also themed my daydreams on the walk home back then, too.  These were great little dramas, now that I recall.  Real Movie-Of-The-Week stuff about the ten-year-old who, to everyone's unanticipated shock, jumped off the roof of his building, as the film unfolds to learn what pushed him off the edge, amidst the fear and crippling remorse of everyone in his path.  It's likely that what kept me grounded the most at the worst times was the common knowledge that I'd never actually drudge up enough desperate courage to actually do it.  Somehow, the fear of my mother's reprimand against such was the principal blockade, and I could not violate that bond, no matter what.  That must have been the Jewish part.

But I never would misplace my seating of death's meaning or purpose.  Even author Barbara Ehrenreich's acclaimed chronicle on American poverty, Nickel And Dimed, was unflinchingly straightforward on the statistics regarding desperation suicides.  

When my mother did in fact pass, days after turning sixty-five, her departure was blessedly sudden and final.  With little bank account or savings in my life yet accrued, I was put to footing costs entirely for services and burial, as the life insurance policy was cashed in years earlier to cover our rent.  It may have set me back at the time, yet at the same time, despite a surrounding and comforting family, none of whom exactly stepped forth insisting upon any wallet-cracking, I found this outcome preferential. Somehow, nothing seemed more maturing than racing down to the bank, procuring that money order and delivering it to the chapel director on the morning of the service, done up in my tailored formals. I'm not so sure it didn't see her out with some satisfaction, either.  It was kind of like a final gift.

Not really threatened by the prospect of that renown Grim Reaper, who will collect beyond anyone's appeal, my fears of life are simply way less ephemeral, and always have been.  Namely, fears of sudden illness and unanticipated destitution.  As generally unreal as that sort of thing may be at the very moment for myself, you, or anyone, praise the Lord, it's also not, in too many ways, less than a sudden possibility at the hands of a much more powerful and feared force far more threatening: Fate.  It's the fear of fate we spend our lives learning to mitigate and rationalize our way out of.  It's the basis of prayer, and the graduate course in maturity at absolutely any age.  Somewhere between being held hostage by it, ignoring it, educating and preparing against it when I can, and accepting it as one of life's immovable structures, it turned me somehow into the man no male-plant-based supplement can or Bar Mitzvah at age thirteen could have.  And it's permitted me to recognize this "death" thing for what it is.  Strictly a thing. But, that's just my own very candid adopted policy..

Which returns me to that apartment conversation in my twelfth year, one of too many quite like it.  If it wasn't immensely sardonic, it wasn't us.  But every now and then, my responsible parent would issue a disclaimer...

"You do know you shouldn't say these things out loud to other people, right..?  They might not understand...."

"Oh yeah, I know..", I assured, topping my slice of Entenmann's pound cake with some Cool Whip on the kitchen counter.  "They're not like us..."

Noah F.

 

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.

"A Few Minutes With Noah F...."

Without any curmudgeonly agenda, and with a sense of positive and due respect to my fellow human, I’m never going to understand the purpose of the common greeting “Happy New Year”.  

The calendar year as we know it is an immense increment of time, in anyone’s life.  Sure, you stack up enough of those things and they get smaller and put more mileage on all of us.  But it’s all about what we endure inside each of those 365-day boxes.  Twelve separated compartments of almost four seven-day sections each. That’s quite an undertaking, and not something upon which to bring some overall pronouncement in any possible way, as presumably well-meant as that might be.

The greeting itself as we know it, “Happy New Year”, certainly has its roots in preceding cultures.  Greek, European, Asian, I couldn’t even tell you.  But the history is all there for the researching.  At the same time though, it’s possible that a more religious-based cohesion in those earlier cultures brought a greater, more sophisticated and respectful meaning to such words.  It wasn’t a thoughtless three-word phrase that conjured up mind images of two-second local television IDs during midnight movies, throngs of drunken young people screaming and blowing paper horns in Times Square, and little holiday logos on cardboard coffee goblets doled out in midtown deli shops.

A calendar year in anyone’s life presents at start immense possibilities.  Some not necessarily great, if you get my drift.  And we’re not even talking anticipated ones.  In the arts, there’s the concept defined as “hubris”.  To make a long definition short, that’s the poisonous ingredient that swells the head of the tragic hero and plummets him to his demise. It’s actually within the contract of various heritage cultures and religions that you’re not supposed to make comment or pronouncement upon one’s immediate future, for fear of any misapprehension of hubris.  Even a buzzed driver can make it across the boulevard intersection unscathed once in a while.  But as a practice, no one would condone this.

Sure, it’s a little phrase all meant in kindness.  But unlike the acknowledgement of a prescient holy day or actual commemoration, such as Christmas or maybe St. Patricks Day, consider the meaning of the words.  You’re making a definitive pronouncement and beyond that, a command upon someone’s untenable fortune.  Is that necessarily respectful..?

If it’s a greeting recognizing the very day itself, well then you have to bring thought to what that means, and what the words mean to those receiving them.  Is there anything religiously founded and solemn in nature about the common conception of New Year’s Day..?  Or is it some imposed mandate upon “happiness”, much like Thanksgiving brings mandate for “family togetherness”..?  How many are capable of immediately bringing a sense of this unattainable thing known as “happiness” to the turn of a new calendar year, carrying everything their lives have yet to shed or attain..?  Anyone bearing a positive mood on January 1st will undoubtedly stroll down the avenue with all the charm of a Gene Kelly musical-variety TV special.  And they just might look upon their “Happy New Year” greeting to that approaching stranger as a beautiful sharing of their warm and precious charm into their heart.  The promise of that sure is beautiful.

One time, in my early teens, my mother and I were out for a stroll on New Year’s Day, when we ran into a friend of hers, a very nice, reserved middle-aged lady.  Introduced suddenly to this woman, I kindly approached with an appropriate, “Happy New Year”, which is when my mom tugged at my arm in some effort at subtlety, and glared at me with that “uh-uhh” scowl.  Okay, what’d I do wrong now..??

Onto our respective ways, my mom leaned into me and said, “she’s very emotionally fragile and her husband is very ill…”  Great.  Thanks for warning me.  But that innocent mishap taught me something invaluable about the unintended weight of a light greeting.

It’s been decades since I’ve valued the New Year’s Eve and Day as anything frivolously celebratory.  Being one of the life-long Jewish faith, raised in a mostly mixed Judeo-Christian population where “the whole commercial Christmas thing”, as Charlie Brown might have perceived it, maintains the upper hand in the industrial complex, I’ve managed, throughout any maturity I’ve accrued, to observe this thing known as the turn of the New Year as literally a day of quiet, peaceful and solemn reflection. That thing known to the devout and secular alike as “prayer”.  It’s not, certainly as the new pandemic and it’s restrictions has reminded us, just for churches, temples, places of worship or even religions of worship. And it isn't necessarily something of a prerequisite, endowed trillion-year cultural heritage in ritual that need be mindfully nor mournfully intense.  Alternately, it's something all of us are readily capable of, and probably more prepared to practice than we realize.  It’s a valve toward mindful, inner peace.  I don’t know anyone who couldn’t benefit from that point blank.

That’s why the stranger I encounter with friendly intention is met on New Year’s Day with a term we could probably all do well to adopt:  “Peace”.

N.F