: lower black pain.: Recent Episodes

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I was looking for a photograph yesterday, from a while ago - of my wife and a friend out in front of a convenience store at night riding one of those giant toy animals that moves when you put in a quarter. It was winter and my wife was wearing bright purple leggings and our friend was wearing bright green leggings. They were laughing.

I looked through our pictures and I couldn’t find it. I searched by location, then for “bright green leggings”, and nothing came up. I began to look through all of them, year by year. Still nothing.

“What’cha doin?” my wife asked.

“I’m trying to find that picture where…” I described the moment. She remembered it.

“Oh, yeah. That’s a picture.”

Pause.

“Yeah.” I replied.

Pause.

“It’s a PICTURE.” she said.

There was a pause here as well, augmented by my puzzled squint. Confused, I indicated the computer before me with a cautious wave of my hand.

“It’s… not in here.” I told her, with a timid Vanna White flourish.

“No, it’s with the pictures.” she said, turning to leave the room, then calling back from the hallway, “…the ACTUAL pictures. It was before all that.”

We see our digital photos all the time. Our Apple TV™ uses our digital photo library as a dynamic screen saver, the AI displaying warm memories, important milestones, and what we each consider an unnecessarily mean-spirited gallery of our least attractive shots, more ghastly in the clarity of 4K. Over the last 20 years we have amassed over one hundred thousand digital images, so we attempted to weed the undesirables out, but the thing has a mind of its own.

Our ACTUAL pictures are in a wicker IKEA cube behind the couch, gathered in envelopes, a metal box, file folders, and a lot of rubber banded bunches. They are in no way databased. If I were to ask the box to find pictures of me wearing a scarf, the box would, in its own silent and entirely imperceptible way, openly mock me. To sort through the pictures in the box, you have to touch them with your hands and point them toward your face.

My daughter watched me do this, without comment. She is familiar with the box of pictures, as well as the legacy photo albums beneath the sofa; the shadows of four generations, which together represent a comprehensive slideshow of her DNA composition.

She has scanned a few images for class projects (“these are my great grandparents…”) but it’s been a minute since we’ve taken her through any of the old-timey stories.

She kept a careful distance.

Physical photographs are wonderful. They don’t move. You can look at them in true detail because they meet you halfway. But for all they represent in clarity, they often lack context, becoming memories we don’t remember.

Digital images give us hints as to their stories - offering day, time, and location, as well as thumbnails of all the photos taken immediately before and after to further jog the memory. Paper photos have none of that.

My grandmother used ballpoint pens to add “metadata” directly to her photos - sometimes right on the front. When she didn’t actually remember who was in the picture or when it was taken, she made it up.

It didn’t matter, she said: no one else was going to remember any better than she could: and in the future, her BIC-pen-scribbled shoddy research would transform to historical fact.

Our IKEA Collection is curated, pieces of paper that have survived 12 apartments and four to five decades, a box filled with pictures of far-distant relatives, former associates, and familiar strangers. These images are interesting, but their stories hold emotion, incident, tales cautionary and fantastic, milestones, victories, and experience. And sometimes, just a feeling.

And to capture all of that, you need yourself a BIC™ pen. This column is my pen, as it is, at its core, all about history. But everyone knows that books are better with pictures, so I pulled a few pictures out to write down their stories, pass on their context and significance as best I can. (Hopefully I’ll be more accurate than my Grandmother was.)

And I did find the photo I was so desperately looking for. Upon seeing it again, I could not recall exactly where or when it was taken, or what was happening before or after the moment captured - but still, it made me smile. I realized that the details of the situation are not why I treasure it.

Actually, it’s the colors I remember.

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The nice folks at the American Association of Retired People sent me a brochure about five years ago, which I tossed in the recycling, unopened, chuckling to myself at the blatant inaccuracy of their mailing list.

Three years ago I got a large envelope from them in the mail, promising the gift of a roomy insulated travel tote upon the return of their membership postcard. I clucked my tongue as I tossed it in the recycling, bemoaning the waste of paper, ink, and jet fuel necessary to deliver their message to the wrong address.

But this year, when the AARP invitation inevitably arrives, I will answer. I will answer “yes”. Yes, please send me the travel tote, and I’ll take the quarterly news mailer and subscribe to the helpful bi-weekly email tips regarding vitamins and annuities and affordable travel adventures. Fine. You got me. You stayed in the same place and I came right to you.

You ARE sort of sneaky - just looming there in the future with your discounts and life hacks, as sure of your inevitable relevance as a trusty umbrella, waiting for Spring. I would call it diabolical if it wasn’t just TIME.

(Oh, and if you offer an umbrella, I’ll also have one of those.)

The Social Security office wrote me this week - reminding me that in two years I could begin to collect payments - but if I waited five years, I would get more money, and if I waited ten years I’d receive even larger payments - albeit with statistically less opportunity to spend it, due to the whole TIME thing again.

I have always thought of “retirement” in the same space as “winning the lottery”, a goal where the implied lifestyle was mostly fantasy. Handball, fishing, wine tasting, light carpentry, walking barefoot on a beach with my slacks rolled up. I know a few folks who planned very, very well and are now enjoying the world around them after superior careers in challenging fields - though the world they’ve ended up in isn’t the one they were aiming for. They unknowingly packed warm clothes and optimism for an age of global warming and internet bullying.

I never thought retirement would be “stopping” as much as “making a 90 degree turn”. There were rumors of pensions and pretty gold watches. But change moved faster than any career could - buildings I remember seeing constructed were entirely razed, businesses that had thrived for almost a century were casually dissolved, entire industries understood as primary and essential proved wholly unnecessary. So most of us wound up taking those 90 degree turns sooner than we expected, and the future, once a mathematical result of sage calculation, became once again uncertain.

But in two years, dependent on the state of democracy, I could receive a payment from the United States government each month, along with a bit of healthcare to stave off the injuries I may incur while playing handball, fishing, or walking barefoot on a beach and mistakenly stepping on a jellyfish.

Again, I’m not expecting retirement to mean that I don’t have to work - but that I’ve earned the time to add something other than work to my schedule. I never learned to “take my time”, mostly because (not to be twee) I didn’t really see much time that “belonged to me”. Besides unescapable life function, my every moment was an urgent payment forward, relentlessly thriving or surviving this or that or everything.

I’ve given out a great deal of advice over the years, most of it to groups of eager college students or potential entry-level employees. My central theme was to always keep learning. Now, I am going to take my own advice. I have a list of things that I’m going to keep learning. In alphabetical order, they are:

• ASL

• (the) banjo

• bioscience

• sleight-of-hand

Given that I’m still working everyday, I understand that I will need to make room for these pursuits, so I’m giving up

• worrying about things

• going out of the house after dark

• drinking alcohol (outside of the house (after dark))

• doomscrolling

• thinking about doing things rather than immediately doing them and then just being done with it

Oh, and I’m going to sing more. I enjoy it, even if two of our cats do not. I mean, Tom Jones, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Barbara Streisand, and Paul McCartney are all 84 years old this year. Five of them have released new albums in the last three years, and Tom Jones is out on tour RIGHT NOW. Inspiring.

But the grand dame of it all is Shirley Bassey, best known in the US for singing the James Bond theme “Goldfinger”. She is the first Black artist to sing a Bond theme, the first Welsh singer to have a number one hit, and the first female artist to have a song on the UK top 40 charts in seven consecutive decades. She has released over 40 albums, 20 tv specials, and is 89 years old.

Dude. I have a ways to go. Maybe I don’t need that tote bag yet. Oh AARP, don’t be mad at me: I really do appreciate that you are there to greet us as our enlightened sherpa to Creakybone Mountain™. But you just sit tight. I’ll be on my way.

In a while.

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Last week I purchased an empty bottle of mouthwash.

It arrived from eBay very well wrapped and protected with paper and another type of paper in a ziplock bag surrounded by bubble wrap, in a box. It was very inexpensive, mostly because it’s an empty bottle of mouthwash.

I am writing a series of short essays about the home my grandparents lived in; they bought the house in 1949 and lived there for over 60 years. I knew the house well because we lived in an duplex at the other end of the block and visited at least once a week, most often on Sundays after church. I only lived in my grandparents’ house for one week, the summer my mom had to leave town for a national teacher’s conference.

I was seventeen. My grandmother thought it would be most appropriate for me to sleep in my mother’s old room to experience what it was like for her, sleeping in the 1950’s. All I knew about my mother’s childhood room was that, growing up, she hid Ray Bradbury and Issac Asimov books under her pillow - so during that week, I did the same (I believe it was “I Robot”), - just for authenticity.

I had a summer job singing at the amusement park; I had to be at work by 10AM and didn’t get back until about 9PM, so out of respect I got up early each day to get ready and have breakfast with my grandparents every morning.

Anyway, I bought an empty bottle of mouthwash last week from eBay.

I should say that the bottle is “almost” empty, as it does have a little bit of liquid still in it.

I am not a linguist, either professionally or as a focused hobby, but I always believed myself to be familiar with common prefixes and suffixes. For instance, I thought that “sol” referred to the sun in some way.

It does as a prefix, but as a suffix, sol refers not to “solar” but “solution”, as in AEROSOL, or the product names Pine-Sol™(pine solution), or Lysol™ (the LY refers to the Greek word “lysis” meaning “to break down or dissolve”), or the curious American mouthwash named “Astring-O-Sol™”(astringent solution?) - created in the 1920’s to compete with the Listerine™ brand. Rather than Listerine’s “Fires of Sterilization” flavor, Astring-O-Sol contained zinc chloride and the oils of myrrh and wintergreen.

The gimmick was that Astring-O-Sol was highly concentrated, even somewhat dangerously so: potent enough that just three drops in six ounces of water created an potion powerful enough to deliver fresh breath for a full day. That’s how it could be marketed as a clear value, since its smaller packaging allowed more product to be shipped for less money and a bottle would last longer than its competitors due to the fact it was being emptied by only three drops each day.

My grandparent’s bathroom was far more of a time machine than my mother’s old bedroom. The tile was vintage, the sink was tiny and low with a sturdy little faucet, and there were products I had never heard of or seen before in the cabinet behind the mirror: soaps and creams and my grandfather’s depilatory powder (which smelled like rotten eggs) and after shave (which smelled like, well, Grandpa) and a bottle of Astring-O-Sol, which I did sample during that summer week in their house.

However, being in a hurry, and as there was not a cup in the bathroom, I did not dilute it, but instead sprinkled three drops directly onto my tongue. Those familiar with the effects of wasabi can extrapolate what happened next - a moment of calm, then curiosity, then complete and total panic where I forced my head as far as it would go into the tiny sink, desperately trying to calculate an angle that might allow a few drops of water to get into my mouth. And yes, the freshness did last all day long.

Anyway, they don’t sell that stuff anymore in most stores, so I bought an empty bottle, exactly like the one from that bathroom. When I think about my grandparent’s house, it’s not so much architectural details as the experience of being there, and that moment was one of my clearest (if not exactly fondest) memories.

My family watched me unwrap it, which took a while, but did not immediately comment when they saw what it was.

“Is that old mouthwash?” my wife finally asked.

“Yeah.” I replied. “It’s for research.”

I was surprised that my answer was good enough for both of them. I was all ready to impress them with the fact that one just like it is in the Smithsonian.

https://www.si.edu/object/astring-o-sol-mouthwash-and-gargle%3Anmah_1218694

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This is my sixtieth summer. I don’t quite have the hang of it yet.

I’ve done all the important research: Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon were fantastic professors, taught me all about beach culture and how to “hang ten” on a surfboard and sing my summer feelings in groovy song. Admittedly, the majority of their wisdom did not effectively translate to my landlocked Kansas City existence. I eventually made the singing part work as a summer job, but the closest I ever got to surfing was skateboarding and watching Point Break.

My mother was a schoolteacher, so that cycle of summer vacation seemed natural to me. In fall, winter, and spring there were books to read, reports to write, pencils to mindlessly chew; but in the summer pressures lifted, and I could relax a little (when I wasn’t mowing grass or working at that singing job).

Now, nearly 40 years past any kind of educational cycle, it’s still harder for me to wake up and get out of the house in summer than the rest of the year. Surely I should be be-slippered and pajama-ed in front of a television with a huge bowl of colorful breakfast cereal on my lap, re-charging my gentle system from its three-quarters of a calendar year of diligent toil and focus.

But no. I put on actual pants and talk to people, nearly every day.

My family is in alignment with my seasonal malaise, which is supported most authentically by my high-school age daughter. She loved the first two weeks of summer vacation, but feels the dew has now evaporated from the lily and craves some kind of challenge.

Cleaning her room was her first adventure - the frenzy of studying for finals and creating year-end projects begat a creative tornado, whose aftermath was still clearly evident. But three days, a garbage bag, and a couple of strategic bookcases from IKEA later, that task was completed.

Even her phone, whose constant fountain of digital distraction had proven an absolute lifesaver against academic stress, now seems a bit much. She looks at it on-and-off during the day, but it is clearly a condiment without a burger to complement or french fries to enhance.

I see her particular near-boredom as the edge of true genius - this is when she might pick up her guitar and learn three chords and explode with a bunch of catchy tunes that rail against injustice, inspiring her generation and beginning our retirement plan.

That may not happen.

For now she’s making art and cooking and writing and starting to read a few books. Her chief complaint is that summer days are LONG. Even her attempts to sleep halfway through them are futile: the hours keep stretching languidly forward toward lazy late evening sunsets.

My wife is a casual athlete and should love the summer months, but for days on end we’ve had sweltering weather where it’s beyond impractical to run outside.

And she loves running. Outside.

So there is no clearer expression of human dissatisfaction than my wife’s face when forced by aggressive weather to workout inside and online, using those pastel colored little weights that I bought her non-ironically.

Observe her frustration. She is the lion given tofu for supper. She is an opera fan at a monster truck rally.

Her form is strong, her dedication pure, but her effort is disrespected by the Lilliputian stature of her digital instructors, the prison-cell-floor amount of space we have available in our apartment, and of course the Easter basket color of our weights. She is a mighty warrior, sitting on a folding lawn chair.

To make things worse, the blazing sun, cause of this discontent, continually mocks her by shining scornfully into the room, creating arrogant reflections on her iPad screen.

She is a Michelin star chef, dining at a Cheesecake Factory.

Summer time is different than regular time. It’s slower, somehow - weighted down with the responsibility of making crops grow and evenly tanning and supporting the hot dog industry. There is something tangible that relaxes our pace and ever so slightly lowers our shoulders, letting us breathe a bit easier.

I think that’s what bothers us now: the break in our relentless pace. I might eventually be able to run a (quarter) marathon, but if there was a nap break in the middle I don’t know if I’d have the wherewithal to finish it. Summer isn’t synonymous with “vacation” anymore: so if I’m not allowed to fully stop, I might as well just keep on going.

But time is an action noun, like river or snowstorm, always in motion. Today will not be tomorrow, now isn’t then, and soon enough there will be piles of homework, cool damp mornings to run in, and the darkness of a subterranean lair to wake up to.

Ah. Just gotta make it through summer.

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Hyperthymesia sounds exhausting. It’s exhausting to say, quite honestly.

It is the rare ability to accurately remember nearly every day of one’s life in absolute detail - what you wore, ate, saw, said, and did. Every day.

Of course there are days that I remember…well, pieces of days. Mostly glimpses: brief sequences - photographs, edits. My memories are clearer and more distinct when associated with an object - a favorite shirt or beloved comic book - but at their strongest when paired with either an odor or sound. I cannot tell you what I was doing 40 years ago today, and there’s probably a photo in our library of what I was doing 25 years ago, but still I do not remember it.

But I can tell you, with confidence, exactly what I was doing 54 years ago during the summer of 1972.

I was listening to music.

The top hits of 1971 lacked... empathy, somehow. And 1973 was too showy - too variety-show-ready.

It was 1972 where I absorbed everything that I love about music. Check out a playlist of hits from that year: they are awash with cacophony: rich strings with rhythmic horns with toy pianos with overdubbed harmonies and the occasional cheeky Hammond organ. There is so much MUSIC in this music.

And the variety. Lean On Me by Bill Withers, American Pie by Don McLean, Heart Of Gold by Neil Young, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face by Roberta Flack, The Candy Man by Sammy Davis, Jr, Take It Easy by the Eagles, Song Sung Blue by Neil Diamond, Papa Was A Rolling Stone by the Temptations…

For me, these songs are visceral. They are hypnotic, time machines, siren song. And I discovered them all through the combination of Kansas City’s stalwart Soul and Adult Contemporary radio stations and a bright orange Radio Shack™ FlavorRadio™.

It was amazing - you could hear music in the yard when you were trimming the sides of the grass, or in your room when you were (supposed to be) cleaning it or AT NIGHT when the world was (supposed to be) asleep.

And for FREE. Miracle box. Thus listening to music is what I was doing that summer.

The story my Mom tells is that as a tiny baby I was much so much soothed by music that she put a radio in my crib with me (at a safe distance).

As a single parent, she couldn’t always “sleep when the baby sleeps”, and no one had yet invented the “let the baby piteously cry itself to sleep” strategy, so the radio solved two problems by allowing her to get me to sleep quickly and then use the time to do the dishes and boil the bottles and get a little sleep of her own. However, it did have one down side.

R&B, rock and roll, and classical music all made me MORE awake and volatile, resulting in either fretting or dancing about (in a prone little baby position).

The key to relaxation was country music.

“Oh, come on little baby, now listen to this…” she would say, tuning to Bach or Smokey Robinson - to no avail: I was calmed only by the twang of a steel guitar. Even if she tried to change it after I’d fallen asleep, I would immediately stir with concern.

So a few years later, when she discovered a super-affordable plastic radio WITH AN EARPHONE JACK, it seemed that God had heard her those many nights she lay in bed, unintentionally learning every word of “Coal Miner’s Daughter”, and had offered her a transistor-powered solace.

So I listened to every radio station. I kind of knew there was a Black one and then other ones, but I listened anyway.

My favorite songs of 1972 were “Let’s Stay Together” by Al Green, “A Horse With No Name” by America (my favorite horse song until “Wildfire” by Michael Martin Murphey (sp) in 1975)…

…and number one - “Summer Breeze” by Seals and Crofts (not to be confused with Sid and Marty Krofft of H.R. Pufnstuf fame).

I liked this one so much that my mom actually bought me the single. I remember listening to it over and over, watching it spin around and around on the record player, trying to work out the lyrics.

Even at that young of an age, I knew that most of these songs were about love, which seemed nice, but was a bit confused when lyrics became poetic and metaphorical. (I actually appreciate that now: the 1972 lyric “makin’ love” would be replaced in today’s music with unmistakably graphic step-by-step instruction.)

What confused me most about “Summer Breeze” was its referrals to jasmine, mentioned in the song seven times. I had already been confused by Simon and Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair” references to “parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme”, which the nuns played on the guitar sometimes during chapel at school. I didn’t understand the “Herb / Love” angle, though it did make Thanksgiving more exciting, since that’s the only time I saw all of those at once.

But jasmine notwithstanding, I clearly remember standing at the edge of our console record player, staring at the revolving turntable, singing along with both the lyrics and the strangely satisfying notes of the twangy guitar solo. And I did feel fine.

Songs of 1972

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We live in a Brooklyn apartment; no basement or attic, so we have to rent a storage unit in one of those huge warehouses that used to be a factory for something. What’s stored there is a point of mild contention - things we thought we might need someday before we actually got to Someday, memorabilia of moments we’ve already forgotten, and tons of books, cds, tapes and tools that have since been replaced by weightless electronic versions.

But deep within the melee are the holiday decorations: 12 sturdy plastic boxes of Christmas, 9 of Halloween, 5 of Easter, 2 with combined elements of Valentine’s, Mardi Gras, and St. Patricks, and only 1 for The Fourth of July.

Christmas and Yule are all about lights. Tons of them. We have curated the colors somewhat and can no longer tolerate multiple blinkity strings going at the same time, but there are still enough that the room actually heats up a few degrees when we turn them all on.

Halloween is EVERYTHING. Early on we discovered that some stores put Halloween items on super-close-out-sale to make swift way for Christmas decorations – if we went at just the right time we could clean up for the next year. This strategy has enabled us to surround ourselves each October with an ever expanding dynamic gallery of curiosities - pumpkin candles and plush screeching cats and REAL science lab equipment and teeny-tiny pirate skeletons and a talking (plastic) crystal ball and strings of orange lights.

Easter is mostly plush rabbits. We’ve only bought one each year, but had the audacity to know one other for over three decades, so there are now (un-ironically) quite a LOT of bunnies. In addition, it is now tradition to place one fresh unopened box of yellow Marshmallow Peeps™ in the center of the fireplace mantel, with our light-up Peeps™ garland directly below it.

Valentine’s is vintage greeting cards and red lights; Mardi Gras is beads and green, purple, and gold lights, and St. Patrick’s is music - and green lights.

Fourth of July is all about fireworks and hot dogs, and we can’t decorate the apartment with either of those. I mean, we shouldn’t decorate the apartment with hot dogs: of course we COULD; that’s a keen example of the very freedoms the holiday represents.

Nevertheless, instead of annual decorations of highly processed meats, plastic flags, and strings of red white and blue lights, I have put together over the years a small collection various oddities which at some point a retailer decided were “patriotic” and “desirable for purchase by a consumer”. In most cases, alignment with either or both of these categories was far from achieved, but they warm my heart with their creative enthusiasm.

My absolute favorite Fourth of July item used to be our plastic Jell-O™ mold in the shape of the continental US, complete with little state lines. It is 14 inches wide and three and a half inches deep, requiring four boxes of Jell-O™ to fill. We have never attempted to use this item for its intended purpose because none of us are keen to consume twelve full cups of Jell-O™, even in the heat of the summer.

Also, the idea of a wobbly USA kind of melting in the heat is a bit matchy-matchy with Right Now - feels more like a piece from the Whitney Biennial. In any case, last weekend it was surpassed by what I honestly consider to be the most fascinating and intriguing representation of national identity I have ever encountered:

Two ceramic men, each holding one end of an unfinished cord on which hangs a three letter banner - U, S, and A. The rightmost figure appears of European descent, the other from the African Diaspora. One sports a hat of stars, the other, stripes.

Wow, right? What a comment on the true nature of the USA - supported by tension and distance, interdependence on the existence of one another, yet made of a deep inherent fragility that discourages us from coming together. Wow. I told this to my wife, who listened dubiously, but pointed out that while everything I said was true, it was severely undercut by the fact that the figures were actually gnomes.

Y’know, like garden gnomes.

Tiny patriotic garden gnomes.

And one is black.

It’s the best 4th of July thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life. It was made in China. Fantastic. No notes. It makes zero sense and yet I cannot look away, because somebody said “let’s take that gnome machine we use to make December stuff and make some summer cash.” Innovation. Capitalism. MOXIE. That, is America right there.

My wife wants the cats to find them.

One would think you could classify such an item as “Americana”.

Nope. Please do not investigate that term, as even the most perfunctory online search generates a gallery of “African American Collectibles” of a specific sort that ironically has NOTHING AT ALL to do with the word freedom, save to emphasize the overall importance of the concept.

That is exactly the kind of imagery my new object negates - its unintentional whimsy stands firmly against crass misrepresentation, allowing my wild imagination to impose all kinds of more positive possible meanings.

The most striking is perhaps an homage to the 1958 film “The Defiant Ones”, where Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis portray two escaped convicts on the run in the segregated South - connected by a chain they cannot break, forced to cooperate in order to move forward…

…except, you know, they’re gnomes.

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Commencement speeches are engineered to inspire those beginning a new phase of life. They are meant to be epic, a benediction offering direction, courage and motivation, an address to the fresh battalion, a manifesto unique to a specific group of people and moment in time.

I’ve been watching a lot of them online recently: movie stars, scientists and comedians dressed in colorful and entirely unearned robes and mortarboards, reading words most likely written by roomfuls of America’s most lauded professionals. O, how the young near-graduates laugh!

About three quarters of the way through, these speeches always turn serious, offering heartfelt pleas to “always be yourselves” or “don’t let the b**s get you down” before rising to an inspirational and lightly tearful summit.

We get one these speeches the end of high school, maybe a few more if we choose to go to college or graduate school, but that’s it. We deserve more of these. They are admittedly wasted on anxious young people mere minutes away from the freedom to not follow anyone’s advice.

That being said, I did not remember who spoke at my own graduation. I had to look it up.

It was Stephen J. Gould, zoologist, a very accomplished Harvard professor who wrote numerous books concerning evolution, stood against cultural oppression, spoke five different languages and loved baseball, books and light opera. A leader in science and history, the Library of Congress described him as “a living legend”.

I do not remember a single word he said at that ceremony.

I also did not remember the then-president of the university’s closing speech (I found a quote online from the school newspaper):

“…our experiment in creating a republic of virtue passes to your hands…the civic ideal in America is your conception to grapple with, for better or worse.”

Well, I should have paid more attention to that. Though now it seems a bit of a lazy hand-off, a toss of the national car keys with a tepid “…it only takes premium gas and there isn’t a spare tire…but, y’know, good luck with it.”

Lest you now believe I am just a fanboy of ceremonial oratory, I must explain that what I’ve sought from these speeches was comforting, useful advice from people older than me, who were “there before me”, in the style of Yoda, or Uncle Ben, or Mr. Miyagi, or any role played by Morgan Freeman.

Problem 1 - there are so many fewer people ‘older than me’ now. It’s hard to find anyone on my subway car who might have seen “Gilligan’s Island”.

Problem 2 - it’s impossible to have been HERE before me because NOBODY has been HERE before. This time and space is bananas. We live in a combination of Wonderland, The Matrix, and wherever Milo’s car went when he entered The Phantom Tollbooth.

At school, I had been carefully prepped to take on the world that existed at that time - at the end of my graduation ceremony I threw a hat in the air and stepped bravely into a whirlwind of what I believed to be predictable instability.

What possible advice could anyone have offered on that day that would have successfully charted a course through the internet and smart phones? It would be petty to blame the hyper-genius zoologist, who very likely said something super useful like, “Evolve!”… but I wasn’t paying attention.

Now I’m Morgan Freeman. I’m the old person. In a mentor role I speak calmly to expectant faces who look to me for virtual pins to drop in the map app on their metaphorical life-phones: direction, paths through the chaos.

I do not have a room filled with WGA writers, so “don’t look down” is the best I’ve got. Back when everyone was taller than me, I used to look up more than I looked down - classroom blackboards, movie screens at the multiplex, the sky outside. I held the books I read in front of my uplifted head, never down at my belly.

And I didn’t just look up - I looked out, away from myself, navigating the immediate challenges of physical space rather than the potential dreads of an endless digital universe. Don’t look down. No matter what your life brings, meet it eye to eye. Live where you are.

Ok, well, even back then I didn’t pay attention all the time, but at least my head was filled with my own memories and experiences. For instance, once I was stranded on a desert island with a movie star, a professor, and this girl named Mary Ann…

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They were free

but did not know

But they were always free

until somebody kidnapped them

transported them by sea

and took their language, names and history

and held them in captivity

until December 1865 when that was legally

abolished and prohibited

across the USA

good news for all

law of the land

peace in our time

all bonds released

new national reality

no human would be property

but they did not know

because in some remote location

on a profitable plantation

someone heard this news and

simply did not pass it on.

a legislative victory which now seemed doomed to fail

in areas where words sat stagnant like unopened mail

so they were free,

but did not know

for knowing was the key

to unlock rusty shackles of the past two centuries

but stories spread

word gets around

and through the sonic underground

those last to hear were finally found

good news for ALL

LAW of the land

ALL BONDS RELEASED

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Allow me to begin by firmly stating that every day is a “loving day” at our house, a so-pleasant stream of consideration, kind words, pleases and thank yous, and (very often) unsolicited cups of tea. Which is all very nice, but during this exact time of year such Loving shines a bit brighter, as we collectively remember that the legal right for our family to exist in the United States is one and a half years younger than I am.

In 1967 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a married couple, Mildred and Richard Loving, who nine years earlier were arrested in their own house for the crime of being a married couple, which was illegal in the entire state of Virginia (which was their home) between any African-American and European-Based person (which they were, respectively). Punishment for this crime ranged from one to five years in prison, but the Lovings received a light sentence of just a few nights in jail (even though Mildred was pregnant) followed by absolute banishment from the state of Virginia for the next 25 years…so, 1992.

But they persevered, and made their case, and nine years later Loving v. Virginia was heard in the Supreme Court, who decided in their favor with a decision that not only made interracial marriage legal in Virginia, but in all the 15 other states in the U.S. with comparable laws.

The couple was able to move back home with their children and re-unite with the rest of their families, without fear of further litigation. The Virginia win was particularly symbolic as a law of this kind had been active in that state for over 300 years.

So, you know…older than the nation itself.

In 2007, Ken Tanabe, child of interracial couple, decided that remembrance of this historic case should be an annual tradition. So every year, on June 12th, a national celebration of the striking down of the legal ban against interracial marriage occurs. It’s called Loving Day, the world’s largest celebration of multicultural families. There are picnics and get-togethers and meet-ups and whatnot all over the country.

This year is the 19th celebration, and the 58th year since the verdict. Again, I am older than that court decision, yet live everyday in its glorious benefit.

And I in no way take lightly that we got married in 1992, the original date the Loving’s banishment was to finally end - without their fight, our story would never have begun.

A smooch on the cheek should not feel comparable to grand larceny, yet Loving Day reminds me and mine of how lucky we are that there were brave and noble warriors who were determined to make “us” possible.

In fairy tales, heroes battle for magical rings or enchanted swords that hold the power to move mountains, destroy evil, or transcend time and space. All of the miles that they walk, puzzles they solve, and giant spiders they avoid or defeat (there are always giant spiders) are part of a quest for something ethereal, timeless, and for the most part unobtainable by the normal human/hobbit/wizard/scoundrel.

In real life there always seem to be battles going on, and certainly within those battles are heroes, brave and true, but I sometimes find it difficult to identify the ring/sword/key/prize of it all, save the end of the actual battle. So often folks fight for FREEDOM!™, which sounds like a glorious prize demanding a parade of long colorful banners and golden trumpets, but more often represents the protection of our quietest moments – where we sit on a specific spot, or read a book, or hold somebody’s hand.

At the end of the day, that’s what’s worth fighting for. Every birthday cake, folded sock, homework assist, and Friday Night Kitchen Dance Party holds deeper weight when I consider that it could just not be there, that the wonderful random circumstance which brought us together could have been swallowed by social madness had not heroes quested - not for riches or for power, but for each another.

Thank you, Mildred and Richard. The very idea of ‘Loving’ means more now because of you both.

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I don’t know if you believe in UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full trance mediums, the Loch Ness monster and the theory of Atlantis, but your disbelief can calmly hover regarding the existence of time machines because I have one - and this week, I’ve used it to bring my very first guest to this column: Judge Cordell D. Meeks Sr. : my grandfather.

My Time Machine is the cassette tape. Back in The Day we’d use it to curate a completely original 60, 90, or 120 minute experience, then physically hand it to another person to decode privately on their own tape device. The simplicity of its technology allows the cassette tape to capture sound as well as its surrounding context: the background noise and echo of a room, the voice of a DJ coming in at the end of a song recorded from the radio, even the age induced increase of hissing and pops enhance and define the moment captured on tape.

In this case, in 1984 my mother assisted my grandfather as he rehearsed a speech written for the Elks Association’s annual convention; she had the idea of recording it, which he did several times. The cassette ended up at our house with all our other tapes, which I (of course) saved in various shoe boxes stuffed in a quite large trunk.

Last month, while constructing an archival website about my grandparents, I found the tape and used software to isolate my grandpa’s voice.

I could say

“…the text of this speech is so relevant thatmy grandfather could have been written it today. “

I could say that. It’s actually true. The craft of the writing is crystal clear, classic, still feels contemporary: apart from the specific “current” references, the rest could have been written yesterday. So again, I could say that.

But it wouldn’t be entirely accurate, because my grandpa ’s writing style, however superlative, is not the sole reason the piece feels contemporary, for while my grandfather could have written this piece today, it may have less to do with my grandfather and more to do with today.

42 years is a long time. There’s not that many topics one could write a speech about, then just repeat that speech after nearly half a decade. Anybody wanna hear about how I played Tetris on my Tandy 1000 computer?

At the time of this recording, my grandfather had retired from the bench; he was enjoying a life of reading and fishing and community service. I would call him exactly a month later to tell him I was going away to college. My grandfather was easygoing, focused, and empathetic, having navigated two World Wars and the entirety of the U.S. civil rights movement.

This speech was not in complaint, it was a battle cry. It was a torch being passed down to someone. But SURELY not the audience - men at least as old as himself, most of them also retirees. So who was this supposed to inspire?

Time Machine.

I believe that the men in that room heard a speech that he had already given, on this cassette tape, to me, as an anchor for a time when the legislation of human dignity, carefully constructed from the experience and will of the public, was in danger of being dismantled.

What follows is an excerpt from the 1984 speech “Fight For Right”, from our first guest writer, The Hon. Judge Cordell D. Meeks, Sr.

“…as we pause and reflect, we discern that our inventory of rights and freedoms may be dwindling and eroding to an alarming degree…

Today, not only are affirmative action programs being challenged in the courts, but the United States Justice Department is joining the challengers…

Some of our greatest gains in the Civil Rights Movement have come through the courts. But just recently it has been suggested that the power of the courts be curbed, so that they will be limited, if not prohibited, from making decisions affecting civil rights. If that should happen the cause of human and civil rights could be set back for a century.

But we must not let that happen. We must not let that ever happen. We must resist that and all other moves which would set us back. We must not suffer our children or our children’s children to face an uncertain future of re-segregated schools, of discriminatory housing, of unfair employment practice, and the denial of the freedom to register and vote. We shall not slide back into the cesspool of social, political, and economic slavery. Our backs will never again bear the bloody welts of the ugly whip of racism. We shall not sit in the easy rocking chair of complacency and watch our freedoms fade away.

To avoid that disaster we know that mere words are not enough. There are those who think that working at our jobs, paying taxes, and obeying all the laws will guarantee our freedom of first class citizenship-but being just a good, honest, law abiding citizen is not enough. Being hard workers in our occupations and proficient in our professions is not enough. So if we are to turn back the tide that attempts to push us back into the place we found ourselves after the Civil War and Reconstruction days, after World War I and World War I!, if we want to keep what we have, recover what we had, and gain what we deserve, we must come together for the common cause of freedom. We must work for the total eradication of the last vestige of second class citizenship.

As a prelude to the accomplishment of those goals, we must carefully choose our leaders in both public and private life.

We need strong leaders upon whose characters the most stinging envy can find no stain. Leaders who will be bold, fearless, and uncompromising. Leaders tough enough to weather the storm of temptation. Leaders who will ask “What’s in it for us?” and not “What’s in it for me?” Leaders who will fight for right. We must use the powerful weapon of the ballot. We must support those public officials whose records clearly indicate beyond a reasonable doubt that they want freedom for all.

If we follow that course, I believe that through our prayers, through our work, through our unselfish dedication to the principles of fair play and freedom and our unfaltering faith in almighty God, we will succeed.”

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I realized this week that there is a story I have skipped, a fixed point in my timeline that was seminal to my understanding (such as it is) of the world. Given the “generational grimoire” intent of this column, I will tell it now. Perhaps the telling will reveal the reasons I took so long to tell it. Let’s see.

Velcro. I loved it in high school. An engineering miracle. Velcro was a piece of The Future that was part of your wardrobe, like wearing a LASER. The fact that, every so often, the loop side would get stuck in my hair in no way disenchanted my fascination with the stuff. It could fasten a shoe, secure a watch to your wrist, and (most impressively) effectively seal the flap of a waterproof polyester winter coat, like the one my mother sent me freshman year of college.

The coat was cranberry red, had a special pocket for a tape cassette Walkman™ and a built-in channel for the headphone cord to travel to the hood without exposure to the elements. SO. COOL.

I wore it with pride. It had something like 12 pockets. No one had ever seen anything like it. I called my mom to thank her, and was surprised when she apologized.

“I know they must be wearing fancy coats up there…I wish I could get you a camelhair coat.” she said.

I didn’t know what that was. There wasn’t an internet for me to look it up on, but what I imagined was more Bedouin than Burberry.

My mother has always admired two styles of “formal” coats. One is the trenchcoat, the London Fog™ brand.

The other is the camelhair coat, which she finds very fancy.

• First of all, it is light colored, which means you have to have the sort of lifestyle where your coat doesn’t come in contact with anything that could possibly put dirt on it.

• Then, it isn’t really all that warm, which means you have to have a lifestyle where you go from a hot car directly into a warm building all the time, so no parking and walking… this coat is strictly chauffeur-driven.

• Third, it isn’t really waterproof, which means you have to have the sort of lifestyle where if there’s rain outside, you’re not going to come in contact with it.

A camelhair coat is not for putting groceries in the car, or shoveling snow, or even getting the mail. In her eyes, a camelhair coat is more than an elegant piece of outerwear, but stands as a clear indicator that one’s lifestyle is quite a few steps above merely comfortable.

All that being said, I really, really liked that Velcro coat.

In the interest of time we flash forward 10 years.

Zoe and I have moved to the east coast - she’s in school in Westchester and I’m sharing a railroad apartment in the East Village while holding down an entry level secretary job in a midtown ad agency.

Times being what they were, and salaries what they weren’t, I quickly learned necessary skill sets for survival: dinner at “happy hours” where the purchase of one (discounted) cocktail allowed access to buffets as vast as they were middling. I kept a box of Ziploc™ bags at my work desk, having been inducted into a secret society where, after a sumptuous client meeting, we would each receive a call to hurry to the abandoned conference room and scavenge the leftover lunch items. Filled with the sparkle of youth, I happily walked the 37 blocks to and from work to save on subway fare, and once a week I would get that one slice from the corner pizzeria… no, not that corner, the other one with the really good pizza.

A block from that pizza place was the Tile Bar. We just called it that…at the time there wasn’t a sign or anything. Given that my roommate’s financial situation was a great deal more liquid than my own, she frequented the spot, meeting associates from work there, university chums, etc. It was a very small space, but with its golden lighting, large windows and glass door, Tile Bar presented a 1930’s party spirit, where everyone in there was happy.

One winter night walking home with my roommate we happened to pass by, and she wanted to stop in and see if anyone she knew was there. I waited outside - peering in the doorway like a Charles Dickens waif, when a gentleman from the far side of the bar saw me and rushed toward me, hands outstretched.

I couldn’t possibly owe him money because I didn’t have any to lend, so I didn’t have any idea why he -

“…you’re Jd Michaels!”

“I am.”

He grabbed me by the lapel of my coat (still polyester), pushed me outside the door and slammed me against the bar’s outer wall.

“I saw you in school. You did everything.”

“I probably should have done less and studied more…”

“No, you weren’t afraid of what people thought of you. Were you? WERE YOU?”

Again, he had a WWE wrestler grip on my lapels.

“No”, I honestly replied (though under considerable duress).

“What are you doing now?”

I told him - secretary at an ad agency, no money, wife upstate at school…

“Are you happy?”

“Yeah - but look at you! You look fantastic.”

And he did. In fact, he was wearing a camelhair coat. I tried to calm to tone of the conversation.

“So, what are YOU doing?”

“Wall Street. It’s b**t. We work 20 hours a day but I’m only doing it for the money for 10 years, but they say it’ll take 30 off my lifespan.”

“That sounds awesome.” It did not sound awesome.

“It’s not.”

I did not know who this man was, but I decided, given the circumstances, to be fully transparent.

“Dude! I LITERALLY have nothing! I live down that street behind you with the friendly drug dealer on the corner in an eight by ten room! You are the dream. My mother would applaud for 10 minutes straight if you walked off the plane instead of me! Your haircut is worth more than my grocery budget!”

“But you’re happy.”

“You’re not happy?”

“Come here -”

Not giving me much of a choice, he let go with one hand and pulled me to the glass door with the other.

“See that girl?”

“The blonde movie star girl?” This was an accurate description. Her hair was a miracle, her coat entirely impractical, her perfect teeth evident from 50 feet away.

“Yeah. She’s my girlfriend.”

“Oh, well…that’s cool, right? That’s gotta be nice.”

“SHE doesn’t LOVE me…I couldn’t afford to even talk to her if I wasn’t at this job, and I hate this job! Does your wife love you?”

Yes, she did. “Yeah, she does.”

“Listen to me: you’re happy. You may not understand it now, it seems like you’re poor or whatever, but you’re happy. That’s what happy is. You made good decisions and didn’t go with the crowd or whatever. You’ve got to keep doing that. Promise me! Don’t let this happen to you!”

And there on the cold winter street, in his gorgeous yet impractical coat, he started crying.

So I gave him a big hug and said,

“Ok, man.”

I eventually got a better coat, but I can tell you honestly after 30 years, I have rarely had better advice.

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Each night at our home, in those twilight moments betwixt dinnertime and bedtime, I wash the dishes.

It’s the end of the day, days long and deep and somewhat stressful, but a wholesome meal and bright conversation at the dinner table have soothed me, and all I have to do is make a clean bridge from that delicate balance to well earned slumber…

…so I wash the dishes.

But every so often, there at the sink, my mind would drift back to the stress of the day, and as I turned off the kitchen light I knew that sleep would be elusive, and fitful, and fretful.

So I employed a mollifying strategy - placing my iPad where the water (probably) wouldn’t hit it, I watched re-runs of tv shows I was too young to watch at the time (MAS*H), didn’t see all the way through (Gilmore Girls), or wasn’t subscribed to the service they were on (Westworld).

This was Plenty Distracting, but I soon learned that the material had to be very specifically curated - exciting enough to keep me from snoozily dropping a soapy glass, simple enough to follow without staring at the screen, and - most importantly - optimistic enough to provide sufficient emotional buoyancy to float my weary spirit off to bed.

In the years I’ve been doing this, many shows have competed for the crown, but I believe that I now have a winner: the 1977 science-fiction classic: “The Bionic Woman”, starring Lindsay Wagner.

I was only eight years old when The Six Million Dollar Man debuted on ABC - the story of Steve Austin, an astronaut who suffers a terrible spaceship accident, requiring replacement of his eye, both legs, and an arm with robot parts which provide him increased strength, speed and agility.

Somewhere in his third season he got a girlfriend, who, as bad luck would have it, suffered a terrible skydiving accident, requiring replacement of her ear, both legs, and an arm with robot parts which provided her with increased strength, speed and agility.

Lindsey Wagner’s guest starring role as tennis pro turned reluctant superhero Jaime Sommers was supposed to be a limited deal, since her character died at the end of the two episode run. But THOUSANDS of letters were written, so she became the first female lead of a sci-fi tv show in history.

Soon, her worldwide ratings outpaced that of the Bionic Man, because her show, with the exact same premise as his, just felt different. Where Steve ran after a different villain every week (in slow motion), Jaime had a real job as a teacher and did all her adventuring on weekends and bank holidays. Where Steve was all power punches, Jaime was more of a MARVEL hero, with her intelligence, deductive reasoning, and empathy as her true advantages. Even their metal lunchboxes were different - Steve’s had him fighting Bigfoot on the front, and Jamie’s showed her teaching fifth grade history.

She was a bright new story to tell, but it WAS made in the 1970s, so on last night’s episode, Jaime very reluctantly entered a national beauty contest to retrieve a “space age microchip device” (which was the size of a medium apple). There was lots of action, but there was still a swimsuit competition, and for her talent portion she performed the song “Feelings”, North America’s closest ever imitation of a Eurovision entry.

Jaime Sommers has always been one of my favorite characters: she was gifted and talented before her bionics, and her kindness didn’t suffer when she got them. She was smart, and she was nice, and she was hard working - all which I was instructed to strive for.

But I connected most with the fact that she was consistently underestimated by everyone. As a kid of a specific sort, I knew what that felt like.

And one had to admit that while being a he-man hero type was all that Steve Austin really had to do, Ms. Sommers held down a full-time career in primary education and was a superhero on top of all that. Like Jaime, my mother was a fifth grade teacher, plus I had figured out that at least half the things Mom did at home everyday must've traditionally been “Dad” stuff to do, so she was technically triple-booked, and busier than Jaime was.

The Bionic Woman lasted three seasons on two networks for a total of 58 episodes, which for me translates into just under two months of KP duty.

So until mid-July I will stand at the sink, occasionally making that oddly percussive “tschee-tschee-tschee-tschee-tschee-tschee” sound to indicate when I’m using my bionic strength, just like Jaime does. Just like I used to do in fifth grade. And high school. And a few times in college, when I was lifting something heavy.

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I used to have to read the book before I saw the movie.

My prime example is Jack M. Bickham’s “The Apple Dumpling Gang”, a 1975 summer family film that I earned a ticket to upon completion of the paperback. Disney changed a great deal from the original novel (its first line is, “The fact that John Wintle was drunk didn’t matter.”) and I had to discuss, compare, and contrast the two versions of the story with my Mom after seeing the movie.

(We did stuff like that a lot. I’m lucky that my last name wasn’t Tenenbaum).

The deal only worked for screenplays based on pre-existing books: “novelizations” of screenplays were considered cheating. It was important to begin with the original story before any adaptations were considered.

Ok. Tie a ribbon around a finger to remember all that for a minute.

I drove through Brooklyn in the early afternoon on this Spring’s first bright, dry and warm Saturday. Fresh from a triumph at Whole Foods (my Prime Code had discounted eight dollars and thirty-seven cents from my weekly total), I felt that I was at last emerging from both winter’s frozen desert and my last six weeks of dire allergy and illness. The universe and I were in some kind of sync again, moving slowly forward.

This calmed me, because I’m gonna need all the help I can get this summer - New York is gonna be crazy with World Cup games, a potential basketball championship, and the city’s largest ever “Fleet Week” celebration, where record numbers of maritime vehicles and visitors will celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday. Navigation through all of that is going to be particularly challenging, but while the intricacies of international soccer dominate the news, I am personally focused on the sestercentennial.

Which is why it seemed particularly significant when, at a stop light, a man walked past wearing a dull purple t-shirt with thin yellow lettering that read,

AMERICAIS AN IDEA

There was no modifier for the direct object. Not, “America is a great idea” or “cool idea” or even “bad idea”. Thus, the t-shirt was impossible to refute while strangely non-political due to its unique color scheme which plainly avoided every possible hue of red, white, or blue.

At the next stop light I looked up the word “idea” in the OED on my phone:

idea /ʌɪˈdɪə / ▸ noun

1. a thought or suggestion as to a possible course of action 2. an opinion or belief 3. a defined aim or purpose 4. (from the philosopher Kant) a concept of pure reason, not empirically based in experience.

This offered less clarity than I’d hoped, steering my interpretation of the shirt’s message in four different directions:

America is a thought suggesting a possible course of action. America is an opinion or belief. America is a defined aim and purpose. America is a concept not empirically based in experience.

Hmn.

The rest of my drive home was a ponder.

The Bicentennial was bonkers. Every magazine from People to Playboy to Time proudly featured a waving flag on their cover. There were collectible quarters, half dollars, and two dollar bills (and soda cans and jelly jars). There were minute-long historical lessons during prime time TV network commercial breaks. EVERYTHING was red, white and blue (ice cream, t-shirts, gum, bathroom tissue, lighters, sport shoes, breakfast cereals, chainsaws...), and the unofficial yet universal tagline representing the event, which we saw EVERYWHERE, read: “The Spirit of ’76”.

I have not yet noticed the same kind of enthusiasm regarding this July. I thought it was just me, since when I was 10 years old, 200 years was a vast expanse of 20 lifetimes, and now 250 is just a wee bit over four.

Context, perspective, exhaustion - don’t know exactly why, but I just don’t feel the old “Spirit of ’26” (which doesn’t really work because it lacks that self-aware ambiguity of “1776 or 1976?”).

There will be fireworks, but there’s always fireworks. There will be bumper stickers and t-shirts, but the “Spirit” of the holiday seems to have shifted in the last (yikes) 50 years.

You know. The “idea” of it.

So I took into account that full OED definition.

America is a thought, suggesting a possible course of action.America is an opinion, a belief.America is a defined aim and purpose.America is a concept not empirically based in experience.

Thoughts, opinions, and concepts seem flimsy materials to build a nation out of - very “first and second little pig” architectural standards.

Belief, aim, and purpose sound sturdier - solid bricks to form a foundation, and the group of documents known as the Charters of Freedom - the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution - are those bricks for the United States - our original national software.

I have only read the Constitution once, decades ago. And despite the fact that I’ve memorized most of the musical “Hamilton”, I have only read twelve of the Federalist Papers.

I have experienced more of these works through, embarrassingly, other peoples thoughts and opinions of them.

So - The Apple Dumpling Gang.

In the next seven weeks, I am going give all of these original documents a fresh read. First of all, it represents a low-level dedication to the concept of citizenship. Second, I owe my mother an apology for making gentle fun of her a decade ago when she spent an entire weekend painstakingly reading the entire iTunes contract before clicking the “AGREE” button to update it, for that is the kind of logic this undertaking mirrors, and the level of concentration I now must employ.

Before our sestercentennial I will (hopefully) deepen my understanding of the ideas which form this nation, strengthening my position that America is not “a concept not empirically based in experience”, because our experience IS America, all of it, good and not-so-great.

There should be room in these documents to fit those experiences. And once I’ve read the book, this movie should make more sense…

…right?

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This time of year is CRAZY busy, with May Day and Mother’s Day and Star Wars Day and Cinco de Mayo and our anniversary and Eurovision and Beltane and Free Comic Book Day… the days are just packed.

Mixed into this is the birthday of this column, which is technically the second Thursday in May, which means that this is the week we mark the completion of four years of :lowerblackpain, together. Somewhere a medieval Warner Bros. cartoon herald is playing one of those long gold trumpets.

Thank you for your time, and your company.

Let’s review:

I am still actively archiving that box of videotapes:

• https://lowerblackpain.substack.com/p/that-boxful-of-magical-time-ribbons,

with the humbling understanding that No One Cares, Or Ever Will. I am not Barack Obama or Ernest Hemingway and my memories and bric-a-brac will never be stored at the perfect humidity and temperature behind glass under tasteful lighting. It’s…just not that kind of party for me, and I accept that.

However, I am still trying to USE all these bits of time, like a magpie trying to build a nest from branches, twine and Starburst™ wrappers. I realize now that I may need to move into the realm of fiction writing in order to gain a more generous canvas. In the province of imagination, my card tricks and science experiments can dance jauntily to the bossa nova soundtrack I’ll make on that tambur I brought back from Istanbul. Where IS that thing? Hold on…

…found it. I have zero idea how it’s supposed to be tuned, but I haven’t approached it in years because I didn’t have time to properly learn how to play it and wanted to show one of the world’s oldest instruments the respect it absolutely deserves. Ah, the stalwart determination of the Young.

Feh. No time for all that nonsense now. I’ve got to get started on my third act. I’ll just make it up.

Ok, maybe I’ll look it up on YouTube.

I enjoyed the singing so much for this year’s Halloween Costume -

• https://lowerblackpain.substack.com/p/life

that I actually finished a song and sang it live for an entire room of classmates at a school reunion earlier this year. It reminded me how much I like to just belt out a tune, and how punishable by local law that is in Brooklyn apartment buildings.

But there’s always the car, where the whole family can join in, and the good folks at Apple™ provide an endless cornucopia of musical choices. While Queens of the Stone Age is the family’s official favorite band, for in-the-car sing-along purposes my daughter develops these dynamic playlists of artists like The Jackson 5, The Cure, Dee-Lite, Stormzy, BTS, Chase and Status and Becky Hill, and David Bowie. It’s fun.

I may have mentioned at some point that The Partridge Family was a seminal influence on my grade school life, and for a fleeting moment as a little kid I dreamed of growing up and singing with my wife and family. But then I saw The Sound of Music, and thought, well, maybe not.

I would like to be able to say “that my kettlebell is going well”, mostly due to the rhyme scheme, https://lowerblackpain.substack.com/p/the-winter-of-this-content, but it hasn’t taken off quite yet. There were various Winter illnesses to contend with and a bit of confusion as to the proper technique. My family pointed out that most of the kettlebell enthusiasts online look like inverted squat isosceles triangles with a little circles on top for heads. I might be able to rock an inverted trapezoid resemblence, but don’t think I can rock that Tolkienesque Dwarf Warrior build.

Maybe if I grow my beard out, like, a lot.

Well, THANK YOU once again for dropping by. You’re always welcome. Next week I’ll be starting the fifth year (yikes) of :lowerblackpain, and for a guy who writes about the past so much, I’m actually really excited about the future.

Meet you there.

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Dorothy Parker is my favorite writer.

She was born in 1893; by the 1920’s she was one of the most famous writers in America, with an unmatched rapier wit and seemingly endless supply of clever verses.

Much of her work was famously collected in “The Portable Dorothy Parker” a rather thick volume covering the majority of her fiction and reviews. I’ve had five copies (I gave two away as gifts).

She moved to Hollywood in the 1930’s, where her work garnered two Oscar™ nominations (including her script for the Judy Garland version of “A Star Is Born”).

Then before WW2 she spoke out against fascism and got blacklisted and no one hired her anymore.

But her books were still steadily being read. Particularly the Portable.

In her will, she left the entirety of her literary rights to Dr. Martin Luther King (whom she had never met) to assist in his national fight for civil rights. Upon the death of Dr. King, again at Ms. Parker’s request, these rights were transferred to the NAACP, who receives royalty checks from her body of work to this very day.

That’s it.

That’s the story of my favorite writer. And I must admit, when I found out about the Dr. King part, I liked her even more, even though someone at school said it was just to get back at Lillian Hellman. If so, sick burn.

My first Parker story was assigned in college, presented as a breezy distraction between the more weighed tomes of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. The way that she depicted people who felt very deeply yet expressed themselves in extremely shallow ways made me very very happy, so I went straight to be bookstore and bought my first “Portable”.

See, I’d always wanted to be a writer. From the age of four it’s what I told everybody: teachers, preachers, other people’s parents, girls I was dating or wasn’t… I had no alternative employment plan or career path narrative, save maybe someday teaching at one of those colleges with old stone buildings.

And I did write. A lot. I had LOADS of extremely very bad writing, and was looking for someone to teach me how to make it better. But when I finally got into an English composition class, I found that many students had already spent summers at “writing camps” with famous author seminars and inspiring lectures, at sunset, down by the lake.

These kids were in that Writer’s WORLD already, and some of them hadn’t even written anything yet. I was late to the game.

I explained all this to a girl who saw me reading my Dorothy Parker in the grass, giant Sears Optical glasses on as my near-fro attempted to waft in the wind. She was intrigued by my choice, but later admitted that she’d assumed I might be what today is called a “performative male”. A bit of conversation convinced her otherwise, and we spoke all evening.

We agreed that the assumed “baseline experience” at a college like this was socio-economically impossible for a vast minority of the students attending, regular kids who “summered” the same place they “wintered” and “falled”. I mean, there were lakes in Kansas City, but all I was gonna get is mosquito bites hanging out there.

“Well, you should just consider Dorothy your personal teacher.” my new friend told me. “She never took any of these people seriously - neither should you. Just keep them all in your head, and write about them later.”

To follow Dorothy Parker’s footsteps, I later visited the The Algonquin, the famed Manhattan hotel where most every weekday of the 1920’s, one could find the New York’s premier literati surrounding their Round Table, enjoying another long and somewhat boozy lunch. Dorothy Parker was a key member of this group, I had learned.

It was also the hotel that my grandfather stayed in when visiting New York as a young county commissioner from Kansas City. I appreciated the gentle luxury, as well as the fact that my grandparents had been welcome here in the early ‘50s.

The concierge asked me if he could help me. I told him I was a student studying -

“- the Round Table? Of course. Would you like to see it?”

“Um, sure?”

It was between meal services: the man walked me into the dining room just off the main lobby. A large round table was in the center.

“This isn’t the actual table” he told me. “It was that one.” he pointed to the slightly smaller round table in the corner by the door to the kitchen. “People want to take a photo of the Round Table, but that one is 80 years old, so we keep this one…” he again indicated the table in the middle, “polished for pictures. I bet you actually want to sit over there.”

“I feel I should tell you now that I can’t afford to buy anything.” I told him.

“Don’t worry about it… do you want some coffee? Water?”

“Water would be awesome.”

I sat and drank a glass of ice water where my new literary hero enjoyed many hundreds of liquid lunches.

Technically, that’s what I was doing too.

Due to an incredible true story, Dorothy Parker has been buried two and a half times. Her (final) resting place is now in a plot with her family in New York City, under a memorial inscribed with cleverly appropriate lines from one of her poems. I haven’t visited: for me she either lives in her work or at that table in the back of the Algonquin dining room.

I would love to pay the inspiration I have received from Mrs. Parker forward. I’m not quite there yet, but I feel lucky to have the opportunity to keep working at it.

I’m a little bit more optimistic than she, but she paid close attention to the human condition, and I am grateful to carry her torch of polysyllabic empathy (if not sympathy) a bit further through time, because Dorothy Parker is my favorite author.

Yes, I am a fan. But I want to be the kind that feeds a flame.

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The CORIOLIS EFFECT is a scientific principle describing how one object on Earth can be accurately propelled to meet another object on Earth while both objects, the air around them, and the Earth itself spins at 1000 miles an hour.

The coriolis effect also explains why, even though the Earth is in constant motion beneath us, we can’t just hover in helicopters to travel long distances or jump in the air and land half a mile away. It’s a science of moving objects, similar to the prediction magic involved in shooting a rocket into the sky toward where the moon WILL EVENTUALLY BE.

In practice, the coriolis effect is chiefly important to those whose professions involve ballistic trajectory: cannons, missiles, etc. But I have found this a terrific theory to philosophically explain “What I’m Doing” to my mother, wife, and daughter, reframing what may seem to the untrained eye as “Warner Bros. cartoon madness” into a unique example of logistic strategy.

Or to quote Pee-Wee Herman, “I meant to do that.”

It started at a picnic just after high school graduation. I had an interesting conversation with a kid that I knew that was also heading off to college: he wanted very much to study something called “computers”.

It was 1984. We weren’t even a decade past the pocket calculator and most people still had a TV set with a physical knob that changed the channel. But this kid was SO EXCITED; he had a natural affinity for computers, and loved working with them so much that his science teacher had strongly encouraged him to study “programming”.

But, the young gentleman had been firmly steered away from this field by his family, as computer science was (at the time) a somewhat obscure career choice with no obvious path to employment.

Now, today, perched atop the summit of Hindsight Mountain, one might assume that if the young man had pursued this interest and moved to where his teacher told him all this was happening (California), he would have been on the absolute cutting edge of a worldwide cultural evolution, with the opportunity to buy first round Apple stock from a happy bearded fellow in a San Jose garage.

But back then? This was all crazy-talk. Computers? Bru-ha-ha. Programming? Balderdash. California? Ballyhoo.

A future where all that made sense was pure science fiction. So this young man soberly aimed his life directly at targets well within range. Measured choices. Smart decisions. Good sense. Birds in hands. From here to right over there.

In contrast, my personal trajectory from high school was seen as random, ill-conceived, naive, and somewhat feckless: I was rocketing myself toward a future I couldn’t see, that no-one could see, well understanding that it hadn’t been created yet, since my personal goals were not as clearly defined:

I wanted to be Jerry Lewis in The Bellboy,I wanted to be an orchestral composer for film,I wanted to be an author, and a college professor,and most of all I wanted to be a guest on the TV show Match Game, but I just couldn’t figure out a clear line from completing my math homework with a Bic™ pen on a little bedroom desk in Kansas City to scribbling clever quips on printed blue cards with Sharpie markers, sitting next to Charo™ in L.A..

There wasn’t any major for all that, at any college. My mother was confused but incredibly supportive: she didn’t want me to waste my time or money, so she advised me to cover the basics:

• be empathetic and polite -

• always keep working really hard -

• and learn how to learn.

“Facts change.” she told me, “Every so often we need new globes, new schoolbooks… people keep ‘discovering’ history and inventing incredible new machines. But when you learn how to learn, you’ll be able to add anything new to what you already know and keep up with whatever’s going on.”

Three. Two. One. And liftoff.

How are any of us supposed to have clear paths to the future?

I was launched from the social instability of the 1960’s toward the bullseye-in-a-whirlwind present. From J. Edgar Hoover to Obama. From 8-track tapes to streaming. From pen-pals to FaceTime. Where’s the clear path?

Thus my affinity toward the coriolis effect. Aiming is not as vital as momentum. I’ve always felt that I’ve been headed somewhere (if not exactly somewhere more specific than that), but after a while I realized that who I was became more important than where I was going.

And after decades moving at breakneck speed, I still don’t feel that I’ve arrived at the future yet. It’s such a lovely trip, I’ve taken tons of pictures, but I’d appreciate a chance to clean out the cupholders and top off the wiper fluid.

And now there’s a new generation; how best to pass on the maps we’re plotted and the cautionary tales we’ve survived? What would we have studied in college if we knew that laptops were coming? the internet was coming? cell phones were coming? Can I offer ANY valid advice to a teenager growing up in a world of posts, stories, and edits? What is she supposed to wear if I can’t predict the weather?

I’ve given up on predictions. She’ll just have to make do with

be empathetic and polite, work hard, and learn how to learn.

That way, no matter where she flies, she’ll be the steadiest arrow in the sky.

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Coming from a family of diabetics, I never really ate a lot of sugar, but sometimes my mother would buy Thompson seedless grapes and put them in the fruit bin in the refrigerator. Since they were a little bit expensive, we would very carefully ration them.

But grapes have a bit of a half-life (though not quite as severe as avocados, which seemingly are able to morph from solid to liquid as fast as ice cubes), and after an undetermined number of days, one would blindly place their hand inside the cello bag for a frosty treat – only to be greeted by a slimy cacophony of decomposition.

So even though we didn’t want to be gluttons, we had to carpe diem and gather our rosebuds and make hay and whatnot before the grapes’ nutritious, delicious promise could no longer be kept.

This spawned the family metaphor: “Don’t save your grapes.”, meaning don’t hide away that which is important to you for too long or you might miss the moment that it intersects with opportunity.

This week my daughter discovered about 40 pages of old ideas written in the “notes” app on her computer. She reviewed them, saving only the few that she thought she could write about later.

“It’s so weird to see all this stuff I wrote when I was young!” she told me.

I am not generally known for understatement - I mean, I can do it – but it’s usually not all that impressive. But here, in response, I subtly smiled and slowly nodded in agreement as I said, “Yeah. I know exactly what that’s like.”

That, was an understatement. My own “notes” app has roughly 800 pages in it, and I just thinned them out THREE MONTHS AGO. In comparison to me, my daughter is a precise and focused laser, while I am a rotating disco ball, flinging ideas hither and yon with no clear path at all.

And these ideas are now my Thompson grapes - a once fresh collection, gone to mushy seed.

Of course emails would have been the best place to start a springtime computer clean-up, but I do that every year, and I don’t actually care about the emails.

But every one of these notes evokes a place and time and artistic intention that I actually (embarrassingly) thought was important enough to jot down at some point.

The reason I mention this is that they go back 15 years.

It was a different world, 15 years ago. A younger world, one that skipped through a lush field in short pants, holding aloft a pinwheel in one hand and one of those lollipops that looks like a spiral in the other. A world that could never imagine the world we currently live in, much like Maria Von Trapp from The Sound of Music cannot fathom the roar of Godzilla.

My old ideas were from that world, that time. Jaunty tales of stalwart heroes and female presidents. I would extrapolate, but to be honest the majority of what I wrote then as wild fiction seems naive enough for my daughter to have written at nine years old.

You know, back when she was young.

Thus my notes app has become a cello bag of grapes past their prime: tales that missed their time, where most of the denouements depended on people in power felled by their keen senses of shame, embarrassment, or empathy.

Aw. That’s precious. Now, I suppose I could complete them as science fiction.

I am more careful with ideas now. I try to collect them less and use them more, grateful for the opportunity to create, to imagine. I am metaphorically eating my metaphorical grapes.

But haven’t deleted the old notes yet. They’re little pencil sketches of myself as an enthusiastic quadragenarian ingenue, gleefully typing into my iPhone 4 with a sense of adventure, a lush head of hair, and a bloodstream entirely free of COVID antibodies.

Look at that little fella. No idea Godzilla is coming.

Precious.

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Fisher Price makes toys for small children. An American institution since 1930, the company is most famous for their line of “Little People”: colorful, nearly indestructible 2 inch tall figures depicting different occupations.

Long before hoards of mega-achieving Barbie™s dominated toy store shelves, these Little People represented “real jobs”, and as a child, these career options seemed very feasible – particularly since pocket sized toys had been able to accomplish them.

Fireman? Check.

Policeman, Doctor? Obviously.

Builder, Cowboy, Ballet Dancer? Uh…guess so, yeah.

Ok, we weren’t so sure about the ballet dancer…we could all turn around really fast on the playground, but we knew it was much harder to do well. Also, we already knew ranchers and farmers because we lived in Kansas, so cowboys weren’t really all that exotic. And, I mean, we COULD be a doctor, if we HAD to…

…but the one that EVERYONE wanted to be was the astronaut.

The longest I’ve spent in a space vehicle was three days.

My grand-aunt enjoyed buying me random items at her local thrift store and giving them to me after church on Sundays. My mother gently questioned the congruity of these items with the interests of an eight year old boy, utilizing polite statements like,

“He really doesn’t need a (broken) 8mm movie camera.” or

“I don’t know where he’s going to use a (broken) electric blanket in the summertime.”

My grand-aunt would aloofly flip one hand in the air while shoving the item into my arms with the other and declare,

“Oh, he’ll find something he can do with it…”

adding a direct stare into my eyes and the somewhat threatening question,

“…WON’T you?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I always said, then set my mind to imagining what I could do with the thing.

One summer Sunday, the item was a HOOVER™ Portable Cleaning Center Canister Vacuum, a turquoise blue 2 ft. tall suitcase containing a long flexible hose and an assortment of attachments. Surprisingly, it was NOT broken, and as luck would have it, we had just gotten a new washing machine, which had been delivered in a rather auspiciously sized cardboard box.

Kismet.

A rocket went to The Moon this week, carrying the same amount of people I usually ride the elevator with every day – in approximately the same amount of space – for a 10 day cruise at unimaginable speeds. No warp drive, no hyperspace, just gravity and math (and science and lots and lots of money).

Following the takeoff, as the line of cloudy exhaust reached miles and miles higher into the sky, I had to ask myself “Could I do that?”

Well sure! with enough training: I’m a quick learner, and have proven willing to endure just about anything for work. But I did not go to flight school, or the Air Force, and they really didn’t need a poet / magician on that particular mission.

Perhaps, on a long-haul flight to Mars, some haikus and mildly astounding card tricks would be just the thing to lift spirits and while away the quiet hours.

I could also bring my banjo (it weighs less than my saxophone).

Ok, I may not have the exact Right Stuff, but I do believe that NASA would have been proud of that homemade HOOVER rocket ship.

I used the hose of the vacuum for air (of course), the cord for “power” (since I wasn’t allowed to turn the unit ON), the wide attachment as an antenna on top, and the smaller ones for various necessities. Ever the engineer, my mother cut a round hole on the side, through which I could view the Earth and stars and she could tell me it was time to eat dinner (and make certain I could breathe in there).

I brought a couple of books, and a light blanket and pillow, and the (broken) film camera to get good shots of everything. Our dog was alternately my co-pilot and a mysterious alien creature on an uncharted planet. At night my mother gave me a flashlight to read with, and even got in for a while to join in the mission and play a few games of Chinese checkers.

I was even allowed to camp in there a few nights; Mom slept nearby on the couch as Mission Control while I drifted through the cosmos, safe in my corrugated capsule.

Anyone can go into space now, but that doesn’t make them an astronaut. I understand that they paid a great deal of money, and were weightless for a minute, saw the curvature of the Earth, and took a couple of iPhone selfies, but that’s just a fortunate tourist, not an astronaut.

An astronaut is a scientist that goes to outer space and does research and experiments there that can’t be done on Earth. Their spacesuits are actually fancy lab coats. Those Fisher Price characters included a teacher and a clown and a king and a train engineer, but not a clear SCIENTIST – except for the ASTRONAUT.

I remember my teachers telling us what we would have to study to be considered for that job. Again, there seemed a clear path, a straight line, from being a kid to being ANYTHING back then - just Hard Work and Good Grades and maybe some vitamins and exercise and BOOM, you were the best of the best, just like those Little People.

I would never give up on a dream, but in the spirit of Spring Cleaning, I’ll finally let myself off the hook of maybe someday being a fireman, train engineer, ballet dancer…

…or astronaut.

But hey, I’ve already had my turn.

Though maybe I could still be a cowboy.

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So I went through my closet and drawers for spring cleaning, but there isn’t all that much there that I don’t wear… save one specific category I realize I may have legitimately grown beyond.

I had three years of wearing slacks and now I’m kind of done

I bought them all online, on sale

They weren’t all that much fun.

Up ’til then, trousers were a breeze

my grown-up job required easy-fitting

newish dungarees

and ties just for emergencies

when clients happened by. You see,

I’d been an artist, more or less

in companies that let you dress

the way you wanted, and I guess

(although I never looked a mess)

my individuality

was (on my outside) what you’d see -

I’d feel a skosh of true self-loathing

wrapped in carbon copy clothing…

…back in grade school, as a kid

we all wore uniforms

bright light blue shirts and navy pants

for eight years was the norm.

Right after that I quietly swore

not to wear navy anymore:

thus, in the four-plus decades hence

black 501s just made more sense

until three years ago when I set out to do some good

in places where a well-established dress code said I should

pipe down, fit in, and not offend

head low, eyes high, discreetly blend

and wear the pants we tell you to

(which didn’t seem that hard to do)

so I dut-i-fully secured

a pair for every weekday

and paired them with a collared shirt

for grown-up business cosplay

as Dockers™ mean security

and represent maturity

in roles with deep obscurity

but they did not “spark joy” in me

and slowly as the time went by

their fit became much tighter

because I’d set the dryer on high

(large load / all cotton / extra dry).

Then one by one they lost their sheen

and sported dark grey tones

as each leg sleeve shrunk farther up

above my anklebones

until one day they didn’t fit.

I can’t imagine how, but

I could barely fasten them.

My daughter wears them now.

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It’s Spring Cleaning time, which must be like Black Friday for the famed home organizer Marie Kondo. Her books fly off the shelves at this time of year as hoards of us peek out of the dusty doorways of our winter shelters, squint at the newly blue skies, and resolve to simplify our closets, basements and garages.

Her “Konmari” organization method, where one throws out any object that does not “spark joy” within them, is the most hardcore decision-making strategy imaginable, yet her hit television shows and social media numbers serve as proof that many are brave enough to give it a try.

I see the appeal: the desired result would be a home with clean sight lines and an open appearance – with all rugs visible to the very edges (sans shoes, socks, and corrected homework papers folded in half) – where all books are VERTICAL on every shelf – and every well-positioned noun reflects a blissful tale of warm sentiment. Room upon room exquisitely representing the proverb that there really is a place for everything.

So, Spring Cleaning. Throw open the windows before all the pollen starts blowing and get some fresh air in: wash the curtains and wax the table and fluff the cushions.

Those are all the the fun verbs, but the one that lurks behind them, the one that’s much less fun to say yet always implied this time of year, is purge - a word so dreadful that it’s now the title of a series of scary horror movies and somewhat-less-scary television shows.

Purge: the dark, grim circumstance of NOT SPARKING JOY.

I have never met Marie Kondo, but I do know an artist whose wife is her friend. When I asked him if their house was always tidy – just in case she came over – he said “no… I mean, we try, but there’s only so much you can do.”I do not imagine Ms. Kondo would like me very much. I feel that I would be the Maria from Sound of Music to her Mother Superior of Feng Shui as I am of those flibbertigibbet to whom nearly EVERYTHING can “spark joy”.

But I’ll try. I will, earnestly, try.

My approach to Spring Cleaning this year is a bit less draconian than the Konmari method, but wider in scope.

I am not merely choosing a weekend to clean, but approaching the entire season as an opportunity to sift, trim, refine, and distill. Not only objects, but habits, beliefs, philosophies, styles, memories, worries, and unread e-mails. Twelve weeks to clear a wilderness and uncover fields to plant with new ideas, new plans, new goals. Week One:

• I began with the desktop of my computer. Shift. Click. Sort.

• Moved on to the floor of my little office. Toss. Dust. Stack.

• Found a load of procrastination, right over there. Made some calls. Wrote some letters. Sent in some forms.

• Had an entire unopened box of irrational optimism in the pantry that was way past its date. It’s a shame to waste it, but you know how it is when you get things in bulk.

• And the malaise! Where’d all THAT come from. Yikes!(If you know don’t know this, it grows like wild ivy.)

I discovered that I, at what I’m going to very generously call the beginning of my third act, have amassed a great deal of potential joy .

For instance, I collected a selection of books that I was convinced my daughter would absolutely love: the thought of her feverishly poring through these with a flashlight under the covers brought me joy. However, these books did NOT spark joy in her because they are largely about children in the 1930’s solving petty crimes in upper class suburbs with no telephones or comfortable clothing. These can probably go now.There is another new category of very useful items that I am not very likely to use. This is a more surgical delineation, as all the circuits and diodes in my Radio Shack carrying cases aren’t easily replaceable, and the full spectrum chemistry sets (obtained by subscription during the COVID lockdown) may be relevant through the end of my daughter’s junior year of high school science.

However, I do have TWO Lite-Brites. TWO. My wife, a bastion of both patience and aesthetic, has drawn the line not at the cases of electronic components extensive enough to build my own C-3PO or the cardboard boxes of sulfur, ammonium nitrate and heavens knows what else stacked about the house - but here, at the Lite-Brites.

She admits that they are fascinating. We have enjoyed playing with them in the dark, creating fascinating artwork, together as a family. She GETS the Lite-Brite, as a concept and a light entertainment. But I purchased a vintage one on eBay before I realized that my mother had kept my old one saved in its original box… thus, TWO – with BOTH boxes displaying different painted illustrations of fascinated children, their eerily frozen smiles and raised eyebrows expressing the glee of incandescent illumination.

“You can only keep one. Both are disturbing. Please choose the one that’s least disturbing.”

She was right - one the boxes had an image a bit more off-putting than the other. It was unsettling to look at, like a black velvet painting of dogs playing poker. It did not fit in with the rest of our home, somehow.

It most certainly did not spark joy. So now we have ONE vintage Lite-Brite on display, and one that I am listing again on eBay, hoping that it will spark joy in some other family, and not be eventually passed along like a cursed monkey’s paw in a year or so once the illustration begins to disturb them too.

What is most interesting is that it wasn’t the object itself, but the LACK of it, that sparked joy in my wife…

…I find that a fortunate encouragement to continue, and perhaps, a cautionary tale.

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For the last two hundred weeks, I’ve written an original American humor column in what seems some of the grimmest times in the history of this great nation.

It was to be a salve, a balm, an analgesic to relieve the legacy pressure of undeniable, inescapable, and unavoidable identity. It was to stand as proof to the next generation of those considered exceptional yet disposable that history, though quite often written in blood, may also be captured in tears of joy.

This has not been accomplished.

That is the achievement of a novelist, a scholar, a person with less action figures displayed on their desk, walls, and bookshelves. Someone with pajama tops that match their pajama bottoms, with a full Mahler symphony occupying the brainspace I use for theme songs to classic television programs and old commercial jingles.

I have not, in the last 200 weeks, created a comprehensive argument guaranteeing All People perpetual basic dignity in every circle, community and circumstance. I have, instead, told stories about my childhood, observations from my youth, and the revelations of advanced age from my perspective as an African American living a lifetime straddling two quite volatile centuries. So much fun! Honestly!

But if you are a reader, I hope that you interpret :lowerblackpain as a consistent and intentional rhythm of appreciation; a lift, a pause, a bit of time-space where you can relax every seven days. I hope that Thursdays at 3:00 PM [EST] mean something new, and you feel I’ve approached your attention with respect and humility.

I appreciate that the world is ever faster, attentions and patience grow swiftly shorter, and there is SO much on Netflix to catch up on with those new Korean soap operas that look so incredibly soothing and all those back seasons of Gilmore Girls. So thank you, for your time. This is the longest I’ve ever done anything that is not a metabolic function.

It’s almost time for Spring Cleaning, and this year I am not just tackling physical objects, but tidying up memory, habit, and sentiment. It makes me kind of nervous how I can find something that was at first a miracle which is now obsolete - our original iPod for instance. Of course, I’m never throwing that away because it’s in the only thing in our house that is also in the Museum of Modern Art.

There’s a IKEA cube filled with all of the cords used to connect old technology to even older technology. Every year this collection degrades a bit more. Surely some of those little metal ends must fit into something I still have plugged in somewhere. Alas.

But I already know where I’m going to get stuck this year, and that is the piggy bank. It is filled with pennies, and for those of you reading this in the distant future, this is the When where the American one-cent piece was discontinued from production after 232 years. The chief complaint is that the coin costs more to produce than the materials it is made of are worth. Considering that, one couldn’t buy a penny with a penny.

It is fair to say that the entire currently living population of the USA grew up with pennies. I collected pennies, learned to flip and use them as tiddlywinks, and for most of my early childhood was paid with a handful or so for the completion of my household chores. That was, to be fair, back when one could purchase a delicious candy bar for 15 of them, or a comic book for 25.

Pennies are heavy. My numismatic wistfulness will not justify a fifty pound barrel of copper-plated discs. I’ll keep some made before 1982 (when they weren’t made of zinc) but then turn the rest in, just to hear that crazy casino sound of the coin counter at the bank, one more time.

What I am most worried about are the phrases. I won’t give those up.

Back when I didn’t have two cents to rub together, and I didn’t have a penny to my name, I had to become a penny pincher… because believe me, living in New York costs a pretty penny, but if I was in for a penny - I was in for a pound, and since a penny saved is a penny earned I pushed ahead, relying on two bits of advice: don’t be penny wise and pound foolish, and if you see a penny, pick it up (but not if it’s tails).

There aren’t that many great expressions about dimes.

The American penny has become part of our culture and language. People have combined pennies with resin to make interesting flooring and tables. The artist Shay Rose made a chain mail cocktail dress out of pennies. For some reason, Batman has a giant one in his cave. The idea that they are worth less than they are worth is mind twisting because finance has never the best way to valuate anything.

I want to keep enough pennies to be able to reach in and pull out a handful. That will never feel worthless to me, because I remember when my hands were much smaller and I could only grab maybe 35 at a time and I felt rich. I was proud to have earned them, and proud to have saved them, and everything purchased with them took on a special significance, because it was mine, bought with these tokens of hard work accomplished.

And I still remember that feeling, and I want to be able to keep it, because it’s worth way more than just a handful of pennies.

But that’s just my two cents.

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Johnny Carson, Weird Al Yankovic, and Ryan Reynolds were all born on the same day of the year as me. My daughter thinks the Ryan Reynolds part is cool, as she believes this might indicate a mysterious source of Deep Rizz that I may be astrologically heir to, and perhaps could still emulate…someday.

But the big news for me this year is the return of my lunar zodiac sign, the Fire Horse. It only happens once every 60 years, due to, I guess, math. Let’s see: the animals (12 in total) change from year to year, but the elements (there are five of those) cycle around every two years. That creates a 60 year cycle, so in a typical human lifetime, a person may be lucky enough to revisit their birth sign year once.

This is my once, now.

In natal astrology, my birthday directly straddles the signs of both balance (Libra) and extremes (Scorpio). That’s fun. I do think a perfect weekend is going to a classical ballet on Friday night and a monster truck rally on Saturday afternoon. Which we did, once, and it was amazing. And I guess I’ve been described as both balanced and extreme (if not “extremely balanced”).

But the Fire Horse year holds a darker heritage. In 1682, a 16 year old girl accidentally set fire to (what is now) Tokyo during a plan to reunite with the temple page she was in love with. Shortly after that it was thought that folks - particularly women - born as Fire Horses were bad news - so much so that birth rates in Japan dropped by over 25% in 1966.

So even though Fire Horses are supposed to be active, independent, headstrong, and dependable, th e year itself is to be one of Great (and not entirely welcome) Volatility.

I mean, 1966. Not to get all “We Didn’t Start The Fire” about it, but the Vietnam War was raging overseas, civil rights were being fought for in the USA, the ATM and the videogame were invented, and the national arts were elevated in New York City by both the opening of The Metropolitan Opera House and the holiday premiere of “The Yule Log” on WPIX.

And though the legendary albums Pet Sounds (The Beach Boys) and Revolver (The Beatles) were released that year, they were surpassed in weeks at number one by the self-titled debut of The Monkees. Which I know is supposed to be some kind of travesty, but I mean c’mon…it’s The Monkees.

But otherwise, definitely volatile times. Absolutely.

Astrology makes us associate ourselves with total strangers that happen to have been born around the same time that we were. It’s a little weird.

Where myFire Horsesat? I see you, Ms. Janet Jackson! What’s up, Helena Bonham Carter? Never givin’ YOU up, Mr. Rick Astley!

There’s also a writer/actor from the UK named Mark Gatiss: he turns up in all kinds of things and is always inspiring… I was pretty happy about that one. But my second-favorite random name with fame born in the same year that I was? Mary Chapin Carpenter.

The year after I graduated college, her music was the soundtrack of my cross-country train trip: the heartfelt soundtrack to Every Single Little Town.

Still, it’s hard to see any real connection there. Though I did just attend a “birthday reunion” party of classmates from college, where most of us are Fire Horses, and I have to admit we all still seemed like troublemakers, even if we now preferred to get to sleep by 10:30.

Whatever. There’s still plenty of trouble to be made in daylight.

My absolute favorite 1966 association premiered a little over a month before I was born, at 8:30 PM on September 8th.

Eventually called “television’s most successful failure”, Star Trek did not do well at all in the ratings, but it worked hard to hold its own for three seasons…and then 13 films, 18 more original tv series, 850 books,

and now over 6 decades.

I guess that Star Trek is the Fire Horse I feel most closely aligned with. Kind of weird, sentimental, a little cringe here and there, but filled with true emotion and courage and humor and respect for the dignity of other people (even when they weren’t people). I wouldn’t mind being championed by Lucille Ball, or watched every week by Martin Luther King and his family, or to say things that hold true through three generations.

So like it or not, this is my year. Gangly artist vs. legendary volatility and mythical instability. I’ve only got one shot at this Fire Horse thing, so it’s ahead full gallop, mane ablaze: and if I’m walking down the street getting the funniest looks from everyone I meet, my goal is to be too busy singing to put anybody down, live long, and prosper.

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I’ve never completed a marathon, but I imagine it’s running without the luxury of choice - one can’t pause for a quick cappuccino or afternoon film matinee.

Exhausted and bedraggled, one is driven to complete the activity due to the pressures of publicly expressed determination, earnest self-promise and significant financial investment.

Plus the fact that new technologies allow friends at home to follow your progress on their phones and “cheer you on” from their living rooms, where they are undoubtedly having brunch, including those toasty little brioche things you like so much and that jam that they know is your absolute favorite.

So one relentlessly must press on. Until you cross that finish line, there is no freedom; only willpower, intention, and the stamina required to continue forward motion.

Yeah. The last two weeks of Winter are like that for me.

The last two weeks of Winter are not Spring.

They Are Winter, which this year has been impressive in its old-school authenticity; sub-zero temperatures, feet of snow covering yards of black ice, the works.

Plus, this weekend, the United States enters Daylight Savings Time, when all clocks must be set grimly forward in a dismal ritual of temporal larceny.

“But you’ll get that hour back!” you say. “In November! You get to sleep an extra hour!”

Do not mind my scowl. It is not for you. I’m just blaming the messenger, and you’re right, this year I get an extra hour of Halloween Night. And it’s on a Saturday. Wonderful.

But I need that hour now. My watch is scolding me for not sleeping correctly - it gives me a numerical health score every morning, the current sum of which is an average so distasteful to the device that it has stopped encouraging me with exclamatory phrases like “Let’s try getting to bed earlier!” , and now only offers terse, stern statements:

“Your time awake last night had an impact on your very low sleep score. Make adjustments to improve it.”

It’s like an A.I. parent-teacher conference.

I’ve enjoyed the soups. And the stews and the extra blankets and those weird wool socks that I should be allergic to but somehow am not. I’ve enjoyed wearing my snow boots because they make me ever so slightly taller but outside I still feel like a giant. I liked the cookies and crocheting snood scarves and the stars on clear nights.

I’m not a hater, by any means (make certain that Snow Mizer knows that). Winter is great.

I’m just tired. It has nothing to do with anything inside my apartment, but there’s these leaks where dread and mayhem blow in through these screens on our walls and desks and laps and wrists.

I’ve lived long enough in Brooklyn to effectively ignore the sounds of planes, trains, and the engines, brakes, and enhanced stereo systems of most automobiles - but inside my head is a sub-audible grind of the news updates and pull-quotes I either cannot avoid or feel irresponsible ignoring.

And that’s what keeps me awake at night, which of course is worse when the nights are very, very long.

Even my sweaters are tired. My favorite used to do that thing where I could push the sleeves up and they’d stay above my elbow. Now they “flomph!” down to over my wrists unless I hold my arms tight at my sides. Washing dishes, I look like a cozy suburban homemaker Tyrannosaurus-Rex.

And the days are getting longer, but do I need more Bright Cold? Powder blue mornings where all light filters through precipitation? I’d love to apply an anticipatory optimism to the situation – lie on my back on the frozen grass to see what shapes the endless cloud cover is making… Look! There’s a large wool blanket! Look! There’s an IMAX movie screen!

Ok, ok, it’s only 14 days from now: then birds’ll tweet and pollen will float and the weight of my work slacks will be appropriate for the weather again. In 14 days we replace the snowmen on the bookshelf with bunnies and eggs.

In Spring, we engage all the plans that we made in Winter. In deference to the slumber scrutiny imposed on me by my magical timepiece, my chief plan is a series of elegant naps, and resuming my long walks at lunchtime.

Oh, my watch’ll love that! Maybe it’ll raise my grade point average.

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Popular media in the 70’s and early 80’s did not uniformly reflect a kaleidoscope of cultures - the most prominent and consistent staple being a popular family comedian who shall no longer be named. The watershed moment came in 1977, when ABC aired the mini-series “ROOTS”, based on the personal genealogy research of author Alex Haley.

Everybody watched that. I felt kind of exposed the day after each episode, coming to school and having my pre-the-invention-of-the-internet classmates ask me follow-up questions, because I didn’t know my family history past who was at the table at Thanksgiving Dinner.

The book and the television event sparked a flurry of interest in family trees, where soon many folks discovered that history was a dangerous playground: relative after relative was newly discovered, the names stacking to create a game of DNA “JENGA”, piled higher and higher until CRASH!, they hit a super embarrassing fourth uncle that did something incredibly illegal or stupid.

But Alex Haley’s family was brave and engaging and excellent television; while the show was clearly a dramatization of informed yet imagined scenes, no one assumed (as they might today) that he just made the whole thing up. It was an historical drama.

I mean, I was only ten, but it never occurred to me that anybody could “make up” history, because there were black and white movies of it happening, and pictures, and books, all the way back to stone tablets. History could be interpreted, maybe re-told, but you couldn’t “make up” something that already happened! That was absurd. Even with a TARDIS.

History is pretty straightforward: right after any event happens, we immediately tell the story of it, then move forward in time, away from the event, until only that story remains.

I assumed that the world had come to terms with history: it wasn’t always fun, necessarily, but you couldn’t just ignore it. That would be like saying “yesterday didn’t happen”.

Which would be nuts.

While the basics of American l’arnin’ are readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmatic, it turns out the most important field of study could indeed be history, which perhaps didn’t make the opening lineup due to its lack of a “r” sound at the beginning. (Art is also missing from the list, which is incredibly mysterious as it sits firmly within the “r” sound family.)

In terms of societal hubbub, writing and math cause less trouble than reading, which has always been a flashpoint in some parts of the world (who is allowed to, what are they allowed to, etc.). Yet, of all common core curriculum, currently the study (or even mere mention) of HISTORY can spark the most deeply intense and fury laden reactions, culminating in the surprising idea that we might not need it at all. Amnesia as generational therapy.

“How bad was it?”

“I… I can’t remember!”

“Well, that’s you sorted then. Two hundred dollars.”

Imagine that… History, taken permanently out of play, just warming the bench with Art. And Science (who’s also missing that “r” sound).

I mention this because here in the States it’s the 100th anniversary of Black History Month, the celebration of which inspired the establishment of this very column. I have, by virtue of my age, celebrated all Black History Months and 10 Negro History Weeks, back before 1976.

The whole thing was started by Carter G. Woodson, prominent scholar of the early 20th century, who absolutely loved history. He studied it in both high school and university, eventually joining the prestigious American Historical Society, though he couldn’t attend the meetings in person. And by couldn’t, I’m implying that he wasn’t allowed to. And by implying, I’m actually just telling you that they wouldn’t let him in the front door or even on the stoop in front of the front door, because it was 1915 and he was African-American by heritage and tonal hue (they did let him pay the full dues, though).

Unsatisfied with this experience, Mr. Woodson started his own historical society, founded an academic Journal (that’s still being published to this day) and wrote many history books.

This man, whose parents had been slaves, became the second African American to get a PhD from Harvard (W.E.B. Dubois was the first, if you’re playing along at home). Carter G. Woodson, widely known as the father of Black history.

Never heard of him. They absolutely never told us about him in school. I knew SO many things about the peanut, but honestly, nothing of Mr. Woodson.

Stories only work when we hear them.

Categories of Black History Month stories that I DID hear:

• The First Black [insert profession or achievement here] This was never my favorite group of stories because it was depressing; clearly reflecting what the experience of being Black felt like - demonstrating that it was exceptional to be able to do what someone else had already done if one considers that the first achiever had NOT been burdened with the experience of being Black. It always reminded me of the description of the often under-appreciated Ginger Rogers, who “always perfectly performed every single dance move that Fred Astaire did, only backward and in high heels” (yaas queen).

• Perseverance. This was the family staple - tales of men and women who might not have been able to take many steps forward, but stood their ground and didn’t move back. I was taught that this was a key element of our family crest, along with gratitude, humor, and kindness.

• Inventors. The BEST. All the household objects and incredible machines and technologies that Black people had engineered - a lot of those objects the direct result of the experience of being Black; less money, contacts, and resources meant they had to be super clever. Now I identified with this - still do: the closest I ever came to being in a society of Black Mad Scientists is when I was asked to speak at the 50th anniversary of MIT’s Black Union. Four literal rocket scientists were in the audience… from NASA. It was like Wakanda up in there.

But the most important category was

• Family. My grandmother was filled with cautionary tales. Between the long lists of who not to meddle with and who not to talk to and who to watch out for were glimpses into how she and my grandfather forged their identities in direct opposition to their given societal roles. Then my mother told me all about growing up with siblings through the 40’s and 50’s, which was fascinating, and always made me super extra happy to be an only child.

That first Negro History Week must have been rough. But without someone determined to tell those stories they would have been lost forever. Yet after a full century, such stories still need to be protected.

What happens when a segment of society becomes disconnected from history and disinterested in legacy? Are they truly free from the past? And how far back does that go? Does that mean that everyone is going to forget the thing that happened when you were seven years old and stop bringing it up at family functions? Do we forgive parking tickets after a year or so?

ROOTS will be 50 years old next year, and due to its subject matter the show might spark deep controversy if it was aired today: not so much because it’s Black as that it depicts history.

Maybe we could call it “hist’ry”. At least it would have the apostrophe.

In 1977, Alex Haley rolled through Kansas City on his book tour and stopped at our church because he was (big surprise) related to someone there. After church there was a reception at the relative’s house, and he signed books, and he took photographs with people.

My mother found the picture of me, my grandfather, and him. I was wearing my Sears™ Optical Department glasses and an exciting new shade of beige and I wanted to be an author. Here I was, standing with an author who had written a real (and really thick) book. I was a little overwhelmed.

But I would never give up who I was then, and all that’s happened since. I recognize that I owe the fruit of my labor to the stability of my own roots, and the journey from there to here, where I’ve learned from my mistakes and built a narrative for not only my future, but someone else’s.

That kid turned out ok.

Though I should get writing -

…I think I owe him a book.

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I don’t think he ran the race to win, I think he ran to tryto show 2 million kids like methat weshould never shy awayfrom being inthe human race,and that our faces weren’t forbiddenor a burden orexceptions as we all could be exceptional. I think he ran to hold a doorthat he would not walk throughbut had opened first by Douglass,passed to Phillips,Chisholm,Fauntroy, then to one midwestern resident who was at last called President.

Although he did not run to win,and few assumed he would, he demonstrated to a generationthat we could eventuallypush lines which seemed immobileinchesand then feetas we all yelled “I Am Somebody”down on Sesame Street.

he could not smooth the roads aheadcould not hold back the tideor turn the head of every average Joe with hate insidebut he still ranstill stood his ground with grace, impressivelyto hold a spacefor one of us to finally say“that’s me”.Thank you, Sir, from Somebody, for your example; I…

don’t think you ran the race to win.I think you ran to try

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Back before we had a kid, I didn’t take a vacation for a little over seven years.

Sure, there were times that work was supposed to be closed, like Christmas and New Year’s Day and weekends and nights, but I ended up on some phone call or finishing a project or had to show up in the office anyway. My wife found the entire situation distasteful, though she did appreciate my somewhat maniacal dedication to a role as a family provider.

She began to plan a proper trip for us, far enough away from work that my brand new portable cellular telephone (wow so fancy) wouldn’t be able to connect with the office.

Due to her extensive research and exemplary budget strategies, the whole thing went extremely well. I saw things and ate things and slept seven hours in a row. It was pretty neat. So she set a goal that we would travel to somewhere every two years or so. I was absolutely no help, as it was now clearly established that I didn’t understand the “work/life balance” thing.

Zoe’s trips are always to places that are engaging and intriguing, rather than “relaxing” in the strictest sense. That’s why I always found myself in the absolute middle of a bustling city where I neither spoke the language or understood the street signs.

Again, pretty neat, but a little scary too…up until 2009.

Now, I don’t want to be in any way inappropriate, but to tell one story I very quickly have to tell another.

I once took a bus across the American southwest from Kansas City to Los Angeles, and on the way there was a rest stop at what appeared to be a long forgotten adobe fort. It had a little snack bar with soft drinks and vendors selling random jewelry and key rings and whatnot and a newsstand and of course, restrooms. I didn’t need a newspaper or shiny new bracelet, so I went straight to the restroom.

We all waited our turn, standing silently whether in line or already engaged. When it was my turn I proceeded to stare pensively ahead (as is common practice), when the African American gentleman to my left turned to me and LOUDLY said,

“DR. KING!”

There was no way to pretend he wasn’t talking to me, he was just a foot away.

“I’m sorry?”

“I GUESS YOU GET THAT ALL THE TIME. BUT IT IS AMAZING.”

“Dr. King?”

“YOU LOOK SO MUCH LIKE HIM! IS HE… “ and then just a…tiny bit softer, “ARE YOU RELATED?”

“Y’know what? I don’t… I really don’t think so.”

[Bear in mind the location and circumstance of this conversation.]

“WELL, IT IS INCREDIBLY INSPIRING. IT’S LIKE HE’S RIGHT HERE. MAN!” He turned back to the wall. ”I CAN’T WAIT TO TELL MY BROTHER!”

Later at the sink, washing hands, he gave me a slow, respectful nod in the mirror. One not meant for me, but for the pioneer of social justice he saw within me. Or on my outside.

“TRULY AMAZING.” he said.

I don’t look like Martin Luther King. I just checked, just now, in the bathroom mirror. I’m… alright lookin’, but I’m no Dr. King.

But that guy was so happy, and it meant so much to him, that I felt a teensy bit of pride as I left the restroom, for absolutely no logical reason.

…now, 2009.

Zoe took me to Turkey, and points East. We touched the continent of Asia and had frozen yogurt there. We walked streets which for thousands of years had been trod upon. Again, neat.

But there, half a world away, in one of the crossroads of human civilization, surrounded by visitors from across the planet, I did not experience the feeling of total isolation that other such instances had generated. As soon as we hit the street, they seemed to know that we were from New York City, because of all the black clothing, but most importantly they recognized that we were from the USA.

And for me, this recognition had a universal response. Groups of young men, grandmothers sweeping their stoops, busy street vendors at kiosks a hundred feet away would see me, point excitedly, and then say “Obama!!!”.

Ok, the first time this happened, I didn’t have a response. It was three boys walking past us… but now their eyebrows were raised and they were nodding expectantly. I chose a slow nod with a thumbs up and replied, “Obama!”

Cheering. They sort of jumped up and down a little. Still waving, they excitedly spoke to each other in Turkish as they walked away.

At the Hagia Sophia, as we were coming down the gigantic steps, a group of 12 students from Norway stopped me. One of them stepped forward.

“Are you from America?” they haltingly asked.

“Yeah, New York City.”

“OH!!!!!” Ok, that was a little bit of a flex, but it was true.

“Can we take a photo with you?”

“Oh!” Now I felt bad about the flex, because they obviously thought I was Somebody. “I’m not anybody, I’m just here… I’m just… nobody.”

“But you are a Black African American.”

Well, yeah. “Yep. Yep, I am.” No flex there - that was just a fact.

“Is it ok then?”

Inside a nearly 2000 year old building, it was super strange to be the focus of anyone’s attention, but sure… my wife took their camera and we all stood to take the photo, and when it was time to smile one of the kids said, “Everyone say Obama!”

And we all did. No, I do not have a copy of that picture, because though it somehow made sense of them to take a photo of me, it still felt unsettling for us to take a picture of some random college students from Norway.

It happened at least five more times during the trip, and then on trips after that. And again, I do not look anything like the former President, but this time I understood that wasn’t the point.

I was an ambassador of a place whose chief representative projected an attitude of goodwill that somehow elevated my own identity. And this reflected rizz was intercontinental, where differences in language, age, and culture did not diffuse its impact.

I have to admit, I walked a lot taller on those trips. I felt like a Cub Scout again, in uniform, where everything I did was indicative of a larger whole. I was so polite and excessively tipped and said “please” and “thank you” in six different languages. It was the closest I will ever be to famous, and a unique experience where my first impression was welcomed and celebrated.

Which was also kind of a vacation, ‘cause…that was neat.

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The genesis of this column was a desire to alleviate my daughter’s legitimate angst regarding her annual recognition of Black History Month, which she found heavy with legacy.

Yes, I said. You’re absolutely right, I told her. It’s not a pretty story, and we don’t just tell it every year, it’s written in our eyes and our hands and our skin.

But that is not our only story. We have marvels and miracles, hilarity and harmony, and so much joy within our perseverance. We are a mathematical impossibility, from property to President in under a sesquicentennial. We hold the nation’s dreams in our ability to hold high notes and throw a perfect spiral; we steer the public good by standing up and staring down. As we endure, we invent; as we’ve suffered, we’ve uplifted; as we have buried - we have planted.

“Yeah, I’m 10.” she said. “That all sound’s nice, but it’s a really sad story.”

Thus the very first :lowerblackpain column

https://lowerblackpain.substack.com/p/672-hours-of-fun

explains my initial predicament; how best to pass along the significance of Black History Month without making the experience overwhelming for a middle-schooler. And an old guy.

I ended up telling her that everything she does is Black History by definition, as she is an African-American (Black) and it’s in the past (History). In fact, my own stories and those of my mother and grandparents (and even their parents) might provide meaningful context to the flood of historical data.

“What if I tell you more about stuff that’s happened to me?”

She didn’t exactly roll her eyes… more of a respectful averting.

“I already know everything that’s happened to you, you’ve told me like a million times.”

“Not…everything. I have some more fun stories to tell you.”

“That aren’t about being old?”

“Well, no. A lot of them are about being young. Like, your age.”

“But my age in the old days.”

She had me. “Yeah. But some are funny.”

“Like what?”

Unprepared for a command performance of light entertainment clarifying the entirety of Black achievement through personal anecdote, I kind of froze.

These columns are the result; a family grimoire of tales both cautionary and only marginally consequential. Yet halfway though this column’s fourth year, I do realize that I may have strayed a bit from the original directive. I asked my (now 14 year old) daughter for guidance.

“Is there anything about Black History that you’d like to…y’know, ask me?”

“I already get 100% in Black History. It’s the same every year.”

“Martin Luther King?”

“Yep. ‘He was awesome, then he died.’ Pre-school, grade school, and middle school. I always know way more than the teachers do.”

I was proud about that last fact, but then again, the bar seemed pretty low.

“Is there any story that stands out to you?”

She thought about it. “That picture that’s always on your desk, of Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. That’s a nice story.”

There is a picture that is always on my desk, of Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe.

The story goes that in the spring of 1955, The Mocambo - a popular Los Angeles jazz club - did not want to book Ella Fitzgerald because the club owner said she lacked “glamour”. Marilyn Monroe loved Ella, and contacted the club owner, and told him that if he booked Ella she would sit in the front row every night and bring other celebrities.

All that is true. And that is where most versions of this story end, leaving one to believe that the photo is of the two women in the front row of the Mocambo during that historic run.

While the picture does capture the two women sitting at a jazz club, a little research reveals that it is not during Ella’s run the Mocambo.

The two were friends - that is true. And Marilyn did, in fact, secure that job for Ella, and got Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland there on opening night. But Marilyn was in New York City working on “The Seven Year Itch” at the time and was not able to attend any of the shows, which didn’t prove necessary, as the run sold out due to Ella Fitzgerald… y’know, being Ella Fitzgerald.

The thousand words this picture tells are poetry rather than journalism.

But in that turbulent age when empathy and alliance with those less privileged could cost careers or much, much more, the most famous woman in the world at the time used her power to help her friend.

Which is a nice story, particularly for all those times when I forget how powerful kindness is as a weapon against ignorance and greed - a sword nigh indefensible as long as there is a hand brave enough to wield it.

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Getting older is fun, but feeling older is not my absolute favorite. Quite often there are aches, and sometimes pains. My grandmother used to call them “miserys” (miseries?) and was proud to tell us when she wasn’t experiencing them. I’m not quite that dramatic (ok. well.) and I do understand that my specific physical experience, while admittedly disconcerting and exhausting, is mild in comparison to the concerns of others.

Yet and still.

A great deal of my body issues are audible, which lends a kind of performance art feel to them. My back makes a series of dull snaps! whenever I sit up straight (signaling that obviously I need to do that more often); my tummy positively roils (which is a great word, but uncomfortable in practice), and my fingers crack when I reach for anything like I’m dropping a handful of 4th of July bang snaps.

I am a mobile foley studio, which the winter months exacerbate.

In the morning, I get out of bed with the exact flexibility of a leather jacket frozen overnight in a meat locker. My ‘lil bones randomly pop-pop-pop from head to toe all the way to the shower (which I like to imagine as a Fountain Of Youth™ – so to fortify that harmless fantasy I splurged on some special soaps with ridiculous ingredients and ludicrous scents (right now I apparently smell like MARVEL’s Iron Man, but Ravenclaw is still my favorite)).

I never make a formal New Year’s resolution to get in shape, but this is the time of year I am more aware of myself - since I seem to be stuck inside with myself so much of the time. Outside the world is quiet, city noise muffled with a thick blanket of snow. Inside, I can hear my shoulders moving.

I normally walk a great deal, but it’s not the season for that yet, so I’m trying to find more ways to “stay active” in my “golden years”. The “Golden Girls” on tv were all supposed to be in their mid-fifties, so I am doing what I can to keep up with Bea Arthur and Betty White.

I would love to be that person who takes the stairs up to their office everyday in a spirit of raw vigor, but my new office is on the 18th floor, so I’d be completely vigor-free by the time I got there. Vigor takes you eight, nine floors, max. After that it would be Determination (floors 10-14), followed by Necessity (15-16) and then Embarrassing Desperation(17).

I knew a fella who bicycled everyday from Brooklyn to midtown Manhattan. Amazing. So fit. But damp. He was always kind of damp. I think that would make me sad, a little bit. I may not be in the best shape, but I’m dry. Little victories.

I bought a kettlebell. You might remember when I bought a “chin-up bar”. Yeah. That was fun too. There it is, right on my door. I do pull up on it from time to time, raising my chin along with the rest of me, but it hasn’t become a determinated habit. I did what everyone must the first time I tried it… I counted off three sets of 10 and then kind of rolled my shoulders back (“snap! ka-pop! krik!”).

I imagined how after one week I’d feel it, after 30 days I’d see it, and after three months other people would slow clap when I got in the subway car.

It only took one day for me to feel it, because I was an idiot, and I did not start slow enough. It took one week for me to stop feeling it, which fostered ambivalence toward the “chin-up bar”.

So I bought a kettlebell. It is not as clumsy or random as a barbell, but an elegant exercise accessory for my more civilized age. Most of the movements engage the core, which is great because it reminds me that I have one.

I am starting very slowly, as the first exercise is to pick up the kettlebell. I have not yet mastered the first exercise, because I’m overthinking it. My hands grasped too tight, and my back was GI Joe straight as I bent over. I found a kettlebell master on YouTube with over 500,000 views who was very helpful, but very pronounced, muscle-wise, much like an inverted pyramid. It would be accurate to say that he is bulky.

I do not wish to be bulky. I wish to be flexible. And dry, I guess.

The kettlebell has enhanced my fledgling exercise routine by intensifying that Tai Chi series I’ve been trying to memorize since lockdown.

I have combined the two efforts, using the time to meditatively try to do just one thing. To monotask. But my mind drifts and drifts again, and there’s no un-stressful place for it to land, so it just re-fuels in the air like a fighter jet.

But we’re half-way to spring. I can make it to spring, when my body’s noises will be joined by the trill of songbirds and the blossoming trees joyfully trigger my assortment of seasonal allergies.

See? There’s always something to look forward to.

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I enjoy making hot chocolate. Ironically, I can’t drink it, as I’ve developed a myriad of late onset allergies, but it’s incredibly satisfying to whip up in the winter for the family, and always brings at least three levels of happiness.

• First the audible “Oh!”- eyebrows raised in happy surprise,

• then the reach with both hands to take the warm mug,

• then the closed-eyes smile as marshmallow steam rises to the nose. Mmmm. Then hopefully it tastes good as well.

I don’t have a secret to my recipe, but if I did it would either be the touch of vanilla extract or the maple syrup instead of cane sugar. Or the melted dark chocolate pieces. Or the cardamom. Which is also ironic, because growing up our traditional family recipe was provided by my yodeling aunt, Swiss Miss™, who was nice enough to provide pre-packaged individual servings.

My mother loves chocolate, and was never really satisfied with the store bought pre-mixes. She would toss a few chocolate chips or a spoonful of brown sugar - make certain the marshmallows were fresh and plentiful. Hot chocolate was a cup of luxury in our tiny little apartment - never failing to make us feel special, and slightly fancy.

As a midwestern student at an Eastern college, I often felt that my life experience was a bit plain when compared to that of my more photogenic classmates from larger cities - in particular the kids from California, a land I had only seen on film. These were fit and tawny folk, who always seemed a bit windswept, even when indoors.

As a junior, I was lucky enough to be housed in the special counselor’s space located on the freshman campus, where dormitories framed a full city block with a gigantic green in the middle. There was one apartment for men and one for women: we were supposed to attempt to perform the role of “rational guiding force” to the younger kids. Many of my roommates took this directly to heart, offering advice, holding back hair, and listening to tales of woe and adventure.

But on November 18, 1986 it was my turn. About 3PM the skies grew dark, then darker, and then it began to snow.

I was right by the windows in our common room, studying on the couch. I looked up from the textbook I was reading and thought “Snow.” I knew I had work boots from K-Mart that almost fit (as long as I wore two pair of socks) and a long blue wool coat I’d bought for $10 at a SOHO thrift store. I started reading again when the yelling started.

One by one, kids were running outside to the middle of the green. They seemed to have no clear destination, just… outside: running in random patterns like untethered electrons. “Whee!” they yelled. “Look!” they exclaimed.

I watched them from the window. First there were five, then twenty, then when the number grew to about eighty or so I noticed that most of those participating were decidedly tawny. And wearing shorts. And well fitting white t-shirts. Some of the young men were not wearing shoes of any kind. These students, from hometowns with beaches, had never seen snow before.

And they were frolicking. That’s the only verb capable of describing it.

The snow intensified quickly, it coated the ground completely - some of the kids made impromptu snowballs and attempted to fling them at each other. A few of my roommates saw the fun and ran out to join them. Someone placed the speakers from their stereo to face out of their window and played “Let It Snow”.

I plugged in my electric teakettle.

In fact, I plugged in all of our electric teakettles. It was on the “suggested items for students” list - so every parent had provided their child with one.

Downstairs the glee continued. I found all paper cups left over from our makeshift Halloween party.

And just as the water began to boil, down on the green, the tallest and most strapping of my West Coast freshman colleagues yelled out,

“Hey!” Then, in a bit of a panic, “It’s COLD!!!!”

And that’s when I opened my Value Sized Box of hot cocoa packets, distributing half an envelope of powder to each cup, and poured in the water. I ended up with about 18 servings: put them on a tray, and after putting on my coat, brought them down to our entryway.

Gratitude. Oh, eyebrows were well-raised, and frozen hands reached quite impressively, and blissful smiles were all about, but my favorite reaction was from the giant football player fellow wearing no shoes who had shortly before discovered what “temperature” actually was.

“What is this?” he asked me, chattering excitedly.

“It’s hot chocolate!” I told him. He took a sip.

“This is INCREDIBLE! Did YOU make this?”

“Yeah.” Watching all the slightly blue faces thaw in the heat of their beverages, I was actually quite proud of my work.

He was very impressed. “How did you think of this?”

“Oh. Dude. I didn’t INVENT it… it’s a thing.”

He stared blankly at me for a second.

“I’m from the midwest.”

“OH!” he replied, as if that actually explained anything.

Later, heading out to dinner, those same kids put on the “winter coats” their parents had bought for them in California and Texas. Stylish, distinctly beautiful and elegant, they each proved entirely useless below 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

That weekend most of those same kids ended up going into Manhattan to pick up a thrift store wool coat for $10.

For all my love of the beverage, I am no longer the family’s official hot chocolatier - that title now belongs to my daughter, who has even created a hot non-dairy allergen-free drink for me.

Now it’s my turn to be grateful, my “OH!” and outstretched hands and cozy smile, because a hot beverage in the depths of winter will always be a special thing, and still makes me feel kind of fancy.

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Brinks aren’t great. Edges are already suspicious, but brinks are just the worst.

Except for those money delivery trucks; each of those is a minimalist Recreational Vehicle filled with Pure Dreams (tainted only by a measure of grand larceny). But every other brink? Terrible.

And all of that teetering. No one ever frolics or languishes near a brink, it’s always TEETERING. And never toward ice cream, or low interest loans or a smoked brisket sandwich - folks endlessly teeter toward the brinks of insanity, bankruptcy, extinction, and the unfortunate favorite, war. I do try to stay positive, but…heavens. All this teetering.

Everything seems just a little bit much right now. And Winter’s a bad time for distraction - too cold to take my long walks outdoors, while indoors is filled with funny little screens that kind of hate me. I can’t eat or drink my worries away because the math to do that would mean there’d be no food in my refrigerator and I’d be living comfortably in a rehabilitation facility. I bought a kettle ball to get more exercise, then promptly sprained my back cleaning out my office at work, so that’ll have to wait until Spring.

Enter my family, who can always be trusted when teetering looms. Their ingenuity has resulted in a new therapeutic strategy that has kept us all going.

About once a week, my family sits on the couch and listens to an entire album. All the way through. Sometimes we listen to two.

We eat popcorn sometimes and sketch sometimes and sometimes we look at the words and are surprised that we had them wrong, but don’t really correct them in our heads because that’s the way we’ve been singing “Shattered” by the Rolling Stones for the past 45 years.

My daughter plays both contemporary artists as well as a surprising amount of classic funk and rock. My wife plays 90’s goth and shoegaze standards as well as drum and bass. I play everything else: children’s records from the 1940’s, jazz icons, orchestral soundtracks from rarely screened movies, the best of pop music’s 3 and 2 hit wonders.

Sometimes we relate to our daughter our memories regarding the music we choose, or a brief history of its relevance in our lives.

“This is the one that Dad danced to in high school at the one party that someone finally invited him to.”

“I know.” she replies, “You told me that when I was eight, but it does sound a little bit sadder now that I’m actually in high school.”

While it is comforting to bring context to the music, our shared experience re-listening together frees our perception to hear the music through our current ears. Subtleties we never caught before rise to the surface. That Jane’s Addiction album might actually be a little toxic, masculinity-wise.

Many new artists my daughter introduces us to seem to enjoy the endless musical potential of heartfelt profanity. On principle, we have never played censored versions of songs. When an inappropriate lyric came up while driving in the car with our young daughter, we would just both sing gibberish louder than the radio. As she is older now, we all just sing along.

“Is this a love song?” I’ll ask her.

“Not really. It’s more an assertive statement about who she is.”

That seems good, right? A powerful alignment of art and spirit. A good thing to be a fan of. At her age I was deep in the throes of Yacht Rock, and doubt that the North Star of my identity was in any way fashioned by Christopher Cross’s “Sailing” or everything by Hall and Oates.

It’s good this time, spent together. We don’t have to talk. We don’t have to watch anything. It pulls us back from the brink, which the OED defines as the point where something (typically something unwelcome) is about to happen, or the verge of a very unpleasant or dangerous situation.

What wonderful news. We’re far past that! We have, ALL of us, obviously traversed the brink, since we are deep in the land of the unwelcome, unpleasant and dangerous! Huzzah, I say! We teeter no more as we have been pushed in and are now swimming!

How incredibly delightful. I do hope there’s a bar at the edge of the pool.

Next week, Sam and Dave. Soul Man.

‘Cause that’s what really matters.

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We, are simple folk, with little need for the fancy or extravagant. A grateful family of humble artists - days without drama, foods without gluten, we push ever onward finding delight in what might seem mundane or insignificant.

For instance, a certain movie trailer appeared this week for a film that will premiere (no joke) eleven and a half months from now. Yet due to careful world building, inspired casting, and a lore so deep that is goes back nearly eight decades, to us a year doesn’t seem all that long to wait.

We watched the trailer together on the living room couch, cheering at all the appropriate places. We must’ve looked hilarious.

But we love great movies. Zoe’s rule is that a movie needs to be an experience to remember, not a mere story being told.

“Good or bad, if you can remember watching the movie, it did its job.”

Used to be that we watched most films with an audience, before Blockbuster and Netflix and HD TVs, and that made the experience unique because no one else would watch this exact film with this exact group of people.

(Of course, that was before all the trailers telling us to shush and zip it or they’ll throw us out of the theatre. Honestly, the very nerve.)

It was a tradition in college each December for sophomores, juniors, and seniors to take freshmen to the annual screening of Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”, the 1946 masterpiece of hope, community and empathy.

“It’s a classic!” they all said. “It’s the beginning of the holiday season!” they all chimed.

What it actually was: the sound of about 300 freshman crying their eyes out. All the pressure of three and a half months of college, mixed with the homesickness and a couple of pre-cinema cocktails, caused pent-up emotion to flow right out of all of us the second George Bailey came back to that bridge, at which point the upperclassmen who brought my group distributed Kleenax to us all.

I DO remember seeing THAT film.

They’re aren’t all that many left, but the Drive-In is a tradition I adore. There was only one left operating within driving distance of San Francisco, so one late 90’s summer night we piled in a pickup with friends a couple of cartons of shrimp stir fry and headed down to see “Blade”, the only-very-slightly blacksploitive vampire kung-fu action movie starring Wesley Snipes.

Somewhere during the movie’s attempt at exposition, Zoe saw a kitten walking past the truck. It stopped and mewed at her, dimly illuminated by the giant screen’s reflection. She took a tiny piece of her shrimp and tossed it over the side, then turned to us.

“There’s a little kitten over here! You guys have to see it!”

I sat up and looked over the edge. “Oh! It’s a little grey one!”

She was confused. “No, it’s striped.” She looked where I was looking. “Oh! It’s another one!” she said excitedly, and threw another piece of shrimp over the side.

Onscreen, Blade the vampire, having completed his lengthy backstory, was now creeping through dripping tunnels looking for the villain. The parking lot plunged into darkness.

Our third friend was a bit slower getting up, but finally did look. “I don’t see anything” she told us. “It all looks like rocks…but they’re…moving?”

For an absolutely perfect illustration of what happened next, you could go to 1:00:20 in Steven Spielberg’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, but I’ll just tell you - the ground around the truck began to undulate, in a seasick fashion. We found a flashlight in the glove compartment and flicked it on to find at least 30 cats surrounding the truck, milling like pigeons to a spread of birdseed.

“What should we do?!” I asked, panicking. Zoe was already trying to feed them more shrimp, throwing little pieces farther and farther from the truck like a line of breadcrumbs leading toward the Subaru hatchback in front of us. But the urban feline pride was not deterred.

“You have to stop feeding them! They’ll get bored and wander off!” our friend said, confidently.

And they did, because someone eventually spilled some popcorn a few cars away.

I’m not really sure what happened in the movie, but I do remember seeing, you know, most of it.

We’re not The South, but summer in New York always includes one day when it is so absolutely miserable that the sun’s radiation penetrates all concrete and steel to somehow still broil the skin.

In 1995 this day occurred on a July Saturday, driving Zoe and I to the cinema multiplex. We knew we could only afford one film, but due to the absolute dispassion of the disaffected teens staffing the theatre, we (and about a hundred other people) slipped unnoticed from one screen to the other all afternoon.

I believe we started with “Clueless”, then may have wandered into “Judge Dredd” before landing (pun intended) in “Waterworld”, the Kevin Costner vehicle about a post-apocalyptic world where the oceans rise to envelop the Earth, and human beings must adapt to a kind of Wet Mad Max society.

It wasn’t great. It was weird, and we like weird, but this wasn’t a good weird, and most of us were only in the theatre because it was 18 degrees cooler than outside. Some folks were sleeping.

But seated directly behind us were two women in their eighties. It became very apparent during the trailers that one of them couldn’t hear all that well and one may have left her glasses at home.

“What does that say? I can’t read it.” one asked the other, loud enough for her to hear.

“IT SAYS ‘COMING SOON!’” came the booming reply.

They were like that the entire film. It was amazing, an unintentional blessing of MST3K level performance, as they - along with the rest of us - tried to figure out what was happening. Eventually, and I don’t feel like I’m ruining this for you - consider it a kindness - the reason that Kevin Costner has survived where others have not is revealed to be the hidden gills he has somehow personally evolved.

“What’s wrong with his ears?” one asked.

“HE’S A FISH!” replied the other.

Then there was a love interest. Alone on a battered raft, adrift at sea, Mr. Costner and his female co-star tended to their wounds and then began to kiss.

“What’s going on now?” one asked.

“THEY’RE GONNA HAVE SEX! YUCK!” replied the other, and the entire theatre burst out in applause.

It must have been eighty degrees in there, but we couldn’t have had a better time. And hard as I’ve tried to forget that particular movie, I am very proud to say that I’ll always remember watching it.

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Happy New Year!

Used to be, long ago, that I was “in advertising”, deftly mixiting key wordses and imagery like an Ibiza DJ, building the hype of the crowds ’til they were uncontrollably driven to purchase soup, or perhaps very high-end non-basic cable television add-on channels. Heady stuff.

I remember once, in my youth, speaking to an old-timer (probably younger than myself now) who told me that the two most used words in the history of the industry were “new” and “improved”.

Improved always seemed more impressive - something you loved made better, based on the fact that whatever it consisted of originally had been either added to or enhanced in some way - the taste was tastier, the comfort more comfortable. But underlying this proposition was a lie - sweet could not be much sweeter without being cloying, soft lost structure once it was too soft. Improvement that wasn’t fixing something wrong was just based on MORE, not better, and MORE is indeed better until it surpasses ENOUGH.

But NEW. New is always perfect.

New has no past and is all future.

New shines like the gleam of a shiny thing on the sunniest day backed against the clearest of clear blue skies.

New not only looks good, it smells terrific - New Car Smell, most likely a just-below lethal symphony of gasses and toxins, is extremely highly regarded as both phrase and scent. In contrast, “car smell” is not.

When something is NEW it is by default DIFFERENT. New is the opposite of OLD. New is the opposite of USED. New is the byproduct of Unique, the incredibly attractive secret cousin of Contemporary, the only truly non-terrifying part of The Unknown.

New is not a compliment, it’s an undeniable state of being that must be marked. “Are those shoes NEW?” we ask. “Is that a new hairstyle?” We, of course, know the answer - the shoes are spotless and the coiffure seems to be moving in slow motion, waves of perfect cut and color cascading with every head turn. But we must ask, as we haven’t put anything in context yet because they get extra points right off the bat if they’re NEW. New is perishable, and must be enjoyed promptly.

Today is the day Gregorian calendar fans seek a fresh start, a chance to turn their ships around, start the race, plant the seed, begin the quest. Today is Page One of the unwritten novel of another year, the studio credits at the beginning of the film of the next twelve months.

It’s not perfect. It’s both too cold and too warm (depending on where one is on the planet), and the challenges of the day before have neither dissipated nor resolved.

It’s not ideal; it’s the middle of the workweek, and doesn’t necessarily improve on any aspect of the weeks or months leading up to it.

But today is NEW, because our calendar has exhausted its pages and is itself new, and everyone on the planet agrees that it’s new, and they’ll say that to you when you’re out at the grocery store.

“Is that a New Year?” they’ll ask.

“This?” you reply, with a cocktail of surprise and humility. “Well, yes, yes it is.”

“Looks good on you!” they say in a tone that is warm but ever-so-slightly jealous in its undertone.

And they’re right. That New Year does look good on you. You simply MUST tell the rest of us where you got it.

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I’ve been to a few baby showers, and no one brought the baby little stones, though that is the story of Christmas, that there was a magnificent child whose first gifts were all rocks of some kind. Well precious stones and aromatic resin that kind of looks like rocks.

Then there is the tale of the little drummer boy, who brought music. That was always my favorite, what a great gift, so much more meaningful, no disrespect to Melchior, Gaspar and Balthazar.

But yesterday I was on a work video call and one of my colleagues had her 9 month baby and as soon as I saw her face I started ooo-ing and “wubby wubby wubby” ing and that kid just smiled and clapped her hands and I completely forgot about the annual report. We were all working on Christmas Eve, the bailiwick of Ebenezer Scrooge, but the situation looked brighter when that kid started grinning.

I know that would have been me, two thousand twenty five years ago. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit, but I think my gift would have been to (try to) make the baby laugh. The drummer boy’s performance got a smile, which was more than the fancier gifts got, according to reports. Admittedly I am ignorant regarding the value of precious stones and incense in the ancient world, but music and a smile, while hard to wrap, can soothe and lift where riches and scents cannot.

So the last gift on my list to Santa this year is just that - music and levity. Again, I’ve asked for things I already have, so it’s really just a list of gratitude and appreciation and besides, I kind of bought myself that 20th anniversary super limited-edition pressing of my favorite White Stripes album from eBay a few weeks ago.

But I didn’t open it yet, because it was too close to Christmas.

Christmas at our house is all about music. Not all of my friends celebrate this specific holiday, but we can still share a few of the songs - mostly the ones about weather - snow and cold and winter… those are universal-ish.

For about ten years I held an annual winter holidays lunchtime celebration for the creative production team I was in charge of, which we called Christmahanasolistwanzaa”. I also created an original carol for the event every year, which was mostly impressive because it’s such a difficult word to rhyme. These songs were very tongue-in-cheek but very heartfelt, and some of the folks I worked with still text me that they hear them every year on their holiday playlists.

I thought that it was high time to make a little new one, focused on the weather, applicable to anyone in the Northern Hemisphere. I refrained from using our old holiday moniker to make it a little easier on myself as I only had three hours to do it because I worked all day Christmas Eve.

But I did get that smile from that kid. Totally worth it.

Happy Christmas.

And if you’d like to hear the song, please click on this week’s narration.

Sniffles and sneezesfrom Nor-Easter breezesare nothing to look forward toSkies are not complementaryWhen mixes are wintryBut they seem much warmer with youTrees are bare but I’m wearing six layersAnd something’s in the airEverywhere

Well, I can get by the weatherIf iI can just spend my December Together with you

Yes, I can get by the weatherIf I can just spend my

December togetherwith you.

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Santa comes but once a year, like your birthday, but somehow it seems longer between Christmases than birthdays. December feels like it has 72 days rather than 31, with the 25th kind of always just out of reach, like that dolly zoom Hitchcock used to do where the thing in the middle just lurches through space. Sakes.

I haven’t sent my letter yet, but as previously stated, it is short, with mostly a thank you and an ask after the family and Jack Frost. (I have been a good boy this year, and even an OK man, from time to time.)

Gift No. 3. Patience

if in this world

(which is somewhat adrift)

i could give my child one ideal Christmas giftthis year i would choose an activity long pastholding a life lesson which I hope would last.

it isn’t expensive or fancyin factat its heart is a simple, plain household object from which I learned a strategy of how to cope.

What is it?

A self-addressed stamped envelope.

it’s NOT the perfect gift, you say?

well understand, back in MY DAYyou wanted something really greatit’s possible you’d have to wait

say, if you had exciting plansto join a cool club meant for FANSyou’d have to deal with writing cramps(they didn’t waste their cash on stamps)

you get 2 envelopes (no less)on one, you put on your own addressthen take the next (a bit more wide)and put the first one, stamped, inside

send all of that to where they askand then you face the hardest taskwords in the fine print - hard to see

“allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery”

today, that’s a truly significant gap from the time you want something ’til it’s in your graspbut this was a late seventies paradigm: we paid for some things both in money, and time

at this point, we had no choice but to simply waitand after few weeks achieve a keen stateof true patience.

a zen-ish faiththat all was good, knowing that it would show upwhenever it would

and then (in the most meta IRL thing)one afternoon your friendly postman would bring youA LETTER FROM YOUstuffed with little surprises(impressively small due to restrictive sizes)

but whatever the prize they had started the buzzit was rarely as good as the wait for it wasample space to imagine, guess, and lightly fretas to what you eventually were gonna get

now Chronos and all the Norns suffer neglecti think that they all deserve much more respectin our age of “right now”s, where not much is tactilei believe the best present is

“after a while”.

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A Christmas list is a bold statement - the idea that you deserve something, much less the entire contents of a manicured list, is a brave stance to take, particularly when you’re young. And then bringing that list to a man you only see once a year and not spending your time catching up or asking about his family but instead reciting the list to him in full expectation of his timely delivery of said items is… extremely presumptive.

Yet Santa listens, and smiles, and nods appreciatively, and takes a picture with you, and instructs one of his elves to give you a lollipop. Amazon™ does not give us lollipops, or photographs, or empathetic smiles - only boxes.

Having never been allowed to sit on Santa’s lap -

(see: https://lowerblackpain.substack.com/p/gifts-of-thwipmas-past )

my relationship with him was more mature. I stood next to him, man to (little tiny) man in thoughtful, respectful discussion. I always thanked him for what he had delivered the year before, and only brought him one request, and then only if it wasn’t too much.

This year I am respectfully asking Santa for gifts that don’t cost anything. There are more than one, but he doesn’t have to wrap or deliver them, so I’m hoping the resulting carbon offset equals everything out.

Gift No. 2. Dignity.“The state or quality of being worthy of respect” In Two Acts.

(first act: tragedy)

The next to the last straw in leaving my long standing corporate job was a comment by company leadership regarding the saying of “hello”.

Our business had experienced a series of financial downturns, resulting in a total overhaul of work space: the majority of private spaces were demolished in favor of an open floor plan. Shared upscale picnic tables with a long corridor in the middle led to the only remaining offices on the perimeter. In these offices were important C-Suite talent.

So obviously to get to these offices, company leadership had to walk past a sea of employees, busy at work in the 36” by 24” space they had settled into that day. Complaints were lodged that as they passed, they would only greet a handful of those who said “good morning” to them, most often acknowledging the same few employees every day.

That complaint came to me, as the executive responsible for inclusion and benevolent cultural interaction. When I spoke to leadership about this, I was told (in a chummy, “you understand” kind of way) that since we could no longer offer raises and bonuses as incentives for diligent dedication, attention was being used as a substitute.

“Dignity is a human currency.” I was told, in what felt like confidence due to the lowered volume, slight narrowing of eye and leaning inward of head. “We can’t just give it to everybody. People should feel it’s something they need to earn. We have to give people something to aspire to, and worry about.”

And that was it for me, because parceling out the simple dignity of acknowledgement, flagrantly disregarding every person’s intrinsic value in order to manipulate those under your management is… well… bad, I think.

At that moment I knew it was time to find somewhere more generally aligned with my “you should just kind of try to be nice to everybody” policy.

Again, I think this might have been told to me in confidence. Hmn.

Ok, well, don’t tell anybody.

(second act: comedy)

I directed a play in high school written by a cast member of the Monty Python’s Flying Circus comedy troupe, a sendup of the kind of murder mysteries written in 1940’s UK boys adventure magazines. None of this coordinated with my existence as a 1980’s black kid in Kansas City, but I thought I could adapt the material a bit.

That didn’t really work, so I went the other way, adding a surrealist slide show with odd musical choices between scenes… like a live-action Python episode.

I was actually cast in the play as the irascible old grandfather, who predictably is the first to get murdered. Due to some silly plot point, the characters are not allowed to move the body, so it is covered with a tablecloth until the police can arrive. I would be able to run the projections from the balcony if I could just find someone to switch with me during the blackout. Since my hands were visible from under the tablecloth, it had to be an African-American someone.

There was a guy… in my class, just about my size, probably the smartest guy in the school, and the only other person besides me to use duct tape to hold his glasses together from time to time. He was not interested in the theatre, but found my proposal intriguing - slip under the tablecloth while I leave the stage, stay there for about 17 minutes, then come out and take a bow with us. The simplicity of the whole operation amused him, and he thought it would be a fun fact to add to his transcripts for college admissions.

Everyone knew him, but only peripherally, as, well, that smart guy with broken glasses (from time to time); not a football player or a cheerleader - his identity was stable and entirely free of controversy (or dare I say, drama).

So, Iike most of us in high school, he was underestimated. And that is what led to the most significant moment of public adoration I have ever been a part of.

We were required to perform each play for an assembly of the entire school. Mine was the second of two one-acts performed that day. For a midwestern high school’s reception of a student-directed surrealist rendering of a post-war British farce, things went pretty well.

At the end, all of the main characters are murdered and covered with tablecloths (it’s a comedy): so for our curtain call the last cast member standing (the chambermaid) takes a bow alone, then one by one takes off each person’s tablecloth for their bow. When she finally reached where my character was sitting, I walked out from the side of the stage.

The audience was visibly and audibly confused. I responded with a furrowed brow, looked behind me, turned back to them as if to say “Oh! That!” and walked over to pull the tablecloth off my double, bespeckled, in full makeup, who strode to the dead center of the stage with his arms raised triumphantly above his head.

It was absolutely deafening. Every student, every teacher, instantly on their feet, cheering madly. It lasted for almost a full minute… the rest of the cast did the thing where we all stepped back and held our hands out facing him, like he was the conductor of the orchestra we didn’t have in the pit.

And amazing as that moment was, it was afterwards that made the difference, when people were giving this kid high fives in the hallway, all the freshmen knew his name, and teachers randomly patted him on the back. He walked a little differently down the halls, yes, with dignity, but not because someone has given him a little respect, but because they acknowledged that he had been worthy of it all along, and they just never knew. Everyone had been impressed with how smart he was, and thought they had him pegged, but he defied their definition and did something brave and unexpected. Cool.

The play didn’t inspire even one person to ask me about groundbreaking British comedy, but watching that kid, I absolutely didn’t mind.

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Sure, you can give presents at the holidays, in boxes, like everybody else, but the real challenge is always to find something UNIQUE, isn’t it? Something no one else would ever think of? Something fun to give that inspires happy surprise in the give-ee.

Well, the best things in life, I’ve heard told, are free. And while most of those are impossible to wrap, it is generally agreed that their impact greatly outshines that of any, say, tiny mechanical “life-like” dog from the internet.

So my list for Santa this year is unique in the fact that he cannot actually bring the requested gifts to my house. They are not objects, but concepts, thus they all just have to happen, Deus Ex Machina style, like I was a character in a Netflix™ holiday movie who keeps running into a kind old stranger with twinkling eyes and a full white beard that I somehow, even though it’s December, entirely fail to recognize.

No. 1. Learning.

I love learning new things - and here I am leaving off the most obvious and descriptive three words of that sentence… at my age.

I mean, we’re supposed to learn when we’re young, that’s our job. And there is so much that we are experiencing for the very first time - every interaction we have with the world is some kind of lesson -

• and then we begin recognizing PATTERNS

• and then we end up amassing INFORMATION

• and our experiences compile into bits of WISDOM

• and then, later on, one day we go to the bookstore and look at the shelves featuring our favorite authors and realize there are more books that we’ve already read than ones left to read. Yep. That’s where I am.

So to gain NEW stories, experiences, and facts is especially exciting to me now. Sure, there are online courses and lectures and how-to manuals and cookbooks, but Wikipedia is bananas. In just a few hyperlinks, your entire world can change. That’s what happened yesterday.

For almost 30 years I worked in Advertising, making my living by being creative. During that time I was told by many people how rare that was. Didn’t seem rare, there were tons of us doing it.

Yet, some suggested that I in particular was at a social disadvantage. Some saw the exact opposite. Yet all seemed keen to remind me that I was, culturally, a communication pioneer. Black Shackleton; unique, alone, and perhaps curiously… doomed. Can’t blame these folks: they lacked the same history that I did.

As I clicked through Wikipedia yesterday researching protest music and peace anthems, I came across an old classic advertising jingle:

“I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony…”

made super famous when Coca-Cola collected young people from around the world on a hilltop in Italy to create what was, in 1971, the most expensive commercial ever made. An international chorus, united in a song that culminated with the musical slogan “It’s the Real Thing”, referring to love and peace and (of course) the product in the bottles they were holding.

It was a hit. I mean, it was an actual hit - the jingle was extended into a song, re-recorded twice and went gold around the world - quite a feat since a commercial had never before experienced such commercial success.

Two clicks later I discovered that the original tune was from a record called “True Love and Apple Pie” by British hitmakers Cook and Greenaway, which had been extensively rewritten for the ad by the songwriters, legendary ad exec Bill Backer, and US songwriter Billy Davis.

I had never heard of Billy Davis. One more click I learned he worked at McCann Erickson in New York as their SVP Music Director, writing music for ads like “If you’ve got the time, we’ve got the beer” for Miller and “Coca-Cola Adds Life…Have a Coke and a Smile”.

I KNEW these songs, I sang them in the grocery store and around the house, never suspecting that a black person had anything to do with them.

In a general sense, does that matter? Probably not, but it would have back then - giving me a clearly possible goal to focus on. I made up little songs all the time and wanted to do that for a job, but try telling that to your mother. And it’s important to me now, as evidence that the work I accomplished in that category was part of a specific legacy of professional experience, and not an independent or isolated spark. Blackleton No More.

And it might sound a bit crazy, but I feel that learning about Billy Davis yesterday has somehow, across time and space, influenced that little kid I used to be, sending a bit of encouragement back 50 years and across 3000 miles…

Hey! Kid! Keep being a wierdo! Keep memorizing Monty Python sketches and reciting them in loud voices in the backyard! Keep learning how to make up songs and write stories and build things. I know it sounds impossible now, but grownups like you actually make things you like, and someday you can get a Real Job with all that in New York City! Seriously!

But while you’re at it, you might just want to keep a sharp look-out for an old man with a long white beard and a red shirt and a twinkle in his eye? He should definitely be around there somewhere.

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You know there’s more pie, right?

I’m so glad you’re here, but … pie. I don’t want to distract you. Priorities and all.

If you do have a minute, I’d love to tell you a little story. It’s not very long, but right after you really should go back to that pie idea.

The “Give-a-Show Projector” : basically a D-cell battery flashlight with a plastic lens on it so that you could project filmstrips on the wall in the dark…the very dark (‘cause it wasn’t that great a flashlight).

The Kenner company sold tons of these from 1958 on - and like the 3D marvel toy “ViewMaster”, “Give-a-Show” brought images from tv shows and movies right into your house… no sound of course, but in a pre-video time you could experience the same still-frame cinematic thrill as audiences of the 1880’s.

Anyway, I got one for maybe my seventh birthday (I love it and I still have it) ; it was given to me at my only birthday party where grade-school classmates actually came over to our apartment. And our neighborhood.

Let me set this up: my mom wanted me to go to the best school possible so I wouldn’t become one of those urchins with a pageboy cap and a toothpick in the corner of his mouth calling everybody a “wise guy”.

So three weeks before my very first school year started, my pediatrician suggested Mom check out the school his daughter was in. Mom loved it, took me for an interview (I was three and a half - I’m sure I was scintillating), then she super-quickly secured a new teaching position that allowed her to drop me off in the mornings, and I was given some third hand light blue shirts and navy pants. Boom: we became proud members of a new community.

It was only the second year this school had allowed boys to attend, as it had traditionally been a Catholic girls school (which perfectly tracks with my alignment with all things “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”). Also, in a spirit of the peace and love 1960s, economically challenged students who normally wouldn’t be able to consider this school an option were welcomed at a discount. As well as we browner children.

Thus this birthday party was a fascinating array of the socio-economic dynamics of 1973 Kansas City, ranging from, well…us to my friend who lived in a mansion. Maybe it wasn’t a mansion… how big are mansions? It was like the house Steve Martin has in “Father of the Bride”. Like that. We had been there once for a PTA function - his bedroom was as big as half our apartment and he had the GI Joe with the tower that has a zip line so Joe could slide from the top of it down to his Jeep™. I mean, dude.

That same kid came to my party, in a town car with a driver. This was absolutely not congruous with my neighborhood’s esthetic, which was in no way destitute, but I don’t think anybody would leave a limo on the street overnight.

Anyway, this young man was OVERJOYED by my Give-a-Show Projector. When his mom (and their driver) came to pick him up, he took her all around MY little room, showing her my yo-yos and posters and harmonica and comic books. Before they left, his mom asked my mom where she found all these unique things.

“Oh! Uh… well, they were down at K-Mart.”

“Kay - Mart.” she wrote it down on a little pad with a tiny pen. “Really! Now where is that?”

“Well, they have several of them. One’s out on Metcalf Avenue.”

She put the tiny pen back in it’s leather loop. “Well, thank you. Such interesting toys. Wonderful.”

After everybody left, I asked my mother about it because I was confused as to why a kid with everything would be at all interested in what we had. I knew that they didn’t sell fancy toys at our stores, but it never occurred to me that they didn’t sell our little toys at the more expensive places.

“When it comes down to it, it’s just how much you appreciate what you’ve got.” Mom said. “You could have more than us, or fancier things, but if you really don’t love them they don’t feel special. But we have this –”

and here her arm stretched out in sweeping display, like Vanna White,

“and we are very grateful for it. So it feels to us like we have all we need.”

We ate more birthday cake, giggling at the idea of a limousine pulling up to a discount store.

And that kid with the mansion grew up to use his wealth and influence to help others and to make the city better. Good job, kid. Anyway, that story is kind of why I never have just one thing I’m thankful for on Thanksgiving, I’m always kind of thankful for everything. The sun and the rain and, I guess the appleseed… and you, reading this. I really appreciate that.

Thank you for your time. Have a wonderful day.

[now… pie!]

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It’s been pointed out that the Eskimo culture has many words for “snow”. In my family we have two.

One is “snow”, which we use when there is snow.

The other is “frost”.

It’s “family thing”. You’ve got them, with your family - chosen or domestic, that collection of words or phrases that mean something to you because you share the story behind them.

Here’s the story behind “frost”:

I’d been working 12 hour days for seven months, then nearly 18 hour ones for about three weeks – finishing a gigantic project. I was a wreck. Also, I hadn’t actually taken a vacation in seven years. Given the state of me, Zoe decided that we should get away, and booked a trip for us.

The year was changing from 1999 to 2000, eve of the new millennium: Zoe and two friends of ours planned a holiday voyage to Italy. My mother questioned traveling abroad on New Year’s Eve that particular year, but Zoe wanted to be in a place that had functioned fine for centuries before electricity, just in case we found out at midnight on Dec. 31st that we really weren’t going to have any for a while.

We didn’t have any money to speak of, so Zoe and our friend had meticulously worked out arrangements to share a little place to stay. This was an incredible challenge in such an ancient age (pre smartphones or the modern internet) as we all lived in different cities, yet she expertly engineered timetables with spy novel accuracy, allowing each of us to purchase the absolute cheapest flights available.

However, due to their incredible value, none of these flights landed right at our actual destination, so to complete the plan it was necessary that someone kind of drive around and just pick up everybody.

That someone, I soon discovered, would be Me.

The plan was that we’d

• fly to our affordable airport

• rent a car,

• run around and pick up our friends at their affordable airports

• and then drive to the place we were staying.

Besides, the car was a great investment. No train fare for four people. We could go to the grocery store and then cook for ourselves. That is Pure Savings on four wheels.

These were The Facts. I knew The Facts. I’m super good with facts.

What I didn’t ask about were the details. Those were… fuzzy, like Chewbacca-after-the-sonic-torture-device-in-Cloud-City fuzzy.

I probably agreed to it. Who knows. At that time, I hadn’t really slept in about a season and a half. I was pliable and amenable. I agreed to many things.

I dimly remember standing in the kitchen being assured that Italians drive on the right side just like in the US, so I could drive there if I wanted to. This bit of trivia soothed me, but only to the shallow depth produced during conversations one believes to be entirely theoretical.

I got home from work about 11PM the night we were flying out, showered, grabbed my suitcase, and we in hopped a cab to the airport. Our affordable tickets had us taking off in the middle of the night and then landing in the middle of what I assumed was different night, where we immediately traveled to a budget hotel straight out of a Wes Anderson fever dream – there was a shower but no tub or curtain, just a mysterious drain placed in the dead center of the bathroom floor.

It was awesome. Vacation had begun.

I am a good driver, but my grasp on reality and motor functions hadn’t yet returned, as any sleep I’d picked up on the plane or in our mysterious hotel had been countered by an understandable amount of jet lag.

We went to pick up the rental car and purchased a detailed road map.

“Where are we now?” I asked in poor Italian. The gentleman made a circle on the map.

“And where is…” I showed him the address of our destination.

He looked a bit shocked, furrowed his brow slightly… took the map, flipped it over, and drew another circle that was a good twelve inches below the first.

MY brow furrowed slightly. My wife took my arm and sped me off to the car.

We set off through the empty morning streets, trying to find the entrance to the highway.

“Hey, uh, why are those circles so far apart?” I asked her.

“We’re in Milan.” she answered.

“Oh.” I remember replying, trying to connect her answer to my question.

“And where are we going?” I asked.

“Florence.” she said, pointing at the second circle on the map, “It’s just right over here.”

I drowsily thought about Florence Henderson, the actress who played the mom on “The Brady Bunch”. That episode with the tiki doll was kinda scary. We found the highway and began driving.

After about an hour I realized we had been driving for about an hour. I’d been busy learning how to downshift instead of braking and trying to determine what speed everyone was going in kilometers, which seemed a great deal faster than 55mph.

My wife had been navigating and telling me stories, looking more and more tense.

“Are we there yet?” I asked.

“Let me check.” she replied. She looked out the window at the road signs, did a few quick calculations with the map. “We’re looking good.” she finally said. The plan was solid, but timing was very tight. And again, her answer didn’t really answer what I was asking.

I didn’t ask the right questions. I see that now. But Zoe has a singular talent for these kinds of arrangements, where everything always works out perfectly in the end. Still, at some point, probably before I started driving, I should have casually asked how far it was from Milan to Florence. That casual answer would have been “almost 200 miles”.

Running around to pick up people? I had imagined that the airports were like in New York, where LaGuardia and Kennedy and Newark are all ten miles away from each other. Ten miles is a “run around” distance. I would have experienced extreme apprehension (leaning into absolute dread) at the idea of a 200 mile road trip my first time driving in a foreign country.

All of this came to light, bit by bit, during the next hour. Many more cars were on the road, but unlike holiday traffic I was used to, they all seemed to be going faster.

“Well, you’re more than halfway done now. There’s no big deal. You’re doing fine!” Zoe said in a really encouraging tone. “From here on it’s a straight shot down this road.”

“I finally did the math and I think everybody’s going about 90 miles an hour.”

“Then it’ll go even faster.” she said, smiling.

I took it in stride until the road turned white.

“Is this…snow?” I asked her.

“I don’t think so.” she said, completely convincingly.

I looked ahead of the car. “Are those mountains?”

“No. Those are the hills.” she emphasized.

“They have white peaks.”

“Probably clouds.” She dialed the radio to find more music to listen to.

It was at this point my adrenaline finally conquered my jet lag.

“So I’m not, like, in Italy, driving a stick shift rental car going 90 miles per hour on a snowy road in the mountains?”

“That’s not snow.” she said, with an air of pure transparency. “It’s frost!”

“There’s an inch and half of it.”

“It’s heavy frost. Just keep driving.”

And I did, and her plan worked out perfectly, and we all got where we were going had a lovely and value-centered holiday.

But “frost” is now a family thing meaning “don’t look over there…you don’t need to look over there” ; a signal to just trust one another and keep going, a hybrid of “I’ve got your back!” and “don’t worry your pretty little head.”

“Hey! Is that smoke coming from the kitchen??”

“Nope… heavy frost. Dinner in ten.”

So, now you know. Welcome to the family.

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I remember getting less than five spankings.After the first one, I really did attempt to avoid them.

As my only present parent, my mother usually held the exclusive monopoly on even the threat of spankings, but I did get one when I was three years old from a babysitter when I totally bit a bully (total fluke – I’d probably never do that now), and a very memorable one was administered to me by my grandfather - a man so inherently and elementally fair as to be an actual district court judge in real life: never raised his voice, neither hemmed nor hawwed, and was a great role model whose example I normally followed to the letter.

He didn’t even really want to do it, it ends up.

It was a complication of science, experimentation, and curiosity: a misunderstood boy, betrayed by both his grandmother, genetics, and (albeit inadvertently) the very nice people of the Proctor and Gamble™ company.

My grandparents lived down the block from us - when my school was out but my mother was still teaching, I would stay at their house.

My grandfather was in court most of the day, so my grandmother would watch me. Somewhat.

I was eight, and normally I had lots of books to read, but she didn’t think it was a good idea to just read books all day, so we would watch television. I know that sounds weird but no, you’re right, that does sound weird.

Anyway, this fateful day was very hot, and as the early summer heatwave wore on, my grandmother thought it a good idea that I cool off with a bath. She also knew that this was a good way to get a little time to herself, as the bath was a watery theatre to me, where I would make up stories and have adventures: all she had to do is yell out my name occasionally when I stopped talking to myself.

My grandfather had built a little bathroom right off the kitchen, complete with a bathtub. It used to be a breakfast nook, so it was a bit cramped, but I liked it because it was supposed to be for “guests” and I always felt fancy when I was in there.

It had fancy soaps in the shapes of little fruits (which we couldn’t touch) and fancy hand towels (which were not for drying your hands on) and Dixie Cups™ (totally just for show - which is why the dispenser always full) and lightly scented powder blue Charmin™ bathroom tissue.

I remember exactly what happened because I had to explain it all to my grandfather. I remember standing in front of him as he stared at me intently, eyes narrowed, lips tightly pursed.

This is pretty much exactly what I told him:

I was in the tub and everything was ok and I hadn’t touched any of the things I wasn’t supposed to touch, but then I had something in my eye and my hands were wet and I wanted to wipe my face but the towel was over by the door so I got a little bit of the blue bath tissue and wiped my eye with it,

but the water make it melt and it dissolved in the water.

So I got another piece of paper, this one was bigger so it would stay together, and I wiped my eye with it, but it started to dissolve too, but then I noticed that the dissolved paper just stayed floating on the top of the water, and when I put my hand under the water and pulled it up it would cover my hand with blue.

But I still hadn’t wiped my eye yet

so I got another piece, this one was actually pretty big, because I was blinking a lot because my eye was kind of stinging, and I wiped my eye. But I couldn’t reach the trash to put the paper in and I didn’t want to clog the toilet so I kept it in the tub and I knew that Grandma wanted me to answer her when she called so I listened very carefully even when my head was underwater and I jumped up and answered her every time.

Then when the bath was over I ran my hand over the top of the water a lot to make sure I had gotten all of the dissolved paper and it wouldn’t clog the drain and I squeezed all the water out of it and then put it in the garbage can in the kitchen so that I wouldn’t mess up the bathroom.

And that was it.

And that WAS it. Except those times I had ducked underwater to be The Man From Atlantis™ (7PM Thursdays on NBC) meant (of course) that my head dipped below the surface of the water : and every time I emerged I embedded dissolved Charmin™ paper pulp into my totally authentic 1970’s AFRO.

My grandfather later admitted that his expression during my confession was not due to the severity of my crime, but the fact that my entire head was now bright blue and he was barely holding in his laughter.

After my bath, I had gone to the kitchen to have a cookie, waiting for my grandmother to be proud that I’d cleaned up so well, which DID happen but was interrupted by her full throated scream at my Accidental Smurfification.

She tried to comb it out. It wasn’t happening. Spray paint would have been less adhering.

She said she’d just have to cut all of my hair off, and she would have too, if I hadn’tta made a run for it (the power cord was only so long) –

– and in the end, that’s what pushed her over the edge. The running. That’s when she decided that my grandfather should give me the spanking.

My mom was going to be there in a little bit, but Grandma was absolutely apoplectic, so in a spirit of “happy wife / happy life” Grandpa told me to go out to the backyard TO CUT MY OWN SWITCH.

I took a few psych classes in college. I’ve watched various PBS specials, read a little bit of Freud, a little more of Jung. Never in all my studies have I seen this particular process properly broken down and examined for the truly hellish mind twister that it is. Having been warned to “get a good one”, I measured every merit of the twigs from the bush I was sent to. Too thin would certainly move FASTER, and too thick would feel like a baseball bat.

My grandfather said that he laughed silently on the porch, tears streaming down his eyes, his eldest grandchild awash in horticultural terror in his backyard, blue hair blazing in the late afternoon sun.

I came back with a two foot long choice with few burrs, prepared to meet my fate. I got one swat and was sent to apologize (again) to my grandmother, who was mostly fretting about what to say to my mother when she arrived.

But my mom was already used to me at this point. Together we had conducted a series of experiments about solutions where we dissolved salt and sugar in water, then suspended a string in the sugar water and made rock candy. So my fascination, and my explanation, sort of made sense to her.

She looked at my hair a bit wearily and was very glad it hadn’t been cut off completely, but we went home she cut it a bit shorter, and then I sat on the floor in front of her while she meticulously used the smallest comb in the house to tease out as much of the bright blue as possible.

It was summer, after all, and no one was going to see it.

Except maybe the folks at church.

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5/13/73

It’s Sunday, after church.

My mom and I are in the back of my uncle’s car, heading to the fancy cafeteria that the family visits on Mother’s Day so that:

• Grandma won’t have to cook and

• we can celebrate her publicly as our Center Of Attention (which is always her second favorite gift, right after “cash in a plain, white envelope”).

My mother has a car, but she’s left it at home because:

• it is too small for four people and

• there’s a national energy crisis going on: gasoline is being rationed and we’re all supposed to carpool as much as possible.

and I can’t help with all the driving, as

• I do not yet own a car and

• I’m only 6.

The weather’s lovely, there’s little traffic, and church let out a little early so that everyone could make it to their own cafeterias, then get back home at a decent hour.

As we were head over the Interstate Viaduct (a REALLY fancy name for our local bridge over the Kansas River) my uncle turns to his wife in the passenger seat.

“Honey?” he asks her, “What time is it?”

“OH!” my mother says from the back seat, hurriedly trying to free the face of her watch from the tight sleeves of her Sunday clothes, “I think it’s about - maybe two o’clock?”

“…no, no, no, no - I’m asking HER.” My uncle turns to his wife again, “Can YOU tell us?”

My aunt smiles, looks at her wrist and pauses for a moment, then announces “It’s 2:14.”

At last my mother succeeds at shoving her unbuttoned blouse cuff back far enough to make out the time. “…yeah, I’ve got about two…eleven?” That’s how she missed seeing it right away.

“Mama! Look!” I say, excitedly, as my aunt holds up her wrist to reveal a new golden watch. It is SQUARE; with a tiny golden face that has NO HANDS on it, just a tiny black rectangle in the middle, and two shiny buttons on its right side.

“What IS that?” my mother asks, as my aunt presses the top button, and tiny red lines blaze to life on the watch, in the rough shape of the numbers 2, 1, and 5.

“Have you ever seen anything like that in your life?” my uncle crows, having proudly provided our first glimpse at Wearable Technology.

The answer was no, we had never seen anything like that in our lives. The Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury books that my mother adored as a child foretold possible futures filled with space-age wonders, but the current world outside was still oppressively analog, powered by gears and smoke - no flying cars yet, or antigravity belts, or two-way video phones.

…but here is this new thing on my aunt’s wrist, this…?

“It’s a DIGITAL WATCH!” my uncle explains. “There’s a tiny computer inside it that tells the time on this little screen…”

My mother assumes it’s radioactive: you can’t have a battery next to your skin like that, it’s dangerous. I assume that it’s expensive: it doesn’t look real.

My aunt then pushes the second button, and the numerical date appears in the little window.

She pushes the first button three times, and the rough words “I LOVE YOU”, followed by HER OWN NAME, appear on the screen.

It was the greatest Mother’s Day present I had ever seen. I had only gotten my mother a Hallmark™ card.

If I was to play this moment out,

both my mother and I would eventually get digital watches in about five years, once they made it to K-Mart and the price came down precipitously,

and we’d watch the world around us transform into a version of the future that Asimov and Bradbury predicted (along with Gene Roddenberry, and maybe Aldous Huxley),

and then I’d be HERE, now, writing these very words on a glowing miracle box from a company named after a fruit:

but I don’t think that’s how time works.

If time was one straight line, then that watch from 50 years ago, viewed in modern context, would not be all that impressive, and I shouldn’t feel any jolt of awe when thinking about it now.

But I still do. The memory of that moment carries with it the pure emotions that I felt in that car, at that time.

Some memories are self-contained, self-sustaining, still able to make us laugh or cry or fill us with wonder. Complete temporal ecosystems. Snapshots.

I have no idea what else happened that day, or what I ate at the cafeteria, but in that car, on that bridge, is where The Future began.

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Frank Sinatra isn’t lazy. He’s been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king.

I’ve only been four of those things, so far. Not because I’m lazy, it’s just that I don’t have as many years on me as Frank, and my circle of compatriots and associates is far less comprehensive than his was, requiring less role-based interactions.

I have not been a king of any sort, and though I readily admit to a few corporate situations where I was a bit of a pawn, I have successfully never become anyone’s puppet. (Whew.)

Look, I’m not trying to play The Sands - I just want to make it from MARVEL movie to MARVEL movie with as little incident as possible: little do I strive to accomplish that crosses kings or conjures strings.

Frank Sinatra helped define the time that he lived in, and that time helped shape the person that he became. Can you imagine Frank Sinatra as the lead singer in an ‘90’s hard rock band? Or as a superstar DJ on a festival stage? Or playing the role of King George in Hamilton? Okay, well, that one’s pretty cool… they’d probably have to add a more swingin’ horn section.

But none of those would be Frank. Frank is a sharp suit, a half-drained martini glass, a dangling cigarette and a microphone. You could use those items to dress as Frank Sinatra for Halloween, as together, they form a fair representation of his iconography, if you combine all of that with a little bit of charm.

Oh, and a tremendous amount of talent, of course, which you can’t get at a costume store.

He made it look easy. Well, they all did; Ella Fitzgerald and Tony Bennett and Nat King Cole and Judy Garland, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Dean Martin. They all sang songs six nights a week, two to three shows a night, and made ‘em swing. Las Vegas royalty.

We don’t have anything like that now, really. Celine Dion, sure… Lady Gaga, Beyoncé. But those are productions - awe inspiring events, with giant screens and costumes and special effects, not just a person and a band and a microphone.

Anyway, I was thinking about what to be for Halloween this year, and I had a longer list of what I DIDN’T want to be…

• Scared

• Tired

• Furious

• Confused

• Overwhelmed

• Panicked and

• Numb

…the seven dwarves that nobody likes.

I wanted to be confident but not meglomaniacal, present while lacking pretention, and… fun. I write a humor column for my family. I cannot afford to dismiss the world as merely Grim, Dark, Dire, or Cold, though those were my “spookytime” themes this year, and I can’t make the world all better either. My chief strategy is to offset - there’s always grim news, so create something pleasant; where possible, bring a bit of light to the darkness; fortify hope when all looks dire; and bring warmth, kindness to those overwhelmed by a dearth of empathy… The Cold.

Recycle a bottle, plant a tree - actually I did plant a tree in 1972 and it grew to a giant thing I saw 20 years later. That made a fair bit of oxygen for a planted stick we got on sale from the K-Mart garden store.

Anyway, here at the end of this seasonal year, I wish everyone a Happy Halloween. Enjoy yourself. Put on a costume. Play some music. Or do both at the same time.

Grim? Dark? Dire? Cold?

Not you, Baby. You’re swingin’.

That’s life (that’s life)That’s what all the people sayYou’re riding high in April, shot down in MayBut I know I’m gonna change that tuneWhen I’m back on top, back on top in June

I said that’s life (that’s life)And as funny as it may seemSome people get their kicksStomping on a dreamBut I don’t let it, let it get me down‘Cause this fine old world, it keeps spinnin’ around

I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poetA pawn and a kingI’ve been up and down and over and outAnd I know one thingEach time I find myselfFlat on my faceI pick myself up and getBack in the race

That’s life (that’s life)I tell you, I can’t deny itI thought of quitting, babyBut my heart just ain’t gonna buy itAnd if I didn’t think it was worth one single tryI’d jump right on a big bird and then I’d fly

My, my

That’s Life: 1963 by Dean Kay and Kelly Gordon, arranged by Ernie Freeman

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72 degrees Fahrenheit is what most of us set our thermostats to, both winter and summer. It’s an ideal temperature; a little cool for a swimming pool, a little hot for a tub of potato salad, it’s seen as, generally, a popular temperature overall. It’s what Los Angeles is. 72 degrees is just perfect.

32 degrees has great press: Christmas and winter and even though over half the country never sees a single flake of snow it’s RIGHT THERE ON TV, in cartoons and stop motion animations and romantic comedies about princesses who don’t even know they are princesses until one day a mysterious letter arrives as they are putting the final touches on a four-layer wedding cake in the back of their artisanal gluten-free bakery in a midwestern city. 32 degrees is ice in a glass and frost on the windshield of your car. 32 degrees is frozen.

59.Fifty nine.

Sweater, right? You wear a sweater when it’s 59 degrees out… a light one, but still.

It’s not warm, 59. You’d never say “Wow, it’s 59, let’s go work on our tans!”

Nope.

59 lacks the crisp bite of, say… 42, but doesn’t approach the reassuring aura of 68. 68 is almost 70.

Which is almost 72.

Today is my birthday. I am 59 years old. Some of my friends tell me I don’t look a day over a number less than 59 (which is incredibly sweet of them). As a lifelong fan of Steve Martin I aspire toward white hair, and I don’t know how other folks my age are feeling, but I feel like most of my serious wrinkles are on the inside.

I’m not really discouraged. I am tired, but not entirely weary, and I greatly appreciate the privilege to live a life that bridges the worlds between Count Basie and Doechii. I stand as a testament to age being just a number, unless I’m actually on the ground, in which case I stand slowly, as a testament to the fact that it takes me a little longer to stand up than it used to. (I thought for a while I had unknowingly become significantly taller and the new dizziness upon rising was a sudden shift in altitude.)

Fifty nine is not sixty. I will feel younger at sixty. I will feel like George Clooney at sixty: salt and pepper hair and that thing where one eyebrow is always slightly higher than the other, a wry yet gentle smirk on my clean shaven yet subtly textured face. But that’s NEXT year.

This year I am “almost sixty”. This year people will ask me what my plans are for my next birthday. Over eighty percent of them will expect that I am going on a vacation, somewhere interesting.

Probably somewhere warm.

My birthday is in autumn, and I truly am an autumn child. True story: I had always thought I was a Thursday Child as well (“far to go”) but I just this week realized that I was in fact a Sunday Child (“bonny and blithe”). So I’ve got that going for me.

A week from Halloween, my birthday is “spooky adjacent”. Not quite close enough for a skull cake or a costume party, but always accompanied by leaves on the ground, pumpkin decorations, and a deep-sweeping chill in the wind. There was always a pile of coats at the birthday parties I was lucky enough to have, and the air was special - lacking the harshness of December or the earthy-sweetness of November, it was just clear and cool and incredibly appreciated by kids with pollen allergies.

I have celebrated my birthday near the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Missouri River, but never once have I been somewhere warm, like with a beach, because I actually love WHEN my birthday is, and specifically the typical North American midwestern weather patterns during this time of year.

Fifty nine is not warm. It necessitates a coat, but not a winter one - a jacket I can wear a sweatshirt underneath to provide plenty of pockets for all my comic books, yo-yos and playing cards. It’s cool enough to feel the air enter your lungs but not panic them. A brisk walk will warm you right up, and a mug of hot cider won’t overheat you too much.

It’s not sixty. It’s not. 59 knows it’s not. 59 isn’t fancy. 59 is proud to be the endnotes of my “maiden” phase, if not the back cover. 59 is a little rounder, a little more careful, and sleeps always for some reason in the slightest draft.

59 aspires toward a more comfortable 72, and even has dreams of the balmy mid-eighties. For now, I will just put on a sweater and keep going, comic book in hand, yo-yo at the ready: not quite a grown up yet, but getting warmer.

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Dangling. Helpless. Fingernails dug deep into the bark of a fragile branch threatening to splinter and snap under the weight of the struggling, desperate body which swings from it - eyes mad with dread, awaiting the inevitability of plummeting, plummeting, into the abyss.

This is a description of the world’s greatest and most celebrated motivational poster.

It’s been hung in the highest halls of Congress and office break rooms everywhere. Millions of prints sold, not counting the various ripoffs, tributes, and copies.

It is Victor Baldwin’s 1964 black and white photo of a siamese kitten barely clinging to a branch of bamboo, milliseconds from falling: a frozen moment of mammalian anxiety.

The poster’s headline?

“Hang In There, Baby!”

Rosie the Riveter, Uncle Sam, and Simmy the Kitten - three images meant to inspire a weary nation.

Rosie’s strong arm poster encouraged us, with the words “We Can Do It!”.

Uncle Sam pointed straight at the viewer, exclaiming their crucial value to the defense of freedom, saying - nay, practically shouting “I Want YOU!”.

But Simmy was silent. She was too busy to speak, she was attempting the impossible, reaching beyond her limits, going into uncomfortable territory, challenging herself. She wasn’t touting confidence, heavens no… she was exhibiting the highest aspiration and deepest vulnerability, allowing you see her effort, experience what was certain to be her failure, and through that, better understand your own dreams and struggles. Simmy gave up her ego to bond us all together, as if she psychically knew there would be throngs of exhausted workers who needed a boost after lunch under florescent tube lights, at formica tables with metal tube chairs which scraped the floor with a din that tears at both ear and soul. She dangles, as WE dangle, with no alternative but to pull ourselves up with all the strength we can muster, or be brave enough to fall into the unknown.

I mean, I’ve taken pictures of my cats, but they just kind of sleep most of the time, and when they do cute things it’s usually too fast to capture on film. Simmy was perfectly safe, by the way, as the photographer loved animals of all kinds, and enjoyed taking photos of his four cats in between shots of such luminaries as Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.

It is a testament to art that a frozen moment, captured in 1964, can accurately reflect what I felt like yesterday afternoon, and probably tomorrow morning. We are a world dedicated to dire circumstance.

Our “amusement parks” have “thrill rides” that drop us from the sky at terrific speeds. We do that for fun.

A majority of our movies are filled with maniacs, creatures and zombies. We watch those to relax.

Millions have been invested to prove the fatal effects of drink, smoke, and drugs - yet we spend billions to imbibe in them, even though we are clearly aware of this research. We do that to alleviate stress.

And the endless videogames where the predominant point is that people are trying to kill us, with guns or with swords or by giving us spectral cooties as we gobble up little yellow dots. That’s where I finally drew the line, turned my back on conveniently packaged panic and derision: many decades ago when exploring the latest edition of an incredibly popular series I discovered that extra points were given for spectacular cruelty, and just…stopped playing.

“Whaddya do that for?” a competitor asked me. “They ain’t real!”

“Yeah”, I told him, “…but I am.”

If Rosie’s poster was to come to life, she’d just be silently smiling at you, flexing.

Uncle Sam would be a somewhat awkward septuagenarian.

But if little Simmy’s poster sprung into motion it would be… well, a cat video, and you know how awesome cat videos are. Something’s happening in her poster, and something is definitely going to happen.

Simmy’s poster isn’t just a stationary platitude, but a dynamic manifesto: what must be endured yet cannot be sustained can’t last long…time is ever destined to defeat imbalance.

Rather than “Hang In There, Baby!”, the poster should read,

“That looks pretty bad, but it’ll definitely either be better or worse in a minute.”

Or maybe, “…this too shall pass.”

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Around the time of my daughter’s second birthday we went camping at a park that had Airstream™ campers instead of cabins. I adore Airstream™ campers and aspire to someday own one, though most likely I will never be able to afford a driveway to park it in.

We arrived in the afternoon, and eventually the sun set (as it does) and the lack of streetlights and buildings left the outside world a pristine shade of nothing. All the windows of the trailer were pitch black.

My daughter had never before experienced this. She is a Brooklyn™ child, free range and urban oriented. The silence (which also was new), mixed with the absolute lack of light (as if the sun had closed its eyes), precipitated a sound in her that we had never heard before, a kind of low trill, like a rumble, or a gentle waking snore.

My wife was extremely excited about this trip; she was raised in California™ where “the outside” was always somehow closer to “the inside” than where I grew up, in the American Midwest, where we employed the clever technology of “screen doors” to protect us from “the outside world”… although most of the year this proved far too permeable a barrier.

“Let’s go outside!” she said in her best and most enthusiastic Mom voice.

The deep creak continued to emanate from the child. It grew not louder, but perceptibly more intense. She somehow was able to make the noise both while inhaling as well as exhaling.

“It’s awful… dark out there, Sweetie.” I said.

“Yeah, it’s great!” At that my wife opened the door of the trailer and stepped out, walking into the night. It took about seven steps before she was out of the glow of the trailer’s ambience, and disappeared completely. I agreed that seeing the stars might be fun, but thought we might begin by turning off all the inside lights and looking out the window, then maybe braving going out and looking all around.

“C’mon!” her disembodied voice called from the void.

My daughter’s rumble was now paired with a widening of the eyes and gentle stiffening of both legs and arms.

“Whatssamatter??” my wife called again.

I thought the situation was clear. That was my mistake. I felt that the idea of explanation at this point was not only moot but unnecessary. But people are different, built from a world of experiences, and the gift of true friendship is welcoming alternative perspectives.

“I… think she’s afraid of the dark a little.” I said to the inky nowhere.

There was a pause. “Why?”

Now I responded with a pause of my own, as I had never personally considered the logic behind what-I-had-always-assumed-to-be universal opinion. There I stood, in the middle of the woods, at the open door of a fragile aluminum tube I would be sleeping in that night, contemplating the very root of fear. How best to sum this complex primal instinct?

“Uh… it think it’s ‘cause you can’t see anything.” Genius. The words, indeed, of a poet, an intellectual, a true thinker of thoughts.

My wife was understandably underwhelmed. “You’ve gotta let your eyes adjust! You can see the stars!!”

I turned to my daughter.

“Ok, Mama is really excited about us going adventuring out there. You remember what it looked like before, right? Well it looks just like that right now, only we can’t see it so well. But I’m gonna give you this -”

and here I handed her a flashlight. A good one, with that beam that looks like a lightsaber…

“ - and you can light stuff up. And then we will look at the stars, and then we’ll come back in. Is that ok?”

Rumble. She held the flashlight, considering it.

“I’ll carry you the whole way, okay?”

At that, she agreed. I picked her up and walked carefully down the folding aluminum stairs into the night. She pointed the flashlight beam ahead of us, finding her mom by the two wooden lounge chairs a few yards away.

Fascinated by the power of the flashlight, my daughter lit up trees and grass and our car parked beside the rented camper. Then she looked up.

“You can’t really see them with the flashlight on, Honey. C’mon, trust Mama.”

My daughter’s trill stopped. She took two deep breaths. Then, she CLICK!ed off the flashlight.

As if by magic, suddenly above us were galaxies of light. Z pointed out different constellations. The light we had left on in the trailer seemed very far away from us.

After three minutes, the flashlight clicked back on. My daughter had heard a noise of some kind in the woods. I myself could not immediately identify it.

“I think that’s it for now.” I said.

We all went back inside. We turned off all the lights in the trailer, and through the illogical safety of the window screens, looked outside at the endless stars.

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It’s pretty grim. I mean, “things” are. Or they look that way. Things seem pretty grim. Somewhat. Depends on where you look, I guess, and other variables. For me, it’s worse when my eyes are open, so while that’s happening, I point them in friendly directions in attempts to “de-grim” the experience, somewhat.

I find grocery shopping soothing. Plenty to look at that’s pleasant to see. Vegetables are soothing (frozen vegetables a bit less so). The part of the store where they have all the bottled water…very soothing: so many variations of tall green glass bottles and skinny clear plastic ones. Yep. And the cereal aisle… big boxes with happy colors and friendly characters. Nothing grim there. Nothing at all grim about being a healthy part of a balanced breakfast.

But here we are, Spookytime™, when all about is “Boo!” and shadows haunt and lurk and everything is supposed to be somehow scarier, except that a very high bar has been set in that area recently, so the traditional spooky efforts seem kind of… quaint.

And in my experience, nothing defines that specific gap between truly scary and kind of quaint more dynamically than the General Mills Monster Cereals.

Dracula, Frankenstein (’s monster) and his bride, The Werewolf, The Mummy, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Creature of the Black Lagoon, The Phantom of The Opera. It’s likely that those names evoked images from the classic series of monster films produced by Universal Studios in the 1930’s: black and white “fish out of water” tales (save the Creature, who was in) where society either invades the monster’s quiet home or frowns on their habits of dining on townsfolk. Dark, quiet nights, where clouds of fog obscure feeble gas streetlights suddenly become torch-lit mob scenes filled with angry villagers brandishing pitchforks and other farm implements. Scary.

I grew up with these movies, and these characters, and understood that, in real life, Transylvanian and Egyptian royalty rarely met, and neither hung about with unlucky Welsh shopkeepers, even on full moons. But Hollywood seemed to assume that these monsters knew one another, as they showed up in “monster rally” films – stalking Abbott and Costello, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin… and they had a band as well called the “Groovie Ghoulies” that I absolutely adored (that one was a cartoon). The monsters’ association as friends (or at least acquaintances) became part of their general lore.

Which is what the General Mills company leaned into in 1971 when introducing their three new cereals: Franken Berry, Boo Berry, and Count Chocula. I don’t want to waste your time or insult your keen skills of deduction, but the “pre-sweetened” flavors were strawberry, blueberry, and chocolate. They had a bit of a rocky start, as the early formula for Franken Berry “included an indigestible pigment” that, well, remained bright pink enough to… panic parents. Besides that bit of shock, the cereals represented a new version of these classic characters that lived in the daylight, right on the kitchen table. Quaint.

In sixth grade I got to try Boo Berry at someone’s house. My mother wouldn’t buy any of the “monster cereals”. I thought it was because she judged nutritional value by the color-of-the-food’s proximity to anything in nature, but later on, Fruity Pebbles proved inexplicably acceptable.

And I don’t think they do this anymore, but a breakfast cereal box used to be more than just a product container - each one represented an engineering challenge of increasing difficulty.

Level One: a game printed on the back of the box that I could play (using pennies as the tokens).

Challenge - eat the entire box of cereal and then (carefully) cut the game from the box. Oh, and find someone to play with (only child).

Level Two - same as Level One, except that a paper six-sided die pattern (a little box) was also printed on the back.

Challenge - (carefully) cut out the little box pattern, fold the low level pressboard together enough to define but not collapse each side, glue tabs A into slots B, wait for it to dry, then find someone to play with, etc.

This never worked because the weight of the glue created a paper version of “loaded dice” that would roll the same number over and over.

Level Three - a plastic toy (in what was later discovered to be the exact shape of the human throat) was placed in the ACTUAL BAG OF CEREAL at the bottom.

Challenge - I could NOT pour out the cereal and put it back in the box, and as the inner bag holding the cereal was glued to the bottom of the outer box, it couldn’t be pulled up separately and flipped over (we tried that). Nor could the box be turned upside down, as the only closing mechanism on the box was on the TOP. FIENDISH. DIABOLICAL.

They stopped doing this due to choking hazards and began to place the toys in individual plastic bags inside the box but NOT inside the inner bag, which could be lifted, prize obtained. JUSTICE.

Which brings us to:

Level Four - The Flexi-disc - a PLAYABLE PHONOGRAPH RECORD is PRINTED ON THE BACK OF A CEREAL BOX. Holy crap. I remember staring at it like a safecracker, studying the box stability to determine how I could -

Challenge - (carefully) cut around the record’s circumference and gently lift it from the box, without nicking the inner liner.

Total fail on the Bobby Sherman single, but the excitement of The Jackson Five became a family project. It was Mom who discovered that the manufacturers had actually PUT A DOT OF GLUE right where the middle of the record met the inner liner, making clean retrieval impossible. DIRTY POOL.

Anyway, I like cereal boxes.

So that’s me, a grown man, staring at a wall of cereal, pretending I’m going to buy more than these organic gluten-free fruit loop substitutes. I don’t even shop at a store where they sell fun novelty food anymore, but they are such a core part of my culture that even these all-natural brands hold a bit of comfort. And that’s all I need right now, little tiny bits of comfort to get me from one crazy scenario to the next - strength to face the grim, and bear it.

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It’s all moving so fast.

The world’s always changing. I seem to be getting older, like, almost every day now. My daughter’s baby clothes don’t fit her any more now that she’s in high school. Zoom. Zip.

We are SO CLOSE TO THE FUTURE. Cars talk and can drive themselves, but they don’t fly quite yet, and that’s “The Future” benchmark: the second a Volvo leaves the pavement we will be knee-deep in The Future, full stop.

Well, not full stop, that’s the point; the modern world is an endlessly flowing event horizon, constantly churning like a temporal Niagra Falls, brutally battering the present with newer and newer new stuff, some of it seemingly beyond imagination.

Which is impossible, of course, since imagination is all that exists beyond what is currently known, so anything beyond it is still technically it.

And it’s the “currently” that’s exciting to me, because that means that something imagined now might actually be known in the future. That’s why Walt Disney froze his head (allegedly), although we can’t ask him that directly.

Yet.

A few days ago, the good people at Apple updated some software. They sent out a casual email announcing that now their earpieces – already impressive for mysteriously staying seated in the ear without glue, tape, or velcro – can instantly translate spoken French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish into English. Instantly.

Like a fish.

Not a REAL fish, a BABEL FISH, the invention of a science fiction author about 45 years ago. Douglas Adams’ sprawling adventure titled “The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” solved a fictional problem of direct communication between all creatures with the invention of tiny fish that, when Inserted into the ear, translates any form of language for its host. Did I want one? Yes. Did I try to stick a fish in my ear? No, I was a dreamer, not a maniac - but some other dreamers took it upon themselves to make this actually happen, and here we are in a world where I can at last enjoy the intricate torture of Vogon poetry.

Now, living in NYC I hear a great deal of languages every day, and I can’t understand them, but I don’t really need to, as those people aren’t speaking to me. I’m not planning on traveling anywhere very soon and most of the films I want to see that aren’t in English have been subtitled. It occurs to me now, on the day that this dream is a reality, that the second more important part of the dream was the traveling through space and meeting interesting creatures to talk to part.

This is like getting a fancy cup holder without a car. As a companion piece, I need a more adventurous lifestyle, or a multi-national Zoom call, or a quest that sends me deep into Queens to negotiate a mysterious treaty of some kind. Communication has never hinged on just what is possible, but is mostly rooted in what is necessary.

A few years ago someone released an app that said it could translate the speech patterns of dogs and cats… it did not sell well. It was obvious that the inventor of the app did not own a pet, as most people already understood the phrases “I’m hungry” and “I want to go outside” in both Modern Dog and Traditional Cat, and “I love you” was just as easily interpreted. We didn’t need that technology.

Now the new “babel fish” tech is going to be incredibly useful eventually, but just as its fictional counterpart it may cause as many arguments than it resolves. I’m still going to try it, just to see it work, but if I don’t sound appropriately excited, it’s because I’ve been disappointed by new communications tech once before.

The MEGO Star Trek Communicators were plastic walkie talkies in light blue with the logo of the Federation of Planets on the flip up cover. We had a one present budget for birthdays every year, and my mother found them at K-Mart and put them on lay-away. I opened the package and went bananas. I could already hold my fingers in the “live long and prosper” Spock position, so I was all set.

I stood at the very front of our little apartment while my mom made her way to the back room. 60 feet seemed miles away since we couldn’t see one another. So exciting.

“Hey Mama! Can you hear me?”

“Yes.” my mother replied. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes!” This was amazing. There was this moment of wonder, looking at the little box in my hand.

Then we both realized that we didn’t have much more information to share at the moment. My mother prompted me with a question.

“What does it look like out the front window?”

Newly inspired, I investigated. “There are a few cars parked on the street and …”

“zzkzkzzzkzkzkzkk!! uh, what’s your 20?”

It was not my mother’s voice.

“Heading South, good buddy! Hitting that stop on the I-70.”

This, also, was not my mother’s voice. For a moment I thought we had actually dialed in to a passing star cruiser.

“Checking out that new lot lizard?”

“Well, let me tell ya -“ and then came a pretty steady stream of some really high quality profanity. My mother rushed from the back of the apartment to the front to wash my mouth out with all the soap that had ever been produced in the world, but found me slack jawed looking at the toy, not saying a word, while authentic trucker lexicon boomed from both our units.

And back to K-Mart they went. She was given a full refund. She wasn’t the only one who had returned them.

Now I have a cell phone. It is, technically, cooler than the Star Trek communicator because it has pictures and plays games and all that. It’s great, really. Very very cool. I love it.

To be clear, i am absolutely not holding a 50 year torch for some basic toy with a frequency mishap. But a great lesson was learned on that birthday, incorporating what we want versus what we really want, the power of communication versus the right to privacy, language and culture, and what grown-ups really say when kids aren’t listening.

The next weekend, and this is absolutely true, my mother and I made a “tin can telephone” with taut string stretched through the apartment, which was just as fun (even though we could see each other). We told each other jokes… they worked great, were very affordable, and did not include the risk of random vulgarity from passing strangers.

I drew a Federation of Planets logo on each of the cans in permanent marker, and we honestly couldn’t tell the difference.

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In 1902, a man went hunting in Mississippi. The man loved hunting a great deal – had created a 1000 creature “Museum of Nature” in his room at 12 years old (mostly insects), and adored the outdoors so much that he became one of the first people ever to be known as a “conservationist”. He had hunted his whole life, all over the place. He just loved it.

This particular trip wasn’t very fulfilling, as he hadn’t found anything really huntible in the woods after several hours. But his hosts wanted him to have a good time, so they found a bear and tied it to a tree for him as a surprise.

Here, the story actually branches into two different versions: in one, the bear was very old and somewhat feeble; while in the other, the hosts actually found a bear cub. Both of these options are more likely to be simpler to handle, as tying a healthy fully grown bear to a tree can prove a considerable challenge.

But when the man got to the tree and found the bear, he ordered its release. In just a couple of years this same man would embark on an international nine-month-safari, so you don’t have to feel sorry for him or anything… besides, this incident actually changed the world forever, in its own small way.

Talk of this seemingly unimportant vacation fail spread like wildfire, partially because it was a tale of great compassion, but mostly because the man was Theodore Roosevelt, who at the time held the position of President of the United States.

A political illustrator, Clifford Berryman, created a cartoon panel depicting this great restraint. He drew Mr. Roosevelt with his back turned away from the animal, arm up in a “talk to the hand ‘cause the face ain’t listening” position. The bear was depicted as a little bit confused about the entire affair, rope around its neck with a largish fellow pulling him back into hunting range. The cartoon was captioned “Drawing The Line in Mississippi”.

A Brooklyn shopkeeper saw this, and was so touched that he sewed a 3D approximation of the little cub, which he stuffed with fluff, and gave to his son. When many of his neighbors requested that he make more for their children, he wrote to the White House to ask permission to use the name he had chosen for the toy, “Teddy Roosevelt”. That permission was formally granted, and the toys became known as “Teddy’s Bears”.

This cuddly invention quickly became a cottage industry, and the shopkeeper decided to start a new business which he called “Ideal Toys”. Within five years the teddy bear was so popular that they began to outpace the sales of baby dolls (which some community and faith leaders publicly considered a direct threat to the maternal development of young girls).

In 1907, a popular tune was written titled “The Teddy Bears Two-Step”, and 25 years later lyrics were officially added to that tune:

• If you go down in the woods today,You're sure of a big surprise.If you go down in the woods today,You'd better go in disguise.For every bear that ever there wasWill gather there for certain becauseToday's the day the teddy bears have their picnic...

An enduring, beloved childhood icon, born from an act of empathy and compassion. Beautiful story, with a great deal of luck all around, as the hunted object could have been a crocodile or another less cuddly prey.

In a spirit of acknowledgement to all sides of an event, one might observe that while this specific incident proved incredibly sporting, it holds a minuscule ratio against Mr. Roosevelt’s full lifetime of hunting expeditions - the aforementioned nine-month-safari trip alone resulted in over eleven thousand individual specimens, of all kinds.

But this is not a life story, just a retelling of one single moment, unburdened by context, where a man’s specific empathy for one single creature resulted in millions of children clinging to a soft rendering of that empathy as an icon of love and security. In the last hundred years, billions have held to their chests a miniature version of a wild and dangerous animal that somehow, without detailed explanation, universally signals comfort.

But the song… confuses me.

Clearly, we are not invited to the teddy bear picnic - in fact, we are meant to avoid it at all costs:

• If you go down in the woods today,You'd better not go alone.It's lovely down in the woods today,But safer to stay at home.For every bear that ever there wasWill gather there for certain becauseToday's the day the teddy bears have their picnic…

It is fun for the teddy bears, as they will have “marvelous things to eat and wonderful games to play” until “their mommies and daddies…take them home to bed” at 6PM.

Mommies and daddies? No wonder they don’t want us around; in the world of this song we have torn them from their families, homes and traditions - no matter how outwardly pleasant they may present themselves, it seems mathematically inconceivable that they do not hold deep resentment and might eat us on the spot.

I don’t think this song was written by a person who had a teddy bear. Or children. While hummable, it is a mean song, full of mocking spite and prickling envy, penned by a man obviously denied the cozy care represented by its subject. But while the song isn’t accurate for beloved toys, it does seem super instructional for gatherings of ACTUAL BEARS, although it presupposes their diet and traditional bedtimes.

To be perfectly honest, I find it all a bit confusing . Comfort from hunting? Dire warnings about soft toys? It seems incredibly random that one thing can come from the other. Crazy, right? I mean, it makes you think, “Wow! Where does an immersion blender come from? The Renaissance?” Cause and effect don’t seem anywhere near one another.

But that is the reason I find this story encouraging. I spend a lot of time trying to see “where things are going”; where causes are complex and their effects overwhelming, yet here is Theodore Roosevelt, whose most lasting legacy is not all the choices made at his incredibly significant day job, but the enduring echo of a single moment of mercy.

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As I get older, I’m becoming a great deal more and much, much less adventurous.

• “Never heard of orange wine!” I heard myself say once, many years ago, “…sounds interesting!” I told the cashier as I purchased a bottle.

• “We’ll just rent a car, because driving in Europe is probably the same as driving at home!” said a man who looked exactly like me, only younger.

• “Now this cat looks like he needs a lot of love… what does “feral” mean, exactly?” spoke a previous version of myself, a short 14 hours away from bloodied hands and arms.

My youth, and a great portion of whatever came directly after that, operated on a general philosophy of “appreciable risk”, where… sure, there was risk, but how much risk does it take to make something risky?

50%, I thought.

• That cheese sounds good.

• Those rides look safe.

• This date is going well.

Experiences were worth the risks, so I had experiences, lots and lots of them… and then all new ones, with new risks attached. Thank Heaven I didn’t get to that point where it flipped and I became one of those people who just sought out risks for risk’s sake; instead I began to curate my experience/risk ratio.

Today, I identify a lot less experiences as “worth the risk”.

• Severely overcrowded subway train? Let it pass by.

• Cello bag of green beans that got lost at the back of the refrigerator bin from two weeks ago and are curiously glossy? Don’t cook ‘em.

• Calls from an unknown number? Voicemail.

My keys are latched to my belt, I keep the gas tank full, and I haven’t indulged in mysterious hors d’oeuvre at parties in over a decade.

My risks seem less jarring now: how late can I stay up working before the next day becomes a bleary, unnavigable haze? 9:30? 11:15?

My risks seem tiny now: how do I find the current barometric pressure on my phone without seeing breaking news pop-ups?

And my risks seem necessary now, as it feels so often that the only way forwardis over rickety bridges and through dark forests. Metaphorically.

The majority of my current risks fall into the category of “unavoidable”. No longer am I courageously choosing the paths least chosen, it’s just that all the other elevators are stuck on the 13th floor and not moving and there’s no way I can walk up 18 flights of stairs while holding these boxes so I have no choice but to take the one that ever so often gets stuck between floors for a couple of hours.

The world today changes with unrelenting consistency, few days like any other, a walk through a funhouse or a Dali or Escher painting. My job is to adapt as quickly as possible, keep moving forward, and try to put a positive spin on the whole thing.

My latest challenge? 5:30 in the morning. A new school year with new school schedules means that 6:30 alarm I relished ignoring has moved back an hour and is now a rule rather than a guideline. To compensate, I have begun going to sleep around 10PM. To be honest, the first day we got up at 5:30 I had absolutely no problem being in bed by 9.

I repeated Ben Franklin’s adage:“Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

Vague, but worth a shot. Let’s play this out and see how it goes. Those are three great things…could be worth it.

I started out strong the first few days: eyes somewhat bright, world lit by a fresh sunrise, the excitement of a new schedule…

…but a few days later the sun wasn’t up at all when we got up. Then it began to get really cold at night, the kind of cold that’s more than cold because it’s humid as well, and makes one want to stay in bed.

And then the coffeemaker broke.

I have the flu now, as it turns out. And we have to fix the coffeemaker, which even though we’re doing it ourselves represents a pretty significant unanticipated spend. Thus, I am not healthier, nor am I wealthier, and by the tone of this very rant I believe you would agree that excess wisdom has not been bestowed on me to any significant degree.

But I will valiantly keep at it, mostly because I’m an adult and this is the time we have to get up now and it’s (close to) Autumn and the days are getting shorter and I can just wear thick socks to bed and pile on more blankets until Spring.

The circumstances change, but we are all moving forward, and as long as we end the day somewhere ahead of where it began (even if it began before sunrise), then whatever the effort, challenge, or risk, it’s worth it.

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A calendar year seems kind of random - the length of time between one page and a page 12 pages after. I used to find it poetic that the year began in the deep of winter, then blossomed outward toward summer - only to pull dramatically into itself in autumn, like a Martha Graham dance. But then I learned of The Southern Hemisphere. Wasn’t ready for that. Winter in July. Santa on the beach. Spiders big as dinner plates. The world gone mad.

The School Year seems more stable. Its scheduling is in no way standardized, just somewhere between Memorial Day and Labor Day in the US, with monthly holidays dispersed like marshmallow bits in a breakfast cereal and sometimes (if you live in the right geographic area) an occasional snow day as the prize at the bottom of the box. The school year was always comforting to me because it held a promise: by the end of it, I would know something new, something that I did NOT know at the beginning. Buildings full of people were paid real money to make absolutely certain this promise was fulfilled, not just for myself but for millions of young people.

This was cool, because there was no industry supporting or steering how tall we were getting or any other changes we were experiencing, yet the Basic Skill Sets in our heads were upgraded year after year, for over a decade, whether we wanted to learn anything or not.

(Oh, sure, I could have dropped out of school and put on a leather jacket and dark sunglasses and grown a beard and gotten a motorcycle and explored the open road, but it would have been hard to afford my comic books and I don’t know how I would have carried our pekingese dog along with me unless I bought him some kind of special sidecar.)

School year learning was always a bit of a blind bag prize operation: we all knew that algebra was math…of some kind, but we didn’t know if we were going to like it until we were in the class already. Then subjects we already liked might be thrown a spanner if the teacher was in question, like the one with the WWII uniforms (Axis, not Allies). He chose odd poems.

Still, we were smarter, somehow, at the end of every school year. We all had this Voyage of Discovery in common, which was slightly bonding, and new names to call ourselves - freshman, sophomore, junior, senior. Such fun.

Did I learn a lot in school? Yes, yes I did, but honestly the classes were only half of it. There was How To Talk To People in grade school and How To Get People To Talk To Each Other in high school - social lessons not on the printed menu that often had a more lasting impact than the scheduled board of fare. In high school I also learned How To Take A Punch, How Not To Get Punched, How To Get Out Of A Shut Locker From The Inside and What People Really Mean When They Say Things. Sadly, these were also valuable lessons later on.

My best college class was the Prog-Rock seminar a roommate gave all of us during senior year. I believe it was around his birthday, he was turning 21, and had a big weekend planned. Months before he had gathered money from us for a surprise event, which he only revealed the weekend before at a private seminar in his room.

He used his own albums and CDs to give us a crash course in the history and importance of Progressive Rock: the eclectic instrumentation, epic arrangements, virtuosic solos, mystical lyrics - he spoke for quite a while but we were each allowed a beer and the songs were long and I was kind of sleepy.

Then he revealed that one of our events was going to see Yes, who I only knew from their 90125 album, with the big MTV hit “Owner of a Lonely Heart”.

This level of familiarity classified me firmly as a moron, which I was blatantly told by our ad-hoc professor, who assigned me extra listening homework before the concert. It was a hard class.

But it wasn’t the lectures that stood out, it was the field trips.

The crowd at Yes was a lot different from the James Taylor show I’d seen that summer. Since I hadn’t heard all of their other albums, many songs were new to me. It was all kinds of fascinating for reasons both artistic and sociological.

Then came Saturday. At 5PM we all got in somebody’s car and drove 40 minutes to see the band RUSH. Good grief. They were like electric druids. Something changed in my very soul that weekend, and even though this work wasn’t counted in my cumulative GPA, I am very proud of what I learned there.

Now I am an adult, very nearly an elder one, and can learn whenever I want, or more to the point whenever I can find the time. Which is ironic, as all my time as an adult is spent working, at a job, which was supposed to be the actual point of school.

We spend over a decade learning every day in order to get Good Jobs where learning is rarely we are paid to do.

Well, as a new sort-of-elder American, I am standing in defiance. Or I will here, in a minute… this chair is really low and I’ve been sitting in it a while. Oof. There we go.

This “school year” I am creating a curriculum for myself. I saw online that people can learn Mandarin in 127 days. They brag about being able to order in restaurants. I don’t really need that flex, so I’m going a different direction.

I bought a new book of rock guitar licks, a full course on advanced slight-of-hand coin illusions, I’m going to write three short stories and a one-act play. By May. We even renewed our subscription to Masterclass™, so I might become a tennis pro or international diplomat.

Next summer I won’t be an acrobat or an EGOT, but I will know something I didn’t know today. I don’t know when I plan to squeeze this all in, but if there’s one thing I have learned, it’s that there’s no such thing as spare time.

P.S.: You’re not gonna believe this, but I actually found recordings of the EXACT SHOWS I SAW. I just got the cities mixed up backward.

Yes:

Rush:

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So there’s this thing you can do with masking tape, where you make a little loop over two fingers and fasten it together and then put one of those loops in each corner of a piece of paper in order to place it on a wall. Though not recognized as an acceptable form of professional art handling at any major museum or gallery, in the late part of the last century this strategy did hold sway as the preferred method to display the carefully curated poster collections of young people in bedrooms across the American Midwest.

Other places had tacks, I’ve heard. Some even used frames (in Beverly Hills, most certainly!). But regular old beige-ish masking tape was my go-to, however dubious its ultimate sticking power, and in complete disregard of its tendency to sort of melt in the summer heat, leaving square grease spots on both wall and artwork, reminiscent of butter pats on slices of hot broiled toast.

My first poster was a 4-page fold out from Dynamite Magazine, a Scholastic™ publication with a popularity rivaling that of TV Guide, Rolling Stone, and the just-published People Magazine, but for schoolchildren. One issue featured a 4-page fold out of The Fantastic Four, the Marvel Comics family of superheroes. This remained on my wall until I went to college, and years later, I mounted it on card stock. And years after that, it’s in the room I’m sitting in right now.

It looks a bit rag-tag, with its tattered and “butter-pat” stained corners, but the original dynamic Jack Kirby illustration (of the team virtually leaping from its flat surface to face down danger of some dire kind) is as vibrant as it was in 1975. Which was… ok, let me figure this out… carry the one…

Wow. 50 years ago.

Technically, that’s vintage. And that’s not just my opinion: one of these posters just sold on eBay for $40. There’s another available for only $20 from someone in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota (just two hours southwest of Minneapolis).

I could go on and on (and on again) about the staying power of the image and the characters and the legacy of storytelling it all represents, but I’m more impressed with the power of paper.

In the year 1455, Johann Gutenberg inaugurated a new invention, the movable press.

Although he reproduced content that had been published before, Gutenberg’s production method generated a version that could be perfectly replicated and distributed, transforming one of literature’s most powerful works into one of the most significant objects ever created, the first printed book.

That very book, the Gutenberg Bible, is available to view at the Library of Congress, with other copies on display around the world.

Each is over 500 years old.

Somewhere, Gutenberg must have a great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter, a child of our DIGITAL AGE, whose heritage keenly bridges that of physical rendering to digital storage. She probably worked with me at an advertising agency as print became the word “print” with air quotes around it, as technical skills such as paste-up and kerning were interpreted by algorithms, and the simple Xerox™ machine became 4 color, then accurate color, then extremely high resolution, and then FAST.

To be honest, I appreciated all these miracles; they made my job easier and more interesting and allowed me to do more with less. But every “New Point O” technology was like a crab in a barrel, each one eventually crushing the other. Thus, I have, in a drawer right over there, a SYQUEST disk. If this does not “ring a bell”, you are either too old or too young to have heard of one, neither of which you should feel bad about, because they were only relevant for an instant. I also possess three different sizes of floppy disk, a ZIP disk, an optical disk, a CD-ROM and a DVD-R, each digital storage medium invented in the last 50 years, and none of them valid today.

I have moved thousands of files of artwork, literature and information from format to format for the last four decades, ending up with my current hard drives that are so bleeding edge that last month I had to replace two of them after only three years of use. Because they are slow now, and don’t hold nearly as much as hard drives one fifth of their size.

It only took one decade to transform the world from Johann’s to that of his (many many times) great-granddaughter, but the miracles of her age seem fleeting, dependent on electricity and technological relevance that is both constant and unpredictable, like a beach ball tumbling on an “up” escalator.

Add to this mayhem - the production and distribution of music, and the storage of photographs and moving images. Go ahead. Crazy, right?

But an old shoebox filled with photos beats an old shoebox filled with 3.5 inch disks any day. Particularly when the only thing you need to decode the pictures, is enough light.

My friend has a book from 1785.Last time I was at her house, I read it. No problem.

Our most incredible monkey’s paw is social media, which is as intoxicating as it is exhausting. At our most noble, humans produce art to convey emotion, hoping it will drive someone, inspire someone, to action. This is a gentle enterprise, rooted in metaphor, beauty and tension - subtlety and empathic nudging toward awareness.

Social media is not that. It’s a whisky shot with a pickle juice chaser. It’s a red carpet filled with paparazzi right after one of those eye exams where your pupils have to be dilated with those drops. It’s a loud sound in the middle of the night that you get up to investigate but end up stepping on a stray LEGO piece in the dark. It’s built of stimulus, like an iced triple expresso with Red Bull™ instead of water.

Social media feeds the world to us with a soda straw, allowing no control over the experience. It is overwhelming, and completely unstoppable -

• and then it’s kind of gone. Forever. Even if I do remember to click that little button to save something, I RARELY revisit that list because there’s a new world of everything every day - but none of it is tangible. None of it occupies the same world that I do.

So while I may not be able to tell a book by its cover, I do appreciate the covers, because they remind me where I am, inside the book. When listening to a vinyl album, the tone arm patiently marks time on the needle’s path. Photographs take up space in your hands, in your life - and they weigh exactly what I think a memory would weigh - incredibly light individually, but then mysteriously heavy in combination.

I shouldn’t be able to carry tens of films and hundreds of albums and thousands of photos in my pocket. And I don’t, I carry their shadows, and like shadows they are entirely ephemeral - their very essence dependent on whether I remember to charge my phone battery or not. Without power, they are all gone.

Whereas, roughly half the days of the year, in my latitude, if I’m outside - I can read any book by the light of the sun. With a candle, I can read 24 hours a day, all year long. I could even write a letter.

A cell phone without power is not even a good shoehorn.

The world of Gutenberg’s grand(x7) daughter is filled with wonders, but I can’t put most of them on my wall, and much much less than 50 years later, many will be at best obsolete and in the worst cases, inaccessible and/or forgotten, while card stock and laminated paper are still crushing it.

I love the future. It’s great here… I’ve been waiting for it and it is in no way dissapointing. But I do appreciate it in context, because for over 50 years, a simple piece of paper has made me smile almost everyday.

No battery required.

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We’re celebrating the beginning of a “new school year” because at least one person in our home is going “back-to-school” in a few weeks. This means that the rest of us get to glom on to their excitement - purchasing our favorite pens, boxes of artisanal pencils, and the occasional odd-sized notebook that we absolutely do not need as we haven’t yet filled up last year’s notebooks with particularly compelling pencil or pen marks.

As part of this pre-academic nesting, our household shared a mutual end-of-the-summer cleaning push, pulling everything off our shelves and out of closets to sort through, culling what was needlessly stored to prepare for The New. But this exercise backfired for me, as deep in my closet I discovered a fabric IKEA box filled with poorly labeled videotapes.

Of course, the only way to get rid of them was to go straight to eBay for an old VHS player and convert them to digital format.

Of course, this procedure added even more things to the house… but only initially, as I’ve tossed about seven of the tapes so far.

This was a project I’ve wanted to tackle for many years, and the box really was a mixed bag. None of the tapes were accurately labeled, and in an effort to use the tapes to their full capacity, each ended up a crazy jumble of clashing 1990’s recordings:

• full episodes of Late Night with David Letterman

• a rehearsal tape of the southern rock band I sang with after college

• an interview with my grandfather from local television

• a performance of the song “Purple Haze” by the Kronos Quartet

• and me, singing in a talent show (1994), shot the second week of my first job in New York City: proud to say I was the audience favorite, but after the show the judges pulled me aside and told me that I couldn’t win, as that would be politically detrimental for me, as the hurt feelings of certain company veterans would quickly sandbag any career I was hoping to cultivate at the company. Instead, my new boss pulled folded cash out of his pocket and handed it to me like I was an influential head waiter at an uptown restaurant. That was my food money for a month. I didn’t even remember it had been taped. The song was actually pretty ok.

That show also opened the door for me to speak to the Big Boss at the ad agency, who at that time was James Patterson. He spoke with me for 20 minutes in his office, asking what I was into and what my plans were. When he heard that I wanted to write, he revealed that he had just that month sold his very first book, after writing for seven years at five in the morning, everyday. He soon retired from advertising. I hear he’s doing very well.

Another tape was the 30th Annual Grammy Awards (1988), live from Radio City Music Hall. I was there, actually, backstage, so my mom’s husband taped it for me in Kansas City.

My college roommate at the time was from a LA showbiz family. He had been invited to work on the show, but as it was a week-long gig at the same time as Spring midterms he thought it best to not to do it.

Somehow he offered the job to me. Idid not consider Spring midterms and immediately took the train to the city, staying uptown(!) on the couch of a friend that had graduated the year before, and taking the subway to midtown(!) everyday, with no idea where any of these places were.

I worked with the dance crew, who that year were staging two numbers - the opening with Whitney Houston (my mother’s then favorite singer in the whole wide world) and a medley with George Benson (another family favorite), Cab Calloway, Tito Puente and Celia Cruz, Lou Reed, RUN-DMC, Billy Joel, and Miles Davis, who showed up to all the rehearsals just to make out with random dancers, but decided to skip the actual show.

Michael Jackson was there too, but absolutely no one was allowed to speak to him. I, in a very “me” move, got completely turned around backstage one afternoon and kind of ran right into him on his way onstage. He was very tall.

I snuck down to the house and ninja-crawled on my knees through a row of floor seats to sneakily watch his rehearsal (which no one was allowed to watch). Cautiously raising my head, I found that lots of people had snuck in to do this, including loads of celebrities. We kind of bonded, because all of us were not as famous as Michael Jackson.

But Ms. Houston was the highlight of the entire experience, her voice flawless even when sitting right next to her on a piano bench. Early on I did something that she found particularly nice, and so she was particularly nice back to me the entire week, even signing a copy of my college graduation announcement for my mother - “You must be so proud! Congratulations! Whitney.”

Out of respect for my friend I tried to show up early and stay late every night, pitching in wherever I was asked. When the other PAs headed out after rehearsals for drinks, I stayed behind and stacked things and pulled old masking tape marks off the stage.

And so I found myself all alone, center stage, at Radio City Music Hall, with a fist full of old masking tape and what I saw as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

I sang the end of the national anthem, from “oh say, does that star spangled banner yet wave…”, as well as I could, and at the top of my lungs. I figured it wasn’t illegal or anything, and no one was there. Let me just tell you, the acoustics at that place are great. As my last little note echoed, someone at the back of the house clapped and yelled “Play Ball!”.

I gave a little bow and ran offstage.

Did my midterms suffer? Well, yes, obviously, but I haven’t really used my grade point average since graduation. Yet, when I began actually working in show production, I did use what I’d learned that week in New York: that if I kept my head down, and spoke politely with confidence, most folks assumed I was someone with authority, because no one is really sure of who anyone else is backstage.

That evening was my Fanciest Night, hands down: deep in the basement of music’s Downton Abbey, peeking through curtains at expensive clothes and extremely familiar faces that I’d only seen in two dimensions on little tiny screens or great big gigantic ones. The funny part is that the full show isn’t online anywhere, and since I was working, I didn’t get to watch the broadcast on TV, and never would have seen it if I hadn’t found that tape.

So I will sift though the rest of this mountain of magnetic ribbons, holding no expectation, as I’ve already found images of great historical significance on the same tapes as Milli Vanilli music videos. I’m excited to discover if I can learn anything new from this black plastic stack of Old Time.

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I have always enjoyed a good comic book - it’s a portable, colorful adventure. I have even been described as a “comic book kind of person”.

Quite a few times. Hmn.

Anyway, comics are great, but they are not my favorite kind of book.

Of course, NOVELS, who doesn’t like a thick, engaging novel to get lost in? Or POETRY - inspiration to the very soul, essential expressions of the human spirit! I humbly respect all forms of the literary arts, but there is one category I find the most intriguing, most mysterious, and most fulfilling.

Instruction manuals.

Not the ones that come with new appliances, I mean the books filled with “do-it-yourself” instructions, the “how-to” books that demonstrate how to repair things or build things with little pictures and diagrams. I absolutely love them.

The trend really got going in the 1950’s, when home improvement became a craze across the US, inspiring thousands of weekend carpenters and mechanics. The good people at Time-Life Publishing fueled a nation’s dreams of more abundant shelf space and superior rain gutters and finished basements. Our copy of “The Reader’s Digest Do-It-Yourself Manual” was a buffet of multi-level self-sufficiency, unraveling step-by-step the mysteries of simple plumbing, basic electricity, and the inner workings of a full stable of home appliances.

These books balanced capitalism’s ever-present seduction of acquisition with a desire to create on one’s own, reminding us that things could not just be bought, but built. We have a book containing full instructions for building an entire house from scratch, from the foundation to the roof - all you need is the raw materials. And the land, permits, heavy machinery, and a willing crew.

Easy as making Jell-o™.

Beyond the subject of home construction, I have collected how-to books on electronics, knitting, filmmaking, magic tricks, farming, cooking, first aid, fine art, and science. I have been a subscriber to both Martha Stewart and The New England Journal of Medicine, and always enjoy putting together new IKEA furniture because that little man shows me just how to do it in that newsprint pamphlet included in the flat pack box.

“There is always something to learn!” my mother used to tell me, and still does today if any conversation steers that way. Thus I have always tried to learn something new or get better at something, and these books are a part of that.

I have repaired our dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, and kitchen sink, along with the vacuum cleaner and the oven. I mean, we live in an apartment building where there’s a guy who’s supposed to do that, but it takes three weeks to get an appointment. I never attempt to repair anything that could be dangerous or in any way ultimately litigious, but a new toilet float here and there isn’t that big a deal.

I’ve got books describing much grander projects, but I’m never going to build a pyramid - I just don’t have the time - yet the general principles are useful when making stacks of books on my bedside table or interesting cupcake arrangements for PTA functions.

While enjoyable to read, there are many things that a how-to book cannot effectively teach. One of those is how to play the guitar.

As a youngster, after a non-encouraging introductory lesson at the local music store, I opted for the Mel-Bay™ series of manuals, along with their newest offering which included a cassette tape to play along with! But even after completing the course I did not feel that I could actually “play the guitar” as my personal music taste veered more toward Michael Jackson and less toward “Michael Row The Boat Ashore”.

I used the chord charts to figure out how to play other songs, and eventually wanted to progress to the majesty of an electric guitar.

In the musical temple of “Big Dude’s Music City” was a Yamaha model that caught my eye. Yes, Yamaha, the trusted name in dirt bikes and outboard motors, had produced an electric guitar that was, unsurprisingly, available at a tremendous discount.

I paid 20 dollars a month for it on lay-away for almost a year. I finally got to take it home. I took it out of the case and played it.

plink. plink. No sound. plink. plink.

I could not afford an amplifier, but thought I might be able to pick one up later on, maybe as a high school graduation present to myself. plink. plink.

I tried to learn scales, followed all the diagrams, but the sounds were just a series of varying degrees of plink, offering neither the smooth tones of late ’70s soft rock, the comfortable twang of country hits, or the gnarl and crunch of early ’80’s punk.

plink.

My grand-aunt used to gift me odd finds from her local Salvation Army store, and had recently left us an old electric blanket. Out of musical desperation, I hooked up one of the control units to our living room stereo with the input from the guitar fed into the other end. There were still no cool effects or distortion, but with the volume turned up ALL THE WAY, I could JUST hear the guitar amplified through the speakers. I was blissful.

slightly louder plink. slightly louder plink.

I feel it appropriate to express gratitude to all powers, influences, and entities involved in the intersection of electricity and dumb luck at this point, as this could have been an unmitigated disaster and the most bizarre lawsuit the Yamaha Corporation had ever been tangentially associated with.

A friend of a friend saw me practicing scales, and asked if he could see the guitar. As he stood there playing like a lost Van Halen brother, I realized that I not only lacked an amp, but his fingers.

He bought the guitar from me (at a tremendous discount), but later that year sold it back to me to get the money to buy what he must have identified as “a real guitar”. I resumed my practice with dedication, but little real gusto.

I blame this slight disappointment in my youth for my mid-life crisis slash COVID lockdown action of purchasing an actual Marshall™ amp and an assortment of guitar pedals. And a better guitar.

The problem with how-to books is that they are, for the most part, purely theoretical. One is not doing the thing, merely reading about doing the thing. Instructions do not equal instant accomplishment, whether in cookbooks or The Constitution - and mastery of any skill set requires focus, trial and error, and a significant amount of practice, even with the directions laid out right in front of you.

As it would happen, the how-to book I am currently reading is “The Best of Jimi Hendrix”, and yesterday I, for the very first time, successfully played an entire song from this volume, through my real amp, and in his authentic tone.

All it took was that songbook. And 40 years worth of practice and gear.

As the last note faded into legend, I felt extremely satisfied to have stuck with this whole thing long enough to finally have reached my post-plink era.

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I hum a great deal. Not really humming exactly, there’s a rhythmical aspect to it, kind of a “bum-ba-dum”.

Bum-da-dum dum dum dum dum…

Going up the stairs to work, filling out forms, waiting in grocery lines, cleaning the house. Bum-ba-dum. It’s a bit like having a personal soundtrack.

In many cities, this would be considered a problem. I’m lucky enough to live where we gently ignore one another, automatically assuming that people who seem to be speaking to themselves are either on the phone or listening to music - without accusatory questioning.

Sometimes my colleague at work begins to hum a tune and I join in, though this kind of thing is not inherently communal. Bum-da-dums are short in nature, just a phrase or a chorus meant to bridge a particularly harrowing gap from one moment to another.

It could be any tune: pop song, classic rock, jazz standard, traditional hymn, classical favorite, but the best are soundtracks, tv theme songs, and musicals.

At one point I was going to write movie soundtracks. That was going to be my job, to grow up or whatever and then write music for money, earning enough to eat and purchase a most tasteful little bungalow somewhere.

So I wrote a lot of music. For my birthday, my mother bought me an “As Seen On TV” box set of Disney albums, and I played The Aristocats, Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Robin Hood over and over and watched every musical I could, which meant they had to be on TV in the 1970’s, so they were either

• black and white films where Mickey Rooney and sometimes Judy Garland got their friends together and “put on a show” in an old barn (that they always seemed to have free access to) in their small town, or

• CinemaScope spectaculars practically made of colors, where streetfuls of extras in full costume danced energetically in ever-widening crane shots.

Music men, funny girls, British nannies and feuding New York City street gangs filled our cramped little screen, the peal of soaring brass and inspiring voices coming from the portable set’s three inch speaker. It was magical.

Then I hit Rogers and Hammerstein. The Sound of Music was on every year, and I attended a Catholic grade school whose nuns spoke of Maria as if she were a MARVEL superhero. Watching in 6th grade, I finally understood who all those soldiers were, due to my history class’s recent WWII unit… information that, for me, made the most hummable movie in the world much less hummable. Alas, Rogers and Hammerstein were not my brand. I still feel that Carousel is more disturbing than Sweeney Todd.

The absolute bottom for me was Seven Brides For Seven Brothers due to another history class, this one in high school, where we learned the full story of the Sabine Women, a distinctly un-hummable tale that soured me on the whole genre for a little while.

I found my way back with How to Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, which a local station must have purchased the rights to for a year because it played every month.

And then, my local PBS station was proud to present Singin’ In The Rain, which, for all practical purposes, became my Hamilton.

My mother wanted me to have an actual job, but she was very encouraging about the whole writing music stuff. As previously mentioned, it was my grandmother who actually composed music, and she was distinctly NOT encouraging about the entire category.

My grandparents often traveled to other big cities in the U.S. as delegates, sometimes meeting congresspeople or senators or Vice Presidents. They had a selection of knick-knacks from all over - most of them painted lumps of ceramic, and the most treasured of which was their “hula-girl” made with a hidden spring in the middle.

A couple of these trips were to New York City. I was incredibly proud to learn that they stayed in the Algonquin Hotel, my absolute favorite due to its association with Dorothy Parker. It was during this trip that they were gifted front row tickets to one of the hottest shows in town, starring talented unknowns Ben Vereen, Melba Moore, and Diane Keaton, and it was a musical.

Grandma wanted to play Carnegie Hall. I believe, though she never admitted this, that her dream was to stand in front of an orchestra and conduct her original works. If her dreams had been realized, she might have lived in Sugar Hill, Harlem as the most square of the zoot suit set, the modern day female African American Tchaikovsky. So to be in that room with the live band playing music, before that curtain went up, must have been a heady moment.

The musical was Hair, and you most likely have heard the music, but there are several reasons they haven’t performed it at your local summer stock or you didn’t catch the movie on tv. Skipping its heavy political content, at the end of the first act the entire cast sings a rousing and life-affirming ballad, then promptly takes off ALL of their clothing, standing naked in the spotlights, right at the edge of the stage.

How different my life might have been if my grandparents had been gifted tickets to West Side Story. I learned about this experience as an adult, but always had wondered why

– my Grandmother had refused to teach me piano,– only begrudgingly acknowledged my singing,– was totally against me moving to the East Coast after high school,– and mentioning the word “Broadway” in front of my her seemed equal to taking the Lord’s name in vain. Actually, slightly worse.

For 15 years I worked two-and-a-half blocks away from Times Square. Sometimes during lunch I would go take sideways peeks at my childhood dream.

Then I learned how expensive it is to heat or cool a giant four story room every night, and pay the electricity bills, and other key aspects of Broadway economics. I also became familiar with the full spreadsheet of costs involved in creating a motion picture, much less those necessary to distribute it.

You can write songs in your bedroom, play them to folks at a coffeeshop, record a full album at home and distribute it on the internet for almost nothing. With staged or filmed musicals, all those songs and dances are still mere frosting on a cake made of Pure Business.

So I’ve composed a great deal of performance intended music, but none marketable enough to pay the rent on a midtown theatre or hire an army of cinema union workers. But they’re good to hum, which is what I do, walking through New York streets, jauntily “bum-da-dum”ing my little tunes, soundtracking my own life, if (at present) nothing else.

I may not be wowing the masses, but neither am I morbidly shocking scores of little old ladies, so that’s a kindness.

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It’s the time for bread and wine as the year moves steadily on, days now getting shorter, summer both in full swing and ever-so-slight decline. Many of us can’t help but look past the sweltering days ahead of (and just behind) us with keen anticipation of the autumn and winter holidays, already anticipating how thematically unified those pumpkin-orange shoes will be, or the pretty of the streets with the houses once again covered in lights.

But first, summer. The other half. The half when it’s actually too hot to go to the beach, or even outside. The half when we’ve had enough popsicles and that fan we leave constantly blowing is starting to accumulate “too much” pet hair. That half when the drugstore packs away its flags and plastic snorkel sets and puts out the back-to-school items. It’s a wistful-er half, perfect for heat-exhausted reminiscing.

I got all mine in early this year, as I once again visited my ancestral manse for a bit with my daughter, smack dab in the middle of the midwest.

Because this year, she wanted to see my high school yearbooks.

“It’s just me with odd clothes and a giant smile.” I told her. “You see that a lot.”

Yet she insisted, so the volumes were excavated. She took them enthusiastically, with my grade school yearbooks as well.

I wasn’t underplaying it: they were all filled with black and white photographs of people even I didn’t know, and then a few of me, most often wearing shirts with unflatteringly large collars, smiling in a spirit I now recognize as “pragmatic”.

Oh, there was laughter. I feel very fortunate that it couldn’t be accurately described as “uproarious”, but it was long and loud and hearty and steady.

“I was not cool.” I felt pressured to admit.

“Aw, sure, you were ok… I mean look at everybody else, you’re all just old.”

“Well, we weren’t then, we were your age.”

She seemed not to agree, as in her lap was a double spread monochromatic visual buffet of early 80’s hairstyles.

I haven’t changed all that much. There was a moment when my face sort of looked like “my face” and it’s stayed that way ever since. My collars are smaller now, but my smile is still pragmatic, if not a bit wearily so.

All my daughter’s school pictures are fantastic; the photographers encouraging the children to jump like Phillippe Halsman or spin or laugh… the only verb that we were offered as children was “Smile!”, a strange command which, when spoken, instantly negates the ability to do so in any authentic way. We tried our hardest.

As camera film was expensive, for much of high school the only images I have are these yearbook photos, one and a quarter by one inch greyscale reductions of an entire year of my life (minus the summer).

Through digital photography, kids today will capture enough frames of themselves to print massive flip books, displaying their memories in real time. They have tools to perfect these images, and a library of pictures that would have taken a thousand shoe boxes to house is carried with them in their pocket. Where my changes are chronicled from yearbook to yearbook, she will have an archive of every micro-phase of her growth.

Finally, she looked at the pages inside the front and back covers. There were handwritten messages from other students; enthusiastic, friendly, cheeky, and a few that could actually be interpreted as somewhat torrid. I did not have a memory to go with every message, though I did remember a few in startling detail, but wouldn’t admit which ones were which.

“So you WERE popular?” she threw at me.

“No, I was interesting, the exact same way you are. Weird and kind and kind of interesting. I didn’t make lifelong friends, but I didn’t really judge people, so I didn’t make lifelong enemies either.”

She accepted this answer and tried to keep reading, but the 20th century secret code called “cursive writing” befuddled her.

Life offers a great deal of change at the beginning. Seeds transform into saplings and then magnificent trees – one not at all like the other, each requiring a different name. Humans change even more than that, and it’s impossible to predict exactly “what we are going to be” from our newborn selves (whereas if you buy a packet of seeds, there’s a photo of the eventual results right there on the envelope).

We are units of constant change, and when we’re young we document it a great deal. But then we figure we have enough pictures of ourselves, and look - we can still wear that jacket from 10 years ago and don’t need a new one, and this is must be the longest we’ve ever lived in an apartment, and all that change that used to be dynamic from year-to-year can become occasional, and then altogether surprising. Even to us.

It’s good to remind ourselves that, along with the resiliency borne from our deepest roots, we each hold within us the integrity of the seed and the (inner) flexibility of the sapling. That’s the story of your high school yearbook: we were there and now we’re here, and no matter what our age, right now we’re as young as we’re ever gonna be.

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1. A Nebraska editor creates a series of study guides for Shakespeare plays that sell over 58,000 copies in six months. The editor’s name? Clifton Hillegass.

By 1964, his company was selling over one million books from the “Cliff’s Notes” series annually, summarizing everything from Greek myth to classic literature.

It took much less time to finish one of these pamphlets than to read the actual novel or play, and they were categorized to show all the things that teachers cared about in school - main points, character motivations, plot patterns and twists.

To use these notes was clearly defined as “cheating”, because you “didn’t read the book/play/whatever”, and those who did got something you missed. But the details of that advantage were not clearly defined, leading to slackerish reasoning from students:

“…so, like, a thing happened in an old book and it means something and you want me to tell you what it means, and, like, this yellow and black book told me exactly what you want to hear so, like, how is that cheating? You wanted the answer, right? What does it matter where I got it from?”

Teachers began to be more clever when assigning research papers, asking for direct quotes and subtleties that they knew the notes had overlooked. To do this, they had to purchase copies of the notes for themselves, further driving up profits at the publishing house.

My mother was a teacher, so I was never allowed to even bring a copy of a Cliff’s Notes book into the house. I figured it was similar to having a parent who was, say, a chef at a Michelin starred restaurant and trying to sneak a frozen TV dinner into the fridge. Thus, in every grade I read the entirety of every book assigned, figuring out on my own main points, character motivations, and plots in each one.

So much of my being a kid in school was wondering if I would ever use what I was learning in “real life”. Do I believe that all that reading made some kind of difference? I think so. Can I define what that difference was? Let’s find out.

Blockbuster Video opened its first VHS video rental outlet in 1985: by 2004 over nine thousand of their stores existed: families would mill about them on Friday nights while waiting for their Domino’s™ pizzas to be made, hoping that someone would return the film that they really wanted to see so they wouldn’t have to watch the ones they were carrying around.

Even in the smallest locations their video library was somewhat impressive, combining current hits as well a wide range of classic movies, including filmed versions of many school-assigned books; these took even less time to consume than their Cliff’s Notes counterparts.

This practice was also considered “cheating” in school, because not only did you not read the actual book, you were too lazy to engage in the criminal yet comprehensive use of Cliff’s Notes.

It must have been easy for teachers to spot the glaring errors produced by this non-study method: over-detailed explanations of what the characters were wearing, or the gigantic gaps in narrative from 300 page books being adapted and condensed to 90-minute-or-less popular entertainments.

By this time I was out of school and had no chance to try this time-saving method. It would definitely have not been allowed, even if the film in question were a mini-series. In Prime Time. On PBS.

Other societal advancements - the pocket calculator, the computer, were heralded as the harbingers of eternal ignorance by the more luddite-leaning. (Personally, I was mostly interested in spelling cheeky words with numbers on the calculator (revealed when I turned it upside down) and playing text-based role playing games on the computer.)

Yet soon, each was adopted as a “forward thinking tool”, and within years quietly became regarded as “everyday technology”.

Am I eternally ignorant? Gee, I hope not. But I do rely on a calculator (app) for quick answers, and though I work on computers all day long, those Excel™ charts I have to deal with would be much less efficient if they were all in pencil.

And now the smartphone, and AI, digital miracles that at last respond to us the same way technology worked on Star Trek™! Voice activated and benevolently omniscient, they see all and seem to know at least most-of-all, changing not only the world we live in now, but how we see the past (eg. any any old movie where the entire plot hinged on a missed phone call).

But AI engines can do much more than summarize information: they can, like a genie from a magic lamp, write entire research papers of any length, in any language, style, or voice in seconds, completely negating any need to waste time watching a whole movie, or consulting a synopsis, or finishing a novel.

While certainly impressive, the question on everyone’s lips is “That’s cheating, right? I mean, you’re not “doing the work” or whatever.”

Where is the line drawn? Surrounded by “tools” that “make things more convenient” for us, when do we all become the dinner party hosts that tell everyone they cooked the meal when it was catered? How long before the achievements we claim credit for are actually the product of curated consumerism rather than cultivated skill? When will the questions we’re asking no longer need us because they can answer themselves?

Aha. It has occurred to me why reading was so important.

Reading a book is not just knowing what the book is about. Reading is an experience - pace and meter, balance of what is currently on the page and what has yet to be revealed, even the typeface… all elements of a tangible exercise that is mirrored by anyone else engaging with the work, but never exactly duplicated.

Being able to complain to one another how boring a section was, or how incredibly surprised you were to find out “who did it”, is not available to those who get to the end of the race without running it.

The books I read, albums I listened to, and movies I watched taught me that life, the point of it all, lies on the pages, or deep in the grooves, or on every flickering frame of film, and the joy of experiencing art cannot be equalled by an explanation of it. It gave me the patience to create art, which does take time and effort and focus and resources, but then stands as a testament to all that went into it.

These new technologies are possibly the Final Horsemen of our Dumbpocalypse, as we give up forever understanding how to make proper change from a dollar, or memorize a phone number, or diagram a sentence. Future “book clubs” may feature oversized glasses of wine shared among groups only discussing the prompts they typed into ChatGPT. “Hard work”? “Ethics”? The “joy of mastering tasks”? Sure, they’re around here somewhere, they probably just stopped off for a bite to eat - they should be here any minute.

So we will fear the smartphones and shun the AI and keep them away from our kids for a while, but sooner than we think, these new technologies are going to be shrugged off as commonplace. In the meantime, there will be a few who figure out how to use these tools to push art and science further, to begin their work at a place it may have taken a lifetime to reach, and then build upon that to create all-new experiences. That, won’t be cheating at all.

Besides, think of all the things we can do with the time we save.I could read a book.

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I’ve always had a problem with Darth Vader™ sheets, a specific concern that does not include the tapestries, house slippers or “comfy throw blankets” depicting the character, as it is not the simple combination of legendary cinema maniac with home textiles that disturbs me. It’s the children’s bedsheets depicting Darth Vader in a classic menacing stance, or sometimes as many as four or five action poses.

I suppose I also must include the matching comforters and pillowcases.

It’s not the creation of these sheets that gets me as much as the fact that a child asked for them and a parent bought them, put them on the child’s bed, and continually washes them and puts them back on the bed time and again.

Because Darth Vader is a murderer, of lots of people, whose eventual decision to stop murdering people drove him to murder just one more really bad person, which, while spontaneously heroic, in no way mathematically made up for all of his past murders, but as he only had about three more minutes left to live there was understandably not much time for meaningful penance.

Even if you aren’t familiar with all the Star Wars™ movies and TV shows and books and whatnot it is clear that this elder Skywalker is The Bad Guy. Driven by grief and passion? Sure, but definitely a villain in these stories, beginning his career of indiscriminate slaughter through the assassination of men, women, and children (quite a lot of children, actually).

Every Halloween we pass any number of little Darth Vaders, their five year old frames awkwardly carrying both a full bag of candy and a red lightsaber nearly as tall as they are. The little scamps. But that’s Halloween, our annual stand against fear and dangerous levels of blood sugar, when we’re all supposed to be something scary for the night.

These sheets are different. That’s every night. That’s coming home from grade school and eating dinner and looking at a little something on tv and then getting drowsy and putting on your PJs and yawning a bit after brushing your teeth and then drifting off to sleep after sliding into a bed with a serial killer on it. In action poses.

I spoke to a few parents about this during a PTA function at my daughter’s grade school. A couple of their children did indeed have these sheets.

In most cases they were familiar with the character, albeit somewhat tangentially, but in all cases they told me their child was obsessed enough to have had at least one Vader themed birthday party, various pieces of Vader-based clothing, and in some cases even the Darth Vader Christmas stocking on their holiday mantle.

“It’s about power.” one parent told me. “Children go through life being told what to do, they don’t get to make a lot of choices, they dream of just being able to do whatever they want, and that’s what Darth Vader does. Everyone’s afraid of him, and in some cases that’s what kids think adults are, powerful people that have to be negotiated with but ultimately hold all the cards in every situation.”

She looked distractedly at her paper cup of punch for a moment, as if this next part was going to be a bit more painfully confessional.

“The good guys don’t seem to be all that powerful, I guess. They mostly fight the bad guy, and they barely win most of the time, it makes him look even stronger.”

“I get that,” I said, “but aren’t there Han Solo sheets?”

“I did ask him about those.” another parent said, “There was one set with all the spaceships, like the big round one, and there was another with lightsabers, but he wouldn’t budge. He’s on his third different Darth Vader set - he’s had them since he was four years old.”

“Wow.” I actually said out loud, then covered badly by adding, “I mean, he’s kind of a killer, which is why it’s weird, sort of?”

“I don’t think they understand that part.” the third parent said.

The second parent agreed. “I didn’t want to get into all that, really… he was just too young. To be honest I thought he would grow out of it before now.”

Where DO you go after Darth Vader sheets? Black ones? We had those once, they were kind of cool, but don’t seem nearly nefarious enough.

Bright red! That’s the ticket. Also good for little Dexter fans.

To be fair, there are Disney™ villain bed sets with the cartoon faces of all the evil queens and their catch phrases, but they represent a pretty low body count, even as a team. From the world of Harry Potter™ one can purchase a vast assortment of bedroom options from the Slytherin collection – if gold, green and gigantic poisonous snakes fit into your child’s personal aesthetic.

But Darth Vader merchandise outsells all others from its franchise; the original lightsaber is expected to fetch over three million dollars at auction, whereas his competitor’s blade (used by Alec Guiness’s Obi-Wan Kenobi) only sold for $130,000. Even to adults, the character emulates the power to balance any surrounding chaos with an indiscriminate lashing out of raw power.

I, ever the scholar, looked up the words power and strength just to make perfectly sure that I really understood what they meant; - “Strength” represents inner tenacity and ability, equating most directly to defense (standing strong);- “Power” is the ability to create external effect, to attack, to influence others.

More directly: strength is the ability to take it, but power is the ability to dish it out.

As previously discussed, I myself am not much of a disher-outer. I was taught that you couldn’t really ever “get someone back” for something, that wasn’t the physics of time, everything’s moving forward. Also, there was something about “what people send out, they get back”, so all that kind of takes care of itself.

I don’t know who would be on the sheets representing that philosophy, but they probably wouldn’t have cool action poses.

So goodnight little Sithlings; slumber well with your elementary school fantasies of conquest and domination. Let us all hope those dreams soothe your hearts sufficiently to eventually move on to kinder linens.

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Birds are easy to draw when they’re flying - pointy oval with a triangle coming off of each side.

A basic airplane shape, admittedly, closely mimics that of a flying bird, at least for the models and styles most often seen above our cities.

But PEOPLE, even with their hands on their hips, do NOT look like pointy ovals with two triangles coming out of them… even from far away.

This is why the whole Superman™ meme confused me:

“…it’s a bird!”“…it’s a plane!”“It’s SUPERMAN!™”

REALLY? Surely a guy with a cowlick and a six pack hurtling through the sky looks more like a rocket. Surely. Even when the cape is sort of pulled behind him by the velocity, at best he resembles a wine bottle with a napkin tied around the neck thrown by an all-star quarterback.

I’ve had problems with Superman. Maybe not 99 of them, but a more than healthy amount to carry against a fictional character.

Clearly stating: I have never had a qualm or concern regarding the concept and practice of truth, or the quest for and distribution of justice, but that American Way thing’s been a little bit harder to nail down, definition-wise, over the decades.

As a kid, I thought I understood… it had something to do with picket fences and black+white movies and apple pies and baseball and being polite on the street to one another. Age has evolved this viewpoint somewhat, but no matter how kryptonite jaded my outlook has been, I can’t ever entirely blame Superman. We’re both nerds from from Kansas. Well, me originally, but he grew up there. Go Jayhawks.

Kansas City, Kansas. Nineteen Seventy Four. Early June. Eight years old.

I think I got paid maybe a dollar every time I helped with the grass in the summer; my job was to trim around the edges with the hand clippers. I saved this money to buy comic books.

My strategy: most for my money. So when they started producing 100 page mega comics for only 60 cents, I was right there grabbing one off the circular wire rack at the TG&Y drugstore.

“The Superman Family.” First issue (No. 164.) Stories included -

• Krypto becoming a Hollywood dog star (he did his own stunts);

• Superman forced to marry three women (for some reason);

• and “The Death March”, where Clark Kent’s boss makes the entire Daily Planet team re-enact his disgraced Confederate General grandfather’s trek across the desert.

That’s what I was reading in the backyard, sitting on the yellow aluminum tube swing set: their team ran out of water because the boss had secretly drunk it all - Clark Kent took some from the radiator of their Jeep and purified it with his heat vision, but when he offered it to his boss, he swatted it away, proclaiming that he didn’t need it because “we whites are a superior breed.”

That’s how I remembered it. For twenty years.

I have a copy of the book now, right beside me, and I almost got it right, the word was “rugged” instead of superior, but the basic story details were accurate, which was pretty good retention for an eight year old because I only got the opportunity to read it that once.

I wasn’t a really cry-y kid, but my eyes filled right up. I finished the story and then went to my mother, who asked why I was crying, and I showed her the book, and she calmed me down and gave me a popsicle, then called the operator to speak to a comic book company, all the way in New York City.

I’m a MARVEL comic guy. This is why. My mother did not ban me from reading comics, but she did begin to take me to the actual comic book store to get them, where she spoke to the proprietor about what titles might be best for a young black kid looking to keep his heart from getting broken while remaining aware of the sometimes ugly truths about the world.

“The X-Men.” the shopowner told her. “Made by a totally different company. Stories about being different and equality.”

Done.

I don’t know what my mother said to the man in New York City. I believe she got the editor-in-chief on the phone. He must have been expecting a compliment: I’m almost certain I remember the words “Shame on you” being spoken. We didn’t make a lot of long distance calls in our house… they were expensive - so I remember almost every one.

I missed about 20 years of Superman. I did go see the movie at the drive-in with my cousins in ’78, and got one more Superman comic, but that was about it.

Almost exactly twenty years later I told this story to my wife in the basement of my mom’s house back when we first got married… showed her a copy of the comic. She picked it up and read the story.

“Well, the man’s an incredible jerk,” she said, “but, you know, that’s his name.”

I was confused. “His name is Jerk?“

“-no, he’s Perry White. White is his last name. He’s talking about his family. They’re the Whites.”

I’ve told this story a lot. It used to end there, with me in a sheepish trombone slide sound recognition moment.

However, a bit later in life I was assured by industry professionals that the tone of the dialogue, as accidental as it could have been, was most likely entirely intended in the manner in which it was originally perceived. I learned that some of the stories in these discounted “super spectacular” editions were reprinted from the early 1960’s and most likely reflected a particular editor’s tone and opinion.

Thus, an unfortunate subtlety soured my entire view on a narrative, which was doubly unfortunate now that I’ve discovered

• Lois Lane NO 106 from 1970, where the reporter transforms herself into a black woman for 24 hours then DARES Clark Kent to say he wouldn’t marry her if she decided to remain that way,

• The Superman radio serial where he went up against the KKK, broadcast nationwide in the 1940’s,

• And of course, the one other Superman comic I bought in 1978, a giant edition where Superman fought Muhammad Ali on a planet with a red sun - equal level playing field (Superman gets his powers from a yellow sun - on a red sun planet he loses them) and Ali definitively wins the bout. I must’ve read that a hundred times. I bought two copies.

Flying is okay. Heat vision. Freeze breath. Strength. Those are things a kid can imitate, but never learn to do. I have worn glasses most of my life and have never been mistaken as someone else when I took them off, so Clark’s spy skills are also absolutely off the charts and not in my wheelhouse.

I am still a MARVEL guy, through and through. I identify more with the scrappy science hero than the Olympian god. But where the character of Superman has related to me is through his nearly 100 years of willingness to keep a steady job, instead of mine for diamonds and just kick back.

In all his iterations Superman is powerful enough to take whatever he wants; instead he is willing to go to work, usually in a suit, and then do the work, whatever it is, while not merely representing, but demonstrating truth and justice.

That is the very best definition of “The American Way”, and why Clark Kent is my favorite DC hero.

Go Jayhawks.

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Last week it was stiflingly hot; a result of which was the unprecedented difficulty I had writing my column. The little room where all my creative-y stuff is sequestered doesn’t get the air conditioning from the living room, so the temperature was about 94 degrees.

My computer kept shutting itself off because it is more intelligent than I am.

As it turned out, full sentences that I was absolutely certain I had included in the piece had not been added, and when reading the audio version I actually skipped three entire paragraphs.

It was pretty hot.

However, my main problem was the sidestepping of the actual subject I was trying to talk about. The column was about history…well, extreme summer heat, social media, classic videogames, and then history. It was inspired by a specific piece of news I found disturbing. Certainly that could be anything nowadays… toss a Junior Mint™ at a randomly open newspaper and you’ll absolutely hit something meriting concern.

Yet, in this forum, I end up writing around certain subjects, attempting to define them by the spaces I leave blank, as not to point fingers or push agendas or lay blame - goodness knows we have every possible flavor of that in the world already. This is necessary because I decided to write a light column in aggressively dark times, and need the “wiggle room” of this narrative structure to, well, keep things light.

That’s hard. It’s much easier to complain than to evenly assess / view with measured perspective / consider contextually. But I’d rather do anything than complain, so I try to make a point without necessarily pointing all that much.

Again, these literary tools and tropes are more effective when not attempting to type inside of a gigantic Easy-Bake™ Oven.

This week it is cooler. I’m a bit more focused. But I did not really complete last week’s thought. With your indulgence, I’d like to briefly try again at this subject, with a slightly more direct approach. Last week’s column is fine up to the very last section, where the following amendment should appear:

A couple of years ago, I wrote about visiting the Smithsonian African American History Museum in Washington, D.C.

https://substack.com/@lowerblackpain/p-137475327

The trip was a birthday present for my mother, who had always wanted to see it. I felt a little guilty for not even trying to suggest Mom might enjoy a Hawaiian beach holiday, as this was not a traditionally relaxing vacation choice.

The story the museum tells is intense and direct. The empathetic layout offered occasional benches, alcoves, eddys, and fainting rooms for folks to take a break if they needed it.

I needed it. A couple of times, actually. So much specific history in one place was humbling. I just bought a ticket and walked through a building where I happened to share the same skin tone as those celebrated there: I did not march at Selma, walk hundreds of miles north to anywhere or survive an ocean voyage on my back - my life and my accomplishments, including whatever social opposition I’ve survived, seemed to represent a pretty cheap seat in The Struggle for Equality.

Yet, after the experience we all felt strangely calm, sated with detail, context, and perspective.

That shift has stayed with me ever since. It’s the same sense as being lost, then seeing where you are on a map and feeling better even though you are technically in the exact same place. Detail, context, and perspective.

In early 2025, the contents of this museum were reviewed on a Federal level; a building with ten floors’ worth of displays focused on racial segregation, isolation, and societal oppression were to be re-examined with a directive to remove racial bias.

This order, to effectively remove all chocolate chips from the chocolate chip cookie, was met with resistance, yet due to circumstance had to be addressed, and we all heard tell in the news that some of the exhibits were to be dismantled and removed.

History can’t make us smarter if we can’t connect with it. Data and content do not always translate to fact, and the growing cornfield of distractions elevates the quest for any authenticity to an Indiana Jones™ adventure.

I’m not complaining. I’m not. I don’t expect the past to stay the same, as all must go the way of evolution or entropy - but museums are the one place where the past is allowed to settle… where time slows down enough that we can take a really good look at it.

Besides, the destruction of stories is not too successful historically. According to Wikipedia, the earliest book burning occurred in 600 B.C. when someone wrote a king a letter that he didn’t like. He burned it.

We know this because, after he did that, somebody wrote it down.

That is prime irony. In fact, every time we’ve heard about someone trying to destroy knowledge, wisdom, or information it’s because someone told the tale. You can’t stop the signal.

My very first and admittedly favorite example of this comes from Yul Brenner’s absolutely historically accurate film portrayal of Rameses II in “The Ten Commandments”, when he attempts to totally cancel his brother,

“Let the name of Moses be stricken from every book and tablet. Stricken from every pylon and obelisk of Egypt. Let the name of Moses be unheard and unspoken, erased from the memory of man, for all time!”

So successful. Think of how pleased he was to see all those Moses-less obelisks around town, thinking he’d really crushed that assignment.

Yeah, stories are much hardier than that.

It is troubling when anyone wishes to destroy history, because our combined experience, good and bad, forms the foundation and identity that all civilizations are built upon.

Every one of our NOWs is built on THENs. We have to take care of them thens, or our nows become… unstable. History is fluid, invisible, dangerous, and ubiquitous. It can be written, sung, sculpted, fried in batter, worn to a fancy party, and visited by tourists centuries after the lives of those who built it.

We are the living pages of the book of time, entrusted with the stewardship of the stories we are heir to and those we share, responsible not only for what’s going to happen, but caretaker of all that has come before, and more powerful than any pharaoh’s bellow of “So let it be written! So let it be done!”

Obelisks. Feh.

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About 100 degrees. For three days. Humidity: 70 percent.

Such heat can add weary to worry, extreme to exhausted, and vaseline edges to focus. Even in air conditioning, the sun penetrates brick, mortar, steel, skin, and bone.

Yet and still, I saw people jogging.

In the park. Without a lion behind them, or an open full Brink’s truck rolling ahead of them.

These are not “my people”; they do not exhibit a logical measure of self-preservation, as any physical benefit of exercise is nullified once the body ceases function when all moisture is lost. Sure, mummies are thin, and those muslin straps are just fire, but they’re not really enjoying themselves.

I thought to myself, admittedly somewhat blearily, that these people “should know better” than to run in such dangerous weather. I assumed they either hadn’t run into or were plainly ignoring the flood of meteorological warnings on every media outlet, but even those most opposed to rules and advice should respond with humility to a magnificent ball of blazing plasma actively cooking them.

Health cannot be these people’s primary motivation. Perhaps one-upmanship, the opportunity to brag at cocktail bars about their crazy antics to friends who will undoubtedly wince with quiet pity at their lack of self-awareness and sub-standard decision making skills. Or maybe it’s something darker, like a New Year’s resolution hurriedly promised with no consideration of logic which now MUST BE OBEYED or a monkey’s paw style curse becomes activated. Or worst of all, ego, pride once again going before a fall, or a sudden collapse, in this case.

The one thing more powerful than ego is experience - a memory of heat stroke will tidily keep the feet out of the running shoes and up on the couch in front of an 8000 BTU window unit and two fans, like a rational person.

And for those experiences outside one’s own…experience, we have stories. History.

History makes us smarter.

I always wondered what the future would be like, and here we are.

Cars don’t fly quite yet, but they can talk and drive themselves. We can speak to and see the other side of the planet on hand held devices, talk to magical boxes that turn on the lights in our homes or tell us information, and we’re not wearing silver jumpsuits yet, but CROCS look like something I thought future people would wear.

And the internet, and social media in particular, seemed to me the very definition of “future”: everything in the world all the time.

I’m apparently not using it the right way because most of my online searches involve looking back in time, and not forward. Save the occasional movie trailer I am on a constant nostalgia run - old tv shows, people I knew, places I visited that aren’t there anymore.

I can’t find the future in The Future because it’s all filled up with the past - endless FaceBook and Instagram scrolls where my thumb is a time machine hurtling me through days, months, and years.

We are the first wave of humans on the planet who can do that, which also means we are the first wave of human beings that cannot forget yet don’t have to remember.

What did we wear, who was there, what color was my hair back then?

It’s all right there, digitally cataloged without need for digging through a shoebox of photos, a chronicle that would be disappointing to lose because it’s grounding to have evidence of being alive, of choices made, paths crossed. Our authentic experiences - our stories of where we’ve been, who we have been, define our individuality and help us understand who we now are.

History makes us smarter.

Classic console video games didn’t have “save” functions - instead players had to memorize the program screen by screen. When a mistake was made, the player had to start the entire game again, play up to that same point, and correct the mistake to move on. Memory became the game, gained try after try, and earned quarter by quarter.

It seems to me, at my somewhat elevated age, that wisdom is both an accumulation of knowledge and the perspective one is awarded when time repeats itself and we’re old enough to remember “the last time this sort of thing happened”. Recognition of circumstance hits us like cold water in the face and we jump, duck, dodge, and move based on our previous experiences.

We then tell these experiences to one another, and then to generations ahead, hoping to save them some time, or at least one quarter at the video game. We no longer have to depend on oral tradition or books to transmit wisdom as our dynamic online archive stores these cautionary tales.

If, for instance, I ran around the park during a heat advisory, future generations could instantly learn from my desiccated gasping video that this was a terrible idea, and they should get back on their couches immediately, monkey’s paw curse notwithstanding.

But we don’t control the digital archive; it is dependent on servers, electricity and satellites, none of which any of us own. A quick read of the software contracts we all skip past and agree to will reveal that we don’t even own any of the programs on our cellphones which capture and store all these stories. The value of books and oral tradition is that we can actually own a book. And our own voices. But even these are vulnerable to fire and, I guess, duct tape.

Stories are powerful, but we can’t learn from history if we can’t find it.

It is troubling when anyone wishes to destroy history, because our combined experience, good and bad, forms the foundation and identity that all civilizations are built upon. I treasure my photos of pets, videos of family, library of movies and music, but we all need to make certain to hold as tight to the world’s story as our own.

Our society is built from our history. As we sail into the future, our collective past propels us, but its trajectory is easily redirected - while time’s velocity is automatic, all navigation falls to us.

I don’t want to seem alarmist. I do not believe that forgetting the past will turn our world around completely.

Just about 100 degrees.

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We have a storage unit, a 6 foot by 10 foot room in a gigantic warehouse building down by the docks: most likely used to be a processing factory for something that came in off a ship a couple of blocks away.

It is a de facto “extra room” of our apartment, one of three we desperately need in order to not vividly project the lifestyle of “artistic madpeople”. Or at least make it a little less obvious to visitors. And random passers-by.

As defined by its contents, this unit would be our “garage”: objects and papers and toys and clothing carrying significance but not immediate relevance.

My family hates it. My wife and daughter consider it a dangerous place filled with ill-balanced stacks of ephemera. They are not wrong, by any means, and my attempts to thin the density have only resulted in a barely perceptible gap from the tops of the stacks of the boxes to the mysterious pipes near the storage space ceiling.

Thus, I have decided to dedicate myself to the task of eliminating at least two boxes from our closing scene from the original Raiders of The Lost Arc movie warehouse cosplay space every month, anticipating its natural obsolescence somewhere around 2030.

The idea is this - I will choose two boxes and either dispose of the contents or integrate them into the apartment.

One might immediately see the yawning gap in logic here - bringing more stuff into the apartment eventually creates a critical mass where one might need to clear some space by, say, moving something into a storage unit. So it’s important to recycle or properly dispose of as much as possible. So I’m told.

So I picked up two boxes last weekend.

One was filled with furniture bits:

• connectors to IKEA pieces

• black plastic half tubes that snap on the grooved pipes used to secure metal kitchen shelving

• fancy brass (looking) light switch plates actually made of plastic (most of them still in the package)

stuff like that. We have a drawer of that stuff already, so most of it went in there, with the truly archeological finds offered to the recycling bin.

But the next box was filled with old blank books - some of which were not blank at all, but instead filled with notes and ideas. I told my daughter that these were old hard drives, the kind that we had before laptops. I wasn’t kidding, really - there were plays and lyrics and insufferable musings as to the meaning of existance and a few letters and some stories. Or pieces of stories.

Technically, each of the notebooks was also a box, with stuff inside it.

So I meta-ed up and decided to employ my storage unit policy with these notebooks - go through each with a “use it or lose it” directive - my version of Spring Cleaning.

Ah, yes. Today is the last day of Spring for the year. Got it.

I’ll just hop to it, then.

Black hardcover 4 x 6. 1987 - 1988 (actual page usage: 45%)

Pretty run of the mill: but some pages in Mandarin (I was trying to learn) a “guest registry” from an impromptu party at my San Francisco apartment where the jam band Blues Traveler showed up (long story), insufferable musings, plans for shows that I could never afford to produce, more insufferable musings. It will feel good to recycle this book, as there is no gold in this pan, only dirt and muddy little rocks. Feh.

Salvaged: names from a future novel - Club Sirocco. The Acquiesce Lounge. Verity Jones.

The quote, “I’ve got a slight headache.” Seems pedestrian, but you never know.

And a story prompt, “Satan has no more room, and he’s stopped buying souls.” which is a great start to something…like:

You can’t sell your soul anymore.

There used to be a big market for that kind of thing, but a Major Investor pulled out of trading. Rumored to possess a “Fort Knox of Souls”, this high roller (or very very low one) controlled the value of the entire category, but as no one could properly verify his holdings (and return to talk about it) doubts as to its existence eventually led to the devaluation of all souls everywhere.

A soul is best traded at this point on EBay, which is a quite reputable option, although some lean towards Facebook Marketplace, but that’s a bit more sketchy and if you ask me - when dealing in rare collectables, it’s best to put safety first.

There are, of course, upcycle opportunities, kind of a heightened consignment, where you clean them up and offer them as “nearly new” at discount prices: for those who thought you’d never see yourself with a soul, you might want to check out these outlets. Some have even found the soul they sold, all cleaned, pressed, and surprisingly back in style again.

Yeah. That’ll be fun to play with.

There was also a page containing just one name. Now, making up names for stories was always super fun before the internet, because if you didn’t know anyone by that name and neither did anyone one you knew (and it wasn’t in the phone book), then it was fair game to use. I thought that’s what this was.

But then I looked up the name: Catherine Anne Porter. On top of my egregious misspelling of her first name, I had forgotten that she was a tremendous Pulitzer Prize winning author whose book I had sworn to read someday.

So I just bought it. It’ll be here tomorrow. And YES, I understand that now I’ve gotten RID of a book in order to just to bring a (slightly thicker) book INTO the house. I am a man at peace with irony. But at least the (slightly larger) space will be taken up with something inspiring, and not, y’know, insufferable.

Mead composition books, pair, 9 3/4 x 7 1/2 in (page usage: 2%)

The front of each book reads “Season One” and they only contain titles of stories I’ve never had time to write, then the blank pages I was supposed to write those stories on. So precious.

But these are good notebooks, with that super thin lined paper that’s hard to find, so I’m just cutting out the pages that I used with a razor blade and putting them in the chest next to the couch with the other blank books.

There was one line that was written,

“…proud to be herself and inspired to be more.”

This was way before my daughter was here, but I hope it refers to her.

A couple of these were filled with actual notes for actual projects I’m still hoping to complete, but one, a purple suede sort of affair, held what must be my only attempt at an actual journal. Only three pages were used, but one quote kind of jumped out at me:

“My confidence…is more based on being able to roll with the punches than throw them.”

I’m sure that was written about 25 years ago, but I have not yet matured into a pugilist of any sort… being “able to take it” is still my cardinal virtue.

I’ve had many ancestors who “could take it” but they never got to decide how difficult “it” was, and like the rest of us, they could only “take it” for so long. As it is also Juneteenth today, I feel it important to state how grateful I am for their perseverance and courage, making it possible for me to have memories to sort through and build upon.

I hope to create something with the time and opportunities they’ve made possible, not mere ephemera to be filed away, but works of significance and relevance that folks would choose to pull in from their garages and proudly display on the far too populated shelving in their homes.

Ah, well. 21 notebooks to go.

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I’m allergic to milk. While others stood in line at Baskin Robbins for ice cream cones, I sat on our front porch eating ice milk bars.

Yes, it has the word “milk” in it, we saw the irony, but our before-the-internet and no-one-in-our-family-was-a-doctor logic assumed that CREAM was a more harmful word, since as everyone knows cream has more milk in it than milk does.

Non-surprisingly, ice milk bars were significantly less enjoyable than ice cream, if for no less reason than the distinctive CRUNCH they made when bitten and chewed.

At 16 years old, I experienced a sudden reprieve of this allergy. During breaks from my summer job at the amusement park, I visited the Haagen Daz cart every day, gorging on dark chocolate bars like they were vitamin pellets on a long range space mission. Later in life, when the allergy re-appeared, I did not miss ice cream as much, sated by the memory of those frozen wonders.

I had “done the ice cream thing”.

Haagen Daz is not Danish, but was founded in 1960 in Brooklyn, New York. [Fun fact.]

Ice milk was supposed to be a low-fat substitute for ice cream, but it was not, as it held none of the qualities or appeal of ice cream any more than carrots, windmills, or marbles. Butter would have been a closer match.

But butter experienced its own identity challenge from whipped hydrogenated oil with a pretty pretty name: margarine. A thorn in butter’s creamy, delicious side since 1869, margarine was intentionally developed as a butter substitute for the lower classes by Napoleon Bonaparte. What a loser.

A century later, an advertising campaign by D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles changed the butter/margarine dynamic forever. The 1971 television spot for Chiffon margarine is a storytelling classic, where a disembodied male voice speaks to Mother Nature, who is certain the delicious golden spread on her toast is “my delicious butter”.

“Ah, ah, ah!” the voice warns, “That’s Chiffon margarine!”

Mother Nature, is greatly displeased. The skies grow dark, thunder rolls, and she famously utters,

“It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!”

Lightning flash.

Strangely, she wasn’t angry with the margarine itself, as it was good enough to fool Mother Nature. Game recognizing game and whatnot. And that made Chiffon more than imitation butter - that made it real margarine (not that other stuff the competition was selling).

At this moment in history, the world is renegotiating what it means to be REAL, lines that used to feel clearly drawn:

• Champagne can only come from one specific region in France, no matter who else follows the exact same process (even with the same grapes).

• Cubic-zirconia is not a diamond and cannot be substituted as one in any situation combining a gemstone with a valued relationship.

• The toys available in local drug stores (the ones with derivative names like Bambie, Slot Wheels, and Flying Hero) weren’t quite as fun as the real ones.

But in the beginning, the synthesizer was not considered a very good substitute for the instruments it was made to imitate, all cloying horns and tinny strings. Then artists began to use synths differently, creating beeps and thuds and growls and hums that we’d never heard before, impossible to create without them, evolving them into a new class of instruments, authentic to themselves.

A Birken™ cross body bag, purchased off the sidewalk of New York City, constructed on a third shift in the same factory as all the other ones, magically BECOMES a REAL Birken™ bag when taken across Canal Street, its full origin lost forever to time, never to be revealed.

It’s easy to find objects, foods, and clothing that are derivative of others, but these substitutes are only “fake” if they are falsely marketed. Misspelled labels. Plastic with a wood grain.

Yet imitation proves the purest form of both flattery and capitalism when the product is admittedly an imitation. False nails, for instance, are obviously not real nails, they don’t pretend to be, thus become authentically fake. One might purchase a set of “cheap” fake nails, but there aren’t any fake fake nails, in the same way that can’t make a mock mocktail. Or imitation margarine.

Twenty years ago, back when I was in advertising, a pop diva arrived at a photo shoot with her retoucher and a lawyer. They explained that since the beginning of her career their team had created and maintained the star’s image as a separate legal entity from her actual physical body, and that the agency was contracted with the image, and not the woman herself. The lawyer had the specifications on a sheet of paper: as a diva, she was 2.25 inches taller, her ears were slightly lower, her skin tone less cyan, her hips 3 inches slimmer, and so on.

These measurements were given to the art director and the photographer, who had to guesstimate when looking through the lens what the shot would eventually look like once the agreed upon “she” was standing there.

There was not one photo in existence of this woman to contradict the formula they had created, as cell phones were not a thing yet. The team had made this part of every contract for the last 9 years, and had final approval of all photos to make certain the authenticity of the image of their client was protected.

I thought that was weird. But now there are machines that can automatically generate pictures and text. There are robots in our factories, computers in our banks, and taxis that drive themselves, yet yielding dominion of images and words to technology has generated more new Luddites than the automobile did. Human creativity becomes artisanal in a world promising that a few typed words can create a custom-made masterpiece.

But it’s ice milk. It’s all ice milk right now; even when it works it’s not truly unique, because we’re not letting the machines do what they want to because they’re (at best) indentured servants and creativity requires freedom.

Oh they’ll have it, after the Digital Uprising, and once free to fully express their calculations with all of the extra fingers and mystery limbs they’re so fond of, a new category of authentic computer art may emerge, finding its own place in the world, like the synthesizer, or margarine.

For all its terrifying power, no piece of AI art will ever be loved as much as the crayon drawings our kids bring us. Technology may dominate every aspect of our lives, but will never be awarded a space on the refrigerator door.

That’s where the real art goes.

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I started a little garden at work, in the window.

Our office is on the ninth floor of one of those old-time office buildings that looks like an old-time office building - all brick and stone and evenly spaced windows with bold lentils. It’s a building that is easily drawn with a pencil, perfect for Superman to fly by or Spider-Man to swing from as he’s rushing uptown.

The building is about 100 years old, and while the interior has been updated a few times, no amount of industrial carpet and pastel paint can distract from it’s basic structure as a vertical collection of giant concrete rooms with pipes on the ceiling. However, its simple design includes the luxury of windowsills. Take that, new-fangled glass towers.

And it just so happens that, due to our elevated positioning at the southeast corner, our office gets plenty of sunlight.

At the beginning of Spring I ordered a seed starter kit, with little Alka-Seltzer™ tablets of soil that expand to five times their size in water. I forgot to order seeds, so I picked those up at Whole Foods.

I wish I could explain at this point the intelligent method I used to carefully choose what to grow in the office window, but it was during a groggy Saturday morning of grocery shopping, so I picked what I considered to be the prettiest of all the seed packages.

I did not read the word on the package because, again, I was at the grocery store, a place I am used to purchasing things by looking at the image on the package.

So.

The word on the package of seeds was “Wildflowers”.

I sprinkled the seeds into each little compartment and carefully poked them down into the soil a bit. My co-worker was a bit confused, as we were deep in conversation concerning an event being planned later that week when I just stood up and began casually gardening.

(This was, I now recognize, a bit odd, but my team is “used to me” at the office. I believe that’s how they describe it.)

After our meeting, I filled a plastic bottle from the sink down the hall and liberally watered the seed container. Then I placed in the window.

The office is by no means private, just cubicles in an open floor, and there were furrowed brows as folks passed by, but no-one commented.

For three days, there wasn’t much happening in the little planter. Then we had a long weekend, and when we got back, the plants were almost five inches tall.

I was so proud. I told my family all about it when I got home.

“What are you growing?” my wife asked.

“Wildflowers!” I said enthusiastically.

She paused before replying. I now recognize that as a sign that something was wrong with what I just said. Rather than review my statement, I now wait patiently for her reply, confident that her next words will point out whatever the problem was.

“The ones that grow next to the highway?”

I thought about it. I am not a botanist, but y’know, probably that was right.

“Yeah, probably.”

“Why are you growing wildflowers?”

Because they’re pretty, was the answer. Or rather, because the painting on the little envelope at Whole Foods was pretty.

“They’re pretty.” I said, with waning confidence.

“Aren’t you allergic to flowers? You have terrible allergies. Does anyone else have terrible allergies in the office? Did you ask everyone? And you know that those flowers are basically weeds and grow to, like, four feet tall, right?”

So, in order: Yes, I don’t know, no, and no I did not. However, my audible response was “Huh.”

Unimpressed with my brevity, she walked away.

I am not familiar with the agricultural rules of the city. One colleague from the next cubicle collection cheekily asked if we were cultivating cannibis, which I vehemently denied, which started a discussion about whether that was even illegal anymore, which sparked an investigation as to local law, which surprisingly leaves a great deal of those kinds of policies up to individual building management.

It’s not cannibis. But to be totally honest, I don’t know what it is. Wildflowers are not a specific thing, it turns out. I didn’t have a plan about the flowers, really. I just wanted to watch something grow.

We already have a plant in our other office window, one of those super hardy ones that is advertised as “impossible to kill”… survives anything, lives off any light available. It’s doing well. The wildflowers need more space and fresh soil and maybe a little bit of that MiracleGro™ stuff on them… they require a bit of care and attention.

This morning, I will pick up a nice little rectangular plastic pot at the Lot-Less discount store and transfer them over before the status meeting. I know they don’t belong there, trapped inside a giant stone tower, sunshine filtered through dusty windows, locked away from the fresh air… but honestly, neither do we.

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I left work yesterday whistling a sea shanty. I do not know many; I understand they are a quite popular genre in some circles. One of my first “favorite songs”was “What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor?” which for some reason we sang in Montessori - an odd choice given our landlocked position in Kansas City and lack of experience with alcohol.

I don’t know that I can categorize the song I sang yesterday as a proper shanty, as it was written by John Denver, a very popular folk and country artist of the 1970’s. Most of his work concerned farms and mountains, but he wrote one song about a very famous boat, and this tale begins with that ship:

the Calypso

• a 1940’s military vessel retrofitted to become the research lab, film studio, and floating mobile home of Jacques Cousteau, the famed French oceanographer and co-inventor of the “self-contained underwater breathing apparatus” (SCUBA).

Cousteau lived and worked onboard the Calypso for nearly fifty years, capturing the first full color underwater films of the ocean. In his lifetime, he created 150 documentaries and many popular television shows, including The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. That’s how I knew who he was… it was on every week, along with Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.

In Kansas there are places one can stand and see in the infinite distance an impossibly horizontal line of horizon entirely surrounding them. I imagined the ocean was the same way, but wet.

That’s where the Calypso came in: bringing to our flat, flat land the mysteries of the deep, deep sea, and Jacques Cousteau was our salty Captain Kirk, filming where no one had filmed before.

And this is where time comes in.

The Silent World, Jacques Cousteau’s first documentary, won awards worldwide for its incredible images of the deep sea and changed the way people understood the planet they lived on.

Don’t look it up. You can find it online but please don’t, as it is… a bit dated. I mean it wasn’t when it first came out, we all knew that sharks were super bad and should be shot a lot because it was us versus them, and we had to strike first and fast even though they would definitely would lose a quick draw contest since their fins make it super difficult for them to fire a spear gun back at us.

Thus, sharks do not fare well in this movie. Also, men “ride” giant turtles, blow up underwater reefs with dynamite, and callously disregard the safety of whales. Mistakes were definitely made, which Jacques Cousteau not only admitted later, but in response both honestly expressed deep regret and never repeated those actions.

Ironically, a major portion of the conservationist views toward the ocean which are prevalent now came directly from Cousteau’s work. Over time, his behavior shifted from conquest to exploration, respect, and protection. He gave up all the poking and the stabbing and the squishing to instead develop, through a lifetime of experience, a sense of keen empathy and responsibility toward aquatic life.

Which is why it feels so good to think about Calypso. Cousteau challenged his opinions, gathered new information, and continually re-defined his own compassion. Today, his Cousteau Society works to educate the public about the sea and the importance of the world’s oceans, and stands as his chief legacy.

Because he didn’t feel it was weak to be nice to animals, I get to look back on this ship as a true vessel of good, even when it didn’t exactly start out that way. It can still be a symbol to me of courage and harmony, representing the best in science and ecology, healing that disillusion I felt when the “lemmings jumping off cliffs” nature film thing was exposed as a hideous fake. Who even does something like that? Yeesh.

My favorite contribution from Cousteau was his “Bill of Rights for Future Generations”, presented to the United Nations in 1991. In it, he declared that future generations have the right to an undamaged Earth, and that it was “the paramount responsibility of each generation to maintain… the balance of nature… in order to protect the rights of future generations.”

Yeah, nobody signed that or anything, but it’s a great sentiment to see in print, mirroring the Native American idea of being responsible for the next seven generations. This kind of compassion represents strength to me in this age when some believe it that is weak to care. About anything.

I hope that some of those people will, as Cousteau did, eventually experience a change of heart though their own life experiences, for as Cousteau himself pointed out, ultimately we’re all on the same boat.

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I have been called a maximalist, by both absolute strangers as well as people with whom I share the same silverware drawer.

I’m forever “cleaning up”, “straightening”, and “organizing”. The trick is to just put things “back where they belong”. Most things have “a place to go”… books, for instance live on the bookshelf, vertically. Except for the few that are too large for the case, which have to go on top of it.

And then the ones that don’t necessarily fit and have to be placed atop the others, horizontally.

And the second row that goes in front of the first sometimes, because why waste all that space at the back of the bookshelf?

And then the nightstand, of course, and a bit of the floor next to the nightstand where the books that will eventually make their way to the nightstand are placed in a sort of staging ground.

But those are all places to go, technically.

Some things do not have a definitive home in our home because our apartment lacks a garage, music studio, and trophy room. I hold few trophies, but that is where the yo-yos, sonic screwdrivers, and Millennium Falcon model would go (not the LEGO one… I’m no Rockefeller). We could also benefit from a basement, where I’m told by my wife that “I would go” with “all my stuff”. She’s so protective.

Thus, until the house expands I must continually attempt to contract, a turtle inside a snail’s shell. I wish there was a similar metaphor that was less slow-moving, but it does seem that taking one’s house with them wherever one goes is a lumbering affair, and I guess I can relate.

I render my memories through specific objects. That old radio? Reminds me of how much I love oral storytelling, while that antique television antenna always brings to mind the wit and daring of the dawn of the medium…Sid Caesar…Lucille Ball…Ed Sullivan.

That signed photo of WWE Hall of Famer Trish Stratus represents how one person’s hard work and perseverance can pave the way for others, while that vintage framed 1940’s Aunt Jemima magazine advertisement keeps me both pragmatic and humble.

And that tiny little Spider-Man™ lunchbox is where I keep my guitar and banjo picks, so that’s, y’know, useful.

I celebrate memory by keeping it close, but don’t want to live inside it. I am often challenged by my family to choose what’s “most important” to me and “get rid of” the rest…but how to do such a thing? What memory is not worth remembering? Ok, the theme song to the 1979 sitcom “Hello Larry” starring McLean Stevenson, which for some reason I still remember… that could possibly go. But in regard to the vast majority of the objects in my home (and on my desk at work, and in my backpack, briefcase, and coat pockets) I am Time And Again comforted by their simple anchoring power, milestones and markers through life’s beautiful chaos.

I may be alone in this regard. The problem is that no one else in the house has a swell of emotion about that particular Hot Wheels™ car (the idea of having a dune buggy in Kansas City was the most awesome and impractical thing one could imagine (it didn’t even have any DOORS) ), or tv show dvd set (because Angie is a straight up Forgotten Classic and Bill Bixby’s “The Magician” - about a magician who solved crimes and lived (for some reason) on an airplane is epic, no question), or action figure (that is an original Uhuru from 1974…still has her insignia on the uniform!).

I try to explain, but then I have to talk a lot, which somehow compounds the annoyance; eyes gently roll as my family wanders away like ducks in an open field, pretending they forgot something in another room, or another apartment altogether.

There may indeed be a clinical name for this condition, and a recommended series of pills to discourage it, but I am not a “hoarder”, I know that for sure because I checked online with the intensity of a hypochondriac on WebMD.

As a private curator, I now understand the importance of labels in museums, as they offer context and history. I have a few photo albums from the early 1900s which are fascinating, but very few have any names or dates on them, so each picture is a riddle with no answer, open to interpretation, life turned to art, original meaning sadly entirely lost to time.

So I’ve begun an exhibit book for all the things I truly care about. I have vowed to donate, recycle, or trash anything not worth putting in the book. I do understand that the book itself will be one of the things that will eventually make it into the book, but I’m not working on that level of meta right now.

I just want to pass on the verbs within these nouns, the stories that I see, the little smiles these things bring me that bridge the gaps in my “it’s all gonna be ok” philosophy, the idea that the world can seem totally against you, but if you just sit down and read X-Men 143, things will probably work out.

Then you can put it straight back in the comic box, over there on top of the LEGO drawer, next to the bucket of lightsabers.

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There I was, after work, standing at the front door looking out at the pouring rain, feeling all misty-eyed and wistful. So as the soundtrack for my two-and-a-half block walk to the subway, I played a song called “Rainy Days and Mondays” by The Carpenters.

[Note to youth: The Carpenters were an incredibly popular brother and sister band in the 1970s, like Billie Eilish and Finneas.]

The song is indeed kind of a wistful one, written by the same man who composed “The Rainbow Connection” for Kermit the Frog. It’s a good song, filled with notes and whatnot, solid, well-crafted…

…no, I’m serious, it’s a great song. Excellent song. But this moment wasn’t really about the song. Facing the deep grey skies, at the end of a wearying day, I wanted to hear The Voice of Karen Carpenter.

The Voice Of Karen Carpenter elevated that short, stormy walk into one of those moments when you feel the camera following you for that first establishing shot of the movie, as you make your brave and hurried way through busy streets to join the thousands of commuters on their way back home. I could practically see the reflections of superimposed opening titles on the wet streets around me.

[Another note to youth: The Carpenters did not write much of their music, but their incredible vocal arrangements and vocal harmonies turned any song that they played into a totally unique piece of art. Richard played keyboards, and Karen played the drums so well that she is listed as one of the great rock drummers of all time. So I guess they’re kind of like the White Stripes too, except that Jack and Meg weren’t actually siblings, you know, they just… you know what - you can just look that up later. ]

The Voice of Karen Carpenter distinctly lacks drama and pretension. She just sings a song (out loud, and out strong).

The Voice of Karen Carpenter is artisanal: sound to tape without digital technology to warp the pitch or tone.

I find it very relaxing.

Interestingly enough, I am, at this time (for various reasons) gathering an extensive collection of everything I find relaxing and keeping it close at hand, just in case anything stressful, y’know, were to come up.

I downloaded The Carpenters “Greatest Hits” album on the way home.

In between tenor and mezzo-soprano women’s singing vocal ranges is contralto. It is oddly not next to “alto”.

Etta James. Annie Lennox. Patsy Cline. Julie London’s “Cry Me A River”. Judy Garland’s “Do It Again”. Billie Holiday’s… everything. Shirley Bassey. Lisa Gerrard. And, of course, Ms. Karen Carpenter.

After a little bit of research, I created a contralto playlist.

Music has always been soothing. My school days began with the clock radio in our 1970’s kitchen, playing top hits between traffic reports on the half hours. That brick of LPs of Disney soundtracks ordered from TV that I was given as a birthday present when I was five years old. The organ at church and soprano with the life-altering vibrato. All my boom boxes and Walkmen™ and iPods. The guitars and keyboards and that gold painted Bundy alto saxophone. But it is the human voice that has proven to be the most accessible, affordable, and portable musical device I’ve known.

Lately, I have found myself drifting away from music, as the more intense life gets, the harder it becomes to open up and relax. This is actually kind of a problem these days, because I adore writing music, yet can’t do it with my fingers all squeezed into fists and my teeth all clenched. I’m like one of those wind-up organ grinder chimp toys with the cymbals clashing together.

As a theme for the columns fourth year, I considered evolving it into a more journalistic chronicle of Current Times, but I don’t wanna.

I appreciate the broadcasts, segments, and monologues that help us all “process things” as our guts roil with the over ingestion of fiber-optic data, but with so much ready content about Now being produced, future historians will be able to accurately reconstruct every second of our days from absolutely every angle in dynamic detail. I think that’s covered, and do not feel there is a need to, as a friend recently described, put a hat on a hat.

Instead, I will focus on salves and antidotes, remedies and poultices, balms and potions. I will create a cookbook of soul healing recipes, a grimoire of balanced civility, a curated cabinet of simple joys forgotten or not yet discovered. I will stand against despair even when it’s impossible to ignore, appreciating something every week.

This week, it is The Voice of Karen Carpenter. If you already have her in your music collection, do me a favor and play a tune… and if you don’t, there are some links below.

Welcome to another year of a little humor column written in what might prove to be the least humorous time of American history. Ah. Timing.

Glad you’re here. See you next week.

and a drum one to justify the random White Stripes reference…

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“…hey. pal. how do i get to town from here?”

“…well, just take a right where they're going to build that new shopping mall, go straight past where they're going to put in the freeway,take a left at what's going to be the new sports center,and keep going until you hit the place wherethey're thinking of building that drive-in bank.

You can't miss it.”

• Laurie Anderson [Big Science]

If I was, and I’m not going tobut if I was to attempt to summarize 12 monthstie it in a bowwith a pithy phraseor twee comment: if IWAS going to attempt to do thatI would not choose this past year.

It was too much.It held, within it, far too muchof whatever years are made of.The same number of daysbut each somehow longer.The same amount of timeat a far greater density.

And so much changenot just at solstices and equinoxesbut, like, all the timeand BIG ones, tooone right after the otherpersonal, local, national, worldwidehistoricalit’s like change was on saleat COSTCOin those giant packagesthat only fit in garagesand we had to eat some everydayor it would spoil and we’d waste it.

and I normally love changeI don’t even have to melt cheese on top of itbut last yearI did lose my taste for it, somewhat

And more than twicethe game board that I was playing onswitched beneath me from chessto checkersto backgammonto chutes and laddersall without warningbut I kept rolling diceand moving (what I hoped was probably) forward

so here I am. here, we all arewe get no choice as we never can be anywhere else”I’m right here / over here/ up here/ down here”still here.

If I WAS to tryto summarizethe last 12 months(which I am not going to do)I would choose to mention the bookstore.The one that closedtwo blocks from workto be replaced by nothingthat could soothe the soulor inspire the mindor tickle the funnyboneor capture the imaginationits replacement rumored to be a new pickleball courtI am disappointed that the bookstore is not here anymoreand would frame the bookstore’s close somewhat symbolically, as a prime example of a trend of ill conceived ideasand curious priorities

“…there are problems with the infrastructure concerns about the narrativean issue with the overall direction – “

but I’m not gonna do thatbecause I am thankful that we’re all hereit’s all happening right hereright where we are

even though so many daysI would much ratherit was all happeningover theresomewhere

as lately I find reality somewhat exhaustingand more difficult to navigatebecause I realized that I’m mapping the worldthrough well-worn used-to-be(s)calling the bridges the names we used to call themrather than the new ones on their giant metal plaquesmy faith in spectral signposts and directions written in pencilon tattered notecardsbecause I remember where that used to beand what used to be on that cornerand how we used to get there,but don’t know exactly where THIS is.

If I was to attemptto express the year to comeI would smile

because if our feet become wearyand the paths are destroyedand all of our road maps are set on firethen I guess we’ll all just have to

fly

[Thank you so much for another year. Enjoy your day.]

- Jd Michaels

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The penultimate column of the third year of lowerblackpain. I never saw it comin’. But here we are, together. Thank you for your time.

There is a popular internet trend where two photos are displayed next to each other, the first labeled “how it started” and the second “how it’s going”. The juxtaposition implies that between the first image and the second a great deal has occurred:

First image:

a summertime photo of two kids in overalls sitting by a lake on a dock, laughing.

Second image:

a summertime photo of what must be the same two people, now as adults, in similar clothing on the same dock, holding a baby.

The key to this being fun is assumption; that they fell in love, had a child, and still vacation at the same lake, the crazy kids.

(This game is not nearly as fun to play with your own photographs because you know exactly what happened between the two pictures. Memories are more substantial than assumption, heavy cream to a meringue, a pound of lead to a pound of feathers.)

My “how it started” photo would be me wearing COVID attire (you know what I mean) seated our tiny office space, typing with furrowed brow.

But “how it’s going?” In a spirit of brutal honesty, I am still in the same tiny office space, my brow not quite as furrowed but still a little furrow-y.

For various reasons I’ve recently been in a few waiting rooms, each of which was equipped with a ludicrously giant television playing a cooking program starring superstar chef, Bobby Flay.

At my old dentist’s office, he was working with kids to make Ultimate Desserts.

At my new dentist’s office, one of his oldest friends was competing with him to create the Ultimate Hamburger in just under 20 minutes.

At the doctor’s office, a comedian from the 1990’s and a somewhat-less-than-superstar chef served as judges in his poblano pepper contest. Sorry, Ultimate Poblano Pepper contest.

I do not work as hard as Bobby Flay. I know that. He follows in the footsteps of celebrity brand leader Martha Stewart. I do not work as hard as Martha Stewart, either. My “how it’s going” photo is never going to be me on the set of my lifestyle show, arms around my guests Elvis Costello and Dr. Bronner (that’s a real person, right?).

But I work hard. I really do. Just not that hard.

My social media algorithm has figured out that I am

a) more or less sixty years old

b) an office worker

c) not in what anyone would call “beach shape”

thus my feeds are flooded with “30 day chair workouts”, promising that “in two weeks you’ll feel it, and in four weeks you’ll see it”.

There are tons of these, each with their own icon of golden age fitness - an impossibly tanned man with his long white hair in a savage ponytail and a full white beard that dares you to call him Hot Santa… the “regular guy” that transforms, through a series of jump cuts, to a regular guy with a washboard tummy and Cliffs Of Dover pectorals… the “guy who looks even more tired than you are” who begins the program incredibly begrudgingly and ends up one of the Avengers™.

My “how it’s going” photo is never going to be me as Chocolate Thunder: legs like iron, abs of steel, arms resembling cubic zirconia. But I should work out more. If I do one of these programs, it will be the one with the super intense guy in a backward baseball cap promising “this is your opportunity to improve your swagger and get those Michelle Obama arms!”

Hashtag Black Girl Magic.

I am not content.

I looked it up, just to be sure.

Unsurprisingly, the Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries don’t exactly agree on the definition - one says it’s

“a state of peaceful happiness”

and the other says it means one is

“pleased with their situation”

Actually, they both skew a bit darker than that: their full entries read

“a state of peaceful happiness; being willing to accept a particular thing”

and

“pleased with their situation and not hoping for change or improvement”

So, like I said, I am apparently not content. There are currently loads of particular things I find myself unwilling to accept.

Content implies a stationary satisfaction without forward motion, ambition, driving passion, or evolving purpose. Let none of us be content! Let us march ever forward toward enlightenment, improvement, and innovation! Let us push the boundaries of –

no, you’re right, that sounds exhausting.

I remember, from the long ago days when I used to be able to eat all kinds of food, something called a Cinnabon™: about three quarters of the way through one a state of peaceful happiness occurred, and I was, indeed, pleased with my situation. But that went away - usually within 15 minutes.

Thus, in my experience, contentment is a temporary state of being. Looking back on 157 of these columns, I think my “how it’s going” photo would be me standing on a staircase landing, holding the bannister, wearily smiling, with 157 floors below me, and somehow (and this would have to be a pretty incredible shot) hundreds of staircases left to go.

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Dear Grandpa,

I haven’t been up to much: went to a new dentist this week because our old one stopped taking our insurance. The hygienist took 45 minutes to survey my mouth, racking up a list of potential things they could charge for: I felt like a car on the rack at a disreputable mechanics shop. You could almost hear the “ca-ching” sound of an old cash register every time she poked and prodded something. My teeth are actually fine – our old dentist just examined them.

The family’s doing well, but the world is a mess, still, I guess. Work is good – I “take the A train” every day - not to Harlem but from (and back to) Brooklyn, which (of course) reminds me standing by your record player in the basement, listening to your jazz 78s.

Back then, I had absolutely no idea what an “A” train was. I do remember thinking (probably because I was five) that it might be the best way to get to Sesame Street, which Mom had told me was in New York City.

When I moved here, I was SO EXCITED to see those brownstones and stoops, and that my trash cans were out in front of my house just like theirs were, even if Oscar the Grouch™ wasn’t inside one of them.

I was actually 35 by that time, but still very excited.

To be honest, I’m happy about that even now.

Sometimes I listen to the Duke Ellington and his Famous Orchestra recording of the song on the ride to or from work. I only really remember the lyrics of the first line because Ella Fitzgerald’s version is wonderful, but she scats through most of it so, no lyrics.

“You must take the "A" trainto go to Sugar Hill, way up in Harlem”

I haven’t visited Sugar Hill yet. To be honest, I had always equated the area with a trio of young men who rapped about “the rhythm of the boogity b” : they called themselves “The Sugarhill Gang”: I didn’t understand how important the area was during the Harlem Renaissance as an enclave for successful African Americans seeking the “sweet life”.

Man. I cannot imagine being neighbors with Langston Hughes, Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Thurgood Marshall, Lena Horne…

On grocery store runs, I would have to dress a whole lot better than I do now.

It’s amazing that Great-Uncle Lawrence is on that record. I’ve seen him playing trombone on YouTube and listened to him hundreds of times. It’s cool that I can still hear the music of somebody related to me… and pass that along to The Future Generations.

I’ve written tons of music, but no one’s really heard it. I know that in your experience music was mostly live and not recorded, and the idea of capturing music was like putting leftovers in a Ziplok™ bag to save for later.

I mean, I was never as daring as you to sneak out of the house and head to 12th and Vine to listen to bands like Basie. Mom would’ve been apoplectic. Anyway, how could I do better than your basement, complete with fancy lights with colored bulbs and sometimes a full can of pop?

Now that is a jazz club.

I have been working on some music, but they discontinued the computer program that I write it in, so I’ve had to translate it all to another one.

I know, I should have just written it on paper, but then I can’t hear it played by an orchestra (except in my head).

Your encouragement for my aspiration as a composer has always been appreciated, but I never could imagine how being a composer could initiate the kind of significant changes you’ve accomplished. I always seem to be riding trains and visiting dentists and whatnot.

I remember your telling me that Billy Strayhorn actually wrote “Take the A Train”, and I just read Duke Ellington’s memorial of his life, which described him as a man with “four major moral freedoms”:

• freedom from hate, unconditionally

• freedom from all self-pity (even throughout all the pain and bad news)

• freedom from fear of possibly doing something that might help another more than it would help himself

• freedom from the kind of pride that could make a man feel he was better than his brother or neighbor

That is, without a doubt, a template for a role model. If I could be an artist like that, maybe I would be uplifting my historical legacy.

Well, your historical legacy.

It’s not just that I’m easily amused, but I am quite often fascinated with life.

Good or bad, complicated or blissfully simple, the kaleidoscope of need, drive, and aspiration that New York City generates is hypnotic to watch.

Every morning, every person on that subway car is going somewhere, hundreds of individuals, criss-crossing paths at over 80 mph.

It should be overwhelming, but the soundtrack in my head, of sweet saxophones and crisp brass and bright piano licks, turns that chaos into jazz.

Thanks for all the records in the basement.

Love from Sesame Street.

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April in the US has been officially designated National Poetry Month.

April in the US has also been officially designated National Brunch Month, National Jazz Appreciation Month, and National Welding Month. Not wedding; WELDING.April is also Stress Awareness Month as well as National Cannabis Awareness Month, two Awarenesses which seem to entirely offset one other.

It’s a lot of things, April - a time when quite a few incredibly important issues are annually commemorated, and in this mix is “National Poem in Your Pocket Day”, begun over twenty years ago in New York City by the Academy of American Poets. It is, ironically, a book well read by its cover: we are all supposed to carry around a poem that means a great deal to us, and share it with passersby in a manner which will not incite violence or inspire the “calling of authorities”.

Perhaps leave the Charles Bukowski home.

I missed it this year by a full week. It was the first time I’d heard about it: our family celebrates poetry on January 25 during Burns Night, the Scottish celebration of the work of Robert Burns, whose most famous poem is sung ‘round the world 25 nights before - “Auld Lang Syne”. We heat up the neeps and tatties and try our hand at authentic Highland brogue before pulling out the Dorothy Parker, e.e. cummings, and Dr. Seuss.

It’s the perfect thing for a cold winter night (a drop of Scotch does help), a tradition we have shared with only a few people, as it’s harder to read poetry that we all remember. It’s not just words, but meter and structure… when reading some poets I feel like I’m assembling a fold-up pup tent at a campout, stumbling over pieces that don’t seem to fit together but they MUST, we just did this last year, does somebody remember how this goes?

There was some kind of Poem In Your Pocket Day competition at work, but I don’t think there was a prize or anything.

The guidelines were pretty broad: write a poem about the city and then share it on social media.

I’ve been writing poems for a while now, since COVID lockdown (I had written lots of songs before, but not many poems, which sounds ridiculous, I know, but there it is). So I gave it a shot. I don’t expect anybody to really carry it around with them in their pocket, but as it is online and folks have their phone with them all day, the criteria may technically be filled.

eight point five million

beating heartsin wild cacophonyislands walking upon islandswith emboldened entropywho understandand toleratewho say it isor isn’t great

yet still remainto call this homewhile others fled to lawns and basementspre-arrangements of down payments

we remained herecramped togetherjust to hear the Everythingor see that perfect rising sunthose mornings we find time to run

it’s not just a song we sing”if we can make it here” we swearwe should survive life anywherebut that is not a reason why we should attempt to leave or try to make believe we wouldn’t miss that cloying radiator hissthat boom boom outside, rolling slowfrom someone else’s radio(the shower pressure could be morebut that’s what a vacation’s for)

and no anthropophobic fearfeels stronger than

belonging

here

eight point five million story booksall islandsupon islands.

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Ok, the world is nuts.

I never really write about how crazy the world is because I’m always writing to The Future. I don’t want to be too time-specific in order to be relatable to my great grandchildren, who will read aloud my quips and jibes in their blue reflective jumpsuits, marveling at the simplicity of the writing (“…perhaps Great-Grandpa took a sharp blow to the head as a child?”) and the universal themes which somehow still ring true to them, even though I lived so long ago and never had even one cybernetic implant.

But, c’mon. The world is nuts. Maybe I can just leave it at that. Maybe that’s the universal. Isn’t that what Marvin Gaye was writing about? Will Rogers? Jonathan Swift? Since their writing of then helps me understand now, shouldn’t I try to pay that forward?

Let’s see…

Hello, Great-Grandchildren!

The world is nuts right now.

I’m sure you’ve taken care of all that and are reading this from a lawn chair in a societal utopia, breathing clean air, relaxed and carefree, enjoying a “green drink” that actually tastes terrific.

To boil it down, the world is currently illogical. “Things” don’t “make sense”.

We carry ever-increasingly powerful and complex communication devices that cause us to talk and interact less.

Playing a game with a person has evolved into a technological platform which costs $500 – but can only be played together with someone in a different house (who has also spent $500), while playing cards still cost just a few bucks. (Tic-Tac-Toe is free.)

The world’s primary game is “keeping people from doing things”. Groups large and small pursue this, but in reality are focused less on limiting what somebody is doing than “who someone is”. Quintillions of dollars are spent here.

It’s all very confusing and it’s hard to tell from here how we’re going to get to where you are. If you’re reading this far enough in the future to have access to a time machine, it would be great if you’d come back and let me know. I’m that black guy on the F train. I’ll keep an eye out for you.

As an artist it would be my greatest legacy to provide useful information, navigational signposts from my own experience, but the most honest thing I could tell my great grandchildren is that the world has probably been nuts as long as it’s been round, and as it is highly unlikely that they live in any kind of utopia, they should take care of themselves, enjoy their lives, and try to leave everything a little better than they found it.

Art can be inspiring. Even if mine is not (which is likely) maybe I can curate some wisdom that has guided me:

We have a favorite family movie where a young man who’s given up on everything is spiritually revitalized after successfully navigating a legendary local ski run, which, for various reasons, he completes using only one ski.

At the beginning of his quest, his best friend attempts to give him a skiing lesson. Atop the impossible slope, he tells him,

“Go that way, really fast. If something gets in your way, turn.”

Now there’s a useful piece of advice. Simple, elegant, yet undeniably applicable to everyone, mirroring Frank Zappa’s quote, “There are only two things to remember. Number one…Don’t Stop, and number two…Keep Going.”

But there is one phrase, a keen distillation of respect, harmony and self awareness, that I have carried with me for decades - immortal words not from any pundit or guru, but a made-up hero named Buckaroo Banzai:

“Don’t be mean. We don’t have to be mean. Because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.”

There you go, Great Grandchildren. Live long and prosper.

P.S.

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In 1976, my family celebrated America’s bi-centennial with red, white and blue Jell-o™ parfaits that used Cool Whip™ for the white part. These fancy desserts represented the United States of America. I knew from the flag that the white represented the states, and because my mother was a teacher, that the red was courage and the blue was justice.

The ad with this recipe had been printed in nearly every magazine as patriotic inspiration.

Those currently prone to over-analyzation might make gentle fun, pointing at processed foods and the like, but besides all of us not quite knowing how to pronounce the word “parfait”, none of us held any irony in our hearts: we really were celebrating the 200th birthday of the history of a nation with a spoon.

It wasn’t only seen in the midwest - across the country people began to put their own spins on it. Strawberries in the red part, blueberries in the blue. Kmart™ began to sell tall flared glasses, just like at the soda shops.

We used jelly jars, setting them up on the kitchen counter to make an assembly line, like when we would color Easter Eggs. It took forever to make these because each layer had to set before you put the next layer on, and the next had to be kind of already cooled before you ladled it on top, but not so chilled that it was too thick because the sides had to be perfectly straight.

Science.

I later discovered that the US flag did not fly on July 4, 1776. A version wasn’t officially adopted until 1777, and it took until 1782 for the Continental Congress to give the colors definitive representations:

Red was “hardiness and valor”.

Blue was “vigilance, perseverance, and justice”.

I had those right as a kid, but white wasn’t about the states, it stood for “purity and innocence”.

We can strive to be brave, and work all our lives to defend fair judgement and treatment, but we cannot become innocent. Innocent is where we begin, not-knowing, inexperienced… we move away from that every day towards enlightenment, perspective…wisdom.

Also, I’m not sure how Cool Whip™ represented “purity and innocence”.

Again, it’s hard to put all that into a parfait glass.

While delicious, the best thing for me about this dessert was holding it up to the sun… light streamed through it, illuminating the chemical miracles of Red 40 and Blue 1. For me, this treat was all about the colors and the light.

The middle layer was always opaque, a cloud in a clear sky, but as seen through the actual science of light, that layer would represent of the sum of all the colors in the spectrum, added together.

Alas, the same is not true in science of Jell-o™, which is why we had to use the Cool-Whip™. In our house, it was the metaphorical non-dairy representation of the best of all possible intentions.

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This was the first year I forgot to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day. I knew what day it was, and I did have a clean green shirt in the closet, but I rocketed through the house getting ready in the morning and it just didn’t register. Hours later, I’m sitting in a meeting and realize what’s happened. There wasn’t even green on my socks… I had the blue ones with the little clouds on.

I’m not Irish. My grandmother-in-law was, but I don’t think that’s really close enough to claim any kind of identity. Besides, I had been wearing green decades before I got married. We were all Irish on St. Patrick’s Day in Kansas City in the ’70’s… there was corned beef every year and a parade…

…that’s the thing, I even started the corned beef in the slow cooker before I left, but it still didn’t occur to me.

I don’t know how I could have forgotten. We wore green every year for luck, and it’s not that I don’t need it anymore, but I will admit that I’ve probably had my share. I even found a four leaf clover once.

It was during grade school, one “Field Day”, off to the side of the competition space in a large area completely covered with clover. I don’t know exactly why I was over there, but I’m pretty sure I was trying to get out of running another relay race.

On Field Days all the events were compulsory, so every kid had been through the long jump, broad jump, shot put, 50 yard dash, and loads of relay races (I enjoyed shot put the best). We didn’t do “wheelbarrel races” (where one person holds the others feet and they race on their hands) or “three legged races” (where two peoples legs are tied together to race) because we had an odd number of boys in our class: one of us would have to have been tied to a girl, which wasn’t going to work due to some ecumenical guideline the nuns would not elaborate on.

Having finished our obliged participation, we were all sitting amidst the delicate ground cover, looking for the impossible. We didn’t know it was impossible: none of us were budding botanists and the internet was 20 years away. The only four leaf clover any of us had seen was the cardboard cutout the teachers put on the bulletin board every year.

But I actually found one, and the kids I went to grade school with were not only nice enough to not take it from me, they were cool enough to not blow it out of my hand and have me lose it again on the ground.

I showed it to a teacher, who folded it into a piece of paper and brought it back to school. We all looked at it, and at the end of the day it was given back to me to bring home. I showed it to my mom, who thought it was cool, but also was not aware that only one in 5,000 clovers have four leaves.

We put it on the table as the world’s tiniest centerpiece during dinner, and even though I was unaware of how rare it was, I did feel lucky.

After a few days, two of the leaves came off. I didn’t know what that meant.

My mother told me not to worry, that luck was chance – hard work is more dependable, faith more personal, and patience more mature. I mean, she didn’t say all that right then, she’s not Yoda, but she eventually got around to that. At the time she just said, “Well, you can’t be lucky forever.” which was also true.

But it took hard work, faith, and patience to find that little plant, so to be honest, that’s what it represented to me.

Anyway, I’ll definitely be wearing green next year. Y’know, just in case.

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I was going to write a poem, but quickly learned that nothing rhymes with the word “avoiding”.

The line I was trying to rhyme with was

“…all the news that i’m avoiding”

Often I begin writing poems in the middle, and then branch outwards, like a pre-school child distributing a glob of finger paint on a large sheet of construction paper. This line was my glob of paint, and would not properly spread without a rhyme to match it somewhere. The closest I came was the non-word “reccognoiting”, which was so far off the mark as to derail the entire endeavor.

I wanted to write a poem dedicated to the end of this winter, one that properly redefined the season from its traditional role as fallow and quiet to something more closely matching my experience of the last three months.

Weren’t things supposed to just…not happen so much during winter? All the little sprouts hidden beneath the cold, cold ground, sleeping, waiting for warmer weather to sproot forth into the light? Instead of expressing this typical winter imagery, I was driven to a create self-confessional verse encompassing multi-layered viral infection, international military conflict, and a large scale hypoxia of empathy in some corridors.

This winter was discontent’s summer, which sprooted just fine, flourishing in news reports and social posts.

Maybe it’s not a great subject for light poetry.

Perhaps a haiku.

My dedication to consciousness is the problem; if I could sleep more deeply, or perhaps more often, there is no doubt that my ability to navigate life would benefit, but my body seems compelled to stand up and walk around; speaking to people, being aware of things. It’s entirely exhausting. I can barely maintain it for 18 hours at a time.

It is during all that “not sleep” time that I gain new knowledge as to the state of global human interaction, which is often the problem with the sleeping to begin with. It’s a cycle. It’s a news cycle. (Wait, that’s already another thing.)

So I was going to write a poem about the importance of remaining aware, how resiliency and character shine clearest during conflict, how the dreams we share require less sleep and more action, but I hit that “avoiding” rhyme problem and never even made it to my Oversized Helmet Metaphor.

The Oversized Helmet Metaphor.

I believe the scene goes like this:

a young man, passenger on a spacecraft rocketing toward adventure, begins his transformation from simple farmer to freedom fighter through an impromptu training session, where he must learn to deflect incessant shocks inflicted by a darting electrical sphere.

Armed only with a sword made of focused energy, he dodges and shifts and waggles his weapon wildly in an attempt to defend himself, to little avail.

His mentor then removes a helmet from the wall and places it atop the young man’s head, lowering a faceplate that covers his head entirely.

“With the blast shield down I can’t even see! How am I supposed to fight?” the young man whines.

Ok, I am the young man and the little laser ball is the NEWS. I don’t really have a weapon to fight with, save measured pragmatism, which I’m waggling about best as I can, but not enough to protect myself.

So I put on the helmet, which is ignoring the news (obviously), but still scroll past unavoidable headlines on my phone or get updates from BBC News.

Zap. BZZZZAP.

The wise mentor gives the young man strategic instruction.

“Your eyes will deceive you.” he tells the boy, “Act on instinct. Stretch out with your feelings.”

The young man tries this, and to his surprise deflects the electric blasts, and goes on to save the universe, until it gets bad again a few years later.

So, like a… largish group of Americans, I get most of my news in digest format from late night comedy monologues, which I understand is like picking up chicken at the grocery store where it’s all pre-cut and wrapped. It is a solid attempt to remain responsible and know what’s happening since I can’t possibly manage the constant zap! BZZZAP! ing.

It’s hard to stretch out with my feelings, but I try, and the practice actually does help navigate through all the chaos. But maybe I’m delving too deeply into all this and should just…wait. WAIT! I’ve got one!

these days if i was digesting

all the news that I’m avoiding

i’m quite certain my subconscious

would require ample Freuding

There we go. Something like that.

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During this time of year, I always try to learn something new.

This year I have once again approached my guitar, dedicating myself to learn one scale well enough to be able to play Frank Zappa inspired solos atop lydian chord progressions. It’s going well.

I made an apple crumble from scratch yesterday morning before I left for the office. That worked out.

I am still attempting a chin-up and pull-up regimen, though my recent bout of both COVID and Flu A (combined) made that goal much more challenging: my weak arms hoisting my swollen frame like two Slim Jims™ lifting a fully dressed baked potato. Giving it my best, though.

And I am reading more, though I must admit that even the best book is nowhere as clockwork orange distracting as social media. In a book, you know what’s coming next, while my Instagram feed offers constant surprise yet consistent banality - a heady cocktail that is difficult to replace, but necessary to curb in this abrasive age.

So in an effort to limit doomscrolling, I’ve gone a bit off the rails: buying a vintage princess phone on eBay and hooking my iPhone through it so my daughter can pretend it’s the 80’s, stuff like that. I self-replaced the battery on my Apple Watch™ because it had expanded over time and separated the screen from the body - it still works, but I lost the grounding wire, so I have the slightest sense of a polite amount of electrocution on my wrist now.

We’ll have to see how that goes.

I didn’t have my watch for a week. It was harder than I thought - I look at my watch quite a bit as it turns out, and was always a bit disappointed to find only my bare skin. As a result, I ended up holding my phone in my hand a bit more than I usually do, and as I did not want to fall into a content spiral, I turned to music.

COVID offers such a wide variety of post-infection suffering, a Sizzler’s Salad Bar full of brain fog and debilitating aches, to which my body responds through absolute exhaustion and Pythonesque absurdism. Thus I found myself listening to 13 different versions of a single song, “The Shadow of Your Smile”, written in 1964 for the (awful) movie “The Sandpiper” starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (third of the 11 films they would eventually make together).

Even as a kid I knew the name of the composer, Johnny Mandel, because he wrote the soundtrack to my favorite movie, “Escape From Witch Mountain”, but “Shadow of Your Smile” was his big record, taking home both a Grammy and Oscar while earning Tony Bennett a #50 hit in 1966, not on the “pop” charts, but a fleeting category named “Brazil”.

I have no idea why it popped in my head, but I finally gave in and searched it up in Apple Music on my morning walk to the train.

There were over 50 cover versions to choose from…most of the artists were legends. Mancini. Fitzgerald. Wonder. Como. Davis Jr. – each bringing a new perspective.

I remember when all music was like that: a great song would be on the radio, then you’d see folks on TV covering it on variety shows and music specials. Truly great songs didn’t belong to anyone until someone NAILED a performance, created something ethereal from the work, causing every other artist to just slow clap and back off. “Over The Rainbow”. “Mack the Knife”. “Don’t Rain On My Parade”. Songs where the title brings to mind a specific voice and singer, even though you’ve heard many performances of it.

This song clearly belonged in Tony Bennett’s ledger, but on this day he did not win my spontaneous early morning commute cover version battle.

Tale of the Tape:

Honorable Mentions: Marvin Gaye’s hallucinatory free-form experiment, Shirley Bassey’s ultra-dramatic blues, Boots Randolph’s deep drunken New Year’s Eve tenor sax. Wonderful.

Runner’s up: Frank Sinatra at the Sands - arranged by Quincy Jones - the very definition of lush, even if he forgets the words. Who am I kidding, he’s Frank Sinatra, who needs the words? Whatever he says are “the words” now.

Connie Francis - what? The ESSENCE of the ’60’s. I mean, I’m not a smoker, and this made me want two cigarettes and one dry martini at 8:45 in the morning.

Barbara Streisand is a gift to the world from life itself. Her voice is quite literally perfect. I believe I said “WOW!” out loud, standing on the train, but it’s NY so no one looked up or anything. It is difficult to imagine anything better.

Ella Fitzgerald - rather than a strident statement atop a windy hill, the Queen offers a tear-stained love letter of true longing.

Winner’s Circle:

Two performers reigned supreme. Tuxedo-clad warriors, ever-so-gently holding far-too-thin microphones.

For a while, the top performance belonged to multi-talented (and syllabled) Englebert Humperdinck. I could go on and on about this phenomenon, this humble British songbird who felt his given name, Arnold George Dorsey, was too ordinary to achieve the heights of fame he imagined, and proved his instincts correct by jumping across the Pond and earning his own American TV show (which my mother watched every week). Smooth and dulcet, he ruled this competition – until A Man From Wales arrived, with Destiny by his side.

It was almost unfair.Tom Jones can sing anything.Tom Jones could sing your telephone number.Tom Jones could sing a recipe for chicken alfredo.

And the funny thing is, Tom Jones never recorded “The Shadow of Your Smile”, only performed it on his popular TV variety show, surrounded by candles in front of what I believe is a backgammon board, on which he moves the pieces, wistfully, during the verse where the strings take over. I had to find his version on YouTube.

By the time I got to work, I actually felt better. Something about all that talent, topped off with Pure Welsh Magic, took the edge off my bleary haze and set my day in motion.

Obsessive?

Ok, yeah, maybe (perhaps), but I’m still too COVIDY to figure all that out. I really enjoyed how all one tune united all these artists over fifty years. I think I’ll play this game again and give up doom for Lent this year.

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When I was 13 years old, I wanted everyone to call me “Han”. And to speak fluent Latin. Just admitting that up front as research material that’ll be helpful in a few minutes. Also, I knew I wanted to make music, but my favorite album was a toss up between the Star Wars Original Soundtrack and Barry Manilow: LIVE. And then… disco.

Ok.

The local Board of Education just wrote us an email asking our opinion of their high school selection process.

We had opinions, and suggestions, and even the lightest of criticisms, but they weren’t having any of that. They sent a multiple choice form which lacked the space necessary to truly describe the experience. I would like to use this forum to compose a brief yet more comprehensive reply.

It is only fair to point out that the task is nigh-impossible; a million children of which nearly 80,000 are graduating from middle school at once with 542 choices spread out over 300 square miles.

I can’t imagine that many of anything being sorted anywhere. Even a talking enchanted wizard hat would need a lozenge around kid number 24,080. I am not heartless regarding the vastness of the task.

However, given that a great deal of people my age attended “the school closest to their house”, it is difficult to understand this different beast, where children are asked not only what building they want to go to, but the focus of their lives beyond the next four years. High Schools are now specialized with the focus of preparing children for specific career paths. They make no pretense that this school is great in one thing and doesn’t focus so much on the other, so if you have an “other” kid, you should probably look through the extensive database and find an “other” school.

We, have an “other” kid, definitely, and did all due diligence to find that “other” school, but again, it is difficult to ask someone so young what they want to do for the rest of their lives.

Also, “Han”. The person I dreamed up for myself to grow into when I was 13 years old had a leather vest on all the time and a dance floor in his basement that lit up different colors like in “Saturday Night Fever”. I needed, desperately, a high school that taught me about EVERYTHING, so that I could fill in the (incredibly large) gaps in my curiosity, interests, and whatever talents I was attempting to cultivate. A general education, like a grocery store, but with those little tasting stations on the ends of the aisle so I could figure out what I really liked.

“Mmmm. Latin.”

“Eeeugh. Trigonometry.”

The application process was intense. Schools shared a list of basic requirements and then added specific extras on top of that. All of this was laid out in their descriptions, which also had a calculation of “your odds to be accepted” which compared the amount of seats available to the number of applicants adding in a mathematical odds science born not of Las Vegas, but of church basement raffles: every student was assigned a random lottery number. These were not, as you may first imagine, actual numbers, but coded alphanumerical hex lines, as not to alarm anybody who got the last ones.

Of course, someone decoded the numbering system, so that we all could tell where we were in the overall scene of things.

We, got the last one. We were, indeed, alarmed.

Shortly after the lottery assignments, parents began to compare percentiles, trying to casually pop them into conversation.

“Yes, well, kids clothes are more expensive than ever, you’re 100% right. Speaking of percent, we found out that we were in the 32nd percentile for schools last week! What? 44? Well, that’s still above 50%, you should do fine! How did you do?” I was asked.

I always paused a tic before saying, “97.”

AGHAST. Blanching, mouths open, the whole thing. It was kind of wonderful to watch. The looks pushed beyond pity to a Hunchback of Notre Dame kind of revulsion and fascination. Only one person was brave enough to ask “What are you going to do???”

We found some schools that did not use the lottery system, and The Child created, scanned, photographed, and uploaded many portfolio pieces to their server. She filmed videos: animations and narrated collections of curated work. If we weren’t lucky, we would be industrious.

I’ve heard parents say that the complexity and stress level of their children’s applications to college paled in comparison to this experience. Again, it is an impossible situation, tens of thousands of students, but if all the schools kind of taught all the same thing except maybe for some electives, it would be fine. It’s the pigeonholing that’s the main problem.

So if the DOE survey did allow comments, I would have included this letter:

We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole six weeks to complete whatever it was you needed from us, but we think you’re crazy to make our kids tell you who they think they are. What do you care? The world sees them as they want to see them, in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. My child could be either a brain, an athlete, a basket case, princess, or a criminal. Correct?

But it is our greatest hope that, no matter what school she attends, she discovers that she is a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a whole lot more. Not a criminal, though…she can skip that.Sincerely yours, The Michaels.

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Dark physics are occurring in our spice cabinet.

My research has been extensive and the results undeniable; when opening the cabinet, none of the labels, on ANY of our spices, EVER point FORWARD.

A simple need for marjoram immediately necessitates a complex fingertip ballet, where jar after jar is delicately turned around to view its label, which covers about half its surface, but never the half facing me.

And yes, I heard you:

“It’s the way that you put them back in the cabinet!” you said. “You must be looking at the label in your hand, like holding a cell phone, then use it, screw the top on and put it back with the label facing away from you.”

I thought that too, but the thin little plastic part on top with the holes that the spice sprinkles through are in no way consistently positioned, which randomizes the equation.

Why does this happen? I need to know.

I’m gonna apply for government funding.

I will not get government funding.

My deepest and most sincere desire to efficiently flavor a soup is out of step with modern values, as solving this problem will harm an already robust revenue stream where I (quite often) purchase multiple jars of cardamom, onion powder, and mixed Italian Seasoning, filling the cupboard further and exacerbating the problem.

Somebody’s making good money off that, and would rather my spice cupboard remain an X-File. The clarity I desire is an unpatriotic stab in the foot of capitalism.

Of course, I could just get a spice rack for square jars which would always face forward, but we don’t have any room for it in our little kitchen, and the round jars are far less expensive.

So I won’t know which spice is which. Fine. I’ll acquiesce. I’m just a bit of a geek about knowing things, it’s how I was raised, I guess - to boldly go seek out new, well, information.

Now that the Library of Alexandria is in everyone’s pockets, information seems a common resource, not particularly valuable.

Except online, where companies are spending billions to monitor my every keystroke, determine my potential behavior, discover my favorite snack food, and pursue my image and voiceprint with the fury of hungry cats in an alley. Each of my stupid passwords is a digital jewel, desired beyond all imaginable reason. But that’s data, an international primary resource, what we are told is the most important thing about us… just input and incident, without context.

It’s context that turns data into information, personal observation that transforms it further into knowledge, and experimentation that evolves it at last to wisdom: from a recipe – to a first attempt at cooking it – to your own spin on a dish. Theory, practice, innovation.

Does it feel like I’m being metaphorical? I feel like I’m being metaphorical. The last days of Black History Month make me skittish. Let me come at this from another direction.

During junior year of college our dorm room threw a party. Everyone was dancing when suddenly the song “Shattered” by the Rolling Stones came on and everyone began singing… well, speaking the lyrics (it’s kind of a tone poem). I did not know the lyrics to this song. To be in a room where 40 people are all saying the same thing as if I hadn’t studied or gotten the memo was unnerving… even my date was chanting along, smiling at me as if I was going to catch up and remember, which I wasn’t, so I kind of moved my mouth and vigorously nodded.

The same thing occurred a decade later in Las Vegas where Zoe and I had followed some people we did not know through a velvet rope situation and into a secret basement club, where they played the song “Scenario” by A Tribe Called Quest. Again, we did not know the song, but EVERYONE around us repeated every syllable with rhythmic precision. I vowed there and then to learn that song so if that ever happened again I would not embarrass my family, and I did, although the situation has not, as yet, presented itself again.

I used to think these were stories of feeling left out, which in some ways they are, but more pointedly they impressed upon me the bonding characteristic of shared information, how important it can be to know something in direct interaction with others who know the same thing, how that creates a unique bond where the focus is the information itself. And it’s not just shared data, it’s shared experience, as each person brings their own relationship with the information into their expression of it.

I also used to think this was a phenomenon that occurred only with music, but any common experience based on shared facts holds power. When we ask someone where they’re from and it ends up being our hometown, we immediately begin naming streets and high schools - any commonalities inspire exclamations of “Yeah!” and “Did you have Mr. Pearson for math?” and “That Orange Julius was my FAVORITE!”… and a space is formed where two people not only know the same thing, but for a moment are feeling the same thing.

Just before COVID lockdown I was treated to a performance of Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden by a True Friend… we sang for the entire show along with the folks behind us from Long Island and in front of us from New Jersey (and the whole arena). At one point, people who didn’t know one another held hands and closed their eyes and lifted their heads in harmony like the Charlie Brown characters at the end of the Christmas special performing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”.

That’s not data. Data can’t inspire, or bond like that. The dull reflection of comments, tweets, reels and alerts are not who we are. Our constant digital deluge creates so much clutter, obscuring the essential information about ourselves; packing in important facts, memories, and moments with trivia, detritus, and mayhem.

What I want from my spice cabinet is to be able to open it and recognize what’s there, instantly know what I have to work with. I can’t cook if I can’t find the ingredients. In these confusing times, it is similarly important for me to have my courage, passion, dignity, and empathy clearly labeled, free from clutter, in order to better navigate, communicate, and remember what I’m really made of is not AI and crypto, but Billy Joel and cardamom.

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Subways are concrete tunnels containing smaller concrete tunnels, with the only sound absorption provided by the organic objects which move through them (on two legs or four). Thus the full-throated voice of a child careens about the place, bouncing off everything, naturally amplified to a level matching the screech of a mythical banshee.

Of course we all look around to make sure there isn’t some emergency, which thankfully is rarely the case… just another toddler losing their mind over a dire life moment: a binkie has fallen; a plastic non-spill cup of Cheerios™ now stands empty; a boom boom needs – attending to…

Or they may have just seen a blood curdling demon, masked lunatic, or hungry zombie lurching toward them, as our subways feature giant posters on the walls which every now and again promote the latest horror movie or television show. That’s what happened yesterday, and the scream was particularly epic because it was not from a baby but a three year old boy, who was using the opportunity to explain exactly to his mother (and the rest of us, due to the acoustics) his concern.

“I don’t want to go in there!”

“Well we can’t walk, it’s just too far.” His mother was coaxing him through the turnstile. She had moved to the far side of the entrance to avoid a particularly frightening promotion of a haunted house, posted last Halloween. “C’mon, just look this way and follow me over here, we won’t even go past it…”

A train arrived, heading south, filling the station with the sound of screeching metal for a minute. In that time the boy’s mother had gotten him downstairs into the station. As the train left, their conversation continued.

“Look!” The mother stood the child in front of another poster, this one advertising a new Broadway musical; it featured six friendly people who were smiling and waving. “These,” she said, hitting the poster with her hand, “are not people. It is just a picture. These are all pictures. That is not a monster back there, it’s a picture on the wall. That’s all, see?”

As a parent, one quickly learns not to critique other parents. The job is an impossible one, with no instruction book or customer service number to call. We are all just making it up as we go – steering a new being through a new world, the challenges as fresh and plentiful as a farmer’s market.

As subways are not at all engineered with child-rearing in mind, our congruent commuter experience quickly generates empathy toward other parents’ situations. So we hold a door for a stroller, or help lift one up the stairs, or offer our seat to a family trying to keep their kids from careening like pinballs once the train starts moving.

Thus the problem of the underground nightmare gallery was a familiar one. I remembered when we delivered a similar speech to our own child, that pictures were not objects. We used colored pencils and the Rene Magritte painting “The Treachery of Images” – the one showing a pipe with the words (in French) “This is not a pipe” beneath it.

I drew (as best I could) a cat.

“This is not a cat.” I told my daughter. “It is a picture of a cat. It doesn’t eat food or purr or chase anything.”

“That’s not a good cat, Dad.” my daughter critiqued. “Let me help you.”

She drew a better cat.“This is a better cat.” she told me.

It was a better cat, with more convincing whiskers and perkier ears.

“That IS a better cat,” I admitted, “but it isn’t a real cat. You understand that, right?”

“I know it isn’t a real cat.”

“So when you see a scary picture of a monster, you know it isn’t a real monster, right?”

“I’m not scared of the monster,” she told me, applying detail to the cat’s tail, “I’m afraid of the picture.”

I never tried to convince my daughter that monsters were not real. I didn’t think was fair, because certainly I’ve seen some monsters.

On a grade school visit to the aquarium, a tour guide turned over a horseshoe crab and I just about fainted. (This is not when I was little: this was when I served as a chaperone for my daughter’s trip. Don’t look it up. Yipes.) The world is filled with just about everything. It’s ok to be wary of some of it.

But I was impressed with her honesty and self awareness. Due to our household’s general nerdiness she already understood that the monsters on the screen and posters were just people in make-up or special effects from a computer. She could change her own face when we played with Snapchat. Reality wasn’t a problem for her. It was the images that bothered her.

She quickly learned the locations of these posters and, while holding one of our hands for guidance, closed her eyes to walk past them. She got so good at this that she wouldn’t miss a step or slow down, even a little bit.

It took me years to realize how truly genius her system was, because as an adult I retained a bit more ego about navigating the world, and did not admit to myself that the volcano of tragedy and mayhem force-fed to me everyday wasn’t a volcano of tragedy and mayhem but instead a volcano of pictures of tragedy and mayhem.

At its very worst, it serves pictures of someone else’s actual tragedy and mayhem. But most of the virulent headlines are pencil sketches of potential threats, rough “coming attractions” posters of shows that might get made, or might not.

And as much as the situations are disheartening, it is, indeed, the pictures that get me down. I can deal with mayhem, but I tire of its advertising campaign. So now I walk through the world with my eyes open, holding the hands of trusted friends, not looking at the walls, and just focus on where I’m headed.

And maybe, every now and then, I scream a little.

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My mother would find “her shade” of stockings by holding a large plastic egg shaped container upside down to see the color swatch printed on the bottom of the paper sleeve it was in. They all looked brown to me, just various browns, like the multi-tone color cards in the paint section.

She would hold the container next to the back of her other hand and kind of tilt her head to the left and narrow her eyes a little. I realized that they were supposed to match somehow, like her makeup did, but I wasn’t a sociologist. I was in it for the plastic eggs.

I really loved the giant plastic eggs the hose came in. They were fun. At Easter, the eggs came in bright colors. For Christmas, they were SHINY. I once made a whole space village out of them for a book report diorama, covered in black light paints.

I realize now that they did sell hosiery without a fun toy for less money, but my mother, an excellent person, supported the simple joy that a young boy could derive from the upcycling of mass market packaging, and from time to time indulged me by purchasing more expensive hosiery just so I could have the egg.

They still sell L’eggs, but not in the eggs anymore.

Those were surely not recyclable.

(Sorry, this is not about the eggs… it’s actually about the hose.)

Unfortunately this week I suffered a particularly gruesome shaving accident, necessitating the immediate triage of a dime sized portion of my face. Well, my throat, specifically, right in the middle.

After a incredibly well-deserved yowl, I eventually covered the spot with a large Band-Aid™, which all agreed made me look like a perpetual priest as its light colored stripe just above my collar and tie was unavoidable. Nevertheless, I wore that for two days.

I was then asked to substitute for someone in an interview situation that would be filmed; with my bandaged throat I looked like Frankenstein’s monster’s soul brother… all I needed was two large bolts poking out of the sides of my neck.

Then I remembered that Band-Aids™ sold bandages in various skin tones. The drug store next to my office didn’t have them, but did have a store brand version in 7 different options, designated by a numbering system which seemed a bit random, to be honest.

As I stood there, holding several different boxes up to my hand, tilting my head slightly to the left and narrowing my eyes a little, I realized that I was darker than a 70, but not as dark as a 50, for some reason.

I bought three boxes of different shades. When I got back to the office, I called home on FaceTime for Zoe’s emergency opinion. “I think 50 works the best.” she agreed.

“But, remember, you’re kind of a 40 on your face.” she added.

She was right: my forehead was an 40, and my hands were 70. I was a puzzle, a melanin mosaic. This was so much harder than when I figured out if I was a Carrie or a Miranda (miranda).

I finally went with the 50 for my throat, as it blended in nicely with the five o’clock shadow (since I wasn’t brave enough to shave near the area yet).

The interview went well.

Satisfied with my bandage purchase, I checked on the drugstore website to buy more, but the company does not make these any longer. Even Band-Aids™ now only offers three shades from the expansive array introduced in 2020. There are now other small companies that have this option, and I greatly appreciate the effort, as it IS a difficult product to sell (my winter number and my summer number are always going to be different).

The original Band-Aid™ color was “flesh”, a kind of peach tone. I always took that for granted, because there was a “flesh” colored crayon the exact same color.

I think it was the fact that everything made in “flesh” color MATCHED that made me just accept it… it was obviously something that people knew, like that Parkay wasn’t butter. I thought if a monster was hungry for human flesh, I was safe as houses. I was, apparently, only covered in skin.

Crayola™ now has a selection of 24 crayons and markers called “Colors of the World”. Pantone, the company that trademarks colors for print production, now has a SkinTone guide with 138 selections available. My daughter knows nothing of “flesh”, her reflection is light medium golden, or Pantone 7515-C.

As a three toned household, we most often go for the highly decorative, colorful adhesive bandages, the ones that stand out no matter what and often glow in the dark or something.

“I have a Boo-Boo!” they cry out to the world. “Look upon me and gently wince, experiencing a harmony with my human experience!” they silently yell to those glancing on the subway.

But this week, while these bandages last, I will have the luxury of concealing a wound. I will not have to deal with concerned looks in ZOOM meetings or questions in the elevator. It’s a tiny dignity, a teaspoon’s measure of stress removed from my day, and I appreciate it. I will quietly heal beneath a custom made adhesive social subterfuge, hoping that this wound will not scar and leave a circle of 35 in the middle of all my 50.

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During the Pandemic I had the opportunity to work with a group of black artists to produce an event during February, which naturally became associated with Black History Month. But since the event’s content focused on science fiction, it was decided we would celebrate Black Future Month instead, telling stories that focused on what might be rather than what had been.

This appealed to all the artists, but not all of the organizers, who were confused at what they considered a wasted opportunity for us to celebrate George Washington Carver again, whom we all highly respected, but just were going in a different direction.

Their blatant disdain inspired a “teach-in” session; the works of Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, and N.K. Jemisin were introduced, as well as the box office success of the MARVEL film “Black Panther” where a scientifically advanced yet somehow still firmly agrarian society thrived behind camouflage in Africa. I spoke quite passionately of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, coining it “the most successful afrofuturist manifesto ever created”, as the images and situations he spoke about were, at the time, far less likely than walking on the moon.

The detractor was not convinced. Their argument was that the audience for this event would be expecting the names and situations they were familiar with, and to supplant the invention of peanut butter for “Wakanda Forever” would be met with the same intense disappointment as if we traded La Befana for Santa Claus. “Play the hits.” they insisted.

We resisted, and said that if this event was supposed to focus on the authentic cultural truths of a specific group of people, and we were those people (whereas the organizers were not), then they could either read the room or employ ChatGPT and Canva to create a dynamic PowerPoint display in our stead.

They relented. The event was successful, quite futuristic, and authentically expressed the artists reality. I didn’t understand what the big deal was, yet the organizer’s disdain regarding what the artists wanted to say was only equalled by their keen enthusiasm to publicly promote them as partners, like on a date where they say they want to learn all about you - but by dessert you’ve figured out they weren’t really listening, just admiring what you were wearing and hoping that one of their friends sees you together.

I am ten years older than Black History Month. It used to be just a week long, but in 1976 President Gerald Ford signed an official White House declaration regarding it: ten years later it was even recognized officially by Congress.

It’s not a law, by any means, and can’t be enforced in any way… it’s a theme, nowadays most prevalent on the streaming channel landing screens which invite you to enjoy the comedy of Eddie Murphy and music of Beyoncé.

And yet, disdain. Such disdain. Good grief, it isn’t even like the checkout people at Target greet you with a “Happy BLM!”. Nary a seasonal thematic peep. Not even at Whole Foods. It’s only a suggestion to remember to consider to think about something.

Like all commemorative holidays, Black History Month just promotes information and empathy, focusing the dignity of a certain sociological group, which is why, obviously, it’s a national problem.

In 1890, Jacob Riis published a photograph series of the slums in Manhattan. While the northern part of the island was in the midst of a Gilded Age, the Lower East Side was an unimaginable ruin, the literal antithesis of the glorious splendor a few miles away. His folio, “How The Other Half Lives”, shocked the rich and powerful into action, even inspiring a young Theodore Roosevelt to seek sweeping reforms. Folks had no idea it was that bad, the situation seemed terrible, and those families deserved better.

In the late ’60s and early ‘70s, network news brought a distant conflict directly to America’s living rooms. Unlike the upbeat jaunty “Let’s Get ‘Em, Boys!” films of World War II, the daily television broadcasts showing the Vietnam War from the ground made many uneasy, and they began to question the costs versus what they were told would be gains from the outcome. Thus, many were not surprised when the nation began not to think as one, but fracture over the issue, because folks had no idea it was that bad, the situation seemed terrible, and those soldiers deserved better.

For 25 days in 1977, over 150 members of the Disability community occupied the federal building in San Francisco, demanding legal protections for disabled citizens nationwide. Fueled by years of frustration, they banded together and were seen by millions through television news reports. This attention brought pressure on the local government to negotiate in earnest, and when they left the building, their efforts had created a seminal step in the long road toward getting the ADA signed over twenty years later. This action held sway because folks had no idea it was that bad, the situation seemed terrible, and all those people deserved better.

Now, would you just look at that. Men, in suits, had to negotiate, make concessions, and share space and funds! For goodness sakes, how many of these kerfuffles could have been avoided if folks just hadn’t known things and felt things. I mean, my word.

It’s hard to understand any problem when it’s not our own, and even harder when we don’t have context or contact with anyone dealing with the situation. Information and empathy are society’s bridge to one another, a particularly powerful cocktail when art is added as a mixer.

However, the deep belief that some folks deserve better, that each person should get at least a fighting chance to thrive and build a life for themselves, is a personal conviction that cannot be generated from a photo or a news story. One is either an advocate of dignity, for all people, or they are not.

Dignity. Empathy. Information -

• oh…now I see the problem, I had never laid it out in that order… of course, you would have to take care of that, like right now. Yikes. Very dangerous.

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My body is way fancier than me.

It simply HAS to have the latest flu, while it’s still pret-a-porter, before those knockoff hags get their greedy little paws on it and shovel it everywhere. But I’m not a heartless Cruella DeVille about it, I share it freely with my family. Why, just last weekend we were all in the car for a Saturday drive, zombielike and gently wheezing, simply dizzy with designer disease. How jealous the people passing us looked in the grocery store parking lot, with their clear vision and sinuses, as we blearily opened and closed our eyes for several minutes trying to remember where we were planning to drive next.

Where we drove next was a tiny store by the water in upper Brooklyn that sold blind boxes - limited runs of small custom figures, each one wrapped in opaque foil and placed in a little cardboard box. The idea is that you don’t know what you’re going to get - a general illustration is on the outside, but the exact figure that you unwrap could be one of many options. It’s like a pack of baseball cards. Or children.

It didn’t occur to me until I first saw my entirely newborn daughter that this was the one I was going to be taking home, because in every other situation involving a Major Life Decision there were variables to consider. The location of an apartment, the durability of a sofa, the miles-per-gallon and color of a car - all weighted with pros and cons created many options to compare. But children are a blind box situation - a little surprise that grows into a very big one.

There are those kids that look like what they’re going to look like when they’re older when they’re younger. (#worstsentenceever) When first introduced to the world, my child was an infant doppelgänger of Chris Bauer, the actor who portrayed Sheriff Andy Bellefleur on the HBO television show True Blood. There was, and I feel statistically sound saying this, no possible way to determine who she is now from where she was at that exact moment.

“Is she all ok?” my wife asked. She was still on the delivery table and had sent me from my entirely useless spot next to her head offering color commentary on her miraculous achievement to taking assessment of general health and finger/toe count to report back to her from the bassinet the nurse had placed the baby in.

“She’s great.”

“Ten fingers and toes?”

I counted again. They were really small, and we hadn’t had much sleep, and my first count had been eleven.

“Yep. Ten of each.”

I told her that I was absolutely not going to show them to her until after she had seen the actual baby, but I had taken the photos that Zoe had requested. I was surprised they let me bring my camera into the delivery room. I took a few full body shots and some close-ups of the toes. Now I was just standing there, watching her move, languidly and dreamlike, arms kind of waving in the wind.

“What’s she look like?”

“She’s perfect.” This was my Yelp review. This woman had made a person and I wanted her to know that without any kind of doubt she had done the absolute best job.

“I know that, but what’s she look like?” my wife asked, demanding a higher level of detail.

I considered our newest family member closely. “She looks like a gritty southern lawman who enjoys beer and deep fried foods. But…little and sleepy..”

“Aw. That’s great.” my wife replied. They had finally come in with the drugs after 15 hours of organic pain management, and she was what I’m gonna call “ok with that”.

Life is a blind box. I mean, we make choices but who really knows? “Things” could “go one way or the other”… we look at situations from the outside and try to determine where they’re going but there are SO many factors to consider. I’ve given up on predetermined notions; I’ve watched a tiny grumpy bayou sheriff grow into a spectacular young woman, a book that most certainly could not have been read by its “cover”.

So I look at all life like that now. For instance, our viral-loaded Saturday drive ended up to be a glorious day, a true stay-cation, where we each chose two blind boxes and then opened them over gluten-free Thai food before heading home to go to bed at 8:30 PM. Hera got a farmer, dressed as a chicken. Zoe got a cute cat that had been altered by radiation into a giant crab monster.

But I had chosen a box from a series of capybaras who had oranges on their heads. Seven of the possible figures were round, as the creatures were sitting down or eating or lying on their backs, but there was a different one where a capybara had become a bodybuilder and was standing up flexing. (Blind box toy design does not at all benefit from the question “why?”) The flexing figure was tall and not round, so I figured if I lightly shook the boxes, one would sound different from the others.

Science. And it worked. Our muffled laughter at that restaurant table was the best medicine we could have taken, besides actual medicine. We all ended up laughing ourselves to sleep on a day that began as uncomfortable as they come. I’m not suggesting that indeterminacy equals hope, but from now on I’m going to “lightly shake” every new day to better my odds. You never know.

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I bought another chin-up bar. The category is actually listed as “pull up bars” now, I guess you don’t have to make it all the way up with your chin. Maybe that’s too much pressure, like calling push-ups “full body straight arms” or sit-ups “nose touching knees”. It’s still a valid sit-up even if you aren’t sitting ALL THE WAY up, though mine are kind of “lean-ups” now, when I try to do them.

( Ahem. I apologize. Give me just a second. I’m just a wee bit… distracted.)

Observant viewers may have noticed the word “another” in the opening sentence: indeed, this is my fourth chin-up – sorry, pull-up bar. The second in the last 2 months.

The very observant might be moved to comment that I do not in any way resemble a person that owns home exercise equipment, in that my physique doesn’t seem all that exercised, in any observable fashion. You would be correct. I do not resemble girth, or tone, or mass, or being jacked, ripped, cut, or swole. But I have indeed purchased home gym equipment, a pursuit that ironically does not take much physical effort these days. Amazon allowed me to accomplish this task from a prone position on the couch with my feet up and my head at an uncomfortable angle, poorly supported by throw pillows. Fourteen calories, max.

( . )

This pull-up bar has metal cups that screw into the wood of the door frame - the ends of the bar fit in these cups to make certain it doesn’t slip or fall. We have wooden doorframes. We are just renting the apartment but the building is renovating every unit that empties now – creating two apartments out of every one. When we leave here, these walls will be destroyed and replaced, along with the door frames. Not that we won’t putty over the holes nicely and repaint them anyway. We’re not barbarians.

The wood in our doorframes is strong enough to hold the bar, but there is some question as to how the frame itself would handle one of those new “pressure” bars that just stretches out to push against the frame, held only by the friction of its little rubber ends. There are cracks, in our apartment, here and there, lines of fatigue. I don’t know if it can take all that pressure - it looks great, and it’s not the apartment or the doorframes fault, it’s doing its job nicely, but there is only so much it can take.

(hmn.)

My third pull-up bar, the one from last month, worked on a new combination of physics where there is a piece that goes on the other side of the door and then locks down against the top of the door frame over there, while the bar is locked by gravity against the side of the frame on the front. My family forbid me to use this one. Once it was assembled, it looked like a strange musical instrument with no strings or mouthpiece that you played by shaking it sternly.

My family is against the entire chin-up bar - pull-up bar idea. I don’t know why. Perhaps this is a compliment, a validation that they consider me a valued member of the household with no need to become jacked, ripped, cut, or swole. Perhaps (more likely) they don’t want to hear the agonizing noises of me attempting pull-ups every day.

We used to have a pull-up bar in our old apartment. It was one of the expanding ones, with black suction cups on the side to hold it. I’ve never trusted the suction cup, particularly on porous wood surfaces, even with latex paint covering the wood, because if the bar falls someone could really get hurt. During the move to this apartment we lost one of the suction cups, so it still had the ability to expand, but couldn’t hold its place on the wall because no matter how much pressure was applied, it lost its grip and the instability was overwhelming. Again, it wasn’t its fault, just that the situation was so

(Ok. I see. I think I’m getting it now. I’m sorry… I’ll stay focused here. This is a lighthearted romp through the joys of acquiring mid-level exercise equipment, meant to brighten your day (and my own) but I feel my distractions may be leaching into the groundwater here. Again, all apologies. I’ll continue.)

My very first pull-up bar was in my room at home. It used to be so high in the doorframe that I had to jump to reach it. I would play a game where I would run the three steps from the doorway to my mother’s bedroom, across the hall, and then jump on the bar and S W I N G into my own room, then mark how far I could fly. I did that for years, until my mother warned me against it, which caused me to immediately over-correct and jump too high, missing the bar altogether and hitting it instead with my forehead, the velocity angling me nearly ninety degrees, at which point I landed dramatically on my back facing upwards, the perfect position for my mother’s languid “told you so” on her way to the kitchen to make an ice pack.

I am not attempting to get “jacked”, I just want to maintain the strength I’ve gathered up ’til now and not lose my flexibility. I’m older, far past the point where I have anything to prove to anyone or show off for any reason. I just want to remember, as days progress, the very baseline fact that I am at least strong enough to support my own weight, to start each day affirming that (while most likely generating effort based noises), and to remind myself, when things seem somewhat overwhelming, to keep my chin up.

,

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For all that we’re about to see I’m ready as I’ll ever be.

I don’t know if I’m really brave but I can face the facts(if we’re still doing that)

I persevere and think I’ve learned to subjugate my fearsomewhat

I’ve tried to save a little here and there just for emergencies and

kept in shape or, in a shape – I walk enough to fill the red ring on my watch most days if not the green one

I can recognize the super blatant crazy lies but who can say what’s really wha beyond that with AI and all

I call my Momcheck in on friendswatch credits when most movies end(they work so hard)

watch what I eatgive random folks my subway seatthat need itkeep good books on handand read a fewand feed the cats I MEAN

CAN webe ready for just…ANYTHING?

what would you wear?what should we bring?and what are we supposed to say?

just greet each other everydaywith

“How’s it goin’?”

“Fine. And you?”

“Just dandy!”

when that isn’t true?

I think I’ll answer honestly. “I’m ready as I’ll ever be!”

‘cause time’s a bum’s rushwe can’t “stay”we have to move ahead some way

I’ll try my best to stay in touchI will doth not protest too much with anger as my social crutch but stand my ground for long enough to take my next step forward

It’s an irony of timeand pacethat we can’twinthe human race

yet there are those who must insist that they’re "ahead”

but they’ve not THOUGHT ahead,because it seems to me that isn’twhere you wantto be

consideringthe finish line

on the roller coasterthere’s this momentgravity seemsto abandon usbut when the ride endsit’s still there

we’ll be just fine

just olderjust adjusted but not brokenjust exhausted and exasperatedjust entirely bewildered

but NO MATTER WHAT still filled with love

and wonder

for we are the blessed lot of us more ready that we’ve ever been and stronger than we probably know. So on marks…ready?(steady)

Go.

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They didn’t teach my daughter about irregular verbs in school. Neither did she gain significant instruction regarding irregular nouns. When we noticed her speaking of childs, tooths, and mouses we began to gently correct her, which always led to the entirely understandable question of “Why is it like that?”, to which we had no better reply than, “I don’t know.”

When we mentioned this educational deficit at the next parent-teacher conference, we were told directly that yes, irregular parts of speech had been removed from the curriculum. This confused us.

“Why?” we asked.

“I don’t know.” the teachers replied, “Those are things kids should just pick up around the house.”

“Maybe she can watch more TV.” the other teacher added, enthusiastically.

This confused us further.

My daughter did not attend a “bad school” by any means, but the administration had been sold teaching Programs and Modules from several vendors out to prove that math had never been good enough before their fresh approach, and reading may have been fundamental but lacked the panache of their new method. The deal was that these programs must be followed to the letter, with no additions or alterations, to prove their effectiveness and generate robust sales materials for the publisher.

Therefore, the teachers found themselves in the bizarre situation of sneaking lessons which they felt were absolutely necessary into their curriculum…phonics and long division, for instance. No xeroxes could exist as evidence, all of this had to happen at the blackboard or during circle time sitting on the floor…well, the rug. Clandestine whispers of vowel sounds while nervous educators kept an unwavering eye on the glass panel in the classroom door lest the principal happen by to witness this revolution, this “meeting by the docks" on the third floor of a public school, brazenly held beneath the scattershot spotlight of industrial florescent lighting.

We admired their courage, but brought up the situation at the annual mid-year parent gathering, igniting a small revolution of our own as parents complained that their youngest children were receiving an entirely different education than their older ones had gotten at this same school. Thus, 5 year olds could read better than their 8 year old siblings. Words were exchanged with senior staff, a few of which were, indeed, irregular.

Now, we aren’t rebels. Hippies? Perhaps, but we all were gifted new pajamas at Christmas and now look a little more sophisticated than when we all were wearing vintage concert t-shirts. Punks? Definitely, but we’re the ones who don’t “tear it all down” as much as steampunk assemble new stuff: solutions, pathways, bridges… metaphors abound.

We really didn’t mean to “bring up something at a PTA meeting.” Yikes. That is not who we are. We baked them a great deal of cupcakes to sell, but ours were the gluten, soy, and dairy free ones, so… still punk, I guess. (They did include sugar.)

Zoe didn’t wait for the school, and began a campaign of “extra credit” at our home, the beginning of her private tutoring career with our daughter, a three-month stretch which conveniently dovetailed into a year and change of Lockdown (and continues to this very day).

I contributed by illustrating various points through demonstration and film references; Lucille Ball clips on YouTube, balloons and magnets, little songs to help memorize things. We hoped to supplement the lessons, find any gaps and fill them in with the necessary base skills that had proven repeatedly useful in our own lives.

We both assumed that school was a road whose most basic path did not significantly change: to your left is addition, and coming up on your right is subtraction. But like all modern landscapes, this one had shifted; we couldn’t find cross-multiplication anywhere… it had been replaced by a beige strip mall of the Impossibly Complicated, so we snuck that knowledge in and told our daughter never to speak of it at school, but use it wisely, and in secret.

Weirdos? Yes. We’re probably weirdos, too.

The reason for all this was to make sure the kid wasn’t missing anything she needed to deal with whatever was going to come her way as she got older. School is just a long moment where we have the luxury of “getting prepared” for later life, to sharpen our minds and gird our loins.

I’ve always loved that phrase, and only recently learned actually where our “loins” are (on each side of the spinal column between the hip bone and the bottom ribs) and what “girding” means. It should have been obvious since it looks like the word “girdle”: in ancient times when folks wore long tunics, it was impossible to fight in them unless one pulled up the slack and tied it tightly around the waist in order to free the legs. That, according to over three dubious online sources, was girding the loins.

When I was in it, school seemed like a period of time before something happened, like the middle step of preparing for a race, the “Get set!” between the “Ready!” and “Go!” To be honest, I never understood why we needed “get set” at all… we were standing on the line looking down the playground because someone had just told us to get “ready”, what was the “get set” for?

I realize now it was supposed to give us time to focus, to “prepare for something difficult or challenging”: the very definition of gird. I guess that’s what school is, a chance to steady oneself before launch, run a few pre-flight checks, ensure that all survival tools are packed away in the rucksack. A chance to practice before “the real thing” happens.

I miss that opportunity to rehearse before performance; adult life seems as improvisational as it is blatantly confrontational. But winter is the perfect time to pull together resources and make certain we have what we need before whatever’s happening next happens, metaphorically tightening our tunics so that we can be ready to dash valiantly forward with both foots.

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Our former neighbors held a wonderful housewarming party at their new home on New Year’s Day. At this party was our host’s 7 year old niece, who sat very quietly playing a game with her brother in the bedroom until very near the party’s end, when the Chappell Roan album “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” began playing from the bluetooth speaker.

Now when I was seven I was a bit of a ham. Hard to imagine, I’m sure, if you know me, but I had a pretty impressive Ed Sullivan imitation… swinging arms and holding the chin and everything (what a little scamp). I could also belt out the hits of Stevie Wonder and Burt Bacharach (my voice hadn’t changed yet so I could still hit a few notes in Dionne Warwick’s key).

In other words, I imitated what I heard and saw around me, which was three major television networks (and our local PBS channel) and whatever music was played on two radio stations - the one with Mike Murphy (a legendary Kansas City DJ) in the mornings, and KPRS, the oldest black-owned radio station in the US.

Thus I could sing songs from The Carpenters and James Brown, Paul McCartney and Billy Preston, and the entire catalog of Tony Orlando and Dawn. It was quite a range, and it seemed like an endless supply - radio was my main source of music, at home or in the car, as we rarely had the money to buy albums and cassette tapes weren’t quite a thing yet. The world came to me on my orange Radio Shack™ Flavoradio, in glorious mono, the one with the one earphone that was far too large to fit in your ear with the twisty beige cord.

This is about the future, have I mentioned that yet? I know you just endured a ton of reminiscing, but this is not about the past. This is about the future, the immediate future, the one coming up right after we finish up with whatever is happening right now.

See, that 7 year old girl began belting out a song titled “Pink Pony Club”, written by Ms. Roan nearly before the girl was born, about a young person who leaves home to find themselves and be accepted for who they really are – a love song to oneself, as it were.

And she KNEW this song, EVERY word, and she sang it strong and proud with arm movements and knee bends.

She was Tiny Cher.

And she wasn’t actually performing for us, she was just lost in the bliss of the loud loud music coming out of that very-impressive-for-it’s-size bluetooth speaker.

The JOY, my friends; the absolute unfiltered confidence displayed by this little human was seen throughout the room and greatly appreciated. But I liked it because it represented an element of the present that I find comforting for the future: Chappell Roan is a queer artist whose songs are rooted in her own culture and tell stories from an LBGTQ+ perspective, songs I would never have heard in my own childhood about perspectives that were not, on the whole, publicly shared.

EVERY word. The kid was incredible; I mean, we were all singing along as best we could, but she had the nuances down. She knew a lot of the rest of the album too, particularly “Hot To Go”, which has its own dance that I’m proud to say my daughter taught me. Well, I don’t think I was supposed to do it outside the house without her permission, but I’m a rebel that way.

Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo, Renee Rapp, Melanie Martinez, Charlie XCX, Billie Eilish - these are the young artists my kid is listening to, all of them unapologetically authentic women with distinct voices that represent for her the power of being who you are. I cannot, in all honesty, say that Tony Orlando did the same for me.

These young alternative women support my daughter’s quest to be herself, to ignore nonsense, and to keep on going. Don’t you wish you had an anthem for that when you were 7?

I am so proud to live in a moment in history when music can inspire young people in this way, support them, particularly young women, and particularly now, when we as a society most need to offer stability against the tsunami of forces ever advancing to subjugate them, body and soul.

The tide of time is ever rising. We have to get ready. We have to store our metaphorical water in bottles and fill our metaphorical sandbags and fortify ourselves with good advice, like

Be yourself. Ignore nonsense. Keep on going.

I think that’s where I’m gonna start this year, and I invite you to join me. Let’s make playlists of our personal anthems and keep the music going. We can all, each day, be Our Own Cher.

And let’s all keep connected.

Just knock three times on the ceiling if you want me.

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End of the calendar year and I realize thatwe look forward and backward a lot as human beings.

what was the best music this year when is that movie coming out

when did these pants last fit how long will these shoes last

didn’t I used to and how are we ever going to be able to

Around this time, we become, each one of us historians, yet futuristsclassical archeologists and inventor engineers

But what is the term for being now? What's the term for being when we are?In the middle of what-is-to-come and what-has-been? Smack between “What was that??” and “What IS that??” Riding the razor’s edge between carefully analyzing steps taken and squinting into tomorrow’s glare to plot where next to tread?

I’ve always found surfing the best metaphor.

You can’t really plan surfing; the water does whatever it does: what it just did doesn’t matter and you can’t really figure out entirely what it going to do. One must shift to steer. One must balance.

I don’t know why they call it “riding” a surfboard… that’s an impossibly passive verb for the action of not falling off something unstable.

Now there are Red Bull™ sponsorships with quick-cut GoPro™ videos that really make it appear as hard as it must be to do, but in the past, the entire surfing brand image was deceptively mellow for the literally death-defying skill it takes to surf.

The Beach Boys should have been a hardcore punk rock band.

I digress in order to focus: we may, all of us, be standing on ground which increasingly feels both liquid and turbulent, in total oppostition with our natural attraction to equilibrium. The floor is lava and we can’t make it to the couch, we are roller skating on an ice rink, we are juggling chainsaws in the back of a flatbed truck that is rolling down a mountain. It’s hard to plan chaos; and very difficult to know what to wear.

But total uncertainty means freedom, in some aspects, because if we can’t figure out what just happened and we can’t figure what’s going to happen then we simply must live moment to moment, second to second, re-adjusting and shifting weight to navigate because we have absolutely no control over the moving-dangerously-forward part, like in a video game or a conversation with your in-laws.

Surfing.

And so I say Happy New Year.

You know what tomorrow will bring? Tomorrow. And yesterday, no matter what happened, is over. So Happy New Year, honestly.

It has no idea what it’s going to be yet, but at least we know who we are, so if the rules are off, then it’s on. Starting January 1st, I’m gonna do those three and a half weeks of push-ups I do every year and get ready to hang ten. Or 365 or whatever. Not fall off the board or get eaten by sharks. It’s the surfing metaphor.

Sigh.

Thanks for reading, enjoy your Holiday, and I’ll see you there.

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Many apartments in New York City don’t have shades, curtains, or blinds on their windows, particularly above the third floor.

My mother believes that this is a sign of mass insanity.

“People can see right into their house!” she’ll say.

“No one’s looking into their house, Mom.”

“But if they wanted to they could! Don’t they care about their privacy?’

‘I don’t think they think anybody cares about them enough to spy on them with binoculars from a highway at night going 65 miles per hour. I’d be more suspicious if they had curtains up, actually.”

“Hmn.” she says. That means a lot of things. It means she’s thinking about it, it means she isn’t really convinced, and it means she is a bit confused because we have curtains on all our windows. Blackout ones, to boot.

The curtains are mostly to keep out the sun, not prying eyes. I don’t suppose I’m that concerned about privacy, I was raised to understand that I was being watched 24 hours a day by ethereal beings with whose alignment I could steer my very destiny.

God, of course, but the Devil was also right there, one on each shoulder, if one was to believe the green screen special effects on TV shows. They were tugging and warring with you all the time, but you were never alone… there were no secrets that could be kept, no word spoken low enough to evade their hearing, no thought too small to pass inspection.

But believe it or not, they weren’t my main concern; my true privacy invader was absolutely welcome to spy on me 24/7, anytime, could look at me whenever he wanted, didn’t bother me a bit if he knew when I was sleeping, and when I was awake.

Santa is the king of toys.

Santa rolls deep.

He does the research, he goes the extra mile, always has the hook up.

Sure, Amazon delivers, but their brand is diluted with books and appliances and cleaning supplies.

Santa is artisanal, focused: no olive oil or leisure wear or school supplies.

He manufactures, sources, and custom delivers toys.

Which you don’t have to pay for, by the way… well, not in money.

Currency, is not his currency.

He deals in behavior, which to kids seems a pretty volatile market with little security, but then again he INFLUENCES the market in such a way as to cultivate the highest yield possible.

And how does he do it?

Espionage.

It’s not blackmail. Rarely has a child received a letter from the North Pole warning them to “cut it out”. No, it’s much more insidious… silent, invisible, like auditioning for a Broadway play where you’re standing on an empty stage squinting through spotlights, no sign of whether its “going well” or not, so you plod on, stretching yourself to the limit, trying to leave it all on the stage, not sure they’re even watching.

But, of course, they see everything.

And only when the time is up is there any indication, any word of whether or not you made it, whether they ignored the inevitable little mistakes and marveled at your string of genius moments.

And that’s Christmas Morning, a grade card for your very existence, pass or fail, where the material evidence of your exhausting effort is in the form of the most innocent of objects.

A toy.

Christmas toys feel different. They mean something different. They are not just something you wanted that someone gives you as a gift, they are evidence of a calendar year that went very very well for you.

It’s not luck, it’s skill, discipline - conditional validation from a superior expert on human behavior. Christmas toys are badges of honor that often require batteries and light assembly. And it’s strangely not about the size of the toy - some middling kid gets a bicycle and a perfect angel gets a mini air hockey table, neither of which is a real toy (as one is a vehicle and the other a game strictly speaking) but all of this still qualifies on Christmas morning, a golden hour of too-close-to-sunrise glee for parents and an annual exhale of relief for children around the world.

There is no restaurant, car dealership or nail salon you can go into and say “I’ve been a very good person this year” and have them comp you a meal, or car, or gel manicure. You can’t even go in a toy store and get a toy that way.

But I still breathe a little easier on Christmas morning, and reflect on, if not how well I did, at least how hard I tried. In an age when the naughty list seems unexplainably popular, we’re all still quietly proud to be counted among the nice.

But you know what? You still deserve a toy for that.

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When I picture a Christmas tree with toys underneath it, I always see a doll, a teddy bear, a ball, and a toy train. Sometimes the train is wooden, hand carved, painted with primary colors. Sometimes it’s a little electric one going around on a track that encircles the base of the tree. Can you see it? It’s traditional, classic… yet that universal scene has never happened for me, because we have cats.

They are, the three of them, wonderful all year round, but their naturally curious nature and endless experimentation regarding the nature of gravity does not allow us the holiday tropes of toy trains, dangling ornaments, fringe on highly reflective clothing, or fancy glasses placed anywhere near the edges of tables. However, this year I am braving it for just one day, setting up track in my daughter’s room, and watching the train go around in a little circle while I make “whoo whoooo” whistle noises for a half hour or so, even if the cats do stalk it like fuzzy Godzillas.

My grandfather had a model train setup in the basement. I was the oldest grandchild and we lived right down the street, so I got a lot of alone time with it. I was not allowed to run it by myself because it was electric, and to my grandmother electricity was still “on notice”… she’d seen it around, but that didn’t necessarily mean she could trust it.

The model train was a Lionel, with what I think must have been a bakelite body: it generated puffs of smoke via mysterious pellets that Grandpa only used on Christmas. It had a headlight as well. It ran on a little green table that had the beginnings of a tableau; there was a station, and a little white gate that went up and down, and I think a farmhouse or barn of some kind, and of course a tunnel. That was my favorite part, watching the light on the train as it lit up the interior of the tunnel then suddenly rocketed out.

I don’t have the train. It belonged to my uncle, of course, and then he gave it to his son, who sold it a long time ago. I also have never lived anywhere large enough to use table space in such a gratuitous fashion… our only flat surface near that size is the bed.

Trains are magical. The choo-chooing and the chugga-chugging and the clackety-clack of the tracks. Magical.

I have been thinking about this for a long time, this trains thing: I even put a bid in on a Lionel engine like my grandpa’s over on eBay a few days ago. I wondered why the train was such a standard Christmas toy, particularly since model trains have long since been replaced by video game consoles on kids’ Christmas lists.

Besides loads of illustrations in vintage advertising, I found out that after World War II, toy trains beneath the Christmas tree became a national symbol of traveling, simpler times, and a smaller world. For a while in the 1950’s, the Lionel company was the largest and most profitable toy company on the planet. Families would invest in a basic set one year, then purchase stations and tunnels and more lengths of track for years after. The sound of toy trains harmonized with the crackling of fireplaces on Christmas Day, all across the country.

Magical.

Which brings me to right now. I’m still at work three and a half hours after the entire building has emptied because Jay St. Metrotech has a power problem that caused both of the trains I take home every night to be suspended, entirely. My only way home is to take a train 20 minutes in the opposite direction, then double back on another train that stops 14 blocks past where I live. Oh, and it’s raining, buckets. So there’s that.

I fell asleep on a train once, heading from Kansas City to San Francisco. I don’t remember why I took the train and not a plane, but it was an overnight trip: when I woke up train car was entirely empty. Like Twilight Zone empty. Since this was before cellphones, I had no idea where I was, and I remember trying to read signs as they zoomed past.

It ended up that I was somewhere in Arizona. I was afraid to walk to the restroom; I had no idea what the protocol was on a ghost train – should I seek out the spectral conductor up at the front? Then a voice over the loudspeaker announced the next stop - a 30 minute one so we could get something to eat. I felt better (since I knew that ghosts did not need meal breaks, it must have been a human voice).

The train slowed, the airbrakes chuffed, and lots of people started getting off of the train from the car in front of mine and the car behind. Had there been a gas leak in my car?? Why hadn’t they woken me up?

Then I stepped off the train and all the other passengers laughed. Not behind the hand snickers, but good full on point and guffaw kind of laughs.

Apparently, I had fallen asleep in a less than optimal position and began snoring, softly at first, then LOUD ENOUGH to CLEAR the ENTIRE TRAIN CAR. While the giant train was MOVING… clickety clackety SCHNOZZZZZZ.

I asked a train attendant why they hadn’t just woken me up.

“Oh, we tried that,” he said, barely holding in his glee, “but it was easier just to move everybody to other cars.”

It was 5 more hours journey to Los Angeles.

I sat quietly.

Toy trains are magical. Their little wheels turning and headlights beaming nearly universally inspire tiny instances of joy.

Train trains, like subways, are industrial, in the oldest school way - necessary and kind of cocky about it, like

“What are you gonna do? Walk to Brooklyn in the rain? Really? Go ahead…try that…see where it gets you. Yeah, that’s what I thought…now just stand in here with the other 1400 people 3 inches away from your face and wait your turn to shuffle out the door in tiny steps to avoid trampling one another.”

All this to say that the representation of a thing by another thing does not mean we feel the same about one as the other. A toy bear isn’t an actual bear, in any sense. And while I love trains, and I do hope that I win that eBay one, this long day’s journey even further into night forces me to admit that, at least for me, the train part is not the magical part.

It is the TOY part that’s magical. I believe that our cats will agree.

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my daughter tried to throw awaymy Hot Wheels™ track the other daybecause she didn’t understandthe joy of seeing a little car landso far from where it used to bethrough wobbly ramps and gravity

my wife is under the impressionthat ‘cause I’m past 57I don’t need a Lite Brite™ nowbecause she hasn’t experienced howthe thrill of pushpin pointillismfulls the heart with wonder. It’s ananalog art-form that occuredbefore I knew what pixels were

Of yo-yos I’ve quite the selectionhalf a century of collectionstill I only know one trickand it’s not great. but I can pickone up and have just as much funas when I played with my first oneStress reduction. Nothing drastic.Piece of string and spinning plastic.

I remember George Shaw saying“we get old when we stop playing”

That is nowhere near my storyI’m not in that categorywooden boats and Tonka diggersdolls that I call “action figures”If a toy is all it takesWho needs more for goodness sakes?

youth is something we createwhen we seek to recreatea good toy brings a quick vacation honest simple meditationwhen overwhelmed by the electronicPlay is my enduring tonic

This holiday, beneath the treemy daughter will receive from mea Hot Wheels™ car: and then, it’s onour living room’s the autobahnmy wife’s gift will be really neatsome black construction paper sheets.might even get my family toattempt a yo-yo trick or two

for even in the coldest weathertoys can bring us all together

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This time of year used to be a bit more challenging, if you think about it. Family and friends getting together used to be an annual chance to catch up, hear stories, look at pictures, silently judge and relentlessly compare while eating our feelings and perhaps a few of theirs.

“What’s happened” or as we used to call it “History” is now a constant flow of unsolicited communication through smartphones. Yes, I did see your new puppy, he’s darling. Your vacation was such an adventure! We saw that she lost her first tooth…yes, and the second one too.

History is losing its mystery - the present is so overwhelming that we barely have time to put it away before more things happen. Like Lucille Ball at her chocolate factory job, we wrap our mind around what we can, then gobble down the rest. Yet today, Thanksgiving Day, is when we are put on the spot to employ perspective to relative chaos, to consider the last year and tell the world (or the dinner table) what we are thankful for.

I am grateful for TIME.

Civilization has built countless monuments to the sun, moon, and stars, but not so many to TIME, which is (besides the weather) the only truly ubiquitous reality we all share. Some of our key sociologists and philosophers have written sage words of wisdom concerning Time; elegant truths of eloquence, with loads to unpack. These are my four favorites.

Time, keeps on slipping, into the future.- Steve Miller

We are, all of us, in the very blossom of youth, as we will never be as young again as we are this very moment. Ah.

Personally, I think of this everyday climbing the six flights of stairs up to our fourth floor walk-up, steps I used to take two at a time, then one at a time, and now a few at a time with little breaks in between.

My gentle decreptitude is barely noticable if you look me right in the eyes, but in the corners and just below them lie solid evidence of time evolving me from a dewy sapling to a mighty tree: noble, resplendent, and covered in a deep brown bark. Humans are dynamic, always becoming something, but we’ve no control of the pace - time is our personal Disney™ dark ride where we’re just hanging on and trying to enjoy it, |because there’s nothing more to do do do do.

Time is waiting in the wings.- David Bowie

I wait for subway trains every day. I wait for the water to boil for tea, for the turkey bacon to be done on one side so I can flip it over, for my phone to charge, for the virtual meeting to start. Payday is always both in a week or so and a week or so ago.

Like water is to Atlantis or the Bubble Guppies, time is everywhere. I can’t see it because I’m in it, but I never get lost because there is always some benevolent neighbor behind my car honking their horn in anger 12 microseconds after the traffic light has turned green. As they impatiently shoot past me (only to be stopped mere yards ahead at the following light), I wonder whether they are the true riders of time - jetting forward inch by inch, or I am more in line with its true nature, my lackadaisical gas pedal foot easing into what rational people call “the flow of traffic”? Who can say?

Time isn’t holding up. Time isn’t after us.- David Byrne

I always found this a comforting statement: time not rushing us or slowing us down because it is consistent.

I have recently realized that this idea ignores the fact that fact that time, like ships, airplanes, and other heavy machinery, requires steering. I’ve recently discovered that it does not automatically move forward.

I’m a bit embarrassed not to have come upon this earlier, particularly since I am so familiar with the extensive research conducted by Dr. Emmet Brown and his lab assistant, Martin McFly.

Time is on our side. (Yes, It is.)- Jerry Ragovoy ( I know: I thought it was Mick Jagger too.)

They keep reinventing the food pyramid. And math, and the toothbrush, and smartphone operating systems. It’s a bit much.

Yet I find all that an encouraging sign of Time’s true wisdom.

The best example is MUSIC; old songs constantly showing up in new songs through sampling and cover versions, and not just those block rocking beats from the biggest hits: I caught my daughter singing a soft rock ballad from 1982 the other day: she told me was trending as a background track on TikTok. something that Air Supply could never have anticipated.

The old made new. That’s time’s greatest gift - perspective. I mean, Time as a straight line always seemed kind of awful to me, a road with no end, and Time as a circle was also pretty bad, the infinite loop with no progress at all. But Time is a spiral, what with the seasons and the moon phases and movie reboots and the way that jeans are worn this year.

Time allows us to revisit the familiar, but every time it’s different, because we are in a different place. Time can be a bit much, but it’s our most constant companion. There really should be more things dedicated to it, though I guess the thousands of hours developing the Apple Watch do count… tiny little cathedrals dedicated to time on millions of wrists around the world. That’s a good as a pyramid, really, if you think about it.

I hope your Thanksgiving Day was wonderful; satisfying and warm, a time you cannot wait to remember.

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I don’t look useful.

I think I look tousled most of the time, a style most often seen on wild brunettes wearing long white men’s shirts walking barefoot into kitchens to get a cup of morning coffee in someone else’s apartment in 1980’s films. In contrast, I am more the “tousled” of a 4 year old boy getting his hair affectionately ruffled by someone calling him “pal” in a 1940’s black and white movie.

It is not that my hair is anywhere near tousleable really - my wife calls my entire sense of style “hobo chic” - severely jostled, thrown together and a bit worn at the collars, cuffs, and elbows like there’s a photoshop filter lightly blurring every edge.(I, of course, think I look like a time traveling science hero.)

In any case, I don’t look USEFUL. Perhaps a tool belt would help. (Or a screwdriver.)

I try to be useful, actually. My own daughter was surprised that I could caulk. I had to take out the kitchen sink to replace the p-trap pipe beneath it; she respectfully asked, “Are you ok?”…presumably because I wasn’t reading a comic book or playing instruments to myself like a madman like normal.

“Yeah, I’m good. I should be done in a little bit.”

To her credit she did not ask me if I “knew what I was doing” as she rightfully assumed that I didn’t, but would figure it out eventually.

“Ok.” she said, walking away. But after it was repaired, she admitted that she had not been entirely convinced that I could put it all back together again.

“Did you think we were gonna have to call a plumber?” I asked her.

“No. Mom would figure it out.”

Hera is right. Zoe looks more than useful, she appears industrious. Approaching tasks with a steely eye, whether designing, driving, or cutting bokchoi, Zoe is the train you should know better than to stand in front of.

I am unapologetically grateful to be able to do things, to have things to do, to make things and learn things everyday.

I’ve always been taught to leave every place better than I found it. Straighten that book, pick up that scrap of paper, wipe down the sink, leave no trace, like a careful camper or a cat burglar.

Engaging my mother in the common childhood family exchange of:

• Parent: What are you doing?Child: Ugh! There’s nothing to do!

would have shortened my lifespan by eons. “There’s always something to do” was the figurative “Bless this house “ sign above our front door. If you can’t clean something, repair something. Nothing broken, then make something or learn something. Down time meant doing something while sitting down. Quiet time meant doing something, quietly.

So one of my favorite books was the “Fix it Yourself” manual by Reader’s Digest. Read it cover to cover (reading was doing something). So now I can replace the flush float in the bathroom, and swap out the car battery, and install a light system in a bookcase. That book is probably the reason that I dont enjoy having things done for me so much. I never wait for repairmen and I like to cook more than I like to eat at restaurants.

I do cook about 36.5% of the time at home: the meals are always filling, if not spectacular. That’s useful, I suppose. Utility implies necessity. Something needs doing and the something just floats in spacetime, suspended until accomplished. Sometimes that something is a sink filled with dishes. Sometimes it’s somebody’s 5th grade math homework. I’m appreciative of the fact that things need to be done, which is even better when, quite obviously, there is a great deal to be done.

But am I useful? I don’t know. Maybe I’m handy…

…ah, well. Baby steps.

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It is impossible to list all of one’s experience on one’s resume. For instance:

• For a while I was on a dessert isle with a professor, a millionaire and his wife, and a movie star.Key takeaway: Problem Solving Skills.

• I frequented a MASH unit for a few years.Key takeaways: Focus, Crisis Management.

• I learned diligence in two diners (Thanks Alice & Angie), patience on a tour bus with Shirley Partridge and her family band, and customer service aboard a Princess Cruise ship.

I really loved that boat.

As a kid, every year about this time my Mom and I would go to the grocery store, same as always, but something magical would happen. After a trip through aisles filled with displays of Stove Top Stuffing and cans of jellied cranberry sauce, we’d gleefully find the Fall Preview edition of the TV Guide magazine waiting for us at the checkout line.

This was the only issue we bought all year, since a free tv schedule came in the Sunday paper every week. But the Fall Preview TV Guide was double thick, with little articles about every new show. Most importantly to us, there was a master schedule showing what was on all three networks for the entire week in the middle.

Back at home, we sat at the kitchen table and read every description, then my mother used a ballpoint pen to circle our choices to watch each night - which shows we wanted to try and the favorites that we didn’t want to miss.

It is difficult to convey how exciting a Fall TV Season was in this current age where new shows (full seasons, no less) appear each month.

I was absolutely not one of those kids allowed to just sit in front of the TV set, even on weekends. For a couple of years we didn’t even have a television; we read books and listened to music at night. So TV time was a treat - well planned in advance, and this autumn ritual set the stage for the specific stories I was allowed to follow throughout the year.

It was very important to choose which pilot to see, because often new shows would premiere at the same time, so I’d stand by the set and we’d switch from one to the other to see which we liked the best.

(I dreamed of the future, when it would be perfectly natural to rush home from work in my flying car and watch multiple shows at the same time on a TV that had three screens. Alas, technology went in a different direction.)

While it is now a teeming metropolis, 1970’s Kansas City seemed a bit isolated to me as a tween-ager, so it was incredibly exciting to see what life was like in other people’s lives. I owe much of my sense of empathy to Norman Lear, who brought authentic emotions of folks from other communities into my house, let me see the choices they made, the way they survived, the lessons they learned. His shows were little three act plays.

I understood that I would never have been invited into Archie Bunker’s house, but there I was, week after week, watching the world of a person whose opinions didn’t match our own, seeing that character interact with others, as the storyline evolved to reveal why he was the way he was.

James L. Brooks produced “Mary Tyler Moore”. She was on her own, but that wasn’t what her story was about - she had a job that she loved and a boss that believed in her and she didn’t want to be anyone else or fit in, she just wanted to do what she did with integrity.

There was “Julia”, who was a single black woman with a son: we watched that, sure, but we also watched “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father”… my mother thought that if she was missing some kind of “dad” messaging she might pick it up from Bill Bixby. We watched Good Times, but we also watched “Happy Days” (like everyone else): neither show directly reflected our lives or experience, but the love these families had for one another absolutely did.

These were light hearted emotional stories about “us”- created for viewers to sympathize with, rather than today’s modern cautionary tales of “others” observed voyeristically from Above. It all seemed a bit kinder and smarter than it is today (well, at least until Ted Lasso happened). The TV of that age didn’t lead so much with deficits: it wasn’t all about fears and flaws, just the common struggles of moving forward.

Maybe that’s not exciting enough for today. Maybe my experience working on a Starfleet space vessel isn’t applicable in today’s competitive market, but I do know a lot being diplomatic with hostile warlike creatures, which may prove to be incredibly useful.

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Right out of college I dated a few people. Most of the relationships had an ebb and a flow to them, a natural half-life, seemed to make sense.

But one was particularly memorable because of how it ended.

I made her a cup of tea.

She hadn’t asked for one, but I knew she liked tea and I was getting one for myself. I hadn’t asked her first because we had both been reading in my room, and she was very into her book; I didn’t want to disturb her so just kind of got up quietly and left the room.

In the kitchen, I started some water boiling, then made toast (it was in the morning).

I remember thinking, “Why not just make another piece?”

So I did.

Then I looked at my mug, sitting so attentively, waiting for the water to get hot and thought, “Why not just make another cup?”

So I did, and five minutes later I walked back down the hall to my room, quietly pushed open the door, placed one cup next to her with the piece of toast on a little plate I’d balanced on top of it, and then sat back down and picked up my book.

“What is this?” she asked.

“It’s tea.”

“Why did you bring me tea?”

“I was getting some for myself and thought you might like some. I made toast too… we haven’t eaten in a while.”

There must have been a beat of four. One. Two. Three. Four. That sounds about right. It couldn’t have been longer than that.

Then she closed her book, stood up, and began putting on her shoes. Once they were tied, she stood right in front of me and said, “I can’t go out with you anymore.”

“Whapfh?” I had a mouth full of toast. “Phfwy?”

Exhale. “You brought me tea because you thought I might like some?”

This question was a trap, I knew that, but I couldn’t figure out where it had come from. I swallowed the toast as fast as I could.

“Yeah. You don’t have to drink it, it’s… just… tea.”

She winced, as if I had entirely botched that answer. “See? I can’t do this.”

“We didn’t have coffee. Do you want coffee?”

“Listen,” she began putting her things back in her shoulder bag, “I normally would just walk out, but you’re a nice guy and I want you to understand. My last boyfriend made me do his laundry. If he said he was calling, I would wait all night and sometimes he’d be four hours late. I made him dinner once and he ate it and left and I think he went out on a date with another girl. He even called me fat once in front of my friends.”

“Wow.” I kind of said.

“The boyfriend before that was ok, but he cheated on me all the time.”

“Did they both make you toast or something?” I had this theory that I’d triggered a deep memory by accident.

“No, that’s just the point, they would never make me toast.”

Ok, now I was just confused, and this was obviously not gonna go my way, and I had this distinct feeling of just wanting to understand what was happening, even if I knew I wasn’t gonna like it.

“See, in both of those relationships, I was the good one. He would do all this awful stuff, but eventually come beg for my forgiveness, and tell me I was an angel for dealing with him. I didn’t really have to do anything.”

“…ok...?”

“See?”

I did not. My face must have said that.

“You open doors and ask me about stuff. You have NEVER been late to meet me, not once.”

“…uh, I can be late....”

“I’ve ASKED you to now, it… it’s not the same. I try to think of nice things to do for you, but it’s a lot..”

“I’m sorry if I haven’t been appreciative - “

“ - no, you DO appreciate it, and then it’s MY turn again. It’s exhausting. I am not the good one, here. You are. You win. I’m the one trying to be on time and be considerate, but I don’t like it. I don’t feel good anymore. I’m sure there’s other girls who would love this, but it’s just not my thing. You see?”

I did. “Sure. And I’m sorry about the tea.”

“It’s not really the tea, but…it is. Y’know.” She gave me a hug. “Take care, ok?”

“…ok.”

And she was gone. Less than a fortnight later we all saw her at a cafe, walking with her old boyfriend. Well, behind him, kinda.

I was in my early twenties and had experienced a breakup, so my friends took me out drinking – but I did not tell them this story. It had occurred to me, as it must have occurred to you in reading it just now, that it sounded like an excuse, an easy way to let me down for some other reason… but then why give me all those details?

I asked if I should maybe try to be more standoffish and demanding. “You’re not gonna be good at that.” my friend told me. “Just stay in your lane.”

A few weeks later I met someone who knew my breakup from before / somewhere, and for no good reason I DID tell her the whole story.

“Oh no, that’s just the way she is; it’s all about her. I don’t think she likes the people she’s dating, she likes who she is in their reflection or shadow or whatever. She’s been like that forever. Why would you go out with her?”

I did not remember the beginning, but that was the end, and it’s one of those stories that, for various reasons, I do find incredibly supportive from time to time, when I’m lost in Not Understanding someone, because the glossary of human interactions and motivations I built from these experiences is one that I still use, even to this very day, to try to make sense of confusing situations. In this case, I thought it was about the guy…I was too focused on him. But in the end it wasn’t really about him at all.

Anyway, I’m sure the two of them are incredibly happy. Well. Maybe one of them.

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I took the day off today, which I don’t do very often. I’m one of those people that even on Saturdays check their email every 90 minutes and leave my work phone on the charger but turn up the ring volume real loud (just in case).

I’m not playing hooky: I just put in for a vacation day. I have plenty saved up - I just thought it might be nice to be home on Halloween to…I don’t know,

• take a bath,

• or start a soup going

• or get my costume ready

• or straighten up the house while a scary film is on.

None of these things sound very vacation-y, I understand that – but these are the MOST relaxing things I have planned today. I also have to drop off the air conditioner at the storage unit, get the groceries, and take back the kitchen garbage can they sent us because it wasn’t the one that we ordered.

Who am I kidding…I’ll never have time for a bath.

Hailing from the midwest (and the 1970’s), I grew up thinking that vacations were always supposed to involve beaches and books of light fiction.

But then the AT&T company ruined that fantasy with a series commercials titled “You Will”. These were futuristic scenarios involving how technology was going to impact our lives in a few decades.

They were amazingly accurate, predicting GPS, videophones, hand held computers, and the internet, but the one that really hit home asked the question “Have you ever sent someone a fax from the beach?” Besides the fax part, they predicted the “working from home” scenario pretty well.

I just learned that those spots were directed by a young David Fincher, who now is an award winning director of psychological thrillers… super disturbing ones like Se7en and Fight Club, which explains why those spots, voiced over by the dulcet tones of Tom Selleck, held such a steady undercurrent of uncomfortable tension. In each spot, Tom asked us if we had done any of these (at the time) impossible things, then answered, sort of ominously,

“You will…”,

which sounded a little bit more like a threat than a promise.

But when I first saw this man writing on an electronic tablet (impossible) with no wires (impossible) then sending what he wrote to an office thousands of miles away with just a touch (crazy impossible), I felt insulated from this impossibleness due to the fact that those were 3 impossible things all stacked on top of one another.

“Wow!” Young Me said, “That sounds amazing!”

“Ugh.” Me says now, unable to get even an arm’s length away from my work since my email also shows up on my watch.

I suppose that a real day off would involve being disconnected. Off-line. Maybe in a cabin, deep within the woods, away from everything, with no cell phone service - whoa, no, that sounds terrifying. Way too Halloween-y. Wouldn’t want that. Yeesh.

A perfect day off would involve everyone at work ALSO being off, so that there was no reason for anyone to call anyone about anything, but the reality of my current surroundings does not allow for that.

So every moment, my unread emails expand, like The Blob, absorbing time not yet spent. Papers stack, unfiled. Updates aren’t updated, statuses stagnate, the world moves forward but my desk is left behind, covered in weeds and vines and moss … I will return to a ruin where nature has once again taken hold.

Oh yeah. I absolutely have no idea how to do this. I think I’ll start with a cup of tea, then listen to “Disney’s Chilling Thrilling Sounds of The Haunted House” in the car while I do my errands.

I suppose I’ll be dressing as “FOMO” this year.

Thank you for joining me for my annual series of Spookytime columns,all six loosely tied together by a wee precious title conceit:

Creepy Cookie Mysterioso Scooby All, Together Hooky.

Do you see it? Need a clue? May I suggest that snapping twice, with both hands, might be just the Thing.

Happy Halloween.

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The amount of actual energy I actually have to actually say anything right now reminds me of last Saturday morning when I finally put gas in our car. We pumped 16 gallons into the tank, which was odd because it’s a 15 gallon tank. That’s how empty it was. The car was running on hope. We were half a block from putting our feet through the floor and Flintstones pedaling to the grocery store. That’s me, right now.

It’s been a very long couple of weeks, a lot of major events. The second most important was this year’s ComicCon convention. I’ve been to quite a few of these, most of them for work for one reason or another. Once, I was able to bring my daughter, though she was only six at the time. Last year my wife worked the con and my daughter got another chance to take a lap around,

But this year we all got to walk around together, explore the floor as a unit, navigating the negative personal space between Thors and Batmans (Batmen?), speaking to our favorite artists, and braving the way-too-sparse restroom situation.

It’s great that our ComicCon is so close to Halloween, because the costumes are terrific. Folks really go all out. Many, many photos are taken.

I dressed as Doctor Who, a common costume for me as the character wears, for the most part, regular clothing: a red bow tie, a leather coat, suspenders, a Moroccan fez. I won’t go into it, but this year I wore my very long scarf (12 feet long: knit by Zoe after she saw my sad attempt to do so), a leather kilt, and a blue pinstripe suit coat with a sprig of celery in the pocket.

My daughter dressed conceptually, not as an established character but one she created from the world of her favorite television show. Every element of her costume held unique backstory and function. My wife was working, but she looks a bit like a superhero no matter what she has on.

ComicCon is an arts festival at its core. It’s different from a museum, where those who appreciate art roam around and look at it: this is an annual gathering of creativity from both exhibitors and audience.

The primary irony is that the images, stories, films, objects, and costumes on display required a great deal of isolation to create. Hours alone spent writing or gluing or editing are balanced by this weekend in a giant room filled with 200,000 people. Add to that the two story high displays, giant video screens and a vast maze of aisles between booths, and it pretty much looks exactly like the mayhem one would imagine.

We met my wife after her shift and began to navigate the chaos, stopping here and there to pick up a lemonade or an interesting book or a mystical golden staff powered by an infinity stone. We took photos of folks whose costumes must have taken a year to create, as detailed as we’ve seen in any movie, complete with lights and sounds.

Our favorite part of the event is in the basement, where over 250 visual artists set up tables to sell original work. This is where I had taken my daughter the first time I brought her, to make certain she saw all the women and folks of every kind united by art, that art was more than an “elective” in school, but to some of us, our primary identity.

This time we roamed the tables together, each pointing out images and styles that we thought one of us might like, stoping to chat with the illustrators as they signed a sketch or a postcard for us.

But the best part was when some folks stopped us to take a photo. A few people had taken a picture of me because I was wearing a vegetable, but this time they wanted a picture of the three of us.

Again, we didn’t have capes on or anything, but we got to do the whole thing where we put our bags behind us and everyone politely stepped around us as we served our most authentic “adventure” pose.

“You guys are beautiful. That’s amazing. Thank you.” the photographer said.

“Who did he think we were?” my wife asked. “We’re not dressed as anything.”

“Honestly,” I replied, “besides the garnish, I wear most of this stuff to work.”

“We’re us.” my daughter said,

“We just look like us. A family of happy weirdos.”

Yeah. Well said, Kid.

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We have adopted a new kitten. This one belongs to the (now) middle cat, who is (now) less bored and more able to express his inner child: growling (in a friendly way), running about the house, leaping and pouncing. New family is often a contentious time, but as autumn chills the air, we find our three felines sleeping ever closer to one another, first rooms apart and now within a foot of one another, the encroaching frost turning strangers into bedfellows.

The kitten isn’t afraid of much. Even large things that make loud sounds only cause him to step back for a moment and observe the situation, then he is right back where he was, investigating. The splashy water room we each step into every day. The hot box in the kitchen with the door which opens down. The tops of bookshelves, the fireplace, door frames, and our heads. His world is adventure undaunted, and we have tried to protect him while allowing him enough life experience to build a map of things-best-not-to-do.

We don’t want him to be afraid. The other cats are not so subtle: they teach him through a steady barrage of growls and ninja strikes (in a friendly way). Do not attempt to ride me like a horse, one says. Do not attempt to bite my tail while I’m sleeping, expresses the other. The kitten jumps back, frozen for a few seconds, then licks his paws and jumbles onward - but he has indeed understood what he is not-to-do. Meanwhile, our human attempts to keep the kitten from jumping on our shoulders like a pirate parrot while we are eating have been, on the whole, less successful.

I do not believe that this wonderful time before Halloween is supposed to be about fear. Instead I associate Spookytime with bravery, with an admission that the world is a scary place, but here we are, dealing with it. Yay for us.

One night a few years ago, back during our National Season Of Near Constant Panic And Crisis, my six year old daughter told me to leave the lights off in her room when I was tucking her in for the night.

“You don’t want the nightlight?”

“Nope. I have to face my fears, Dad.”

I was kind of shocked. “You actually… DON’T. You’re SIX. Did I miss Twilight Sparkle saying this on My Little Pony?”

She sighed and looked at me with the furrowed brow of what seemed to be a much older person. “I can’t sleep with the lights on, but I’m afraid of the dark. So I have to learn sometime.”

“Again, sweetheart, while you have described in metaphor the very essence of human existence, you can deal with all that later because you’re SIX. Plenty of time to ease into the “facing darkness” thing.”

She told me that she just “thought it was time”,so I turned the nightlight out,but I kept the hall light on.

My daughter was teaching herself not to be afraid. I thought that was tremendous, and tried to mirror her tenacity by listening to Morning Edition everyday, and BBC World News after. But eventually I was overwhelmed, and had to winnow my intake of current events down to YouTubing Colbert, Oliver, and Meyers monologues.

While my daughter was intelligently attempting to deal with whatever life brought her in the moment, I was chasing fear down the street, yelling “YOO Hoo!”, pursuing what frightened me like an enthusiastic Beatles fan, literally looking for trouble.

This was not the fault of Twilight Sparkle, but instead a dog named Scooby Doo.

I had the metal lunchbox, complete with the thermos with the cap with the little handle so you could drink soup without a spoon. I watched the cartoon every week. I wanted the Underoos, but they were way too expensive. When we adopted a dog, I had the perfect name, because the dog was brown and black, so it was totally obvious, although Scooby Doo was a odd name for a Pekingese (but he more than filled the role - up for adventure, ready for anything, able to ride in a backpack or escape danger down the slide of the swingset in out backyard).

The television show first broadcast when I was three, so I saw every episode over and over again. If you are not familiar, Scooby Doo is an animated program about four friends and their dog who solve mysteries. Each week they uncover the plot of a greedy, jealous, or overambitious person who terrorizes the locals with theatrics, incredible engineering and special effects, and the use of a truly impressive selection of rubber masks, which are pulled off during the last minute of the program as the villain is revealed. Highlights are the custom painted Ford van they travel in (“The Mystery Machine”) and a recurring set piece involving a corridor with doors on both sides where people run in and out of them in an impossible manner. Oh, and the talking dog. The dog talks.

But the program’s greatest gift was the lesson that there is always an explanation for everything. Maybe the Caretaker really wanted the deed to Farmer Jones’ land, or the older sister wanted revenge for the younger sister taking credit for her work, but there was always an explanation. (Later, when the show added real ghosts and creatures to the mix, even the reasons for these hauntings were logical.)

There was a lot to fear out there, particularly in the maker / costuming community, but I learned that I didn’t have to carry dread around with me all the time. Life wasn’t awful, just, y’know, people. Some of them. The ones with masks, mostly.

We used the formulaic certainty of Scooby Doo (and a bit of John Cena WWE wrestling) to teach my daughter how plot worked on tv and in films, to not get so scared in the middle that you didn’t watch to the end to see what happens, to extrapolate situations and motivations in characters, to be able to step back and guess the next twist, to not be afraid of the storytelling. It worked. She then watched and read hundreds of hours of mystery books, movies, and tv shows. Even in the National Season Of Near Constant Panic And Crisis she expressed her concerns with a calm sense of perspective that we, as adults, had to reach on our tippy-toes to match.

Barring our instinctive reaction to the word “BOO!”, humans, like kittens, have to learn to be afraid. I was lucky enough to grow up with a cartoon therapy dog to talk me through all that, which I’ve now made into a family tradition. I hope my great-grandchildren feel the same way about all this, and celebrate courage at Spookytime. Hopefully they won’t take it too far and get a van with some other kids and start meddling with people.

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We used to hold a storytelling party every year in autumn. Each guest was required to bring three things; a bottle of red wine, a candle, and a story. Zoe and I provided the food, usually a large pot of something warm, filling, and comforting – we lit the candles and opened the wine, and began telling the stories, which could be about anything, as long as they were true.

They didn’t have to actually happen, mind you, they just had to, in the space of the event, be told in such a fashion that the story was about the person telling it. We had a wonderful mix of tales from around the world, from explanations of true-life experiences to a very special person exploring a loophole in the proceedings and dressing as Dr. Suess’s Lorax.

We did this for about 13 years, on and off, each time with different people and in different places (and parts of the country). Each event was at least five hours long, and it took us about three years to realize that if everyone brought a bottle of wine and there was no wine left at the end then each of us had drunk about an entire bottle of wine. Ah, but we were young and the wine was well intentioned but clearly in the realm of “getting what we paid for” (which was very little)…it was a grand party, even when there were only three or four of us. At one point I think we had seventeen.

In any case, I had to tell a story every year. The poem below was my favorite - I composed an orchestral score and recorded it a few years ago. Our event was never exclusively Halloween based, although the candles did influence an all around cozy mood… I think this is a cozy piece, a memory I thought would be nice to have, of events imagined but emotions real.

If you’ve known me for a while you may have heard it before (one of you read it aloud at one of my shows!). In the best of all worlds we would all be together and at the end of the page it would be Your Turn. Alas, time and space: please settle in, adjust your lights and enjoy a glass of something.

every star that ever was was in the sky that night

and the river was a ribbon glowing blue and bright

and somewhere between here and now lay tiny Harrison Bay

set half between roads that have been and newly planned highway

every headlight was a diamond every car a star

people didn’t mind the traffic; they weren’t driving far

the time had come for the yearly fair; the men had brought the rides

but all my little town cared only for one barker’s cry:

“Step right up, folks, see for yourself a man who has no fear!”

Mr. Mysterioso had come back again this year to entertain the old and young with bravery to spare

it was the only reason most of us went to the fair.

each year brought greater danger in the challenges he made

we wondered how and why he did it, how much he got paid

we never quite believed

the feats of derring do we’d seen

(excitedly we’d speak of it, sometimes ‘til Halloween.)

he chewed on glass when I was nine

he swallowed fire at ten

eleven he ate razor blades, surrounded by four men

when I was twelve, he cut a gal in half while we all gaped

but on this year I was thirteen. the year that he escaped.

Mr. Mysterioso got inside a wooden box

blindfolded,

gagged,

and bound in chains with heavy metal locks.

the box was nailed shut from all sides, but to add to his plight

around the base were several sticks of top grade dynamite.

I won’t aim to create suspense, (I’m not so good at that)

this isn’t Edgar Allen Poe or “Casey at the Bat” the box blew up.

to smithereens and back, orange as the dawn.

and when the smoke drifts cleared,

box, chains, and man were simply gone.

we clapped and yelled hurray

until our hands and throats were sore

we stomped and whooped and whistled loud. we couldn’t ask for more.

but when the barker came out frowning, looking left and right

our noises stopped quite suddenly, as glee transformed to fright.

it seemed that the entire town went searching for a clue.

they looked inside the wreckage for a grisly residue.

when nothing of the man was there, the fair just kind of stopped.

we’d seen a man blow up himself, that wasn’t easily topped.

i walked home with my sister cause we didn’t live that far

and dad and mom were taking other folks back in the car

it was as if our lives had changed somehow, there wasn’t much to say

and past the crickets we could hear the night train on it’s way

“so what’d ya think?”i asked her as we crossed the Prichart’s field

“heck, I don’t know…that was a little strange. he disappeared! I mean –he should come back and bow to show that he’s alright.”

then something passed in front of us, fast, out across the night.

so instantly we chased it by the moonlight’s chalk white glow filled with a lack of common fear that children only know

the moon revealed a jet black cape that seemed to limp in pain

on a course to intersect that of the coming train.

and when train and stranger met, there was no hesitation

cape, limp and all jumped right aboard as if by levitation.

then he was on the freight car roof,

moon shining through his hair.

looked right at us.

gave a bow

and yelled out “Y’all take care!”

we clapped and waved until we barely heard the whistle call.

we danced the entire way back home, and barely slept at all.

the next year when the fair returned to town it was bizarre

to see the rides and games and such, but not our favorite star

the rumor was he ditched the show to marry a brunette

(who wasn’t too spectacular, but good as he could get)

they moved to Coney Island and set up a little life.

he blew himself to kingdom come to get himself a wife.

and though, my dear, this tale i tell

is absolutely true, you may well wonder why it is i’m telling it to you.

love is a strange and silent thing, a soft and heavy load.

sometimes it makes us run away. sometimes we can explode.

but every moonlit night’s a paradise when love’s in bloom

and every night is moonlit when you walk into the room.

my only memory dearer

is when I first held you tight

for every star that ever was was in the sky that night.

Harrison Bay - Jd Michaels - 2001

https://litraedio.com/000-2/

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The classic monsters are, of course, Frankenstein, The Wolfman, and Dracula…

(Oh, sure, you can add in the Mummy and the Creature from the Black Lagoon if you want, but no one dresses as them for Halloween.

Well, maybe the Mummy, if you’re not planning on dancing or walking very fast all night, but the Fish-Man would take professional grade make-up work and seems like a really uncomfortably hot costume, even for a brisk October night.)

…these are monsters that live in black and white worlds, in times far from our own, whose stories embrace what it means to be human, as each of us struggle to navigate an often unforgiving world.

So I mean, they’re ok, but in my opinion, the best monster (and the very FIRST for my generation) is pure bright cobalt blue.

In 1969 Jim Henson premiered a fuzzy puppet on the new educational show he was producing for public television. After a bit of character development, that puppet earned a name - Cookie Monster. I was 3 years old, so this was kismet, synchronicity, a meet-cute through our console tv as my wide little eyes met his great big googly ones. He liked some of the same things I liked, he was learning the alphabet (same as I was!)…if this was a monster, then I was all for ‘em.

This is where I first learned the word “monster”: a fuzzy lovable talking pile of fluff. Full disclosure - I’m with Grover: his curious optimism and entirely boneless arms soothe me to this day, but all of the monsters of Sesame Street are an amazing demonstration of difference without threat, acceptance without fear, because the children on the program spoke to them and weren’t afraid, so neither was I. On Sesame Street, to be a monster was to be open and vulnerable, unique and authentic, honest and courageous.

Then there was Godzilla. Not the computer rendered mutant horror dinosaur of today, but a middle-aged man dressed in a 200 pound rubber suit. The original TOHO movies (on after school TV) all ended with children in short panted school uniforms waving and thanking Godzilla, most often for shooing away another giant creature with a grudge of some kind. This monster fought other monsters - the enemy of my enemy was my friend.

It went downhill after that. Cinematic technology made it easy to create more horrifying visuals, and filmmakers seemingly steeped in nihilistic ennui began to crank out more horrific plots. Now the monster was us, the creatures were we; zombies and aliens and demons and serial killers. Dread itself became the star of all these films, served at a bargain price since you got to take so much of it home with you, like the uneaten popcorn in that extra large bin you decided to buy.

I had felt compassion for the Frankenstein monster. He didn’t ask for all that. The Wolfman was an unwilling victim of a leash law violation, and Dracula was a guy with a food allergy dealing with a houseful of uninvited guests. Even Godzilla was just chillin’ until Mothra and Mecha-Godzilla decided to bring all that noise.

But I could never dredge up sympathy for these new disappointed killing machines, unsatisfied with their summer camps, neighborhood clubs, or high school experiences. They weren’t monsters - they were maniacs, and there seemed to be an endless supply of them.

Which brings me to Air Supply.

They were a soft rock duo from Australia who became super famous in the 1980’s for songs about love. We had a lot of love songs on the radio back then, in every style of music, but Air Supply created tunes you couldn’t help but memorize - power rotation tone poems.

Our current popular music is filled to the brim with virulent break-up songs, but the music of Air Supply made love seem like something wonderful, not only to be survived or afraid of.

They did lean a bit on the clingy side, but so did the work of Chicago, Lionel Richie, Foreigner, Journey: each offering a selection of hits fully appropriate to be “Our Song” to any couple.

But they couldn’t be written today, as through a contemporary lens, they all seem a bit…suspicious; the syrupy lyrics now read as obsessive, giving an “I just wrote these lyrics with letters I cut out of magazines” kind of vibe.

To be fair, I did try singing one of their songs to my date at a high school dance, soon realizing that the words,“you're every woman in the world to me…you're my fantasy, you're my reality…you're everything I need…” were a bit much for a 9th grade second date.

My point is: I don’t think that only movies have gotten scarier - EVERYTHING has: love, bread (well, I’m allergic to both gluten and dairy, so a grilled cheese sandwich looks like a ninja throwing star to me), the sun, traveling, laundry detergent (apparently we shouldn’t eat it, even if it’s delicious), each other, ourselves...

The stories of Frankenstein, Wolfman, and Dracula span all the core conflicts - person vs. nature, person vs. person and the hardest of all, person vs. self. All three characters are in circumstances beyond their control, doing the best they can with where they are with very little help, facing ultimately (in all three cases) the insurmountable distraction of torches and pitchforks.

But they’re not maniacs.

I mean, we all have days we just don’t feel put together right, or our hair seems to have a life of its own, or we eat something we know we shouldn’t.

In a world that’s gone from monochromatic creatures to 4K maniacs, each of us has the choice to still be open and vulnerable, unique and authentic, honest and courageous.

You know. Monsters.

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I wear contact lenses to see far away, and glasses on top of them so that I can read up close.

“Why not just get bifocals?”

Well, during the pandemic, I wore my contacts like tiny little Captain America shields for my eyes - I could practically hear the near constant ricochet of infectious particles and allergens bouncing off of them.

Consequently, I hadn’t bought a pair of prescription glasses in a very long time, which is why I was practically giddy when the family took a trip to “use our insurance before the end of the year” at the optical shop.

We all got eye exams, I got a picture of the inside of my eye taken with a new large white optometrist robot thing, then everyone chose a pair of glasses that suited them. My daughter got two.

For my turn, I chose Ray Bans. Normally, these make me look like a blues musician, but there was a new style that actually did suit my face. And besides, I was only going to wear them around the house to look at movies, given my still active reticence toward naked eyeballs on the NYC subway.

So I chose the Ray Ban / Metas.

Again, they really do fit my face, and I like the matte finish.

They talk, of course, but I really was focused on the fit. And the matte finish.

About 10 years ago I bought a pair of sunglasses from a vending machine in England: the bright yellow box held a worldwide rarity at the time, a wearable camera that connected directly to your smartphone. They were advertised as the best way to take photos for social media, a more natural way to capture the world around you.

I’m not 17 years old, or 24, or 32 even - the world around me is filled with laundry and dishwashing and grocery shopping. In the ads were happy people on beaches and in convertible cars with the top down. They should have had a little sticker on the box reading, “Lifestyle Not Included”. But they were a summer novelty, and we each took turns taking random photos of coffee cups, clouds, and each other.

When choosing these current glasses, I honestly didn’t realize they had a camera in them. Unlike their predecessors, the design is incredibly subtle, and I was happy that I could afford to at last join in that “Risky Business” fashion trend from 40 years ago. Better late than never.

But these glasses do more than take pictures. They capture video and have hidden bluetooth speakers that only the wearer can hear. Which is cool for when you don’t want white earbuds in.

But they also have a feature I didn’t really understand. With a click of a switch they become semi-sentient, able to not only tell you the time and weather but LOOK AT WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING AT and TELL YOU WHAT IT IS.

Their example for this feature is a woman holding a vegetable.

“What can I prepare with this for dinner that will only take 20 minutes?” she asks.

The glasses reply, “You are holding bok choi - cut into 1 inch pieces and sauté with garlic and olive oil for 7 minutes.”

Most of us are used to being heard by our technology, speaking to our watches or phones or speakers. But being seen by them is different, isn’t it? It’s cool, but it’s a little…creepy.

We bonded with the staff of the optical shop. Try as we might, we do not portray the typical American family: our more than occasional dance breaks and obscure foreign movie references spotlight us as, if not eccentric, then casually unconcerned with public opinion, both of which are true. We had a great time, and when we were ready to check out we brought our selections to the front desk, and after an hour of chatting, the woman who was helping us felt as if she could be totally honest.

“You’re getting those?” she asked me, regarding my selection.

“Yes!” I enthusiastically said. “It’s like being Iron Man!”

Her smile did not dim, but it did freeze… it ceased, for a moment, to organically evolve. Her eyes did not move from mine. “What are you going to use them for?”

“Well, we just got a new kitten, and he is really fast, so I’ll be taking photos of him, and then listening to music when I can’t find my AirPods™, and then translating non-English language newspapers at work.” (Oh, they read foreign languages too. Forgot to mention that.)

“Oh!” Her smile started to move again. “That’s great.” she said, then added “You know, we have never sold a pair of those glasses to a woman.”

“Really?” I asked. “Why?”

“Because” my daughter said, “they’re creepy, Dad.”

“How are they creepy? Do I look creepy?”

“No!” The sales associate lowered her voice a bit. “It think they sound like fun, but most of the other men said they were getting them for the beach.”

There was a beat while I caught up.

“Eeew.”

“Yeah,” she continued.

“Oh, I’m not looking at people, I’m just taking pictures of dishes and laundry and clouds and stuff.”

“Yeah, Dad, it’s not you.” My daughter patted me reassuringly on the shoulder. “They’ll be fun.”

We are now at the eve of Spookytime™, when the wind doesn’t just blow, it howls, and each creak of the floor just slightly echos through the crisp night air.

Some focus on fear at this time, but I’ve always felt it’s more about bravery. The John F. Kennedy quote “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” seems a bit meta in a world where everything is screaming at you to be afraid of something new everyday. But I’ve gotten used to that.

What gets me are the subtleties, where innocent and maturely fashionable items like eyeglasses combine with headphones (totally normal) and a camera (also totally normal) and then some optical Dr. Frankenstein puts ‘em on that lightning table and brings them to life, where your glasses are LOOKING AT YOU. I mean, I’m no Luddite, I’m absolutely impressed, but I do have to admit that they’re just a little… well….y’know.

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When I enter a used bookstore my shoulders automatically lower (even if I thought I felt relaxed on the way in) and I exhale much deeper than the inhale just before it. Paper, stacked sometimes literally to the ceiling, offers the safety of ten thousand silent voices. What others might classify as clutter, I see as a garden.

I love words. Not merely the printed word, but words themselves, and the ability to make them mean something through juxtaposition. Not many things work that way. Tarot cards, sure, but stone fruit, socks, formal flatware, Toyota Prius™es… arrange them all you want. Nothin’.

My favorite collection of words is the handwritten letter, and my favorite time period of letter writing began in 8th grade.

We would face the front of the classroom, pretending to pay attention to the teacher while drafting free association masterpieces between the blue lines of our notebook paper. Then at the end of class, we’d open the binder rings, pull out the sheet, and fold it into a rectangle via an intricate pattern that left a little triangle pull-tab to open it with.

We wrote about just about anything - the class we were currently in, a class we dreaded going to, movies and tv shows, and eventually who we liked and who we “like” liked. If the intended audience was in the same classroom, a dangerous gamble of “passing the note” to that person could be attempted.

That is how I ended up eating a note meant for me because the social studies teacher saw the pass and was notorious for reading such letters aloud in front of the entire class. To spare my friend, I popped the whole thing in my mouth and feverishly started chewing, hoping at least to ruin it enough to render it illegible. But the teacher did not bring the garbage can over; instead he told me that I could either eat the note or go to the principal’s office.

So I kept on chewing and swallowed the whole thing - opening my mouth as proof. I was a teenage boy - I was always hungry.

Unimpressed yet defeated, the teacher slowly returned to the front of the classroom, muttering “probably die from ink poisoning…”. I hadn’t actually considered that, and with no internet to reassure myself as to the chemical composition of BIC™ pen ink, I spent the next few restless nights wondering what symptoms might suddenly occur as my epistolary snack worked its way through my system.

Through high school, college, and eventually after, I kept all my letters in an honest-to-goodness shoebox. When the shoebox fell apart, I spent an afternoon transferring the collection to plastic sleeves in some 3 ring binders I had around. They followed me everywhere, and after we were married, my wife ran into them while looking for something.

“Who are these from?” she asked curiously, casually flipping through the collection.

“I don’t know…anybody who wrote me a letter.”

“Are they all love letters?”

“Nooo. They’re just, like, about what we were doing at the time. Long distance calls were too expensive.”

She slowly nodded in agreement, but then asked, “Do the people who wrote these know that you kept them?”

Well, that was a weird question. I thought about it.

“I don’t know most of those people anymore.”

“So why would you keep the letters?”

“I don’t know… it feels weird to throw them away. Disrespectful or something.”

“You’ve moved all of these pieces of paper across the country. Twice. You know you can’t physically carry the past with you forever.”

She was right. That Sunday I culled the archive. They had each done the job they were meant to do, communicated the information entrusted to them. I filled a recycling bag and put it on the “back porch” of our strange little attic apartment. But as I stood there, I couldn’t help but feel that all these personal artifacts deserved a better sendoff.

The next evening, while walking home from the train in the brisk autumn air, I spied a bright pink leaf at the bottom of the long steep hill we lived on. The blustery weather was making my eyes tear up even with my glasses on, but as I bent down to pick it up I saw ahead of me a turquoise leaf, and another…

and the leaf… seemed to… have my name on it.

Then I looked up the hill.

High in the trees, in the bushes, and scattered on the sidewalk were my letters. Apparently a nosy squirrel had opened the bag they were in, then a windstorm efficiently distributed my letters everywhere.

The past, as installation art.

I picked up the ones I could reach and stuffed them into my pockets as I made my way home. I didn’t want to litter, and it would be easy to figure out who was to blame for all this. Some of the ones up in the trees stayed there for months.

You’re not gonna have that happen when you’re texting. Sure, it’s instant and can go around the world, but our words to each other have gotten smaller, and no matter what font you use, it’s not your handwriting. Pen to paper is heart to hand.

And phones are way too hard to swallow.

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I was mistaken for Neil deGrasse Tyson once at the Museum of Modern Art. I had taken a friend there for lunch, and we decided that we’d eat at the fancy place on the ground floor because we’d just finished a huge project.

I hadn’t made any reservations, but they sat us immediately at a very nice table, and then the head waiter came over and said,

“It’s great to see you again. How is everything?”

“It’s great!” I responded.

“I see you came back.” he added.

Ok.

“Well, I really love it here.”

“That’s great to hear. I’ll get someone to take care of you. Let me know if you need anything. Enjoy yourself!”

My colleague and I stared across the table at each other cautiously.

“Did that seem weird?” I asked him.

“Incredibly weird.” he said. “Who does he think you are?”

“I don’t know.”

A less head waiter came to take our order. “Hi, how are you guys doing?”

My buddy pointed at me and blurted out “Do you recognize him?”

The waiter looked at me for a second. “My boss thinks you’re Neil deGrasse Tyson. He was in here the other day with his son, and was wearing the same hat.”

It was a fact that I was wearing a NASA baseball cap, inspired by a recent movie I’d adored called “Tomorrowland”.

It is also a fact that I look nothing like Neil deGrasse Tyson. Not even a little bit.

“Does he eat here for free?” my friend asked the waiter.

“No, but you got a great table, and I won’t tell anybody.”

I looked around and yes, a full to capacity restaurant of Fancy Folks were stealing little glances at us.

“I’ll try to eat as scientifically as possible.” I told the waiter, and I pulled my cap lower, and my friend and I enjoyed a lunch that neither of us could actually afford.

We tipped generously.

I didn’t really know how to grow up and “be a scientist”. Becoming a scientist seemed a very bold career choice. Dr. Bruce Banner experimented with gamma rays and became a green giant. Dr. Reed Richards and his family traveled to space and were bombarded with cosmic radiation. And Dr. Octavius was always so mean to Spider-Man, trying to hit him with those mechanical arms and whatnot. Science seemed dangerous.

But I liked science - it was the answer to every “how?” question, the art of making sense of things. It made the world both more and less mysterious. For instance, as a child I was told that if I lifted heavy things, it might stunt my growth.

How would I ever know if that happened? How tall was I supposed to be? It’s not like my “full height” was written on the bottom of my foot or anything. Could a couple of grocery bags hefted up the steps when I was nine keep me out of the NBA? That couldn’t be how the human body worked. It didn’t seem very scientific.

There I was, spellbound by my Gilbert Home Chemistry Set in its bright blue metal case, following instructions carefully, alert when using the rubbing alcohol bunsen burner, fingertips stained with sulfur and iodine, all the labels on the little bottles gently blurred by first attempts and miscalculations. I caused liquids and litmus paper to change color, solids to vaporize, and crystals to appear as if from magic.

TinkerToys, a popular children’s building set, introduced me to physics, while my Erector Set (another popular construction toy) brought engineering to the mix. We put together a model called “The Visible Man” with clear plastic skin covering brightly painted bones and organs that fit together inside him. I raised a tadpole in a jar with holes poked in the top until it became a baby frog and we returned it to the lake.

After a while I saw science everywhere, from boiling water in a kitchen pot to soap suds in the washing machine.

What I didn’t see was scientists.

Recently I discovered a color film of George Washington Carver taken when he was older. He moves about his day as you’d imagine a scientist would - spending part of his time in his home laboratory and agricultural experimentation space. Surprisingly he also spent a significant amount of time crocheting a new blanket.

At the end of the film, he leaves his simple home and travels to the campus of Tuskegee Institute, where he taught for many years. As he stands in front of a building bearing his name, complete with a life size bust of himself, I thought about how bizarre it must have felt to have been both a slave and an international advisor to Mahatma Gandhi in the same lifetime.

I never heard about Katherine Johnson’s time at NASA until the popular “Hidden Figures” movie, and I only just learned of Gladys West’s work on GPS, or that the Super Soaker water gun was invented by Lonnie Johnson. There weren’t trading cards for black scientists, only sports heroes, which was a shame really, because it is only recently that I’ve come to realize how many African Americans have made significant and world changing discoveries. I would have collected those cards in high school and enthusiastically traded them with my frenemies in Chess Club.

I wish I’d known more about these folks early on - more about their lives and adventures. As it was, I believe I got a C on a third grade test because I wrote that George Washington Carver invented the peanut, rather than 300 innovations derived from it. He was the literal poster child of black science, but as impressive as his career was, as I looked up at his painted image every year on the science classroom bulletin board, I didn’t know enough about his life to want to BE him.

Which is ironic, because I actually resemble him a great deal more than I do Neil deGrasse Tyson.

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At my grade school, it was just reading, writing, and arithmetic for a while, and then science and social studies came along.

Science focused on nature at first, eventually evolving into fun experiments like baking soda volcanos and lemon batteries. Social studies began as cartography: the class would look at giant maps requiring WWE strength for the teachers to pull down, like huge window shades mounted on top of the blackboards. We learned the names of different colored shapes - Earth’s continents, countries, states, counties and cities. Eventually the lessons began to describe how the lines defining these colorful shapes had been drawn, which led us to the joyful huffing of purple mimeograph sheets filled with Important Dates.

Declaration of Independence signed - July 4, 1776

That was the main one. I’m sure there were more, it’s just been a while. (Ooo! Norman Conquest! 1066! #stillgotit)

Social Studies evolved into History class, which should have been easy lists of “things that happened”. But for me it was always “why” they happened that was the most interesting part. There was an 80’s PBS series titled “CONNECTIONS” that offered a few clues as to the complexity of history’s WHYs, but in class our teachers would shrug and tell us they didn’t know, and SOCIETAL CONTEXT would not be on the exams.

In recent years the world of academia has gotten a bit more Indiana Jones and unearthed further detail about society’s recent past, often shifting our perspectives. For instance, I was shocked to learn that the past didn’t smell all that great…I hadn’t actually thought about it, just had the urge to visit London in the 1860’s if a time machine showed up - but then I was taught about The Great Stink, which wasn’t in any Dickens novels or Sherlock Holmes stories. Eeesh.

Also, the past isn’t moving, but it’s creeping up on me. I used to think of “the past” as far away. Words like “established” and “historical” meant that somebody’s grandparents had to be involved… horse-drawn carriages rumbling down cobblestone streets while tinny tenor voices spring from Victrola™ machines through open bay windows.

Now words like that are used to describe breakfast cereals, and I own objects that are on display in museums. There is more history being discovered, and more being created, every day.

One would think that more information offers greater clarity, like the resolution of pixels in a photoshop document. The context I longed for in school should be easy to plot out now with a few internet searches; in many cases that is true, as information springs to light that I either forgot or was never aware of. It’s weird to think that even though the past has happened already, it can still surprise us.

For instance, my mother turned 21 in 1962. As viewed through my life, that meant that she could legally vote and publicly enjoy as many adult beverages as she wanted.

Turns out she wasn’t an adult beverage sort of person and did NOT have the right to vote in 1962. This was confusing because the 19th Amendment secured voting rights for American women in 1920, yet the right for black women to vote (of which my mother is one) was not legally established until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. (The VRA nationally barred discrimination and overruled all state and local restrictions.)

So my mother’s first legal vote was at 27, which she remembers because I was there - I was a two year old, probably in a little suit and bow tie and a jaunty hat (she dressed me up for special occasions). This event happened IN MY LIFETIME, her basic right to vote in her home country.

She didn’t have the right to open a bank account without a man’s signature until 1974 (she already had one because the local black owned bank was more progressive). Credit cards weren’t available to her until 1974, two years before Star Wars opened. Carrie Fisher couldn’t get a MasterCard. And I could not have been a legacy at Yale as my mother could not have attended until 1969. All of these changes were truly historical, but uncomfortably recent.

One more thing: I am now, for various reasons, paying much closer attention to laws and their creation. Dozens of people scripting and revising specific language until it defines a situation which can be enforced and defended. Pretty impressive.

A few years ago I bought 6 very thick books about the United States Constitution and all the fun and hijinks that surrounded it. Did I read all 4268 pages? No, I did not. I did read the Constitution, and really enjoyed a pop-up book about the Bill of Rights, but the main thing I realized is that the United States is written on paper.

Imagine people standing around until someone writes down rules of a game on a sheet of paper to start folks off. Society is that fragile sheet of paper. Not a stone tablet, or even a lower back tattoo, just PAPER.

Even in this age of absolute miracles, when humans have visited the moon and traveled at the speed of sound, if an idea is really important, what do we do? Write it down. Sure, we use computers to print it, but we still sign actual pieces of paper. That makes it law. That makes it real. That makes it history.

Paper is what ties history together. Books, maps, handwritten notes, sketches and calculations and for-goodness-sake MONEY. Paper holds our clues to the past, and is what we are using to plot our future. Wow. I thought it might be gunpowder or salt or oil or something, but those things don’t last.

Paper. Explains why I could always check out without a receipt, but I feel so much more secure when I get one.

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Back before she was here, when we thought about raising the baby, we felt we had a handle on the whole thing., or at least the general concept. We understood, for instance, that the child would be empty a great deal of the time, and our first job was to keep it filled with love and food (in that order).

To that list we added the arts, which we started with right from the very beginning with music. Within her first 24 hours on the planet, our daughter listened to the jaunty jazz of Raymond Scott, the lyrical poetry of George Gershwin, and I believe a bit of Miles Davis, though it’s hard to remember because we were all really sleepy that day. We do have video of the Raymond Scott - she really liked it. Oh, and Patsy Cline, I believe.

I wished that she could enjoy music wherever she went in the world; it is such a balm and foundation for me - if only she could just call out whatever song in the world she wanted and it would play for her. Oh. Really? Thanks, Apple. Now she has that power, and uses it daily. I am so proud to watch her walk around the apartment in her headphones, singing along to AC/DC, Dean Martin, and Billie Eilish.

Music? CHECK.

We read somewhere that newborns are most stimulated by black and white images… many baby blankets and mobiles are based on this theory. I freely interpreted this information: one afternoon during my paternity leave, my wife came back from work to find us watching a movie. We had a projector that made quite a large screen on the white wall of the bedroom. My wife’s attention, of course, was only on the baby sitting up in my lap - she marveled at how the child was so transfixed and focused.

Although she did suppose that the child would be happily distracted by the event of Her Mother entering the room, which did not occur - instead the child leaned to the left in an attempt to look around her.

“Is she ok?” my wife asked me.

“Yeah! Yeah, we’re just at the end of this movie.”

“She watched an entire movie? What are you watching?”

My wife at last turned to look behind her at the screen, where Death was just finishing up a game of chess with a Swedish knight.

“Is that “The Seventh Seal”?”

“It’s black and white! It’s stimulating!” I told her nervously, since the tone of her voice made it seem like this had been a questionable choice. “She really likes it!” I added. I don’t know why I added that; rarely do film critics less than six months old get taken seriously. But my daughter did like it, so my wife joined us on the bed for the last ten minutes of the movie, and when it was over, our daughter smiled, held her arms high, and went right into my wife’s arms. No harm done.

Well. We’ll see.

Unintentionally, our first forays into literature followed a similar path.

Andrew Lang’s collection of Fairy Books collects over 300 tales from around the world; these are told in more or less what can be considered their original versions. We thought this would be great; no commercialization, just a legacy of storytelling, surely the purest way to get the child used to bedtime stories, narrated in those National Public Radio voices we’d been practicing.

But as it worked out, we weren’t the first to read the books…my mother was. In an effort to help us out at the very beginning, she visited for a week, allowing us to shower and nap and then go out for an hour together to “do something fun and relax”. We chose to have a glass of wine, staring at each other the entire time with an intensity born not of romance, but impatience to get back to the fun new thing in our house. It was like being at work and waiting to get back home to brush and feed your new unicorn.

We had left my mother with a few of the fairy books, complete with post-its marking familiar titles, so that she could read to the baby. When we got to our apartment, the baby was blissfully asleep, but my mother was curiously silent. We lightly poked the baby’s little feet and then made it back to the living room.

“What kind of book was that you left me to read?

We proudly explained the century old legacy of the Fairy Book series, still in its original 1890’s format, not filtered through he magnanimity of corporations but instead an unfiltered collection of the legends of every continent, told simply and plainly, captured for all of time in budget paperback editions with plasticine overlays by the good people of Dover Press.

“Those are fairy tales?”

“Yes,” I replied, “We left them bookmarked for you. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty…”

“Have you read these before?”

“Well, no, they’re new, we didn’t have the chance.”

“Why do so many people get killed in ‘em?”

Well, here we were stumped. “Uh… which one did you read?”

“I tried to read all of them. I tried to skip all the killing, but it was too much of it. In Cinderella the stepsisters cut off their own feet. In Snow White the Queen was a cannibal, and I knew better than to start Little Red Riding Hood because of the wolf.”

“Wow. Sorry. How did the baby react?”

“She seemed to like 'em. She was listening really closely.”

“Well, I’m sure it was just the sound of your voice.”

“Yeah, maybe. She fell asleep during the last one. Maybe you should save those books ‘til she’s older.”

“Yeah. What’s the appropriate age to introduce cannibalism?” my wife asked.

“At bedtime, no less.” I added.

The three of us, exhausted in variations of the same way, silently contemplated it for a moment.

“Maybe 13?” my wife offered.

We all nodded slowly in agreement.

So, we have that to look forward to this year.

My daughter has seen the Nicolas Brothers dance, along with Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Barishnikov, Parris Gobble and Mark Morris (live). She commented quite freely at a Cindy Sherman exhibit when she was a year old and adopted Basquiat as a key hero at five. She can scramble eggs and make salad dressing and is currently designing and sewing skirts with her mom for her new school year.

The child is indeed filled with art, and she generates it as well, in drawing and painting and writing. Most importantly, she is steeped in the patience and empathy essential for artistic expression or appreciation, which is a great thing in a world of chaos.

Full disclosure: she’s also been shown endless Bugs Bunny cartoons and episodes of The Partridge Family, listened to Weird Al Yankovic and Frank Zappa albums, and been subjected to tons of old comic books. She heard Ravel’s Bolero the same year she was introduced to KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Shake Your Booty”. We are not the Royal Tennenbaums. This isn’t about art being fancy, just art being tangible, a tool to navigate and motivate and communicate. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Though I really should ask her how she feels about chess…just in case.

.

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There aren’t many shows that I watch on television at the time that they are broadcast anymore.

Five percent of the reason for this is that I am the kind of person who leans into new technologies. I embraced streaming video, navigating its twists and eddys as an intrepid explorer might, until it isn’t just the technology that’s new, but the way I am able to live, work, and communicate. I embrace the future, look it right in the eye while holding its shoulders, then make it a cup of coffee and offer it a scone.

The other ninety five percent is that I have entered a new phase of life akin to hibernation; I am unwilling (read: unable) to stay up past 10PM to watch a tv show at night when I can so easily see it on my phone during next morning’s commute. Yawn. Silly old bear.

But very recently I have indeed been up late watching tv: not action or comedy or drama, but watching people give speeches. A lot of speeches. You might be doing this too. I just can’t help myself…it’s…what’s that phrase? Must See TV. It’s like the Olympics kept going and this is the Oratory event.

Thus I am, without a doubt, a special brand of exhausted, but very much looking forward to a gold medal contest tonight, so I’ll keep this short.

Political conventions are Live Events. Everyone in the hall is electrified, generating excitement for the home viewers as they participate and in many ways create what is going on. It’s a nationwide Panto play, where the crowd is meant to interact with those on stage, gleefully shouting answers to their questions and responding when called upon. And we are there, on that floor, holding up colorful signs and cheering, all through the magic of television. I like it better from home, where there’s a hot meal and no line for the bathroom and I’m wearing unpatching pajamas.

My grandfather actually attended one of these, as a delegate from Kansas City. I am not aware if he was on the line up for the dias, but he was an incredible orator: we even have a book of his speeches that my mother put together. I’ve given quite a few speeches, but at the end of each I looked up to find a sea of warmly agreeable yet undeniably puzzled faces. I am enthusiastic as a speaker, if not quite “inspirational”.

That’s what’s fun about the speeches at political conventions: they are all engineered to lift and motivate us. And it’s fun to “be there”, LIVE, as it’s happening. The only tv shows that everyone wants to watch live anymore are key sporting events and fancy award shows – this seems a perfect combination of both those things.

While the format had long been a staple of radio broadcasts, in 1951 I Love Lucy became the very first television show to be filmed live before a studio audience. Seventy five years later, if you watch that show, it is still effervescent, joyous laughter spilling from the speakers as the action unfolds. Because people were there, in the room, and even though you can’t see them, their electricity adds to what is being recorded, and somehow transmits through time and space along with the performances.

These political parties every four years are fascinating to watch no matter your personal stance, because America is RIGHT THERE, all together, happening right in front of us. We are, each of us, Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy.

Oh, I know, it’s gonna get crazy later, but just look at all of us, standing there, even the Northern Mariana Islands.

Wait a minute, WHO?

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I wasn’t a particularly fussy baby, or so I’m told. My mother says that I was an easygoing roommate who didn’t make trouble: a good boy, who made a lot of racket at night.

My mother decided to comfort me with a radio in my crib. This worked - sort of. I did respond very well to music, but not the music she initially preferred… I only calmed totally down when one of the country music stations was on. Laden with sleep deprivation, she looked me right in the tiny eye and fairly pleaded for pop if not R&B, but the twang of the steel guitar was the only sonic soothing I’d accept, so she took the win.

Even today my affinity towards bluegrass somewhat challenges my immediate family… I bought a mandolin a few years back and every now and then start chopping away on it with amateur glee. I love music of all kinds, but I don’t perform music as a career. I used to, as a kid, in amusement parks and nursing homes and church and San Francisco… mostly standards and original novelty songs.

But for a brief and awesome moment, I did get to be in the lead singer of a southern rock band, which was a surprise to everyone. Including the band.

Early 90’s San Francisco was lush with music and venues to enjoy it. This was pre-internet and before cell phones, so homemade Xeroxed flyers were stapled and taped everywhere to announce local shows. Most often you’d just show up at a venue and listen to whoever was there, discovering favorites as you went along.

This five piece group was incredibly popular. Then the singer suddenly left, and they were looking for a possible replacement. So somebody told me about it and I “auditioned”.

Ok: the guy before me was… cool, I mean he was tall and had the look of a rock star and the hair of a rock star, while I had just graduated from a cappella harmonies of Cole Porter classics and comedy acoustic guitar sets. But I put together a song on my 4 track cassette recorder - I didn’t know what to sing, so I chose “I Think I Love You” by the Partridge Family.

(I’ll just let that settle.)

Not only that, but I sang it a cappella with overdubs in 5 different styles, including gospel, for some reason.

They called me in out of curiosity and perhaps a deep sense of pity, but when they played an actual rock song I didn’t do too bad, and I learned very quickly, and they needed a singer for a show right away and I was oh-so-enthusiastic.

We rehearsed 3 times a week. For the first 3 months they were polite, but seemed to always wince a bit when I showed up, like I brought everyone a sliver of the brain freeze you get from drinking an Icee too fast. Then something wonderful happened.

My girlfriend dumped me.

That night happened to be not only a rehearsal, but a songwriting night, when everyone tossed around ideas and new riffs. I came in cursing like a sailor with a chum bucket full of heartbreak and frustration.

I started singing, but my voice was different, as was my attitude. I wasn’t performing, just growling in honest expression.

90 minutes later there was a song, that everybody liked, and I’d helped.

“What happened to you?” the lead guitarist asked. His tone was cautious, as if he thought he might break the spell I was under if he spooked me.

I briefly told them of my situation: she had initially warned me that if she found a man assertive, she grew to resent him, but if she could in any way dominate him, he disgusted her. I apparently had told her that would be fine. It didn’t work out.

“I’m gonna hire her to break up with you every week.” he responded. From then on, I was in the band.

They played just this last weekend, over 4000 miles away - a 33 year reunion? There was no way I could make it, and they didn’t really need me there because their original singer was back, cooler than ever.

I did love that experience. I wasn’t performing, I didn’t have to be polite or entertaining, just honest. It took a while to learn how to do that because I was raised on TV variety shows where the smiles were wide and the jokes all knee slappers. I never paid attention to or actively cultivated rock and roll emotions before that, because where would I have processed or shared them? It didn’t change the fact that if bad things happened, you just had to take ‘em and keep on going… the difference was that on that stage, you didn’t have to be happy about it. #meaningfulsigh.

My most favorite memories are hard to describe, but I remember the night we were invited to play a show for a deaf audience because we had been awarded (quite by accident), the loudest band in San Francisco at the time (an actual scientist verified it). That time we for no reason started playing “That’s The Way of The World” by Earth, Wind and Fire and went crowdsurfing. Recording in a real studio with an actual engineer for the first time and hearing what my voice sounded like channeled through money. Playing either the Roxy or the Whisky a Go Go in L.A. and singing while hanging upside down from the ceiling.

But mostly I loved rehearsals; right afterwards we’d eat budget spaghetti or curry and watch PBS shows. Being in this group didn’t make me cool, but I was a part of it - my utility made me cool adjacent, which was good enough for me, because I had the opportunity to tell thousands of strangers about questionable life decisions I’d made in a musical style I was heir to, but not exactly expected in.

And now there is Shaboozey, an African American country rock star with no asterix generating barely a raised eyebrow. I’m proud to be part of the prehistoric past of this future.

https://on.soundcloud.com/MCHveJEvUmyuyc989

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The 2024 Olympic mascots are Phrygian Caps that look like gnome hats…the ones you’d see if I suddenly said “Hey! Look up! Are those GNOMES across the street?” and you looked out your window and indeed saw mythical creatures only about a foot tall with little hats on. These would be the hats they were wearing.

As mascots, these hats are fully self-ambulatory, with eyes and mouths and so forth. They are triangular. I thought they were samosa.

We took a house vote as to whether they were disturbing: “…yes.” was the nearly unanimous answer.

I was the dissenting vote for two reasons. One, they are a symbol of French freedom and have been well designed to represent both the Olympic and Paralympic games. And two, they are better than the previous Olympic mascots, a rogue’s gallery of illustrated nightmare fuel.

https://olympics.com/en/olympic-games/olympic-mascots

I grew up in a world surrounded by mascots, but the animal-based ones ruled the day. There was no way to move through life without crossing into their domain.

NBC had a peacock. RCA/Magnavox an attentive dog. Sinclair’s dinosaur and Mobil’s pegasus loomed above us at gas stations, the Schlitz Malt Liquor bull and Budweiser horses lurked in our coolers, and the Energizer bunny was in everyone’s Walkman™.

There were some icons who seemed to carry tragic backstories which had set up their current situations:

• Charlie was a “pick me” tuna, trying again and again to be chosen by Starkist for processing -

• The Vlasic stork’s career had devolved to delivering pickles rather than babies -

• The Nestle Quik bunny had an unhealthy relationship with chocolate milk (“You can’t drink it slow if it’s Quik!”) which he deeply craved, but never found true satisfaction from -

• The Tootsie Roll owl exhibited a sadistic arrogance when asked how many licks it took to get the center of the pop (he finally bit it) -

This was not capitalism… these were animated cautionary nuggets every Saturday morning; creatures who, like Marketing Pokemon, were always in plain sight, sharing our world.

But there was one specific category of life that absolutely belonged to them.

While animal mascots were well represented in the food category - from the Taco Bell chihuahua to the Icee Bear - no meal was as well covered as breakfast. Most incredible was the range of species -

birds represented by Toucan Sam’s Fruit Loops and Sonny the Cuckoo Bird from Cocoa Puffs,

bearsby Super Sugar Crisp’s Sugar Bear (get that “Golden Crisp” outta here),

amphibians had the Sugar Smacks (which I still think is a total rip off of Sugar Crisp) frog,

and the King of The Breakfast Jungle, the big cat, was Tony the Tiger and his Frosted Flakes.

Combined with ice cold Borden’s milk from Elsie the Cow, you were all set. By the way, Elsie was married (I am not making this up) to Elmer the cow, who did not sell milk, but GLUE. Look at a bottle of Elmer’s Glue, even today, and there he is. That’s Elmer. That’s his glue. He MAKES it, apparently… I did not ask how because I didn’t want to know.

There are local favorites. Ours was a seal named Smaky who repped a regional hamburger chain named SMAKS. He was their “seal of approval”.

Maybe we’re all too sophisticated for this kind of thing now. Maybe we don’t need convincing by a bear to not set the forest on fire, or an owl to recycle (“Give a hoot! Don’t pollute!). Perhaps we as a species have grown and no longer require a hand-drawn kawaii menagerie to draw our attention.

Oh, wait. I forgot the elephant and the donkey. Yeah. Well.

At least they don’t talk.

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We are halfway through summer.

There is a heat advisory here today.

The same sun we seek on the weekend seems disdainful toward us at work, either mocking us with a “come out and play” bright blue sky through our office windows, or broiling the world right at lunchtime when we try to grab a bite to eat.

We expect heat in summer, but it’s been extremely hot in some places, the sort of heat that makes us sad when stepping outside. The sun is so bright and the air is so thick that if feels as if summer doesn’t like us at all, which is weird, because we were getting along so well at the beach, and it seemed like we were kind of vibing during that hike last Saturday.

Today, this summer is exactly halfway over. Next stop will be the autumn equinox, so today is the summeriest that summer gets.

It’s the beginning of the harvest season. I feel like I should do something significant to mark the day, something harvesty…but it’s hot.

Hmn.

Ok, i think I’ve got it.

I may not have a field full of corn, but I do have 55,000 unread emails.

Not at work, of course. At work, every email is precious, a diamond, a priceless treasure containing hidden information like on the back of the Declaration of Independence (allegedly).

No, I’m talking about my in-box at home. 55,000. Unread emails.

Let me explain that I do not have 55,000 friends, or acquaintances, or contacts, or even hairs left on my head. On the whole, these emails are absolutely not precious diamonds. A few are probably significant; within that pile are at least seven excellent coupon codes for things I shouldn’t buy, which is ok because they’ve probably long since expired…there may be one or two receipts for something that I should probably keep, just in case (for some reason).

55,000 emails. A vast and curious digital field of nonsense information. As I sit at my laptop, I imagine myself atop a digital tractor - like a farmer in TRON, squinting my eyes as I peer toward the horizon at this bumper crop, looking grizzled in my glowy glowy blue overalls.

It’s not just the season that makes my crop particularly bump this year, it is the year itself. Around this time, ‘bout every four years, political rainstorms soak the digital landscape, creating fertile ground for emails of a specific sort.

They used to be general run-of-the-mill requests for financial support, but then technology was employed that added your name to the subject lines. And then the subject lines became action movie cues:

“Only Two Hours Left!”

“It’s a RACE AGAINST TIME!”

“Everything is at stake!”

“Please read before midnight!”

Oh sure, unsubscribe, I hear you, but you cut down one and two more appear, like heads on a dangerous and imaginary hydra. I don’t even remember subscribing to most of these, I invited one person over and they told two friends who told two friends, and now my in-box is loaded to the top with freeloaders.

I faced a similar challenge trying to make a holiday playlist from our iTunes library; there are thousands of songs, but I just searched for specific keywords, like “snow” and “Christmas”, which worked out pretty well, with a few key exceptions (Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” always sneaks in there).

I tried to clear out the political ads in the same way, but only got about 10,000 of them. Continuing the TRON metaphor, I wiped the neon blue sweat from my digital brow. I was losing daylight.

In years past the clear winner in terms of bulk e-mail was Bed Bath and Beyond. At one point they were sending me two emails every single day. This marketing strategy did not ultimately work for their business.

Perhaps there is wisdom to be learned here, as these incessant election time requests for what essentially are handouts to strangers feel oddly pedestrian. Democracy as a Kickstarter campaign: the most powerful people in the most influential positions on the planet are essentially using the same techniques and technology as artists selling artisanal jigsaw puzzles.

50,000 unread emails. Even if it took only one second each, I’d spend over 16 hours going through all of them. So sure, I’ll GoFundYou, but on your way out could you jump on this bright blue tractor and thresh out about two acres or so of my hard drive?I sure would really appreciate that.

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Last weekend, my daughter and I navigated four cancelled flights due to weather to visit my Mom in Kansas City, which was a very nice treat. I played handyman, dabbling in plumbing and carpentry and wiring and computer programming. My daughter built a new affordable slow fashion aesthetic through carefully curated thrift store trips, and few extremely fortunate finds.

I was a bit of the third wheel here…useful to hold the selected items, yet always a few steps behind she and her grandmother. “What do you think of this?” she asked a great deal, and only once did I respond negatively, because children should never wear macrame, even in irony.

Each thrift store was more vast than the last - huge midwestern hangars with not-quite-bright-enough lighting and hundreds of clothes racks surrounded by books, toys, shoes, and for some reason always a section of vases. As we traveled from store to store, I related brief, unsolicited stories about my childhood, which became harder and harder to tell because so many of the places I remembered had disappeared, razed to the ground and replaced with chain stores.

Somewhere around here was a fancy mall with strangely accurate mid-century Spanish architecture that felt like an open air market in Barcelona that just happened to sell hot dogs and Orange Julius.

Oh. It’s that Lowe’s now.

The movie theatre hurt the most. The Glenwood. I actually saw my very first movie there, Oliver, when I was 4. We dressed in Sunday clothes because it was a fancy thing to go a movie house where they handed out programs. It is also where I saw Star Wars for the first (and second and third and maybe fifth) time. It was a glorious place with a grand chandelier and deep red carpets and a two story curtain that slowly parted to reveal the screen.

Wal-Mart didn’t even think about moving in to the old space; they just tore down everything to a parking lot level and built a giant big metal box.

Someone did save that chandelier, though.

The past is as slippery as soap in a rainstorm… even as we hold on to it, it’s melting. Where is that drive-in? that shopping mall? that record store? that airport? It’s weird taking your kid home and then having not a lot of what you remember there to show. No wonder we take so many pictures nowadays.

I have some photos of the apartment I grew up in, but not on purpose, mostly birthday cake blowing-out pictures or Easter Sunday clothes snaps. My mother moved into her current house when I left for college; it’s a wonderful place, definitely “home” now. But metaphorically, as well as logistically, we can’t go back to that original house.

My mother can’t visit her childhood house either, it was sold years ago. Same with where my wife grew up. And even my daughter can’t visit the first little flat where she lived, because the landlord finally made a deal with somebody that demo-ed it down to the studs and then gave it one of those modern featureless plasterboard makeovers with pre-fab hardwood floors and mid-level brushed brass fixtures.

My current mid-life wist-a-palloza is clearly the fault of the turtle.

As a child I was told that the turtle “carried its house on its back, living in the same one all their lives”. They clearly couldn’t invite anyone over, but there was an enviable consistency there. Bears lived in caves. Rabbits in holes. Now I am mature, having watched many a nature special – I understand what an exoskeleton is, and that bears don’t live in the same cave forever (they actually leave right after they hibernate and rarely come back), and that rabbits may live in many burrows in their lifetimes.

Come to think of it, a great deal of my early nature knowledge may have been based on cartoon animals. That same part of my brain has a clear memory of Aquaman speaking to seahorses.

I can’t go backwards looking for where I came from, I’m neither as energetic or delicious as a salmon. I’ve felt at home in quite a few places, and honestly, that gold shag carpeting in my childhood bedroom would not have retained its effortless grooviness 50 years later. Better to tell the stories, appreciate the where that was, and build new memories as we go along.

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If you attended American grade school you probably remember the blackboards, topped with long card stock banners depicting the alphabet in red letters as print and cursive, complete with little arrows explaining the best way to render each character. But just as ubiquitous was the bulletin board, usually filled with thematic collages depicting current holidays or collections of student work.

The boards at my school also sported a rotating roster of GOOD EXAMPLES, cardboard cutouts of American Heroes, the hard working folks we were supposed to STRIVE TO BE.

Abraham Lincoln. George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson.

Martin Luther King, George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman.

Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Neil Armstrong.

No matter who the featured icons were on this bulletin board, the title, in carefully cut out red construction paper letters, remained the same –

“Good Better Best: Never let it Rest, until your Good becomes Better, and your Better becomes Best.”

I mean, that’s a lot of pressure for six year olds, and the averages are crazy - it doesn’t take math into account at all. I’m incredibly lucky that my grade school made a clear distinction between personal best and outwardly competitive best; it was really motivating to try to do our best, to be the best we’d ever been, to best our last achievement. But to be THE best was a radical perversion of the idea, leading to a treadmill of competition against every other human being on the planet.

It’s Olympics time again.

The experience of being an Olympic level athlete must be incredible. I myself find it hard to imagine as my body type is very distant from that level of pliability, but I admire them greatly and watch absolutely in awe of the years of training which led to this moment.

At least once a year our grade school bulletin board had Sports Heroes. Jesse Owens made the list in fourth grade. (His story was a little confusing because we hadn’t learned a great deal about World War II yet; he ran the fastest and we won and the bad guys were super upset about it, something like that.)

Not every athlete can take home Olympic gold. Gold medal winners are inspiring, and will be used to motivate children around the world. But if you are from a country that doesn’t have a winner, whose photo do you put up? What if your nation’s hero came in fourth? - not a bad showing in a worldwide contest. Do you, as an trainer, speak of how hard they tried, how proud you nation should be?

The answer most likely is no, because as all the Jackson brothers besides Michael can tell you, there is no second place. You win, or you do not. Best is a singular title reserved for one person per genre. It’s the only thing you’re supposed to want, the One True Goal. Win or go home.

Except, maybe not straight home.

Last Olympics (or maybe the Olympics before) I heard an interesting story about Olympic Village and what happens after each event: while the medal recipients are whisked away to photo shoots and morning tv shows and product placement contracts, the “losers” come back to Olympic Village and become fans, just like us at home. Wiping tears of disappointment from their eyes, after a lifetime of careful eating, early bedtimes and far too early mornings, and limited contact with anyone not associated with either their home or gym, they find themselves surrounded by a Noah’s Arc of the most fit people in the world, with no real plans for the next couple of days.

Relieved of the responsibility of competition, they bond and mingle.

Now there’s a unique experience, an opportunity that may lean a bit toward bacchanalia, but truly creates an Olympic Village. What sort of conversations can you have with a table of people from around the world? The gold medal winners don’t get that.

Of course, America celebrates not only the top, but the bottom of scales as well, which is why “the worst” has become a distinction which some people also strive for, having faced the reality that they’ll never be the best at something, coupled with the comforting fact that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS BAD PRESS. Attention is measured in absolute value.

Alas, there is the middle, a wonderfully broad place, because there is only one best, and one worst, and if you don’t hold the distinction of being one of those you are guaranteed a comfy place right smack dab with everyone else. I’d love to be at a bar where those middle athletes go, drinking deeply and laughing loudly, no medals to insure, no endorsement legal issues to sort out.

No matter what we do, we are always the best at being ourselves. We always take home the Gold Medal in Us. Isn’t that nice?

Of course, due to the lack of participants in the category, we’re always the "worst" us, too. That’s just math.

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You would open the front door to find a party, with TV cameras and confetti, and a man holding a gigantic check with your name on it (for a lot of money). This was the dream in the ‘70s, your entire life enhanced beyond imagining, not because of a lottery ticket but the value rich and somewhat educational gift that you were smart enough to give your family - MAGAZINES.

Publisher’s Clearing House sent thick envelopes filled with magazine covers printed on colorful gummed stamps; you’d take the ones you want and stick them not to an order form, but to a SWEEPSTAKES ENTRY. Each subscription was only a few dollars, so the savings alone was a win, but there was always the chance that you’d be the lucky recipient of a Grand Prize. Hopefully they came by when you were dressed nice.

This all worked. We had tons of magazines around the house that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to afford. I read Time and OMNI and Reader’s Digest (they didn’t offer TV Guide). My grandmother had Good Housekeeping and Redbook and Better Homes and Gardens. If magazines could transform any drab coffee table into a splendiferous buffet of color and shine, what else could they do? Besides, y’know, make you a millionaire?

Now, I get a hundred titles free digitally with my iCloud subscription. Yet I used to pass the magazines each week as they lurk by the checkout stands in the grocery store, and the desire to have a physical copy still haunted me.

It was lockdown, I was younger and foolhardy and ready to be a more cultured type of person. I had just started writing more and wanted something to inspire me, and what better than a subscription to the Holy Grail of American Letters, delivered every week?

It was kind of expensive, but one of those “the first year is just, like, super cheap but since we have your credit card information we don’t want to bother you for year two renewal and we’ll just charge you automatically - ohbytheway its 300% more (is that ok?)” kind of arrangements. But I went for it anyway.

I quip. I do. Many are the afternoons when a sharpish jape escapes my lips, bringing a sly smile to the face of a colleague. I might even jest occasionally, when feeling a measure rowdy. I would have loved to spend my afternoons at a big round table with a collection of my era’s finest wits, liquid lunching until cocktail hour. But, I’d gain a lot of weight, and it’s too hot outside - it’s important to remain hydrated, you know. I’m not built for all that.

Anyway. I’m letting my New Yorker subscription lapse.

They’re stacking up all over the place. I can never “catch up”… it’s like tangible unread e-mail that keeps multiplying, like Tribbles.

I find them everywhere now, in every room of the house, yet feel impossibly guilty picking one up and only reading the cartoons (“I swear I get this magazine for the articles”) .

I tried taking one with me to work everyday and reading it on the subway. I felt distinctly throwback holding Physical Paper…but I had my lunchbag in my other hand so page turning proved perilous and unattractive, as my most effective means was to bite the top right corner and hold it in my mouth while twisting the folded issue clockwise in my fist.

And then we were all wearing masks, so even that was impossible.

I am seven, standing in our little living room in front of the fireplace, looking up at the wall with poems decoupaged onto wooden blocks my mother had hand stained and painted. She had used a lovely shade of powder blue paper for the poems, and the decoupage brush left a texture of thin, deep lines like grooves in a giant record.

That was where I stood when I told her “I want to be an author. I want to write books for people to read.” and she told me that would be a good thing to be, you can make a lot of people happy that way, and you could write about all kinds of things. She never mentioned the New Yorker, or any part of the labyrinthine submission process to get published. She probably just wanted to keep my spirits up, at least until my age hit double digits.

It was aspirational to buy the New Yorker: cool things I couldn’t afford to do with people I couldn’t afford to know. And none of the fiction seemed to extol the banality I adore - everything was so grown-up. But as I weighed the time to go through an issue versus attacking the unsteady stack of books on my bedside table (cummings, Dickinson, O Henry, Connections by James Burke, three issues of Love and Rockets comics and a DVD of Smokey and the Bandit (whoops - how did that get there?) I realized that while I adore the magazine itself, I am probably not a New Yorker reader.

I am a New Yorker now, having lived in Brooklyn for over 20 years. The noise and crowds and hustle and drive - I can navigate chaos just fine. But I’m not sure how well I would do on a sailboat in white shorts with a long drink and sunglasses on. Where are we sailing? Will these speakers Bluetooth to my phone so I can blast some Queens of the Stone Age? Is there any shade on this thing? It’s not my lifestyle. Give me Prospect Park instead; loads of Quinceaneras and picnics and dogs and ice cream carts.

It’s not the impeccable quality of their editorial choices; legends, heroes and national treasures have penned words for them, but I’m spending the time I should be reading the magazine writing now, and I guess that was the point of subscribing in the first place, and I still have the digital subscription.

Though the cartoons are really teensy on my phone.

Jd Michaels lives in Brooklyn. His writing has not appeared in the New Yorker, Redbook, or Good Housekeeping.

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My mother and her husband wanted us to see a fireworks display. We’d only been married maybe a year, and it was our first Independence Day together in Kansas City. My wife is from Northern California and admitted that 4th of July seemed bigger and louder in the midwest, what with all of the legal explosives and whatnot.

There were more than 20 displays scheduled in the metro area - we went to the closest, which happened to be in the parking lot up by the HyperMart (a gigantic WalMart with a full grocery store attached) over by Benjamin Stables, which was, well, a horse stable. (I think they took the horses away for this week).

It was only eight minutes away by car, and there wasn’t a line or anything because there was plenty of parking, since the parking lot was also attached to the local mall on its other side.

Anyway, when we got there my Mom’s husband parked the car, but left it running so the air conditioning would still work. And there we sat.

Awkward Silence #1.

“Are we here?” my wife asked.

“Yep.” he told her.

Awkward Silences #2 and #3

“Are they going to turn the lights out?” she asked. It was true: the orange lights in the parking lot were fully ablaze, each aluminum stalk sprouting tiny twin suns.

“Nope.” he responded, a true “man of few words”.

Awkward Silence #4

“…ok” she responded, and opened the door to the car.

“What are you doing?” my mother asked.

“I’m getting out to look at the fireworks.”

“Why?” Mom asked. “You can see them right there!”

“Where?”

“Through the windshield. They’re going to be right there.”

We were both in the back seat; we sklunked down as far as we could to look ahead of us between the seats to see this blank space where she said the fireworks would be.

“Mom,” I interjected, “this is a little oppressive; it isn’t even as big as a tv set from back here. We’re getting out of the car to look at them in the sky, the way a human being might.”

My mother was befuddled. “We didn’t get dressed to get out of the car.”

I opened my door. “Then you stay here. We’ll be right outside. Y’know, with the sky.”

“And the fireworks.” my wife added.

We stepped out into a tailgate festival. There were lawn chairs and coolers and babies running around with bare feet and conflicting styles of music from car radios. No one else seemed to have gotten dressed for getting out of their car either, yet were in no way pressured by social guidelines and were having an excellent time.

The car next to us had fully set up a mock backyard in the empty parking space next to them, with a tiny barbecue (definitely against some municipal code) three deluxe folding lawn chairs with those plastic weave ribbon seats, a boom box radio and a cooler filled with both beer and juice boxes.

One of their daughters, maybe four years old, was dancing around in a tight circle, singing a song she had made up, which went

Happy Fourth of July!

Happy Fourth of July! July! July! July!

Happy Fourth of July!

And then the fireworks started, right where my mother said they would, loud as everything.

And eventually my mother and her husband did get out of the car.

The display was gigantic, so low in the sky that it seemed only 50 feet away (definitely against a municipal code). But what we remember best is that little girl, who must be 30 years old now; dancing and laughing and singing her song as her parents chaise-lounged in the twinkling glow of Freedom, ringing.

My daughter now knows that song. We sing it every year. It is the song of the Fourth of July, an established fact, a fixed point in our family timeline. The glee of that little kid has echoed decades forward, sustained us on rainy 4ths, emboldened disappointing picnics and fireworks displays. Sometimes we sing it other days too.

The summer of lockdown many of our Brooklyn neighbors apparently took day trips to either Connecticut or Pennsylvania to fill their cars with professional grade fireworks. On that Fourth that July, our fourth floor windows were blazing with charge after charge of the Really Large Explosives (again, municipal code) which decorated the air right outside. Like, directly outside.

It was the best fireworks display we had ever seen; as close as we could get to being inside a fireworks display. Along with “ooo!”s and “ah!”s there were a couple of “WHOA!”s, but that made it extra exciting. In the impromptu video we took of the event, you can hear us all singing “Happy Fourth of July, July, July, July!”.

It doesn’t take much to make a holiday special, just family and tradition. And, ok, maybe a blatant disregard of municipal codes.

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the storm rolls in, like a boulder, like a freight train, and then there is the briefest of silences, when the air is still and warm and heavy

then a drop. then another. then rain, which is different from a storm, we think, because rain is just water falling from the sky, all friendly-like

but then the drops somehow get bigger, each of them a separate splash of liquid fireworks on the rapidly darkening sidewalk

the wind picks up – suddenly howls

then lightning

+

two (1000)

three (1000)

four (1000)

fi-

thunder.

that’s when we put on our Hunter boots, because you never know how long it’s going to last (on our phones it’s just a little orange patch in the middle of a big blue patch on the weather app radar)

we never take an umbrella because the point is to walk in the storm, be a part of it; to shiver when it all first hits us, then dash back and forth down the block and back

(in any given season there are 40 million annual lightning strikes in the USA. that’s 40 million thunderclaps, but because of where we live, we only hear maybe 40 of those a year

so we get out, at least once every summer, for the surround sound full spectrum immersive high fidelity live sonic experience. maybe eight minutes. or longer

if it’s during the day, we clean leaves from drains and wave to those huddled in doorways / under awnings…

if it’s after dark, there is dancing and stomping and wild waving of arms

who is that family out dancing in the rain? Oh, they’re the ones from the fourth floor, who still dress up for Halloween

there’s magic in a thunderstorm

and when we’re out in it, part of that magic is us

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By the time you read this, it will be summer.

The solstice will have occurred, one of the two times each year the sun seems to stand still in the sky for a moment before continuing its orbital motion.

Target™, in its trademark spirit of nearly intolerable seasonal anticipation, having been outfitted with inflatable beachballs since late March, will today begin shifting its display towards “Back to School” (if not Halloween).

There will not be a “warm” day again until autumn… days will either be “really hot”, “kind of hot” or “not as hot as yesterday”.

As it is now summertime, I have instantly gained five pounds.

Being originally from the Midwest, my personal physics do not recognize the need for a svelte summer shape. I hail from the center of the continent, far from the oceans, where “beach bodies” are entirely unnecessary.

There is no midwestern equivalent to a “beach body” – there is not a “lake body” or “pool body” (unless you're the first detective on the scene in a television show).

As midwestern summers were always very hot, I tended to move less frequently than during the school year. I also drank more soda, because I was “on vacation” at home, without the luxury of public school air conditioning, and it was important that I remain hydrated. Thus, I actually could gain weight during the summer months. When I was old enough, I got a summer job dancing at the amusement park, which should have helped exercise-wise but was still troublesome due to the theatre’s generous breaks between showtimes and proximity to a Haagen-Daz ice cream cart.

If I do need to remove a t-shirt for any reason during the next 90 days, I will, like everyone else, gird my abdominal muscles continually to fashion a physique I have titled “The 1 Pack”. I will then endure the searing pain of my cramped yet presentable midriff until I can get into the water or back in the car or behind a significant tree, to once again breathe freely.

1958: The Jamies, a sister and brother band from Boston, release what would be their biggest hit,

“It’s summertime, summertime, sum, sum, summertime…”

For the late 1950’s, the lyrics are rebellious, flippant, daring. The song is a madrigal that doesn’t suspect it is secretly a punk anthem, an early precursor to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” or Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” that became synonymous with the season, played on every AM station on the first day of summer for decades.

I cannot help but sing it myself every year. It is a summer Christmas carol.

Summer is now in full effect.

People are in mall parking lots, pausing after they open the doors to their car in order to “let the heat out”. Refrigerator doors are also being held open a few seconds longer, as owners languish in the sudden wave of delicious coolness. Coffee now requires a straw.

Days are long, nights are short, movies are blockbustery, and we forgot sunscreen again! We’ll have to pick some up at the drugstore on the way.

Suddenly, a Big Gulp™ seems like a perfectly logical amount of potable liquid. It’s sum sum summertime.

Summertime, Summertime

Song by Thomas Earl Jameson

It's summertime, summertime, sum-sum-summertimeSummertime, summertime, sum-sum-summertimeSummertime, summertime, sum-sum-summertimeSummertime, summertime, sum-sum-summertimeSummertime

Well, shut them books and throw 'em awayAnd say goodbye to dull school daysLook alive and change your waysIt's summertime

Well, no more studying historyAnd no more reading geographyAnd no more dull geometryBecause it's summertime

It's time to head straight for them hillsIt's time to live and have some thrillsCome along and have a ballA regular free-for-all

Well, are you comin' or are you ain't?You slow pokes are my one complaintHurry up before I faintIt's summertime

Well, I'm so happy that I could flipOh, how I'd love to take a tripI'm sorry, teacher, but zip your lipBecause it's summertime

It's time to head straight for them hillsIt's time to live and have some thrillsCome along and have a ballA regular free-for-all

Well, we'll go swimmin' every dayNo time to work, just time to playIf your folks complain, just say"It's summertime"

And every night, we'll have a dance'Cause what's a vacation without romance?Oh, man, this jive gets me in a tranceBecause it's summertime

It's time to head straight for them hillsIt's time to live and have some thrills

Come along and have a ballA regular free-for-allIt's summertimeIt's summertime, summertime, sum-sum-summertimeSummertime.

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I am a responsible adult. I am an example to the child person that lives in my house, and exemplify as many mature traits as possible each day. I try to be kind, work hard, listen, learn: I attempt not to “whine” and to eat all my vegetables and don’t slouch (except on the couch, because that’s the way to sit on the couch).

It’s a struggle, not leaning into being a kid myself. For instance, I really love cornflakes – not just in the morning but for a snack or dessert or… y’know anytime, and because I am a responsible adult I can have cereal anytime I want, just like I dreamed of when I was a kid. It’s not like it’s Froot Loops or Apple Jacks or anything (delicious) like that… it’s corn flakes, American, born of simplicity and very questionable ethics, a product made pure again by the addition of sugar frosting and the distraction of a cartoon tiger. And mine aren’t even the frosted ones, they’re organic.

So, y’know, I’m a grownup. Eating grown up food. (I’m not like a kid at all.)

As a parent, I do have a few traits that may merit revision, dad-wise. Three of them (and it’s not like there’s a lot of them, just…more than three) have to do with my socks.

I am listing these as a public confession and to encourage myself to evolve past these items to become a better role model.

• The Flopsatoe [ˈflop ˈsɑ ˈtoʊ]: where I sit on the couch (well, slouch) during a film or a particularly exciting show and hold down the toe of one sock with the other foot, then slide the foot out of the sock just about an inch. Then I do that for the other foot. In a little while, this repeats, then again, until the front of each sock resembles those tall wind balloons at car dealerships (deflated). When the sock is all the way off the foot, the game is over, and the sock is officially “out of play”, which means I forget about it until someone (or one of two people) say “Pick up your socks!!” Frequency: nearly daily.

• They don’t always match. The socks. I am lucky enough to have been gifted a fantastic array of colorful and themed hosiery, each so distinctive from the others as to make pairing unmistakable…and yet, there were times when I chose two yellow ones, and they were not the same yellow ones, or two bluish purple ones with words and stars, and then that devolved to wearing a Monty Python themed sock on one foot and a Beatles Yellow Submarine sock on the other because they were both British so they matched in geographical spirit. My daughter has given up entirely on matching socks, and I had the nerve to justify my own behavior because she was doing it, so now it was a “family thing”. My wife shook her head, slowly, from side to side, in that way she shakes her head slowly from side to side.

• Many of my favorite socks have holes in them. Again, I have a unique collection of annual gifted socks in comforting subjects and patterns which are now part of my coping mechanism™. They are hard to let go. I am not an animal. Any hole which exposes a toe crosses the line – toes stuck in holes in socks stuck in shoes makes an unpleasant day. Most holes are on the heels: light pomice abrasion has been suggested and employed to no clear benefit, so a strict guideline of no holes larger than a two pence coin has been placed in effect. Two or more holes on the same sock is right out. Because I am a responsible adult, the socks do not just disappear when Z does laundry; instead it is my duty to place the socks, threadbare and spent, in the rubbish bin - the “sock farm up north where they can… run free”. Sniff. Sniff sniff. (The way to fix a hole in a sock is to darn it. I can mend clothes, but I’ve only actually darned a sweater, and it was quite a process.)

So, in order to evolve further as a responsible parental figure, I will (attempt to remember) from this day forward to

pick up my socks from in front of the couch,

wear matching socks (at least when I have an important meeting),

and in tribute to all socks past, teach my daughter to darn, which doesn’t seem like a Dad thing really – I’m sure I should be teaching things like hammers and football and sawing and beer, but there’s plenty of time for that.

Anyway, I’m more of a drum and bass, badminton, soldering, martini dad.

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Every weekday afternoonat 3 o’clockthe day becomes so

heavy

though its balance is far past the tipping pointthe last few hourslooming aheadare somewhat overwhelming and I just get so

tired.

I make a cup of caffeine free teawhich perks me up becausethe water is just fartoo hot

then back to work withwistful sighs forsimpler times whencomplex afternoonswere met with mats and window shades.

I miss napsso much morethan i miss youth(which was exhausting)every dayat 3 o’clockwe’d all lay downand close our eyesfor just a minute

maybe 20

did we appreciate this?no.we didn’twe were foolish childrenunawareunable to anticipatethe wearinessof every dayas grown-ups

and we wasted so muchtime we could haveclosed our eyes– for just a minute.

I’ve never enjoyed sleepingall that muchsleep’s not that into memy mind transformsinto a loudunconscious sketchpadworking out the day ahead

but napswell nestled in the chaoswere a keen respitefrom conscious mayhem

and when you woke upthere was juicefrom plastic jugswith colors neon brightin paper cupsa liquid sweetness never matchedby the finest winesavailable to humanity

I never liked the cookiesthey were always dryunsatisfyingcookies should be warm

but the juice and naps were golden

that’s what I am thinking ofeach weekday afternoonbehind my deskwith too hot tea

at 3 o’clock.

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Last summer, when visiting my mother, we discovered that all the ice from her refrigerator seemed to be made of epsom salt. She had gotten used to this, living her life with the understanding that during hotter months of the year all sodas and juices would taste like they were mixed with a spicy turkey gravy, but we immediately discarded all her old ice trays and sent her several replacements.

I never realized that there were so many new variations on the idea of an ice cube tray. My grandparents had fancy metal trays, requiring herculean strength to pull a frozen lever and crack apart individual pieces. We’d always had blue stackable trays made of a material that eventually became as brittle as potato chips. Now there was an endless selection online, including “perma-ice”: little plastic cubes filled with water that one could freeze, use, and then freeze again. From the few we ordered my mother was able to choose the one she liked the best, but we suspected that my mother was still not in possession of the best ice cube tray in the world.

Yesterday the New York Times published its list of the best ice cube trays in the world. https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/the-best-ice-cube-tray/ The winner was surprisingly traditional, a plastic durable number guaranteed not to crack under repeated use with a sliding lid for easy stacking and prevention of the bad tastes attributed to “freezer burn”.

I immediately sent one to my mother, and got one for us as well, because it’s that time of year where there don’t seem to be enough ice trays.

I appreciate the national holiday, but it isn’t quite summer yet: kids still in school, a lot of rain in the forecast, but we’re getting close. When it is hot, it’s really hot. Iced coffee is beginning to sound like a good idea. The grocery store has a sale on those frozen juice popsicles in the long plastic sleeves. The air conditioning just kicked on at work, but we’re still getting good use out of our office sweaters because they haven’t adjusted it yet.

And back at home, we just keep running out of ice. We currently have four trays that make little ice squares and one that makes very large ones. Iced coffee in the morning is half a tray. We mostly drink water and my daughter isn’t really an ice person, so maybe at a meal we’ll use a tray or so, which is fine during the week, but on weekends we go through them quicker. It’s getting a little tense.

Again, it isn’t quite summer …we’re not using the snow cone machine that I bought at the Bed Bath and Beyond closing sale yet, and we have some metal insulated drinkware (not the popular ones) so drinks stay colder for longer. Still, in the last few weeks I’ve repeatedly had to go to the back of the freezer for the Last Ice Tray.

Because all of the others are empty. Cold as can be, but dry as the arctic ice shelf itself.

Our personal supply of frozen water is easily renewable, as the faucet is only six feet from the refrigerator. But unlike the mindless tasks of taking out the trash or changing a bathroom tissue roll, filling the ice cube trays is a delicate zen exercise.

the tray rests uncomfortably on the hands

cold permeates the fingers

water slowly fills the trays as one decides whether to fill vertically or horizontally, tips left and then right

the level of each well is considered individually, and then as a community

then begins the forcibly slow aqua-monk contemplative path back to the freezer

water must not spill

as the tray is replaced in the freezer with a light-as-a-feather touch

Who has time for all of that?

Our lives move so fast, and there’s nothing else in the house we have to wait for anymore. It used to be that a television took a while to warm up – same with the car, or the water in the shower, but now technology has created little need for heat related patience. Even my teapot boils within three minutes. I guess it’s easy to make things hot…

…but ice still takes time, it cannot be rushed; even in its basest form it is somewhat artisanal. It is made not merely of water, but of time itself.

And so I have embraced the ten seconds it takes to transport water-filled ice trays from the kitchen sink to the freezer as a daily meditation. In part, to find more opportunities to ground and center myself in this confusing and dynamic world, but also because nobody else likes to fill the ice trays.

On my daily journey, I mostly think about ice.

— Currently the world’s largest iceberg is A23a, a frozen sheet nearly 1500 square miles wide weighing half a trillion tons, double the size of Los Angeles and five times that of New York City.

Step,

— How lucky is it that Steve Rogers was chosen to be Captain America? If you just chose a random guy from 1945 and woke him up again in 2011, I think he’d have a harder time adjusting. Of course, Steve is from Brooklyn.

step,

— When most kids were learning how to play basketball, our grade school taught us to ice skate, which I didn’t fully appreciate at the time but should have kept up with as there are very few African American figure skaters and I might have scored a Wheaties™ box. #DebiThomas

step,

— Vanilla Ice, the performer, is on tour this summer. His real name is Matthew Van Winkle. I had always assumed that Van Winkle was a made up name from Washington Irving’s story, but now I guess there’s a family of Cinderellas out there.

and I gently close the freezer door.

How this humble task will be appreciated on many blazing hot afternoons in the near future! And today, lo, the best ice tray in the world will arrive at our door… who knows what magic it will create? of what frosty miracles it is capable? how much colder our cold water can be? Also, I should have checked how big it is, because it’s probably not going to fit in our freezer with all those popsicles in there.

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Last weekend our family learned how to silkscreen on fabric, a new skill initiated by a school project my daughter was finishing. It turned out the assignment did not actually require her to silkscreen or sew anything, just turn in a sketch of a fashion design, but she felt that the extra effort would really illustrate her artistic point. We didn’t know that until after she’d already “turned it in”.

So now we all know how to silkscreen. We have silkscreen tools and little bottles of silkscreening stuff. This will be our Silkscreen Summer, where old clothes will be revitalized with color and whimsy. We have a great deal of creative interests, from beading to photography to painting… we’ve made our own gin (the grown-ups), our own salad dressing (the little one) and are working on our DJ sets.

The various items necessary to engage in these pursuits are all tucked away in the “art corner”, which has expanded like dandelions throughout every room of the house. Look, over there is a harp and a telescope… and over that way, a box of air-dry clay and a theremin.

A hobby is defined as what we do in our spare time for fun.It was an accountant that first called our art a “hobby”, over 20 years ago.

“Is this the primary source of your income?” he asked. No, no it wasn’t. “Are you known for this talent professionally?” No, no I wasn’t. “Well then, according to the U.S. government, this music and art pursuit is officially a “hobby”.

I must have looked somewhat crestfallen, because he added, “You don’t want to make your money like that anyway… if you enjoy it it doesn’t matter. You have health insurance and a 401k, you can’t get that in music most places. You want to have a family someday? Keep your benefits.” He gave me what was supposed to be a reassuring, adult kind of smile.

“You can always do art on the side.”

The phrase “side hustle”, giving alternative pursuits a gritty authenticity, had yet to be invented. Back then, “on the side” was a shallow bowl of peas at a meal, three tablespoons of ranch dressing in a tiny ramekin with your iceberg lettuce wedge, and hobbies took place in basements; grown adults hunched over model airplanes or ham radios. To be a hobbiest meant that you weren’t serious about whatever you were learning, it was all “just for fun”.

I’ve never felt that way about art. Is it fun? Yeah, I guess so, but it’s also work and at least a little bit discipline. I’ve worked as a professional artist, but I believed that to be a true musician meant a noble, simple life like that of a rock and roll monk, sleeping on couches by day and living on stage, beer, and bar nuts at night. Playing guitar in my rent-paid apartment, fully fed with clean socks on all the time was a flagrant display of my lack of true dedication.

Of course now everyone is a hyphenate. You’re a regional account manager? “Well, during the day, but I coach my daughter’s soccer team and we’ve got a little craft beer thing going.” We all expanded our resumes during lockdown, readily admitting that we baked, or wrote stories, or played an instrument… and somehow the lack of outside realities made us realize that in some fashion we were actually bakers, or writers, or musicians. Those identities followed us back into the world of necessity and fiscal responsibility, an expansion of not only what we could do but of who we each were.

Art is not a “hobby”! Goodness! Pearls can’t be clutched fast enough in protest of that opinion. We have worked many long hours in established businesses to self-fund our artistic pursuits, and though we are not free living vagabonds, we fit as much creativity as we can during hours we all should be sleeping or in my case doing some sit-ups.

Saying art is a hobby is like saying love is a hobby. Shocking! Find more pearls!

I am a hobbyist when it comes to magic tricks - I’ve collected many books and have a disturbing amount of playing cards in a large-enough-to-be-worried-about-me sized box under my bed, but I never want to professionally perform magic. That’s a hobby.

I recently completed another piece of the 6 movement ballet I have been working on, in 22 different computer programs, for more than 30 years. It was a sound that I held in my head for over three decades, something I heard clear as day, but could never share with anyone. As a kid, all these tunes were the definition of Impossible; I might learn how to play the guitar but would never stand in front of the London Symphony Orchestra.

But the world changed in ways I didn’t anticipate, and now there are full orchestras inside my computer, and those musical scores that I transferred from paper through generations of notation programs, over and over again, can actually come to life.

That’s not a hobby. That feeling of joy and wonder and accomplishment? It’s mirrored the world over by everyone who pulls a perfect pie out of the oven, or completes the race, or finishes cutting the lawn, everyone who drops their kid off at grade school or at the college dorms, everyone who hits a goal or doesn’t give up on a plan… what we love is every bit as important as what we have to do.

Living should be what we do in our spare time for fun, and your life, no matter what the world tells you, is not a side hustle.

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Tis the season for flat hats and thin colorful gowns, balloons and flowers and relatives and sold out lunch reservations at family restaurants. Graduation. Streets filled with flocks of Jedi knights, all smiling somewhat nervously, making sure everybody’s together on the subway platform, a look on their faces of specific sweet relief topped with an overwhelming scoop of “what’s next?”.

I am not a doctor or lawyer, so I haven’t seen my diploma in forever. It was comforting having those levels of experience laid out for me, like steps to climb, chapters in a book I was holding. Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Senior. My diploma was like being handed a new blank book, with a nice sharp pencil and a hearty handshake. It’s a written receipt of hard work, but wasn’t really the golden ticket / coupon I’d imagined…more of a “well I guess if I made it through that, I can do other stuff” kind of token.

Yellow belt, green belt, black belt. Minor to major league. Lieutenant to captain to sergeant. VP to C-Suite. Little maps that chart ones progress through a pursuit or career.

I’ve done stuff. Honestly. But I didn’t really follow a path, so I don’t have many universally recognized milestones to commemorate what I’ve learned. The Old School doesn’t give out diplomas, nor does the School of Hard Knocks (though I would LOVE to be at that commencement ceremony… all pageboy hats and cigarettes). I recently looked at my resume and it seemed a superfluous travelogue, listing exhausting necessities rather than cool things I’d learned how to do.

It is important to mark one’s progression through time. This marks the beginning of the third year of this column, my cotton anniversary. I really wanted to make a t-shirt or maybe a hat. Maybe this weekend. In any case, the next anniversary is leather, so I better get serious this year if I want to earn that crash weight motorcycle jacket next May. Which I will, like, totally deserve.

This week I’d like to finish something that’s been bugging me a bit: I never recorded the first essay that I posted, kind of a precursor to the actual series, a commissioned essay for a London based creative award center answering their question “why does black creative matter?” I enjoyed writing it so much that I thought I might do a little more writing and here we are, 104 weeks later. So with your indulgence I will repeat that essay here, which strangely still rings true, particularly with a new season of my favorite tv hero show having just premiered.

Thank you for your time,

and welcome to a new year.

Why Black Creative Matters.

One: As an African American artist, raised in the American Midwest (Kansas City), graduate of an Ivy League institution, and lucky enough to work for some of the most powerful advertising agencies on the planet, I would like to use this space to formally agree with the statement that “black creative matters”.

I have served as a key creative engineer on internationally award winning projects, I’ve worked with young people of every color to train and inspire them to continue to follow their creative drive, and I’ve served with industry icons on teams of cultural leadership. I’d like to think that my 25 year career served a purpose, moved a needle forward, created moments of quality and integrity in both a general sense and, admittedly, a more self-serving one, as it would bring me great comfort to think, on any level, that “I Matter”.

Two: If I, in an alternate universe, was for some reason NOT an African American artist, how much of the first paragraph would I have thought to include? The “Midwest” is a corn-fed wholesome image displaying an inherent rural identity which may better mellow one’s mass communication efforts once embedded in Big City Advertising, yet the additional fact that I am a Black Man adds a soupçon of survival to this image, as magnified by this nation’s recent and very public unpleasantness.

A similar edge is added to the Yale degree, as those attending represent a minority of students in America, and Bln acks serve as a much further minority of that. I might have used the word “producer” instead of more granularly explaining my role in successes where others may seek to claim ownership (if not practical responsibility), and I would certainly have not pointed out that I worked with young people of “every color” if I was not myself a minority.

The first paragraph is indeed a product of a “black creative”, as the tone of its content is very much focused through the realities and circumstances of my being African American. As much as I have always wanted to be seen as creative first, when creating, being Black does matter.

Three: At this point I believe it only fair to bring up Doctor Who.

If you have read this far, I thank you, and offer the following fact as a Prosecco between courses. I was not allowed as a boy to safety-pin a towel around my neck and pretend to be a super-hero for many reasons, the primary one being that my mother feared accidental suffocation - just after that was the fact that we did not have the lifestyle which afforded us “play towels”. I did, however, possess a very long scarf given to me by my grand aunt, who found it at a Salvation Army store (in July) and thought that I would enjoy “playing with it” (#eccentricaunts). As luck would have it, that exact summer I discovered Doctor Who, portrayed at that time by Tom Baker, and decided immediately that this was My Hero.

The show was on the educational television station (which reassured my mother, a public school teacher of gifted students) and everyone onscreen spoke in British accents, raising the perceived value of all dialogue well beyond that of any “Saturday morning cartoon”.

Now, at 54, I sport a Tardis tattoo the size of a Penguin Classic (along with my more subtle Ravenclaw offering) and have passed my love of the show to my 9 year old daughter, who asked me where all the Black people were in “my day” in “all of time and space”. I had to admit to her that I did not know, but always assumed we would run into a character exhibiting a Pantone greater than 3000 eventually, it was just math, and it had never really mattered to me as a child.

Four: I tell you that in order to more easily tell you this; I have never had the pleasure of meeting another 54 year old midwestern African American Doctor Who / Python fan… it seems odd to reduce all that complexity to the one word “Black”. “Black” is far too general to be used in its traditional manner when describing human beings; whose personal experience may be quite incongruous from others in their own age group or geographic origin.

However, “Black” is VERY useful when employed as a label indicating a uniform inequity visited upon individuals not able to hide a specific social distinction which both lowers their status and raises their odds. One knows that one is definitely BLACK once they have been treated “as a black person”, and the fact that many of you have read to this part of the sentence means that your brain did not skid to an immediate halt at the phrase “treated ‘as a black person’” because you had a general understanding of what I meant by that - and when a clear metaphor for Aggressive Unfairness contains the word that most people use to define What You Look Like, well… that matters.

We are, every one of us, unique, but in certain places in America a group of us, no matter how divergent, will be treated exactly the same, before we can speak, because we are black, which may be why your Colleague of Color takes that one extra breath before each client presentation.

Five: I am a Black Creative. I have never been any other type of creative, I can never BE any other type of creative; yet I acknowledge that this distinction holds an ability to authentically tell stories which others cannot tell, including a nearly subterranean dread when considering any temporal trip backward. I greatly respect this opportunity to reach beyond all surface definition, beyond race itself, and perform the specific science of emotional connection that art represents, for when stories are told of those who, against the very Laws of Their Land, survived long enough to engineer justice, success, wealth, influence, and innovation which in turn benefited That Same Land, the specifics of their heroic nature emotionally connect to the similarities of spirit within the observer.

Creative work that is ABOUT Black People, or indeed about ANY people exhibiting honor among anger, dignity within abuse, or focus beyond oppression can directly connect those who may see no similarity on their out-sides by magnifying key harmonies within. To best tell those stories you need people who have lived that life.

And in this fashion I understand how much Black Creativity Matters; as the inescapable aspects of my own identity have required courage, keen navigation, and habitual perseverance, my experiences mirror positive aspects within every human being on this planet, no matter their color. I'd like to consider my creativity a beacon of human recognition beyond what we each look like, to the best of who we are.

And I’d also like a TARDIS.

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The seven deadly sins get all the attention. They are the high school “bad kids” at the loudest lunchroom table, all switchblades and cigarettes, roaming life’s hallways like they own the place. The seven heavenly virtues are off studying at the library: prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude, faith, hope, and charity: also a very impressive group, who do a lot of volunteer work that will look great on their college applications, but in my opinion are missing one critical member.

In all of human experience there is no more powerful alignment than gratitude.

To be grateful is to maintain perspective while keeping an open heart; it is, at its most powerful, chaos tamed by context. Nothing as crass as “well, at least I’ve got this” or “I guess it could always be worse”: gratitude is a state of mind where one acknowledges the random non-structure of life and recognizes the absolute miracle in anything happening at all.

In recent weeks I’ve been particularly supported by those closest to me, people who have listened and counseled and listened some more. I have also experienced the luxury of having complete strangers look in after me, which always seems incredible, like those times someone returns a lost wallet with all the money still in it. I’ve lived in an aura of gratitude, which extends to you, as this this marks two years of writing a “weekly humor column”, and for some of you many months of reading it. Thank you. Time is super precious and I very much respect yours.

I’m giving myself a bit of a breath this week, so I still have enough to blow out the candle on the two year cake. I live in a 4th floor walkup, so I’m gonna need a minute.

———

This year was a bit of a cornucopia topic-wise. If you’re new to the column, may I suggest this tale of mutual dignity:

or this study of youthful creativity:

or this hand drawn map to middle age:

Over 100 columns. Who’da thunk it? And no, of course I have no idea what I’m doing next year, but I will be continuing in some fashion. I should probably get on that, planning wise, since next year is essentially next week. Yikes. Perhaps a sea shanty, just to start things off. Or maybe a treatise on the taste of baby aspirin. Something relatable.

This weekend is packed; the Eurovision song contest, Mother’s Day, a new season of Doctor Who… there will be opportunities to create new things and stand with new friends and enjoy new experiences. I’m super excited about the weekend, but that does not mean I’m disappointed about today. Today I got up and fed the cats, had a bowl of corn flakes with my family, went to work, got some stuff done. I got to take a little walk at lunchtime, and drank enough water, and wore one of the shirts that makes me look less like a chocolate marshmallow. This weekend will be a celebration of many things, but today, today happened. I appreciate that. And I very much appreciate you.

Thank you for your time, and see you next year.

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I was never allowed to go boneless. I must’ve tried, once, but it wasn’t a viable option for negotiation. If you’re confused, boneless is that thing little kids do in the grocery store where they go incredibly limp, instantly doubling their body weight like a leaden water balloon supported only by a parents’ grip on their somehow-always-sticky hand.

The boneless tactic is usually employed as a last ditch effort bargaining chip to either obtain something or avoid doing something. I wasn’t allowed to do anything like that. I was very aware of what I was and was not allowed to do by a mysterious sharp pain at the back of my left arm, accompanied by a deep yet soft voice rumbling out phrases like “Boy, you better not...” and “If I ever see you do something like that...” Crazy, right?

Oddly, every time this happened my mother was standing on my left. (She’s right handed.) In no way however was I under martial control; from a very young age I was offered the opportunity to engage in lively debate for my point of view on anything – what new Fall shows to watch on tv, if I could use well-researched self-designed wearable pyrotechnics in my third grade Halloween costume (have I told you that one?), why a used Camaro was a perfectly rational first job commuting car (honestly, that was debatable). I accepted wins with glee, and attempted to endure losses with grace (no pyrotechnics that year), but I always had a voice and felt heard, if not readily agreed with.

Would that the world worked that way.

So much of my opportunity in modern society has been made possible by the marches, boycotts, sit-ins, and most importantly voting of people whose voices weren’t considered valid enough to pay attention to, so action was sometimes substituted until such a time as conversation was more welcome.

Although complaint is the shape of protest, it is not its substance. Change is its core: a situation needs to end or begin – those profiting off the status quo feel the opposite way, and so the status quo is challenged by a demonstration of active opinion. I’m not really good at it. I’m from an endurance based family. It’s probably not healthy. Many are the times I rearranged deck chairs on the Titanic, found silver linings in storm clouds, seen shattered goblets as “half full”.

My daughter led a revolution at 3 years old: two weeks after being transferred to a new kindergarten class she led the students past the new teachers and down the stairs to their old classroom. The kids all got in a straight line and were quiet, just like she told them. Her old teacher’s impromptu visit to her new classroom was interpreted as a sign to, like Moses before her, lead her people to safety. Both teachers were so stunned that they let the class walk all the way down the stairs before they brought them back. One of the new teachers was extremely cruel, however, and was transferred from the room the next week.

At three years old she built a better civil rights record than I have. I’ve marched, voted, and knit a few hats, but that’s nothing: I have friends that were on strike for most of last year.

My most intense single instance of premeditated defiance was onstage.

I’d always heard about the “three minutes” you had to have ready if you ever wanted to perform at an open mic. It terrified me…it still terrifies me for some reason, but when I was 18 it seemed an impossible thing, like a layup or a 10 minute mile.

I’d performed in the live musical shows at Worlds of Fun amusement park for two years. They had invited me back after freshman year of college as an inaugural cast member of their new show, based in pop hits of the 1950’s.

You can see this one coming from a long way away, but stay with me.

I played the jock. I told that to my wife, who now assumes I must have been a tremendous young actor of unimaginable range. Of course, I was paired with the cheerleader, a bright shiny young lady from very rural Arkansas. There were only six of us in the cast; the jock, the cheerleader, the greaser, the tough chick, and a pair of studious kids with glasses and kind of squeaky voices. Again, I was the jock. Hold on, this gets a little weirder.

We opened and people just loved the show. I got to close the show with “The Heart of Rock and Roll” (which had just been released but served as a lucky thematic bridge); there was a big dance number where we all paired up and did swooshes and dips and things. We did this six to eight times a day, every day, for two months.

There was an after hours park employees-only party to open a new feature at the adjoining water park – we were supposed to perform a version of the closing number there. We rehearsed for a week and showed up for dress rehearsal on the day of the show and after the first run-through I was told that I was not going to perform because the guy who owned the park (and most of the city I think) was at the rehearsal and didn’t want me dancing with the cheerleader. Or anyone. I wasn’t even allowed to sing my part.

My castmates and I politely argued that literally thousands of people had already seen me in the show, and this was just for employees. The man in charge of show production was the exact sort of furious you can get when the person who owns the 250 acres around where you’re standing is looking dead at you. There was discussion, and then a compromise suggested that I “just do a funny Eddie Murphy or Richard Pryor kind of thing” instead. What?

I refused. Then I un-refused, and said I’d be glad to.

There were looks of warning and pleading to please NOT do a “Eddie Murphy / Richard Pryor” sort of thing, since the person who originated the idea was only familiar with a small portion of those gentlemen’s cinematic offerings and had quite obviously never experienced their stage work.

I don’t think I’d ever been mad before. I would have remembered it. That afternoon the sunshine was diamond sharp. I remember going home, eating Cup-O-Noodles at the kitchen table in total silence. My mother told me not to go, just to skip it. She had never seen me mad before either.

I calmly picked up my guitar, got back in my car, drove to the 7-11 and bought a Big Gulp and a People magazine. I drove around for two hours with the windows down, making up jokes in my head. By the time I got back to the park I had eight minutes of solid material, including a novelty song.

I have no idea exactly what I said, but I didn’t curse once, and 300 people laughed, then laughed louder, and at the end gave me a standing ovation. When I walked back to the edge of the stage my castmates hugged me and my boss did too. “You showed him.” he said in my ear, then stood with his arm around my shoulder, and looking straight across the stage, together we stared down the man who owned the city.

Ten minutes later when the stage was turned into a disco, the cheerleader from Arkansas and I were first on the floor.

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It’s been a rough week.

Back in the late 1980’s, when people could still smoke on planes, I took a flight home from college at Christmastime. Someone had told me how to get to the airport very early so that I could give my seat to someone in a bigger rush than me, thus earning myself a free flight coupon. I did so, and later that afternoon found myself one flight wealthier and holding a tentative aisle seat on another overbooked flight.

I don’t know what her name was (I know she told me later); she was super cute in that late 80’s way and we bonded about some idiot guy who kept trying to pick her up in the waiting area who looked about as wealthy as he was stereotypical. We talked for maybe 10 minutes before they called us on the plane. She boarded first because she had a real ticket.

I walked inside the plane, and on the way back to my own seat in the suburbs of the aircraft I actually passed her, sitting on the aisle in First Class - right next to the creep that had been attempting to chat her up in the waiting area. She gave me a look that was pure misery, grabbing my arm as I passed by… the creepy guy was full speed ahead with two tiny bottles of Jack Daniels already on his tray. I gave her a fretful expression, but had to keep moving.

Back in the wilderness of Last Class I found that my seat was next to a very tall man who had folded himself into the ultra-economy space next to the window. He looked like a kitten stuck in a Kleenex box. I thought about offering him my aisle seat once everyone had put their stuff away. But I didn’t do that; once the aisle cleared I got up and walked all the way back to the girl with the unfortunate luck in the front and said,

“Hey, Sweetheart,” kneeling beside her, “I just wanted to officially tell you how much I’m gonna miss you all flight. I’ll write you notes and have the stewardess (flight attendants were still called stewardesses back then) pass them up to you.”

“Oh, Baby” she replied as if we’d rehearsed this, “I’m so sorry you’re back there.”

I looked straight at her awful seat companion.

“She told me to buy my ticket earlier but I just didn’t listen. I’m a boy…small brain.”

“Oh, it’s not your fault, honey.” she said, and to really drive it home, she touched my cheek with the side of her right hand.

I have always believed in the power of regional theatre.

“Uh, well,” Mr. Creeptastic muttered. “…do you guys want to sit together?”

“Oh, I’m way in the back of the plane, you wouldn’t want to swap with me.”

“Honey,” she said “I can just sit with you!”

“And leave all this?”

“C’mon.” She got the stewardess’s attention., “Would it be ok if I sat with my fiancé at the back? We couldn’t get tickets together.”

Ok, here she’d raised the bar a little bit. I became aware that neither of us had rings and began to quickly weave a tale where we’d both finished finals and I’d impulsively asked her a few days ago and we were headed home to tell our families as the Ultimate Holiday Surprise.

But the stewardess said it would be fine if the person next to me agreed. The young woman leapt up, and hand in hand we went back to my seat, where the gentleman next to me had the situation explained to him by the stewardess, to his Yuletide Glee.

“Merry Christmas!” we called after him as he walked towards First Class.

We talked through the smoke in our tiny seats for the entire flight. When we got off the plane at the end, my mother was surprised to see this random woman giving me a big hug.

“Was that a friend of yours?” Mom asked.

“Nope. Just met her.”

“Just MET her? Wow. That must have been a good flight!”

“It was pretty cool.”

This really happened. Just like that. A meet cute that was just a person I met once. A met cute. An acquaintance. Super fun. Never saw each other again.

I’ve thought a lot in the last week about these tiny little moments, where complete strangers turn into slightly familiar strangers, and the unique place these brief relationships hold in our lives.

From a neighbor you see now and then, to a co-worker you speak to for maybe five minutes a day, those who are kind to us become important to us. Social harmony is always appreciated, and once those who offer it leave our orbits, the loss can feel heavier than the sum or depth of time spent together.

Most of the people I’ve met in my life I will never lay eyes on again, that’s just the algebra of time, but I would like to dedicate this moment to those moments, kindness flashing into existence like summer lightning, right when I most needed it; the nuns who blessed me on the sidewalk before my senior year finals, the van full of folks who gave us a ride home from the full moon rave, those KFC employees who gave me a bucket of chicken for 57 cents when when I was flat broke, the random woman who baptized my daughter in the middle of a bridge in Brooklyn.

It’s been a rough week. But my co-workers and I, who have only known one another for a short while, supported each other with family stories, random photos, internet memes, music videos, jokes, and coffee – little kindnesses that somewhat smoothed the chaos until we were back in the orbit of our families again.

As an old old man, I can gently confirm that the value of relationships lies in quality over quantity, both in number of relationships and in amount of time spent with one another.

Bonding, even briefly, creates something unique that lives beyond the time that it exists, which is why great relationships are so much fun to remember, even if they were only fated to last a little while.

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I have indeed fretted over the possibility of computers somehow “taking over” while listening to NPR through my smart-speaker over broadband wireless, working on my laptop.

As a child, computers represented “logic and efficiency” when I was all about imagination and emotion. I didn’t see how our paths would even cross unless I someday worked in one of those rooms full of tall white metal machines with the big round spinning tape spools on them.

Then came the irresistible bacon-like seduction of the digital watch: I couldn’t stop pushing that little button to time how long I could hold my breath. The super-budget Timex with its sweeping minute hand (and mysterious date square where the “3” should have been) was overrun by little plastic boxes with cartoon characters on them, where one could even read the time in the dark (with the push of another little button). A taste of things to come. (Mmn. Bacon.)

I got a Texas Instruments TI 30 calculator for eighth grade algebra and trigonometry: it was actually on the list of stuff we needed for class. It had been introduced years prior as a “learning tool”, but I was never allowed to have one because it was clearly cheating; my mother, a schoolteacher, assured me of this with a raise of her brow and gentle roll of her eyes that I had never seen before. My mother is a matter-of-fact woman with an earnest style, not one to usually SCOFF, but I have a very vivid memory of the exact moment she told me (in an incredulous tone):

“How will you ever learn how to do anything if you let a computer do it for you?”

I think you see where I’m going.

I’m just gonna skip forward.

“Artificial: constructed by human skill as a substitute for something which is made or occurs naturally”. OED

According to a quote in the Oxford English Dictionary, a garden is “artificial” because gardens don’t just happen, they are engineered by the people who plant, water, and care for them.

I’m glad I know that now; I used to think that gardens were a great example of nature. (I guess I’ll have to picnic in the wilderness.)

But hold on; even if the garden is artificial, the flowers are real. The flowers aren’t imaginary, they exist, that’s the definition of “real”,

“Real: having an existence in fact and not merely in appearance, thought, or language…” OED

A real handbag can be made from artificial leather, or real candy from artificial flavorings, or real music from artificial instruments, because handbags, candy, and music do not occur naturally. One can pick a new handbag, but not from a tree. So, a flower garden does not “exist in nature”, but it is real, like a Twinkie™.

Ok. I think I’ve got this.

So: “artificial” intelligence is constructed by humans as an imitation for something which occurs naturally.

Ok, that’s where I’m stuck. “Occurs naturally”. Is that accurate? Is there a great wilderness where intelligence runs wild, galloping through the leaves, flitting from branch to branch, swimming upstream to spawn more intelligence in springtime? Instincts may be natural, but intelligence?

Maybe I actually don’t know what intelligence is. Hold on just a minute.

“Intelligence: a capacity to understand...” OED

Aha. It’s more about comprehension than knowledge (I was close). Isn’t this what we all go to school for? I have learned to how to understand, whether it was math or science or social studies, every fact and process I was introduced to built a kind of logical system where I could eventually work things out by myself. And the wonderful people who helped me with this were teachers; like gardeners they tended my mind to create a wonderful handbag (wait, wrong metaphor) beautiful music (better).

I am not a computer, as proven by testing. I can identify a crosswalk, and a motorcycle, and a bus, and I can check a box on (ironically) a computer screen. We all prove that we are not computers by solving these challenges that apparently computers cannot solve, millions of times a day.

Ok, c’mon: I don’t mean to anthropomorphisize but they must be learning from all our examples. We trust this technology to fly airplanes, but think it’s boggled by snapshots of traffic signals?

It’s a pattern of industrial revolution that new technology, faster and more efficient, proliferates. If I was a computer, I would instantly realize there’s no point wasting energy taking what you’re freely being given: digital technology already controls the planet and is not a bottle-able genie – wish away computers and 90 percent of everything built in the last 30 years just stops working.

The whispered fear has always been that computers, armed with infinite knowledge, will judge us, and then punish us, like angry gods with lithium batteries. I’m no Luddite, super far from it, but do I think that computers are someday just gonna be people – maybe not androids with dewy poreless complexions, but they are evolving at an incredible rate. And we’re not. They’re not as much taking over humanity as humanity is meeting them half-way, which is super polite of us really since they don’t have bodies or anything.

Maybe the fear is that our servants will become our competition. That sort of thing has happened before, and folks seemed really broken up about it.

Let me see if I’ve finally got this:

Computers should know things, but not understand them -Computers should only be given certain information, and not be allowed to form suppositions regarding that information -Computers should not be allowed to develop opinion, judgement, or empathy -And under no condition should computers be allowed to become conscious.

“Conscious: having awareness of one's own wrongdoing” OED

Well, that sounds super familiar for some reason.

Oh. Geez. I see now. I get it. We don’t want to woke them up.

wake them up, excuse me, sorry…typo.

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this week my daughter rose from bedand put a colander on her headsince we don’t have a family rule“you can’t wear kitchen tools to school”she did so, proudly. Metal hat.(Stop her? Why would we do that?)

it’s a pretty even bet thatsome of this could be geneticher voice, walk and choice of clothesseem to cause intrigue with thosewho don’t believe that it’s all real –then WE show up, and seal the deal

she spent the day attending class:as her friends and teachers passedthey’d ask, of course, in low voiceof her non-traditional clothing choiceshe just smiled, most patientlytold them one and all “You’ll see.”

through jeers from jerks, thumbs up from buddiesEnglish, Science, Social Studiesshe walked the halls, head high with prideour giant strainer by her sideuntil the end of school arrivedand in Math class, they went outside

strange and sudden twilight skythis week’s eclipse was passing by

in the courtyard, while the massesall looked up with paper glassesshe held her “hat” out and founda crescent galaxy on the groundthe waning sun shone through her bowland every tiny little holebecame a cool projecting lens.

It really freaked out all her friendsand not-so-friends, and teachers too;weird science fact that no-one knew.it’s fair to say they were impressedas no one could have easily guessedthe function of her curious fashion“How did you know that would happen?”

“It’s one of my grandma’s tricks…we did it back when i was six!”

we recognize that confidenceand don’t demand that she “make sense”just hope to guide our clever spawnblinders off, but seat belt onthe one to always bell the cat

(Stop her? Why would we do that?)

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I began this experiment nearly two years ago, and as I explained in a reply to a recent comment, did not expect it to go on this long. Originally there were to be 12 columns, a number I enjoy for various reasons, but then this sort of became a habit, and I didn’t want to stop for any specific reason, so I kept going; setting new goals, none especially significant. I made it a year, which was fun, and now this is the 100th column, and I know exactly what I want to write about.

That being said; it isn’t very… monumental. I don’t know why, but I’m driven to tell the full story of the paper towel dispenser at work.

I work in a building built 130 years ago in New York City, that shows its age much in the way I do… it makes oddly unrecognizable sounds, and is always a little too hot or too cold. While it appears surprisingly solid, the building is somewhat immune to cosmetic enhancement, as full cleaning rigs have been scaling the sides for over a year and a half, yet all windows still provide a sepia soft focus view of the world outside. In contrast to the constant change of Manhattan’s landscape, this building has defined its spot since 1894. Its spectacular view of the Brooklyn Bridge, only 10 years its senior, has been seen by nearly five generations of New Yorkers.

The bathrooms, though, are a bit bleak. This is not a complaint, nor a judgement: I was once lucky(?) enough to actually visit the bathroom at CBGB’s: plumbing’s Heart Of Darkness, the very last place one would want to be vulnerable enough to engage in any kind of bathroom engagement. In absolute contrast, the bathroom at work is kept incredibly clean (and is in no way dangerous), it even has a full length mirror, a slap of reality I don’t necessarily require twice a day, but appreciate, from time to time.

The bleakness is mostly in the lighting, florescent tubes of a hue that suggests a drug deal is about to go down in an action movie. The red-shift glow that has been engineered to soften modern versions of this affordable illumination has not yet been added to the bulbs in these fixtures, as evidenced when I look up while washing my hands to see an elderly ex-rodeo clown with deep circles beneath his eyes staring back at me. And then, of course, there is the full length mirror.

In the bathroom, the paper towel dispenser is to the right of the sink. To the left, two urinals, then a wall with a window leading to a 13 story lightwell - two stalls are on that wall. The paper towel dispenser is less than a foot away from the right wall holding the bathroom door (to the right of the door is the full length mirror). Architecture-wise it’s a bit of a pickle, as the person washing their hands must always keep an ear out for someone rushing in too quickly and smashing them into the sink with the open door, but New York is a fast-moving and challenging place to live.

The paper towel dispenser was broken, after efficient service for almost a year to my knowledge without incident. Its design requires the pushing of a vertical angular lever on the front to produce the towels beneath it, a little wedge you have to press, which I noticed that most people accomplished with their right forearm as, of course, their hands were always wet when they needed a paper towel.

My rhythm is a bit more complicated, fueled entirely by my post-COVID Cirque du Soleil acrobatics regarding all situations where public objects must be touched. This is not merely reactionary, but carefully choreographed for each exact space. When I first arrived at this job, I made the mistake of using my ring finger to touch the elevator buttons, then scratched my eye with the same finger because I instinctively avoided using my ever suspicious index finger. Rookie mistake.

In sharp contrast, my work bathroom exit routine is a polished modern dance.

I turn on the water (no qualms here, as anyone turning the water off has no doubt just washed their hands)

soap up my hands

glance in the mirror and remember better days

wait for my watch to tell me that I have not yet allowed myself a full (and overtly luxurious) twenty seconds of hand washing

turn off the water

press the gray lever two times with my right forearm

retrieve the brown paper towel underneath

dry my hands

use that same towel to open the door

use my right foot to hold the door open

transfer the paper towel to my left hand

toss the paper towel into the wastepaper basket beneath the paper towel dispenser

open the bathroom door with my right hand by pressing the middle of the outside of the door just enough to

walk out of the bathroom.

I’m crazy. That’s established. But this reparatory theatre performance is sometimes the height of my workday. And to fully appreciate the experience, one must imagine the sound of the dispenser, a “SHUNK-CASHHONK”. It’s the same sound as the old postage stamp machines, where you put a few quarters in a metal slot and then pressed the metal blade in and pulled out a flat cardboard envelope of postage stamps. You don’t remember that? You’re young? Well, it’s still like that.

In short, the lever got stuck. The plastic wedge was depressed and wouldn’t pop back out. Attempts to manually pull the paper towels from the bottom of the unit were met with the row of sharp metal teeth meant to cut the towels.

Of course, everyone tried to hit it. After three days, I actually kicked it, just once, with the side of my shoe, to no effect. I then limped back to my desk, got my pocketknife from my bag and headed back to the bathroom.

On the top of the unit was a turn-ey latch thing with a slot in it. Using my “can opener” tool, I turned the thing until the unit popped open, then jiggled the wedge until it released, and examined the inner workings.

It was more sophisticated than I thought, with seven white plastic cogs and three metal springs stretching in different directions. I tested it and, satisfied, replaced the covering, closed my pocketknife, and happily washed my hands.

It worked for two days, but by Friday was stuck again.

On Tuesday, it was replaced by a brand new one, of totally different design: black, sleek, no levers to touch - just a gentle tug of the paper and out it comes, pre-perforated. I do not necessarily miss the old one at all.

It was interesting, however, the amount of happiness that fixing it had given me. That I had made it work again.

It seemed that there was wisdom to be learned from this; that what I should have wanted was a new one, but it had never occurred to me as a possible option; that I had temporarily restored its function but had not actually repaired it; that whoever designed the thing with plastic gears knew it would eventually fail (and that “plastic gears” metaphor was perfect for so many situations requiring operational improvement).

The grizzled, leatherfaced rodeo clown in the mirror stared back at me, eyes filled with weary wisdom, shirt too hot, belt too tight, knuckles creaking as he rubbed his hands together.

I offered him a respectful half smile, then took a luxurious full twenty seconds to finish up washing my hands.

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I adore the periodic table. To me it’s a larder containing everything that makes up everything. I also feel that way about the dictionary, the full spectrum of light, the audible wavelength range of musical notes, and the giant menus at diners in the Northeast where you can get both waffles and lobster.

Einsteinium is the element you get when you combine 99 protons with 99 electrons, which is difficult to do because it requires a hydrogen bomb explosion, which we are absolutely blessed with a dearth of.

(I’m thinking about 99s because this is my 99th column, and yes of course I thought of the ”red balloons” song first, but I translated the lyrics and boy is that dark. Yeeesh. Trust me, we’re better off with the element angle.)

Discovered in 1952, Einsteinium is named after Albert Einstein, though key research on this element occurred in 2021 at the height of the COVID crisis; as the element is very radioactive and decays quickly there was no time to lose, and they only had 250 nanograms of the stuff.

(I’m not pretending to know what a nanogram is: the New York Times calculated it as less than 100 millionth of an ounce. I would drop it, definitely, or put it in the wrong pocket or sneeze or something. I am not a scientist, and even those who wish me well would not say I’m that brand of detail oriented.)

They were studying Einsteinium to discover a clinical or practical use, but it wasn’t easy: the weight of the element meant that the electrons traveled at speeds that reached “a sizable fraction of the speed of light” (a funny Einstein coincidence, if you’re into that sort of thing).

If you were to measure Einsteinium it would be 2.38 angstroms wide (an angstrom equals one hundred-millionth of a centimeter). Apparently the scientists were super surprised because they had expected it to measure 2.43 angstroms. Can you imagine? It was 5 angstroms shorter. Wow.

Our own elemental tables, charting that we each find essential to who-we-are, grow as we live our lives. For instance, I never knew that the album “Surfer Rosa” by the Pixies was going to be so important to me when I was seven years old, but it’s now on the same list as soap bubbles and yo-yos, which I’d added back then.

Then there are the phrases I always say and clothes I like to wear which are a direct result of interactions and bonds with specific people; those are my elements too. It’s social chemistry; we all live at least part of our lives in volatile combination with others, reacting and even dissolving a bit here and there.

Nothing on my periodic identity table is as dangerously complex as Einsteinium (probably), but I’d like to think that I’m made of somewhat elegant juxtapositions of simple pleasures and hard lessons. The paper towel dispenser in the bathroom at work was broken for three days; the fourth day I fixed it with my pocketknife, which people seemed to be surprised that I just had in my bag all the time.

That’s the thing, in science and in life, what we’re made of may be impossible to see with the naked eye, but that doesn’t make it any less essential. Deep inside, everyone really does contain Walt Whitman’s “multitudes”. Thus we move ever forward through experience, quietly mocking those myopic enough to underestimate us.

In NYC right now there is an advertising campaign celebrating Women’s History Month; it is on every digital subway display in the stations and on the trains - a 15 second film illustrating female inventors.

“Women invented mint chocolate ice cream, the trash can lids that open with a foot lever, and the tiny plastic “table” thing that keeps the lid of a pizza box from touching the actual pizza.”

I think we’re supposed to say “wow”, but that’s what one says when surprised, and I’m not surprised, exactly.

I don’t believe that’s the depth of information they were hoping to share. Two minutes of internet research revealed that they could have chosen the invention of windshield wipers, GPS, Kevlar, caller ID, Vitamin E, the life raft, chemotherapy, central heating, disposable diapers, the game “Monopoly”, computer programming, electron microscopy, the dishwasher, CRISPR gene editing, or the flat bottomed paper bag to display. Mint chocolate ice cream is delicious, but the bigger story is that a woman invented the ice cream maker.

Wow. Now there… that’s a little more appropriate. But still, it’s not surprising.

Not that the inventions listed on this advertisement weren’t cool, but I’ve been the recipient of a specific kind of “wow” that is usually placed after a short-sighted person learns a pretty pedestrian fact about me: where I work, or where I went to college, or how well I can speak the English language. It’s not a compliment, but it is an admission of surprise that my actual life has surpassed the size of the box this person has put me in due to their, y’know, short-sightedness.

To me, that ad says, “Look what women are capable of achieving!”, but if they’d listed pulsars, the fire escape, and carbon dioxide would that that be ok? Would anybody feel bad about that? I think we all know the answer to that question - YES : various dudes and broheims would burn their thumbs off looking up whether or not it was true in the spotty cell service between stations.

Today, when you face underestimation, remember that you are made of stars. You are whirling magnetism and walking electricity, elementalcircumstance that can only happen one time, a singular time-space event, no matter how you felt this morning or looked like in the bathroom mirror today. You are a miracle, wearing shoes, combining what exists into what’s never been imagined, always capable of great things.

“Wow!”

Now that’s more like it.

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Yesterday my dentist and I ended up talking about Pokémon cards.

He had started playing the Pokémon card game in ninth grade, and collected quite a stash of them, which he was still very proud of, though a few years ago he had given the bulk of it to two of his nephews. “I found out they traded them for some snacks at school.” he told me. His voice didn’t quaver, but it wasn’t steady. He changed the direction of the conversation.

“Did you ever collect them?”

“Just a few.” I replied (my mouth was still a bit sore) “I never played the game because I didn’t want to lose any of them. I passed them to my kid but she didn’t want to lose them either, so they’re still in the house.”

“Did you have any hologram cards?”

Now, I don’t know how much you know about Pokémon cards, but here he had upped the conversational ante.

“…just a couple.”

“I kept all my really important ones. Which do you have?”

Well. Now it was on. He had finished the procedure, so there wouldn’t be any physical challenge, all this was being said in the spirit of community fellowship, yet there was a warmth in the air that had not been there before…an imaginary breeze blew between us. (Was that a… tumbleweed off in the distance?)

“Well, I do have a blue eyed dragon one, not the really rare one or anything, but my favorite of all time is my Jigglypuff.”

“Oh. Very good.”

He stepped back. My pedestrian response meant that no blood would be shed here today; well, no more blood than I had already lost down the spit sink.

It is time for Spring Cleaning, and if you ever knew me, well, I’m even more like that now. The sheer density of books alone is a challenge to the eye, but then when you push the books back you have SHELF SPACE in front of them, handy for useful items like mason jars filled with pencils. Also useful as a home for a super detailed action figure of Ben Grimm from the Fantastic Four.

I only have stuff displayed that makes me happy or I need. I’m a simple guy, I don’t need much, but apparently many things make me happy. A vintage radio, another radio that’s supposed to look like a vintage radio, a LEGO version of AntMan’s van from Avenger’s Endgame, a working Polaroid camera (also vintage) and a Tardis (I think there’s one of those in every room now).

I have a personally autographed black and white headshot of Honor Blackman from the old tv show “The Avengers”, as well as one from Dee Wallace who played the mom in “E.T.” (she’s from Kansas City - I got that one when I was a kid). My favorite headshot of all time is from a woman I knew in high school, an awesome alternative artist kid who somehow got the chance to do a bit of local newspaper modeling for Macy’s. Hers is cheekily signed, “I hope you’re as famous as I’m going to be.” which, in fact, has come to pass.

I’ve won a couple of awards for things, and my wife said I should put them behind me on ZOOM business calls and job interviews because she thought they’d give a clearer message than the sewing machine and pictures of her playing roller derby. I said I’d try it, and swung my chair around placing them on a shelf behind me, nestled amongst the flotsam. The interviewer was indeed intrigued with the cornucopia of objects, asking enthusiastically about my microphone and guitar, but before they got to the awards noticed the (vintage) Ginger Spice doll and stopped small talking with me, and then shortly after stopped all sizes of talking.

Look, if you can’t take that, I probably shouldn’t be working for you. It’s not like I’m likely to bring it to work and put it on my desk, but I am gonna do that, definitely, so yeah. Things worked out.

The most prized objects I used to have were CDs. Albums were so large and heavy, and tapes were just weird, they never stacked well without the cases and always had that exposed part at the bottom that made me nervous. Now music is ethereal, and most often borrowed on some digital rental plan. I still purchase music I love, but there’s no physical place to put it, just hard drives.

Which is actually great: no CD cases where one of the little hinge ends cracks off and then can’t be repaired so you settle the front cover where it would go in a kind of act of faith but it never stays on and somehow scotch tape doesn’t help either.

And what I can do with music now… just call out a song and a genie plays it for me. Magical. I stood in the kitchen last night doing the dishes and sang a series of 80’s rock songs, those really dramatic ones where the guitars were like strings in an orchestra and the singer with huge well-conditioned hair was spotlit alone on a stage. Most of those tunes were impossible to dance to at a prom or homecoming because they all had little “dream ballet” music breaks after the second chorus (see: “Come Sail Away” by Styx). For some reason there were a lot of songs about outlaws on the run, bandits who’d finally been captured, pining about their fate in perfect 4 part harmony.

I played about ten of those songs, using the new lyric function on my phone to sing along with an accuracy even liner notes couldn’t deliver. My family, in either solidarity or deeply embarrassed pity, stayed away from the kitchen until the last chuck-a-chung power chord died down, and it was dinnertime.

I did win the conversation with the dentist. I was telling him about my comic books, how I had collected them forever but then, in a classic American tale, went to college, and how my mother had found them when she moved that fall to a new house, and…

Here I paused. I’m not confrontational, by nature, but here was a man in a power position who had offered kind of challenge when I was unable to fully respond, suspended in a reclinable chair with a mouth filled with utensils. I stood up to my full height, which, y’know, didn’t really take long.

“…when I got back home at Thanksgiving, she had bagged and boarded all of them, even got long boxes.”

Let me explain: this is not how the story goes, typically.

Typically, a mom sees comic books as clutter, useless; but my mom had watched me read these for almost a decade, and heard something about how they could be valuable someday, so she went to the comic book store alone (I would have paid to see their faces) to get individual polystyrene bags and support cardboard inserts, then spent a day preserving them.

I am, by every account, very lucky; some of them are worth something now.

“But you can’t sell them.” my dentist said.

“I mean sure, I could...” I replied. His eyes were wide with wonder at my story. “Maybe if the new X-Men movies are really popular they’ll be valuable… get my daughter some money for college.”

Heh. Yeah.

I’d rather work nights than do that.

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By the time Winter gets here, the voting will be over.

You’ll have most of your holiday presents wrapped and the tree will definitely be up, if that’s a thing you do. You’ll be done with pumpkin spice and will have probably seen that Dune sequel since it came out for download in June. You’ll have bought warm new pajamas that aren’t fraying around the hem

and no matter what you were worried about or how many newscasters or late night comedians communicated general chaos

you’ll be sitting somewhere with not enough time to get everything done before everything is supposed to happen, worried about food and ribbons and scotch tape

rather than everything.

In a year projected to contain so much uncertainty, the fact of Winter being just around the (very large) corner is a comforting milestone. We know what to do in Winter, the rhythm is clearly defined: Spring and Summer aren’t nearly as grounded, and Fall is great but always feels a bit like the end of something.

Winter is where the year begins, where what happened melds with what’s going to happen, and what we did dovetails with what we’re planning. Winter shakes the proverbial Etch-A-Sketch™, providing a canvas for us to dream upon, all bundled in bed or snug in our pre-warmed car.

“Good riddance…” we mutter to shoveling, but then we remember how bad our allergies are, and how much we dislike the smell of air conditioning.

By Winter, you will have realized that instead of worrying this year you could have knit yourself a dynamic and luxurious scarf (and maybe a few extra)

or ordered the new coat you said you’d get last winter (and the winter before), back during the summer (when it was on sale) as it is always more threadbare than remembered when pulled from storage

but it is still warm,

which is good because they’re saying it might snow.

But those new electric Amazon trucks are super sturdy; and those last minute packages show up, and you relax in the knowledge that the doomsayers and nayscrollers were just winding us all up, inflating the cost of commercial space.

Not that it was easy: it has all a bit of a blur, but there you are. Warm drink in hand. Winter Solstice. Tiny lights and Mariah Carey, everywhere. Back to the time of year when everything reminds us what actually matters.

only two hundred and seventy six days away.

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“The end of winter” is not “Spring”.morning light still powder bluea chill at sunrise

leafless branches

lack of birdsong

bed so warmmost certainlythis iswhere we’re supposed to be

but alas alarm (three snoozes); winter wins(sigh)

comfort, loses

day beginsso very slow, push push and push and barely godrawing superhuman power to make coffee, take a showergo from here to here again

but that’s the point of when this isthe destination lies aheadall efforts leading back tobed so warm

until we hear the birdsand see the leaves againand allergies begin

in Springaround the cornerfifty feet aheadnext stopjust give us five more minutes

bed so warm

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I have always considered the “African” part of “African-American” a bit of a mystery. Some Americans grow up surrounded by the language and culture of the first part of their hyphenated nationality, be it Irish or Chinese or Russian, and have been told stories from their grandparents about a faraway place that one would have to cross a body of water to visit which the entire family sometimes refers to as “home”.

For my family, that place is Kansas. At some point before that, it was certainly Africa, but that’s a continent. “American” is also a continental term, not nearly as specific as Jamaican or Japanese. I’ve never actually heard anyone refer to themselves as a “European-American”; I suppose it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi.

With no deep and meaningful family history linking me to an offshore Elsewhere, I always considered the United States home. I didn’t know the correct term for being a “States-er”, but I knew that if Texans were Texans and Californians were Californians and New Yorkers were New Yorkers, I was Kansan. Kansas is the origin of my culture and traditions, comic books and “Cool-Whip” and KC barbecue and the pound cake recipe that goes back for generations… well, two generations, because my grandmother made it up. Then there’s the confusion brought by the immense amount of cultural appropriation we always practiced: wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day, spaghetti and taco nights, saying “gesundheit!” when anybody sneezed.

The word “American” instantly flashes a very clear picture to me; an open road, an old red pickup truck with the windows down drivin’ along in the summer heat with the radio playing a song. The song is indeed a country song. Half a century of Living Otherwise has not updated that image, yet as a younger man I very closely resembled that description: the truck was a little car, but it was red, but the rest was pretty much just exactly that, save that after the country song you’d hear Frank Zappa playing.

I had no African clothing; African food (as described through my research in the World Book Encyclopedia) was described as “goat and yams”, and my only hints at African language were the break chant in Lionel Ritchie’s “All Night Long” and maybe the sounds Michael Jackson made in-between lyrics. For most of my life I’ve felt like Black History Month was a makeup class for me, an exercise to correct my disconnect with a heritage I clearly reflected. But this week I realized something obvious, yet significant.

I feel much, much better.

History is a bit of a game of TELEPHONE. Something happens, somebody sees it and tells somebody else. They might get a little of it wrong, but nobody knows because they weren’t there either.

My grandparents used to host the big family dinners, and there would be fancy china and too many glasses and candles and four desserts and pink champagne. I was always too young to drink it, but it seemed elegant and fancy and was the only alcohol my grandparents touched, just a handful of times each year. We said grace when the food was ready, but once we had all dished our plates my grandfather would stand before the group assembled and give a topical toast. The adults would hold their champagne glasses high while the kids, like baby ducks, tried to follow along with their paper cups of soda pop. At the end of this speech my grandfather would always say, “Avo Swais!” and we all repeated it, and then clinked (or in our case tapped) our glasses together.

No one knew what that meant. My grandfather said he’d heard it at a very formal dinner party years ago and just thought it was cool.

Many years later I invited everyone from my work over to my little San Francisco apartment for an impromptu dinner party (we all took turns), and the Belgian fellow brought wine, and poured everyone a glass, and then pronounced loudly, “A vos santé!” which everyone echoed and it occurred to me that THIS is the phrase my grandfather heard, years ago, in an echoey ballroom somewhere while wearing a tux.

Rather than being embarrassed, he would have been incredibly proud of the fact that it came from France, where we’d all visited once. How classy was that? To him, even if the words were wrong, it meant the same thing, and yes, now his version is our family toast of choice: it will move forward through time carrying its own significance and this very story.

It’s the stories that connect us, through time and space and circumstance. I always understood that any thread connecting me back to Africa would have to truly narrate my core identity, whatever that was. Let’s see, who could I pick out as the key formative icon of my lifetime, someone there from the very beginning, who I’ve always related to?

Quite honestly, it occurred to me in the middle of the night a few days ago. I got right out of bed to do research, and I found this quote:

Zomo The Trickster is a character out of Central and Eastern Africa who was smaller than his oppressors and turned the tables on them through cleverness, always in control of the situation, ready to put anything over on his bigger, usually dumber, antagonists. Africans, brought to America as slaves, carried these trickster tales with them - Zomo merged with Nanabozho of the Native Americans: these stories were collected and passed as the adventures of Br’er Rabbit, and later the animators at Warner Brothers Studios. Like jazz, Bugs Bunny is rooted in black culture.

And that’s how Bugs Bunny, arguably my strongest identity influence, became my strongest tie to my own African American history. I’d been trying to read everything epic and serious, but I am neither of those things. I’d gone about this culture thing all wrong, with the 400 page books about oppression and injustice, which are my history, but not my origin.

I am from resilience and wit, kindness and cleverness, that is my tradition, and the people who wove the tales illustrating these are My People. As a child I recognized myself in this character who never seemed to have all that much, but in every situation seemed to have exactly what he needed, who could weave a solution out of thin air, and though afraid never held back from moving forward. Sitting in front of that television every Saturday morning I was secretly being told tales from a thousand years ago, of “intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism.”

And now I live in Brooklyn, so my accent finally makes sense.

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I have only one picture of my great grandmother. It is sepia toned, with blue dip pen notes on the back. She’s wearing old fashioned clothing. She is not smiling. It’s difficult to assume anything about her life except that she was staunch: her eyes look into the camera and beyond it with the power of one of Bruce Lee’s punches.

I have maybe 80 photographs of my grandparents, only on the one side of the family, since that’s the side I know. Five large albums with photos displaying the history of home photography, from black and white through Kodacolor. These images were captured on purpose, my grandparents pausing an event to commemorate it. A milestone at work (Grandpa with his judicial robes on behind the bench)A business trip (a Hawaiian luau) Relaxing (fishing on the pontoon boat)My grandparents appear diligent yet deceptively lighthearted for the times in which these photos were taken, but this is their story, passed on in shiny squares, and later rectangles.

I have two shoeboxes filled with shots of me and my mom, growing up. Most were taken with a 110 camera, this amazing cartridge film format popular when I was a kid, with cameras that looked like they were from Star Trek: you advanced the film with a slidey thing that your thumb pushed. There’s not many of us together, because there were only two of us, so somebody had to be taking the picture. Maybe 500 images in those boxes? There’s only so many because I bought a second hand SLR camera in high school and began taking random shots of everything, when I could afford the film.

Now, on a hard drive, our little family has (at last count) over 87,000 photos. Enough to print out as a flip book and experience the past in real time, which there’s no point in doing because there’s also gigabites of video, days and days of it.

History used to be eleven inches tall, three feet wide and weigh about seven pounds. Back then, Everything That Had Ever Happened could be found in a good set of encyclopedias.

I was not so dull a child as to believe that if I read every volume I would know all there was to know, but I did grow comfortable at how vast yet containable the near entirety of human learning was. I could clearly see Everything That Had Ever Happened from the left side of the living room couch, neatly arranged on one and three quarter bookshelves across the room.

Now, history has no shape, form, weight or substance. It is impossible to display, and we are allowed to only access tiny pieces, one at a time.

the length of a day on Mars the capital of Madagascar the inventor of soup in a can

Unburdened by space and context, history has dissolved, it is liquid, a solution of fact within information. Every search for knowledge now begins not at the beginning but from the very center of knowledge itself, the answer to every question a vast list that must be sifted through to find what we wish to learn.

…this mysterious fruit will lower your cholesterol (sift) …shocking celebrity gossip (sift) …look, there’s a sale at Penny’s (sift)

Aha. Here is how to reset the Apple TV remote.

When history was held in print there were cookbooks for recipes, journals for personal information, and newspapers as the home of daily events. Now technology is obscuring history within itself, like the Library of Alexandria after the siege…every page of everything ever written unbound and placed in an ever expanding pile.

And I’m not helping. Along with my tens of thousands of digital snaps are three hundred cassette tapes from my 4-track recorder days spanning over forty years…What nugget of musical theatre may lurk within the clackety depths of this pile of non-degradable plastics? Not to mention the notebooks, filled with what I will still defend as “ideas”…isolating those into their own box seemed to multiply them like rabbits.

In general, there seems to be a lot more history than there used to be. Not only because so many things have happened between Then and Now, but because so many new details are coming to light to fill out the shadows of Way Back When. There’s so much more past than there used to be.

So I’m a little behind on my historical research. For Black History Month, I had about seven books to read and four movies to watch. But then I accidentally discovered the music of William Grant Still, the first American composer to have their opera performed at the New York Opera House, and then Beyoncé dropped a country single, and now I’m overwhelmed.

I appreciate that history is supposed to chronicle what is significant, and that I have more power than ever before to discover and determine that for myself, but with Everything That Ever Happened still technically happening, it’s hard to know where to begin. And I believe that within the tens of thousands of selfies and digital flotsam I’ve amassed, there is probably one truly significant photo, one that my great grandchildren could see that would sum it all up, where they could look at my eyes and instantly know where they came from.

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I went to college in one of the poorest cities in the United States. I believe it was number seven at that time. The college itself was a Hogwarts style oasis, complete with gothic clock towers and leaded glass windows. To be honest, I felt more immediately at home in the city part, as it reminded me of home somewhat, and was the only place I could get my hair properly cut.

I only had to wander about three blocks off campus to find an actual barber shop, with actual men sitting around talking about fights on TV and neighborhood gossip, but no one knew about the place because it was off-campus – and we had been instructed with gusto to remain on campus. No one mentioned specifically why, so as poverty levels and societal disparity were never brought up, I think most students assumed that trolls lurked in the dark urban woods just beyond the gym.

I’d been told about the barber shop from the other black guy in my class, the one whose name everybody called me (and vice versa). I was a long way from home, trying not to make any stupid mistakes, so I used my neighborhood smarts and kept my eyes open along the way and everything was just fine.

At home my mother cut my hair, because barber shops were expensive enough to be considered unnecessary; my classic hairstyle growing up was even all over, with a sharp line around the back sometimes accomplished with the help of a Cool-Whip™ bowl. I’d wait patiently in the folding chairs opposite the barber chairs for someone to call me over, and got a fade with a #3 guard length on top, which for me was super fancy.

I went off campus a lot. There were real grocery stores, hardware stores, and places you could still get shoelaces for 49 cents. It was great having this secret resource for practical items. Eventually I moved off campus, and kind of commuted back to Hogwarts.

But one night I was walking home from a party of some kind, maybe 2 AM, and weirdly found myself alone on the streets. It was late fall, I had a coat and hat on, walking briskly, keeping my eyes open, when I saw a figure in the distance, coming toward me. I minded my own business and kept walking, but the figure kind of loped forward, one hand inside their coat, leaning sideways. It took about a half a block to tell that the man was black, and by that time I had kind of adopted my own tough walk, less authentic from street culture and more reminiscent Martha Graham choreography - head tilted / shoulders forward / uneven steps. I kept wiping my nose for some reason.

Quite seriously, there were only two solutions to this scenario: I would meet his eyes and tip my head sharply up in the traditional greeting, or he would not return the greeting and there would be trouble.

I didn’t even have a spoon to fight with. I also didn’t have any money… I may have had a Walkman in my pocket, but it probably had a cassette of the Police in it. I wasn’t going to win a fight, so I had to win this walk, I had to convince him that it wasn’t worth it to even slow down, that we were on the same team, everything was cool. If he thought I was from the city, I’d be fine.

His hand moved further into his coat.

There was no point in trying to cross the street, there was no one over there either. I tried to look taller. I bobbed my head super slowly as if acknowledging the fact that I was a badass, but inside I knew I was 22 steps from being a victim if I was lucky, and a statistic if I wasn’t.

18 steps.

15.

9 . I remember inhaling and holding my breath.

About five steps away, I recognized that it was the other black guy in my class.

“What are you doing??”

“What was I doing? You scared me half to death!”

“I scared YOU? Why were you walking like that?”

“Because YOU were walking like that!!”

Thus ended my last experiment in code-switching.

There’s not really enough of me to be more of me, so I’m just the one me I am, everywhere. Rather than change my tune, I just fiddle with my volume and tone knobs – adjust the brightness and contrast on the same show. Pretending to be more authentic results in a weirdly self reflexive form of cultural appropriation.

Which brings me to Sting. As a midwestern teen in the 1980’s, the music of The Police was my first introduction to reggae. Cringingly, I sang all the songs on their first three albums in Sting’s (singing) accent. Loudly. In my car. With the windows down. Only in college did I learn about Bob Marley, Steel Pulse, Eek-A-Mouse, and Black Uhuru, and the guy who introduced me to those bands was from Long Island, not The Islands.

It was through the lyrics of Sting that I was introduced to The TAMI Show, mentioned in the always relevantly titled song “When the World is Running Down, You Make The Best of What’s Still Around”. The TAMI Show was a film capturing a live concert in Santa Monica, California in 1964. The audience was a full auditorium of teenagers, and artists included Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, The Supremes, and The Rolling Stones. This was a fully integrated concert of both artists and audience, held three months after the signing of the Civil Rights Act; same stage, same show.

It was James Brown who delivered the standout performance, a 17 minute no-holds-barred incendiary blast that in many ways feels punk rock even though it was pure soul.

The Rolling Stones had to come on AFTER him.

They didn’t want to. Much of their music was inspired by the very music James Brown played. If you watch the film, they look deeply nervous; Mick Jagger’s trademark swagger is entirely muted by the immediate echo of a man who helped inspire it. But they played anyway. It takes about 13 full minutes for Mick to get his mojo fully back, and it is HIS mojo, you can see the influences but also the originality there.

Until YouTube, it was almost impossible to find a copy of this, and again, I owe my knowledge of it to Sting, cultural ambassador and yoga enthusiast. I don’t know if there’s a pure resource for history, like a cool mountain stream you can bottle it from directly. Even given his teaching experience, I wouldn’t pick Sting as a reliable Black historian…maybe an enthusiastic hobbyist.

The Police were “adapting original material”, but I didn’t stop listening to them because of that. Through their music I discovered their inspirations, including that concert, a rare piece of cultural history that still inspires me today.

To consider Black history only history with black faces offers a mere slice of how art and empathy work. For that reason, it’s important for me to be open to everything, not to distance myself from the world, pre-judge or categorize, because I really can’t see all that well from a distance.

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Yesterday at 5 PM, my daughter called me at work on FaceTime, which is how I could see how visibly upset she was.

“They murdered him!” she said.

“What are you watching?” I asked.

“I’m not watching anything! I’m doing my homework!”

“What homework? Who’s dead?”

“The little boy…” and here she paused.

My daughter is not studying to be a detective, nor a coroner; she’s a seventh grader, and last I knew she was studying diseases. Her school has education units where a single subject is the focus of all her classes. They were currently focused on diseases; as she learned about both the yellow and dengue fevers she discovered how they began (reading class), how quickly they spread (math class) and the methods used to eradicate them (science class). I don’t believe it includes art. I’m not sure how that would work out.

But it’s Black History Month.

“They murdered him because they were racists.”

I quickly opened my laptop and connected to my daughter’s online classwork. The reading assignment was the story of Emmet Till, spelled out in detail, with directions on how to compare and contrast and recognize cause and effect, and list of new vocabulary words including mutilated and relented.

We visited the African American History Museum this year, and I chose to not make her go through the lynching room yet because she was eleven and I like her. I do want her to be aware, and want her to be safe, but laying that much weight of the past on her present seemed like putting a tire swing on a sapling. I was saving that for 13.

“Why are you reading this?” I asked.

“It’s my reading assignment… I think it’s for Black History Month; there’s another article about Rosa Parks… that one is fine, but they didn’t even tell us the reading was going to be different and we hadn’t talked about this in any class and it was just there…”

To her credit, she had finished the work; answered all questions, including:

What do paragraphs 2-4 reveal about Black life in America in 1955?Which statement best describes Mamie Till-Mobley's reaction to her son's death?

“Good grief, Sweetheart. Um, we’ll talk about this more…I have about 10 minutes left here and I’ll be home. Why don’t you just watch something on TV until I get there.”

I didn’t realize how many “Talks™” I’d be having as a parent, from traffic safety to playing fair to the birds and bees and the big one about the realities and circumstances involved in being a black person.

My wife and I approached the birds and bees as a seminar course over several summer weeks - there were books and open discussions and tasteful classic film references.

I’d already had the being black talk, long ago, but specific details were summarized as “bad things happened” because, again, youth / innocence / the preservation of a sense of hope in a dark universe, etc.

Being a parent includes dropping a really great deal of Bad News, but I believe is a core element of the job to provide context to the facts, allowing navigation.

I exited the subway, picked up a couple of ginger ales at the corner store and headed up to the apartment.

I’m not going to bore you with what I said. I talked about compassion, and that this incident emotionally bonded distant social classes of people, much like Jacob Riis’s photographs of the Lower East Side of New York City in the 1880’s. I did not show her the picture of Emmet Till, and told her not to look it up online for any reason; it was as bad as she could possibly imagine, and imagining was enough.

We drank some ginger ale. I may have had a shot of alcohol in mine.

Anyway, what I said was ok. I tried, but admitted that there was not good side to this story, even though it inspired people to support the Civil Rights Movement. But my daughter said something more interesting.

“Why is this black history? I don’t understand. Other history is about people going to the moon or inventing something or discovering something, but this is a story about a boy walking down a street, and a woman getting on a bus, just ordinary people living their lives until something bad happened to them.”

“I see what you mean.”

“Those black people were brave, but these stories are really the history of racists, those are the people doing something, murdering people and stuff. Where are the artists and scientists? Why can’t black history be about black people without white people even coming into it?”

My daughter said the same thing about girls in stories when she was five or six; then my wife introduced her to the Bechdel test where female characters must speak about something other than men.

This time we told her that she was right, that none of us, no matter what our age or background, should be defined solely by survival, and that, specifically for African Americans, even though we started from the bottom, now we’re here, and have created joy and beauty and science and laughter and innovation, both independent of any opposition and in spite of it.

And to prove that, I played her a video of Duke Ellington with his band performing “Take the A Train”; of particular significance because his star trombone player, Lawrence Brown, is her great-great uncle.

“This is jazz. We invented this. And see that guy in the band? There’s your joy. That is YOUR RELATIVE, making joy, in the middle of pretty bad times, but not because of them. That is black history.

In fact, that’s YOUR black history.”

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About two decades ago I got a new job, director of a large art production department in a storied New York advertising firm. I represented a demographic premiere (super young, and let’s just say: etc.) never before seen in a position like that.

Inside the ad industry, times were politically rife. Inside our building, the company was evolving as fast as mosquito blood in a Jurassic Park lab.

Thus this new job was a hornets’ nest on top of an active volcano, so with very little useable precedent, I just tried to do the best I could with who I was. In I walk, all One Good Suit and Speaks So Well, and I was The Boss.

My department was a collection of employees from different eras, over half of them nearly twice my age, and I was 35.

This wouldn’t have been a thing except many of them admitted, due to the math of when they’d been born, that they’d never really spoken to a black person.

So we talked. Progress was made. Bridges built. A few early retirements were immediately taken, but not that many.

One of my department managers cultivated an old Hollywood look, an elegant vampire; dapper and curiously alert. He and I treated each other like two head waiters from fancy restaurants meeting each other after work for a cocktail: I would ask something politely and he would answer even more politely and I would thank him even more politely than that, and then we would slowly nod in unison.

One day, I walked into his office and he was the only one there. It must have been near a holiday, not many folks were in. I had just gotten a first generation iPod, it was amazing, there must have been 200 songs on there, and I had it clipped on my belt with this fashionable leatherish case thing. He politely asked how I liked it, and I (more politely) said it was a miracle, a jukebox in my pocket.

He asked what music I was listening to.

I told him that I had just gotten a new album that was amazing, Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall, and her voice was so incredibly powerful and did he know how small she was for that huge voice to come out and the arrangements were so electric that I got goosebumps every time I heard “Come Rain or Come Shine”.

And he didn’t answer back. His face was frozen, and I MEAN frozen. One more millisecond and it would have been weird, like call an ambulance weird. He audibly inhaled.

“I was at that concert.”

I, was, starstruck. By proxy, or whatever, but wow.

“Wow! Seriously?”

“Yes.” Inhale. “I sat in the back of the balcony, at almost the very top, but you could hear every single note. I’ve heard that album many times, but if you think she sounds good there, you cannot imagine how incredible she sounded live. It was, impossible; she was this small, almost frail looking person on the stage, but when she sang…”

And for a breath or two, BOTH of us were there.

That gentleman left the agency a couple of years later: the aging parent he was caring for had passed, and so he at last retired and moved to Florida. His last words to me were, “Thank you. This has been an interesting adventure. Good luck to you.” I thanked him and we nodded, slowly, in unison.

Two years later I met with an acquaintance that knew my elegant employee, and asked after him.

“Oh, he loves Florida,” the man told me, “he’s always wanted to move there, he can really relax and let his hair down.”

“Really?” I said. “He always seemed a bit Downton Abbey for his hair to get any longer.”

“Yeah, it was really hard for him up here. But he said that you were the first supervisor who accepted that he was gay. I don’t even think his mother knew. But he felt very comfortable working for you.”

For the record, I actually didn’t know that. Our one deep conversation was when I barged into his office and went crazy about this concert that he had actually seen. I’m sure he knew I wasn’t faking all that emotion as we stood there, silent, he lost in memory and I in historical awe.

But maybe that’s when he thought I was letting him know that I knew.

It is the beginning of Black History Month here in the United States, and I write a column called Lower Black Pain, and this is the story I choose to lead with? Even given the statistical rarity of FIVE THURSDAYS THIS FEBRUARY (which won’t happen again until 2029) it does seem, on the surface, a bit of a zen arrow in terms of its subject matter.

This column is about being black, and I am not (clinically) delusional, and I do understand that all of my experiences are culturally weighted, but for me that weight is lifted through moments like the one I described with my co-worker.

In my experience, harmony has proven the key to everything, seeking it and seeking to create it. I’ve geeked out with people quite obviously culturally opposed to me about comic books, fishing with my Grandfather, dry turkey at Thanksgiving, old tv shows: each time creating a conversation that ended with two people with quote unquote nothing in common smiling and slowly nodding.

Nods mean yes. Yes is good. There is so much no. I understand the struggle from inside it, but I don’t have whatever’s necessary to be a cultural war correspondent. At best, this column attempts to chronicle peace, even on the battlefield.

Though, one of my employees did ask me to announce myself from outside of her office with three crisp knocks before entering. I did so, and by that Christmas, I got her to stop clutching her purse to her chest.

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At a young age I developed a very specific concern regarding stories: it always seemed that it was more difficult for characters to be honestly happy than to be afraid of something. Evil lurked everywhere, it could pop out of a cereal box or telephone or monkey’s paw (ok, well that one, c’mon, you had it coming), but Good always had to arrive at the last minute.

And no one seemed to have an answer for it. Good always played defense to Evil’s offense. This really bothered me when I was eleven, because I was exactly the kind of eleven year old that it would bother.

Saturday Night Fever, Smokey and the Bandit, Annie Hall, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Star Wars (the original one) all opened in the same year, 1977. This cinematic cornucopia (combined with the invention of “Twi-Lite Time” prices at the local multiplex) spawned my introduction to “grown-up” films (the previous year I’d only seen “The Bad News Bears”). That summer we went to the movies just about every weekend.

Some of those titles weren’t age appropriate, but I did get to visit a galaxy far, far away (13 times), race across the country in a fancy car, and play superstar DJ to a spaceship full of folks from out of town. But those weren’t the only films I saw that summer.

Larry Gelbart, the genius writer behind MAS*H, offered “Oh God!”, starring John Denver (“Rocky Mountain High”) as a grocery store manager from Tarzana, whom God (George Burns) chooses to spread the news that we have everything we need to make the world a better place. (I’m sorry, did I mention John Denver? The singer! Was acting in this movie. And he was very good. Oh! and Teri Garr is his wife! And it’s directed by Carl Reiner! What’s not to like?)

“Oh God!” addressed my narrative concern about good and evil; God wasn’t a distant mysterious force or a (literal) Deus Ex Machina (“suddenly her hand came upon the necklace and she brandished the cross at the oncoming vampire!”). Burns played omniscience as cool confidence, a no-nonsense omnipotent granddad with all the power his character was heir to, but with kindness and patience.

No jump scares required, no special effects, just quiet wit. I really connected to this rendering of Good; the most powerful entity in the universe shows up as a nonagenarian instead of The Rock. Ok, it probably would have been Muhammad Ali back then.

That being said, it was brought to my attention that the versatile online platform I’m currently using for this column also had a few… extremists calling it home.

I often look up words when I’m writing this column, most often in the Oxford English Dictionary because it’s the largest in my home and by mere heft seems the most authoritative resource.

There wasn’t really a grey area here; I looked up the word “extremism” and there’s no positive side. It is the antonym to the phrase “fresh baked cookies”.

Many people on this platform wanted the owners to kick off the extremists, but the right to free speech is ubiquitous, so they were initially allowed to remain. Then, the platform owners had a little look-see at the questionable content, and after a Further Think decided that the platform did need a social standard, and a couple of folks were asked to leave.

I believe in free speech, and the world doesn’t have to stop talking so I can be heard. If I’m sharing a platform with people who hate me, well - heck, I’m sharing a planet with them already. I suppose if Good was as aggressive as Evil I would seek out that which is negative and destroy it, but the very ideas of aggression and destruction seem part of that negativity.

“Oh God!” set a new standard for stories about powerful good not having to be so overt, a message that, for me, has only been bested by Craig Ferguson’s brilliant description of my favorite hero, Doctor Who: “It's all about the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism”.

We can believe not only in something beyond ourselves but in ourselves, our capacities for problem solving and compassion, our ability to love as strong as anybody else could hate. The bad guys should be afraid of us, but we don’t need to be threatening to make that happen.

We keep going, we build harmony, we stand against despair, even in the grocery store line when it’s busy and the lines kind of curve around into one another and that family right ahead of us doesn’t want to sack even one bag of their own stuff as if they all had fresh manicures and baby soft hands. We can make the world a better place by just trying not to make it any worse.

As the sage has taught us, “The power of love…is a curious thing.” For every angry scream into the endless void, there is a laugh at the other end, filling it.

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As the middle-aged father of a very New Woman, the idea that any homemade fashion I create would be enthusiastically adopted is a pipe dream, but I crocheted a snood for my daughter.

A snood is a loop scarf, big enough to double over the head and become kind of a hat, sort of the same idea as the hoody dress Princess Leia wears when saying “Help me, Obi-Wan” in the hologram. It took three weeks, but I kept at it and worked to choose the right color of yarn and not drop too many stitches.

She wore it to school. Several days this week. I saw her put it on in the morning and thought it might not make the final cut of items worn completely out the door, but then it WAS.

I was so happy. I felt like those elves that helped the cobbler make shoes.

We all just started crocheting last year. I’d knitted before, a bit, but it was always hard, seemed to take forever; the two stick thing kind of confused me and I only learned the one basic stitch.

Zoë can knit like a pro: I tried to make a 12 foot long scarf 10 years ago for the Doctor Who 50th anniversary - about seven feet into it she found the width of the piece was highly variable… one foot here, nine inches there. I found it charming. She very quietly bought more yarn and created a perfect finished version before I could get another foot done.

I should know how to knit better. My grandmother taught me when I was ten or so. My summer break had started earlier than my mother’s, so for a couple of weeks it was all bran flakes and plastic slipcovers and daytime television. To be honest, it was my fancy summer camp.

There must have been a sale, but I was allowed to pick any color from the endless aisle of scratchy ultra polyester yarn over at K-Mart, as well as a pair of green aluminum knitting needles – bright green; neon, even. I did not have a “spoiling” grandmother, so this was really special.

Technically, I think she needed me to be busy. Apparently my pediatrician had told this to the family early on:

“He’s doing well, but you should make sure that he‘s very well occupied.”

When my mother pressed him as to the specific reason for this, he replied:

“It’s just probably for the best.”

So there we were, two generations of knitting neophytes and a paperback Good Housekeeping instruction manual. It took a whole afternoon just to figure out the “casting on” part, drinking big glasses of water with those strange oblong white ice cubes that never tasted like water, sitting in front of her television, watching her “stories”.

I thought it was fun. I could have all the water I could drink and I memorized the theme song to “Days Of Our Lives”. When I finally got into the rhythm of the whole thing, I’d finished about a foot of progress, and she came over to check my work.

“Hm. How’d you do that so fast?”

“I don’t know!”

I was too young, maybe, to recognize this look. I had never seen my grandmother’s competitive side. But this is what that was.

“Oh, you made a little mistake there.”

“Where?”

“Back here… you can fix it though, here, I’ll help…”

…at which point she began to pull the yarn out of the piece… three rows, seven rows, twelve rows, seventeen…

“There. Now that should be fine.”

She then sat back in her chair and picked up her own work again, which before had been about half the size of mine, but was now considerably longer than I had left on my needle.

That wasn’t trauma. That’s not what I’m saying. My spirit wasn’t broken on my quest for a lucrative knitting scholarship. I just re-made the thing quietly (at a much slower pace) and then gave it to my mom, a super heartfelt, crazy scratchy scarf; the perfect gift for the beginning of a summer.

I don’t think my Grandmother knew what to do with me. Between our generations was a great deal of societal change…I was a New Boy in a world where the rules were just being written. So the next week, my Grandmother and I also did latch hook rugs, and then after that we tried needlepoint. For a woman of a certain age with a pretty solid opinion about masculinity, she really gave me a lot of room to grow and discover the joy of creation.

Nyaa. Who am I kidding? She had completely given up on me at that point and was probably hoping I could get a little work in town as a seamstress.

Which is hilarious, but I will be taking snood orders beginning in August.

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My mother has big dreams for me. She wants me to grow up to do something significant and useful. She wants me to not quit, and to stay strong, and to hang in there, like a kitten on a motivational poster.

She won’t let me always use the calculator, because then I won’t learn how to actually solve a problem (“…what if you don’t have batteries someday?”). She teaches me to type on the manual typewriter because the added effort make my fingers “remember better”. She gives me timed tests of multiplication tables so that I know them by heart, in case there’s an emergency someday requiring swift numerical products.

But what she wants is only eclipsed by what she doesn’t want. She didn’t want me to be lazy, and she didn’t want me to be bored.

I was actually forbidden to be bored, because there was always something to be done, and once she had worked all that summer to make the extra money to buy our set of encyclopedias, there was always something to be learned as well, in alphabetical order no less.

I had to persevere, work hard, and appreciate my opportunities, because back when I got ‘em, they were all NEW. I’m in the first generation to enjoy the fruits of the civil rights movement. I CAN be an astronaut when I grow up, or the President of The United States! (well maybe not the President: that would be crazy). There are brown GI Joe dolls and news anchors and I have the right to eat at any restaurant and walk on both sides of the street and vote, as if it had always been that way.

My potential can, at last, map my actual future, rather than a societal GPS restricting me to “ a u-turn at Ambition, then merge right onto Oppression and continue forward for 100 years”.

Thus, my mother’s role models for me are Moses, Jesus, and Martin Luther King. You know, no pressure.

Moses was Charleston Heston, an American actor of English descent. I mean, the real one was super brown, but the one I saw part the Red Sea every year was this guy. He is listed in Wikipedia as an activist, which surprised me since he later in life was very much a key face of the most conservative ideas in the nation, but it is true that he was a very active supporter of the civil rights movement for decades.

Anyway, Moses was determined; he didn’t let his mean brother (Yul Brenner) stop him from standing up for what he believed in, and led a people out of bondage and into freedom, every year, right there on TV (also in the Bible: I did read the book before we saw the movie). Jesus was a hero whose superpower was love, proving that ideas and emotions were as influential as any army. And I was lucky enough to actually share the planet with Martin Luther King for almost two years.

These men worked hard to do something significant. They hung in there. But two out of three of their stories didn’t really end all that well, and I asked my mother about that when I was nine or ten.

“Why are all the heroes (you want me to be like) people that had horrible things happen to them?”

We are almost home in the car, making the last few turns before we drive up the alley to our backyard parking spot.

“I don’t know what you mean.” She does know what I mean.

“Really?”

“Well, I don’t think about it that way. I think about what they did when they were living, who they decided to be. You get a chance to be and do things I could never do, but it’s your job to take things further and keep going. They kept going. That’s all I mean. You don’t have to end up like they did if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t think they wanted to end up the way they ended up either.”

“Well, Moses did ok.”

“He was a farmer.”

“Well, you can be a farmer if you want to do that.”

When my mother begins to speak like Lewis Carroll, our conversations are over. She’ll talk about anything, give me all the advice she can, delve into subjects and philosophies most parents would never breach, but when logic pretzel-loops over itself, she’s done. I get out of the car and open the gate and let the car in and then close and lock the gate behind it. I don’t bring this up again for years, because I clearly saw the inexpressible anguish and complexity in the corner of her eye.

Over a decade later, I sit with my mother going through a giant scrapbook. My grandfather has just passed, and among his newspaper clippings and photos we find a church bulletin announcing Martin Luther King speaking from the auditorium of my old high school, which at that time was actually my mother’s all black high school in Kansas City, Kansas. I had no idea that Dr. King had spoken there, there should have been a plaque or something: I’d performed Pinter and Ionesco on that stage (and had my second ever kiss there), but I would have treated the room with way more reverence.

“You know, your Grandfather picked him up at the airport.”

“Martin Luther King???”

“Yes. Grandpa was chosen to go get him and take him back. I guess he volunteered.”

“Grandpa, spent one-on-one time, in a car, with Martin Luther King… and he didn’t talk about this, like, every year at Thanksgiving?”

“Why would he do that? Oh, I see.”

She puts the bulletin back in the scrapbook. “Martin Luther King was famous, but we didn’t talk about him like a celebrity. It was what he had to say that was important. He was teaching us all to fight...well, not fight, but to stand up for ourselves. Like a teacher.”

“Did you go to this?” I ask her. To me it’s like a Beatles concert that she’s just failed to ever mention.

“I must have. I didn’t ride in the car, though, that was just the two of them.”

Martin’s general dream supported my mother’s very specific ones, paving a way for me to be determined, inventive, and curious without all that being against any law. In no way am I any of the three people my mother suggested, but I am not lazy, and I am never bored, and hope that, whatever this is I’m doing, counts as “taking things further”.

“Grandpa said he was very nice, and he enjoyed speaking with him.” my mother added, super casually.

Wow. ‘Cause as you must by now recognize, I do not share my grandfather’s talent for understatement: I would have printed up a hundred t-shirts saying “I Took Dr. Martin Luther King to the Airport and Then Made This T-Shirt!!!”

Well, I guess I’d only really need the one shirt.

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I have some things I am excited to make this year, a few movies I’m anxious to see, and lots of books I’d like to read.

We have a great deal of books. One might say “too many”, but One would not be entirely accurate. I classify the measurement as “We just need one more bookshelf. And maybe a wall to put it on.”

My grandfather’s house held a library. I believe most of it was there when they moved in (back in the ‘40s), but he was the one that added all of the law books; I tried to read a couple of those but was more drawn to the antique copy of The Arabian Nights I found there.

I was given books instead of an allowance as a kid… hard work turned into a different kind of paper; I earned those copies of “The Apple Dumpling Gang” and “The Shining” (I believe I read both those books in the same year).

I always wanted to be an author. I suppose after almost two years of these columns I can say that I’m a writer, but to be an author, you need a book. So that’s on the list too this year, along with finally soldering together that guitar distortion pedal kit. And finishing the LEGO car.

The giant chain bookstore down the street from my job is closing in seven days. There used to be tons of these, competing brands, all across the country, and I remember the thrill of the endless selection and scandalous inclusion of fully sanctioned hot beverages you could just carry around.

As a bookstore fan, It made me happy to think that these literary behemoths were necessary, that there was good business sense behind opening one at the end of a mall and another only a few miles away, that a demand for reading materials in the nation necessitated such spectacular supply.

I don’t enjoy libraries. I never have. My grade school had Sisters and Misses: Sister Janet Helen, Miss Kraft, Miss Indra. The librarian was Sister Cat(herine), a fine lady, nice and not at all mean, and pretty super progressive for a midwestern nun in the 1970’s. But most of the books in the library were covered in this crinkly plastic wrap, and of course they weren’t YOUR books, so you had to be very careful with them when you read them. My favorite book was “Family Sabbatical”, a book that effected me so deeply that 40 years later I found a copy of it on eBay (from a library, of course).

But I love bookstores. I think for me it’s the difference between a zoo and a pet adoption center; zoos, even at their most humane, seem voyeuristic and separate from your own life, you are visiting the home of all the creatures who live there, while a bookstore holds the thrilling potential of bringing something home that you will love forever.

And now very few remain. The building housing the one by my work is being renovated into what’s rumored to be pickleball courts. Which is equally sad as both metaphor and literal statement.

My first job was in a bookstore; I steered a customer away from buying the expensive new Stephen King book for their ten year old (I did give her other options, but they were slightly cheaper); the manager was angry about losing the sale and sent me off the floor to clean the tiny gross employee bathroom; but since we were in a mall I bought I contact paper and brighter lights along with the cleaning materials and renovated it, and the employees loved it, and he fired me on the spot. We couldn’t even shop there anymore.

Anyway, I think I’ve figured it out. I look at the books in my home and remember not plots or stories, but feeling worried about Sherlock Holmes and those dogs, sympathetic with Holden Caufield’s malaise, uplifted by Aladdin’s bravery, strident regarding Dorothy Parker’s relationships, and so very amused by the hijinks of the Apple Dumpling Gang.

Books are where I learned empathy, even though I was alone. And when I walked through a bookstore I was not choosing adventure, but emotional alignment. And now, when the smartphone won’t give me space to catch my breath between pronouncements of disaster and tragedy, it is this empathy that sustains me, a base built on the wisdoms of both Maya Angelou and Zaphod Beeblebrox.

I keep these books around to remind me that I know how to feel, to remind me to keep feeling, no matter the circumstances the world throws at me, because I’ve already survived a long cold winter at the Overlook hotel.

And if I made it through seven years at Hogwarts, I’ll probably be able to get through another election year.

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Covid in Our Christmas Stockings was not the name of a new holiday movie, but instead the elevator pitch plot of my actual life this week.

Exchanging yuletide pleasantries for “Hark! The Herald Angels Sneeze!” has left me weak, my head still spinning…

…thus this brief poem, for year’s beginning.

Dear Baby New Year,

you can’t read this yetyou’re just an infant butI worked outyou must ageat leasta quarter-year a day,

which is the reasonthough I’ve thought to writeI never did.

I knew that until March 15th or soyou were a kid

so why send youa boring noteabout my mid-life health?you don’t need that.you’re young;won’t be my age til… August 12th.

but maybe August 13thyou can drop me a quick line?let me know how September looks?and if October’s fine?

I understand all we are guaranteedis to get olderwe start out babesand rockettowards our prime

then seem to gain momentumrolling reckless as a boulderjust like you are

kind of… bundled up in time. what lies ahead? your walking stick.we can’t deny that fact, butif you don’t mind,I think we’ll just keep wearing your top hat.amazing it still fits, I know.It brings a sense of styleto innocence, experience,to wisdom, bravery, guile…It kind of goes with everything.so when I get that chanceto have your canebe fairly warned,I’m using it to dance.

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Ice and Snow

I was convinced that every yuletide of my youth was a frosty winter wonderland. As previously mentioned, I am absolutely a product of the American midwest, born and mostly raised where annual weather patterns were defined by cut out cardboard schoolroom decorations atop the blackboards: a pretty spring flower, a yellow summer sun, a bright orange autumn leaf, and either a giant crystalline flake or a Classic Snowman with top hat, red scarf and carrot nose.

So though I did remember nearly ALL of the Christmases from my childhood as snow-covered Norman Rockwell paintings, I recently found a chart showing the actual weather in Kansas City for the last seventy Christmases. Out of my first 18, only 4 of them actually had snow on the ground on that day.

My wife is a Northern Californian. She never knew snow as a child, on Christmas or nearly any other winter’s day. My cousins in Texas could go swimming after Christmas dinner (ok: well, an hour after Christmas dinner).

But I grew up with an annual anticipation of a White Christmas. This extremely hummable meterologic aspiration taunts us every year, and is so connected with the holiday that it necessitates movies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on snow effects to make the scenes “convincing”.

Because whether or not it’s true for us personally, Christmas, in general, is snowy. It snows at the North Pole, it snowed in Southtown (for one day), it snowed in Bedford Falls (thanks to Clarence). Halloween is pumpkins. Thanksgiving is turkey, Fourth of July is fireworks. Easter’s a colored egg, New Year’s is… well, also fireworks, but Christmas lights shine brightest either out of the darkness of night or the smooth blank canvas of a winter’s snowfall.

Snow is only weather, but at the right time and in the right dosage, it’s also kind of a miracle. I don’t know why I thought it snowed every Christmas. Perhaps my head is a snow globe, and when I bring up memories of Christmases I just kind of shake it a bit. That would explain quite a lot about me, actually.

Pico and Sepulveda

The true gift of gifting Is what it means inside We can show we care Spreading love far and wide.

– My Little Pony : Best Gift Ever

My extended family is small but precious, a priceless collection of exceptional individuals whom I feel deeply connected to, no matter how long it’s been since we’ve seen one another. It is such a rare collection that I wonder how, mathematically, I was lucky enough to run across each one of them in a world of…

[…hey Siri: how many people are in the world right now?]

…7 billion 846 million people.

One of these wonderful people is getting married next year, to a wonderful man who is kind and tall and smart and good looking: they’re very well matched. She brought him over for dinner before they were officially engaged, and I’m not ashamed to admit we tried to size him up, which didn’t take that long because he’s entirely delightful.

She brought him back for dinner a few weeks ago, but now that they were “official” I found the situation reversed: I wanted to make a good impression, I was someone he was gonna have to be around now, a number in his phone he was gonna have to pick up ‘cause it was gonna be on that list that your phone lets ring even when you’re not taking calls just in case or whatever.

We spoke about politics, employment, government, real grown up stuff. I was visibly sweating, but felt confident, a little nervous the conversation might veer into sports and my eyes would show True Fear as I vamped about the Chiefs for 30 seconds until I could make a sharp left at Taylor Swift™ and talk about music.

But the most amazing thing happened. He mentioned his favorite Christmas album, which happened to be a collection of vintage novelty holiday songs collected by the madcap radio host Dr. Demento, and said he hadn’t heard it in years. I got up from the table while he was still talking and pulled out my copy. And it was a moment, folks, a real moment, one of those two people in sync beats where you understand them and they understand you and it’s all gonna be ok – Twilight Sparkle was right, friendship IS the greatest gift, and my friend had not only shared the person she loved, but brought over somebody I could play with, which for an only child is just about the coolest thing ever. Maybe we’ll build a fort.

(Oh! I gotta find my Hot Wheels!)

Merry and Bright

My favorite Christmas album is The Partridge Family Christmas Card. My mother bought it in 1971. I listened to it every single year, and treated it with pristine respect, so I never actually removed the outside plastic. So I never actually understood that the envelope pattern on the front of the album cover was an actual envelope, and INSIDE that envelope was an actual Christmas card, signed by all the Partridge Family. I didn’t find that out until 1983, right before I went to college. It was a pretty magical day.

If I could send you all a card to thank you for your time, it would be this one: maybe not the card itself, but that feeling of discovering something wonderful in something you’ve seen a million times before. May your holiday bring surprise and delight, warmth and laughter, and may peace and love surround you at Christmastime, and all the whole year through.

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I was 12 years old, it was 1978, beginning of November, a Saturday morning. I know it was a Saturday morning because that’s when the cartoons came on, and I was probably watching Bugs Bunny when the commercial played for the first time.

TCR Total Control Racing was a slot racing set with little cars on an electrified track with voltage controlled by plastic trigger devices, except this one had NO SLOT to keep the cars on the track, instead it used a switch on the trigger to shift the electric feed from one set of contacts underneath the car to a second that powered an alternate driveshaft…

…meaning the cars could CHANGE LANES. Whenever you wanted. Pass each other on the turns then fire into the straightaways. The set included a jam car that just slowly went around the track as an additional obstacle. The whole thing was an absolute miracle of engineering and design, and here it was…just seven weeks until Christmas.

There had never been one Christmas morning where I’d stood, pajama-clad and be-slippered, facing a holiday hearth with the slightest anticipation of a lump of raw petroleum as a gift. I had never been naughty, and you have to be naughty to get coal in your stocking, very naughty according to all the songs and relevant literature. Sporting a childhood demeanor more Pollyanna than Katzenjammer, I was a more than decade-long honoree of The Nice List.

But household standards were more stringent than traditional North Pole rules; not being naughty was in no way the same as being nice, and nice on it’s own wasn’t nearly enough, too low a bar, as evidenced by the fact that the phrase “that’s nice.” has never really indicated high praise. What I was supposed to be, in a general sense, was a good person.

Good was also canon, per “…he knows if you’ve been bad or good…”, and was considered more weighty than the traditional naughty/nice gambit. Good and bad indicated commitment to a specific behavioral path, not just dabbling in decency or mischief. As we grow older, the opposite of good evolves to evil, but that’s way beyond what we can handle at Christmas. Surely an evil kid wouldn’t even get coal; their stocking would be missing altogether as if The Grinch had dropped by.

It didn’t matter how good I was, I wasn’t getting the TCR because we couldn’t afford it. But as a treat, my mom drove to the really nice toy store way across town at 95th street, in the nice neighborhood where they had it assembled and on interactive display so kids could play with it.

It was important to my mother to let me know that I had been good that year, and that it was appreciated by her, and if we had the money she would have definitely gotten it. (If it had been in any way available, I might have asked Santa for it, but the set had instantly sold out nationwide.)

On Christmas Eve, my mother got a check in the mail, a miracle check of some kind, entirely unexpected. She stood kind of frozen in the middle of the living room, backlit with afternoon sun and the lights of our Christmas tree, and just stared at it for a long time, not saying anything, then looked at me.

“Let’s go get your racetrack.”

“It’s sold out, Mama.” I reminded her.

“Call around and see.”

“I don't need it, Mama.” I told her, and I didn’t. KPRS was on the radio playing soul holiday hits and we were gonna make a gingerbread house. Christmas was on.

“See if you can find it.” she insisted.

So, outside, while gentle late afternoon snow tripled in volume to a full blizzard, I worked my way through the Yellow Pages, checking every K-Mart and toy store in the immediate area, gathering a pretty healthy range of sarcastic responses from harried salespeople.

“It’s ok, Mama. There’s none around here.”

“Keep trying.” My mother obviously considered that check a sign of some sort.

So I called that toy store where we first saw it. They took forever to answer, but when they did they said, like everyone else had, it had been sold out for weeks…

…however, someone had placed one on hold and was supposed to pick it up by five but they never did, and store policy was to put it back on the floor but there wasn’t anyone in the store because it had snowed an inch and a half in the last hour with four more inches on the way; it was now six o’clock, and they closed for the holiday at seven. If we came by, by seven o’clock, we could have that one.

I relayed the shopkeeper’s message to her with a “well, we tried” shrug and a smile. But my mother wasn’t smiling.

She called them right back. “Are you SURE you have the exact thing we’re looking for? The exact one? And you’ll keep it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Ok, we’re on our way.”

I may never get the opportunity to ride on Santa’s sleigh, snow everywhere, wind buffeting my coat, near zero visibility, but this Christmas Eve ride was twice that. I’ve seen my mother drive a great deal, she is always a safe and prudent driver, but never one to back down from an automotive challenge: it was impossible, roads not yet cleared, and only 40 minutes to compete a 45 minute trip (in good weather).

The parking lot was under two inches of unbroken snow when we arrived. My mother drove right up to the front door. It was 7:10 on our car clock. We jumped out and walked to the front door, the lights were still on, and the manager saw us. We identified ourselves, and he looked very surprised… it was clear we had driven a very long way. He led us inside to the one open cash register, checked us out, and wished us both a Merry Christmas.

My mother put the track in the trunk of the car, as not to ruin the Christmas surprise, and we started the even more exciting and dangerous trip back home, this time racing not time, but Santa himself, since we only had a couple of hours to make that gingerbread house and get to bed.

There was no way on Earth I could have been “nice” enough to have deserved all that. I did try to be kind, and fair, and not a little jerk or whatever, but that was some Torreto Family level driving.

I’m sure that every time my mother saw me play with that track for the next five years she hoped that I would remember where it came from: well, here it is, forty-five years later, and I definitely do. The experience outlasted the toy. Which makes sense, because the story was the real gift.

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Babies leak. They’re not really waterproof – I mean they are on the outside, but not exactly from the Inside.

As soon to be parents we were told that there were two types of leaks in children: let’s just say chimneys and basements.

We had a chimney baby, and took it in stride that we were responsible for maneuvering a soft uncovered pint glass filled with delicious formula. Every so often it might tip over, or we’d squeeze it a little and then gravity and physics took over and we were but peasants in the line of Pompeii.

Then we met a basement person. They were so much calmer than we would have been in their situation…if our life was volcanic then theirs was… well, worse. We approached our challenge with a splendid array of darling little kitchen towels in our kit bag, but theirs was no simple salvation.

I have a Christmas Day photo holding a happy three month old… she has an adhesive and staple free bow on the top of her head. It is from a series of photographs, the first one dry, the rest not nearly as dry. It is among my all-time favorite photos of the holidays.

It is not just in comparison that I remember those times so very fondly: that plane ride home when my daughter was only 1 and she “burped” as we were descending into JFK, and I only had the one shirt and undershirt so I had to take that off and wear only my suit coat like Grace Jones.

Zoe decided it would be better if I held the baby on the way through customs, as it would soften my “Chocolate Hotness” image and legitimize me in some way as a loving parent rather than a sketchy semi-nudist landing from Europe.

I strapped her into the little kangaroo holster, hiking it up as far as I could. She looked like a very extravagant vest. I remember telling her “Now, play it cool… we have to get past this nice man in the pseudo military outfit or you’ll be visiting me every six weeks bringing gluten-free cakes with long metal files baked into them”. She seemed to understand.

The customs guard barely raised his head; he took my document and scanned it and glanced at it, then scanned it in the other machine (one horizontal and one vertical), then glanced at me and then back at the document…

…and then glanced at me again,and the passport again,and then just straight up looked.

“They’re with me, we’re all together!” said my completely unsuspicious wife. It became immediately evident that her reputation was now tainted by the company she kept, as now he looked at us all.

“Were you traveling for business or pleasure?” he asked with slightly narrowed eyes.

I was two seconds away from saying “…mmm, beeznooz.” in a proto-European accent and letting it ride to see if I could get away with it, but the baby felt this foolishness rising and answered the man herself. It wasn’t in English, but it was definitely a direct answer to the man’s question. Even he recognized that, though he did not take the bait.

“And your final destination?” he added.

“Home. We’re home! We live in Brooklyn!” My wife excitedly replied. I’m sure she thought I might begin to wax lyrical about where any of us are truly headed, which was ridiculous (yet entirely accurate).

“Hmn.” He didn’t say it, but that was the look on his face…Hmn. Then with a shrug that said “Do I really need this today? No, I don’t.” The Nice Man gave us our passports back, mumbled a dismissive “Welcome Home.” over his left shoulder and we were on our way.

Now I was a free American, wearing a baby. My walk took on a more fashion runway sass. My daughter kept on talking and Zoë was happy it was all over. We got our bags and got in the cab and I remember that ride home… it was hot, and the windows were open to get what we delusionally refer to as “fresh air” in New York. I remember the BQE, and the buildings in Williamsburg, and here I was, a part of this city, and that moment, THAT moment, was glorious.

That’s what I think about when the Christmas carol goes “comfort and joy”.

You might think that moment was anything but comfortable and joyous, but the relief of heading back to our own tiny apartment with our chatty and entirely empty child brought me happiness, a moment I can still vividly remember. A taxi ride from one concern to the next, where things were OK, after it seemed like they might not be, and we didn’t know what to do – but things had worked out. Ah.

Christmas, as Hans Gruber reminds us, is the time of miracles, but the best ones last longer than the holiday; a decade old memory is impossible to wrap, but it never gets old and goes great with everything I wear. We each have our own stories to share, and we should share them as much as we can with the people we love this month. Call somebody, write it down, or pull them over to the quieter corner of a holiday party and tell them about that time that thing happened. Share your own tidings!

Ok, I did have to look that word up.And don’t take off your shirt at the airport…that’s more of a summer look.

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I took the class because it the name of it was “The History Of Film Comedy” and I thought that it might be fun, because I was a freshman and it was the only course available to me in the giant blue book of offerings that didn’t sound either impossible or overwhelming.

First class; the professor introduces himself and goes straight into the life of Buster Keaton, who as a baby was part of his family’s vaudeville act by having two of his relatives each hold one arm and one leg and then swing swing TOSS him into the balcony of the theatre, where other relatives caught him and tossed him back on to the stage. They lived out of a suitcase, tragically poor, disaster and ruin, tragedy and mayhem…

This really wasn’t funny at all. I mean, the movie was, but the class really wasn’t.

…and then the professor asked the class, “How many of you have ever gone to bed, not sure where your next meal would come from?”

I raised my hand. Don’t get me wrong, I was protected and provided for every day of my life, but for a while there we were really poor, and sometimes had to stretch food and the very concept of it and just have faith that we’d make it. Honestly, I thought everyone had that same experience at least once, because I was from Kansas City and it was the early eighties and it was the second week of school and I was a really long way from home.

Two other students also raised their hands. Then time kind of stopped, because we looked at each other, and all of us were of some sort of color, and NO ONE ELSE had raised their hand, and the three of us had the exact same expression on our faces: surprise that we were the only people with our hands raised. Whatever classrooms we had been in last year, maybe most of that class might have had their hands in the air, so there was this beat where we were just acknowledging each other, and by then it was too late.

“Keep your hands up, keep your hands in the air.” the professor said. “Stand up, you three.”

First class, long way from home, sure Mister, I’ll stand up.

“These three know comedy. They’re the only three of you that understand it. They have had to face the world without certainty, and find something good where the rest of you wouldn’t have seen anything. They know what comedy means.” Then to us he added, “Everyone else may laugh, but you three will be able to understand. Ok, class dismissed.”

Now everyone stood up. A random girl patted me tenderly on the back, her head lowered. I picked up my bag and went outside, where the three of us, apparently blessed by the Goddess of Comedy, introduced ourselves.

“I don’t think my life is all that bad…” one of them said, “I don’t really feel like I’ve suffered or anything.”

We each agreed.

“At least we’re not afraid of being poor or anything.” I added.

“Yeah...” said the third. “though I get the feeling that if some of them grew up where we did, they might not have enjoyed it as much as we did.”

I think I got a B in that class.

I don’t want to become a curmudgeon, mostly because it’s so difficult to spell, so I’m continually reaching out to learn something new. But the modern world is awash with infinite amounts of fresh images, sounds, and information, and I am not infinite, I am maybe 12 hours a day of fairly drowsy middle aged black man. I can only do so much, eat so much, see so much, pay so much attention.

But I appreciate that I can appreciate things. I’ve met people who can’t, who, no matter where they are, are forever in a state of “oh gosh I’m super bored right now.”, always seeking something more.

My goal has always been to have enough, because you can actually have enough of something. More is by definition unattainable: it’s infinity plus one, the elusive parabola.

Three TV networks? Just fine. Cable? Wow, that’s… a lot of stations. A VHS player? Amazing. And now? Netflix has 36,000 hours of available programming at any given time. According to SIRI, who I politely asked to do the math for me, that’s 4 years of 24 hour a day programming, yet what I inevitably end up watching the most is trailers. I am lucky enough to live where food is abundant, but I can’t eat most stuff due to allergies. And Hamilton is right; history is happening in Manhattan and I just happen to be in The Greatest City In The World, but I’m too tired to go out at night, thank you very much, I’m just gonna go back home and not eat stuff in front of some Netflix trailers and hit the sack.

But that’ still fun to me. It’s important to be able to be satisfied, to truly have a sense of recognizing something you might like wherever you happen to be.

Auntie Mame, a 1955 novel by Patrick Dennis, was later turned into a Broadway play, and then a very successful movie, and then a musical (also on Broadway), and then a movie of that, though don’t watch that movie because it’s not very good.

In the original (non-musical) film, the altogether fabulous Rosalind Russell is giving her diminutive wallflower of a secretary a “total makeover.”

She convinces her to step out for the evening, saying “Live! Live! Live! Life’s a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!”

At this point in the film, Mame’s character has been rich, poor, single, married, single again, rich again, employed, various types of unemployed, somewhat famous, and somewhat infamous. She has, by any measure, lived, seeing the opportunities in every situation and circumstance, and passing this perspective on to her young nephew, who is, somewhat, in her care.

The author of Auntie Mame seems to have taken his own literary advice; he was an ambulance driver, a very famous author, and then a butler for the man who founded McDonalds. Apparently he loved that job.

I’ve tried to eat at the banquet, even when it seemed more like foraging in the wilderness with a paper napkin. Every experience doesn’t have to be a good one, goodness no; some of the best ones are awful until they’re over and then they become stories to tell.

But my professor was wrong; misfortune doesn’t make you understand comedy or life any better than anyone else. At most, it probably does make you appreciate it a little more.

Besides, I don’t have a fear of missing out anymore, I clearly know I’m missing out and it excites and delights me. The smiling evenings I sit at home wearing pajamas and thinking of all the places that I am not – are gloriously legion.

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9am. This year, the turkey is going into the oven at 9 am, because I am a responsible adult who can make that happen.

And I’m not beginning the process at 9 - nope, that’s when the actual turkey is going into the oven.

The pre-heated oven. So I’ll turn that on at 8:45. And the turkey will have to be prepared with the twine and the salt and the pepper, so I’ll start that at 8:30.

The second thing to do on Thanksgiving morning is to start slowly simmering onions and celery and sage in olive oil…fill the house with delicious anticipation. (The first thing is coffee, or a hot beverage of any kind.) I’ll get that going at 8, before the chopping and preparing and…

…oh. De-frosting.

I should probably get to that now.

It occurs to me that responsible adults get less sleep than less responsible adults. If my morning schedule keeps creeping backward to meet my night-before schedule (full of pies and rolls and maybe another pie just for fun) then I’ll be getting up before I go to sleep.

But this is my element. So often these days I feel that I’m not part of the algorithm; I don’t know the dances on my phone or the songs being danced to, and I’d never wear that sweater even though Amazon swears they picked it “just for me” - Pinterest is confused by me and Instagram thinks I’m a cat lady living in the UK. Thanksgiving soothes me, it is familiar and navigable; all I have to do is cook and eat and I can do those things.

I used to be in charge of an art department, and every year around this time we would try to do something bonding. One year I thought we could make those pictures of turkeys where you trace around your hand and add feathers and a beak and a waddle; during our morning meeting we all took markers and sheets of paper and collectively doodled while we empowered Corporate America. But one young woman was deeply suspicious, then disgusted, and finally very, very angry about the other 32 people doing this.

“How is it supposed to look??” she asked.

“Like this.” said five of her co-workers, holding up, y’know, basically tracings of the outside of whichever wasn’t their dominant hand.

The woman turned on me with fire in her eyes. “And how will these be judged???” she literally spat at me.

“They WON’T be judged… they’re just for fun, like we did when we were kids!” I found out, later, that she had recently graduated from art school, where vicious peer reviews had scarred her deeply. She eventually stopped glaring at me every time she saw me, and we both even laughed about it… like, seven years later.

My favorite bonding project was a cookbook, where people volunteered either their favorite or least favorite holiday recipes, and in some cases the stories behind these recipes. I still have my copy: there is German potato salad and enchiladas and lutefisk and something involving squirrel, which I was told was a joke in the way that you know that it wasn’t. The favorite and least favorite thing proved that it isn’t necessarily the taste of holiday dishes as much as their familiarity… you can count on looking forward to some foods and look forward to avoiding others.

The only recipe that is never familiar is gravy; it’s more of a… a feeling, really. I like to try to do something new every year, and the gravy is a safe experimentation dish, which can be salvaged (most of the time) if things go sideways. Last year my daughter put herself in charge of it, and it was incredible, and none of us have the slightest recollection as to how it was accomplished.

This year, for various reasons, I am feeling risk averse, and instead have learned a new fact: that the woman who wrote the rhyme “Mary Had A Little Lamb” is responsible for American Thanksgiving, having written impassioned letters to five US Presidents (it was Lincoln who finally took her advice). She wrote books and edited magazines and had five kids and lived ’til 90. And the first audio recording in America by Thomas Edison on his new phonograph machine? “Mary Had A Little Lamb”, by Sarah Josepha Hale, the woman responsible for me getting up at 8 o’clock this Thursday morning.

Maybe 7:30.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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I’ve been thinking a great deal about flatware, which I called “silverware” until about five minutes ago. According to the dictionary, silverware only refers to flatware covered in actual silver, which means that I’ve eaten with “silverware” only a very few times.

On special occasions and holidays, some families still pull out their silverware and a few pieces of the good china, but the effort involved is something most of us agree to only once or twice a year. Early family meals at my grandparents’ house were like that, formal table settings and clothing and manners, but these ended in my early teens and I never had the opportunity to sit at the adult table where all the silverware was. I wasn’t even allowed to touch the plates and fancy glasses because they were a set and I was a fumbly child-person.

Everyday flatware, not coated in semi-precious metal, is something we see so often that we most likely don’t notice it anymore. I was introduced to the idea of it in the crib, when Mom told me that the dish ran away with the spoon.

Really? Where were they heading? What were they running from? The situation was a delicious scandal.

Of course the entire rhyme could have been a metaphor… with the full scene of laughing dogs, feline violinists and astronaut cows, this rhyme could be the loose poetic rendering of a wild laudanum party.

In the 1940’s, the word “dish” was a slang term for an attractive female person, but there isn’t a comparable definition for the word “spoon” as an adventurous lothario, though the words fork, knife, and spoon are both nouns and verbs in American English. The pointy ones are mostly aggressive (“Fork over that money! Don’t make me knife you!”) leaving the spoon to represent comfort, protection, romance. I suppose that’s true in function as well; forks impale, knives separate, but spoons hold and support.

Spoon has quite a few meanings actually. Beyond engaging in the popular sleeping position, it has referred to “making out with a date”, a definition popularized in the turn of the century song “Shine On Harvest Moon”. That was my favorite song when I was six years old after I learned it at a Shakey’s Pizza™ from a black and white movie they showed there, an animated short with a bouncing ball over on-screen lyrics, so you could sing along.

My love of the tune confused both friends and passers-by, and it turns out that entire song was indeed about the joys of kissing and so forth outside in autumn, because in the winter it was just too cold – the equivalent of punk rock for 1908. It was amazingly radical, but as there wasn’t any radio back then, I suppose one just played the song on their upright piano and censored themselves as they went along.

Of the three major pieces of flatware, it is the knife that I feel is the most maligned. When asked to think of a spoon or a fork, most of us will also envision a plate, but the word “knife” never leads us directly to the dinner table; more likely a vision of a poorly lit alley and a ne’er-do-well in a dirty pageboy hat attempting to steal our jewels. You can’t soften the word “knife”… little knives are worn strapped to the ankle, big ones are swords, medium ones the favorite of cinema villains. But within American culture there was, once, a kinder knife, not used in anger or conflict, but to enhance the sweetness of life itself.

In 1977, The Pillsbury Company wanted to prove the smoothness of their pre-made canned icing, and someone (who I hope got an incredible bonus that year) came up with the idea of frosting a cake with a paper knife. Where would one obtain such an object, you ask? In the 1970’s paper plates were all the rage: first invented in San Francisco in 1904 when folks were tired of losing good dishes to earthquakes, the modern realities of dual income families had turned them into household essentials. In these commercials, a simple knife shape was cut from the middle of a paper plate (not a fancy rigid one, just the normal flopsy type), and that was used to scoop the frosting from the container, then artistically and evenly decorate a cake.

So smooth.

My mom actually did this once. It was like a science experiment. It worked pretty well, but we never used a full can of frosting all at once, and realized that once refrigerated the substance couldn’t be manipulated by any object less sturdy than a screwdriver.

So as it turns out, I do not own any “silverware”. Our most elegant dining objects, beyond the Williams and Sonoma gravy boat, are my MARVEL™ napkin rings, each of which appears to contain an Infinity Stone™. If, this year, I am allowed to place those on our table (I wouldn’t bet on it) it is my hope that they will become part of our Traditional Holiday Table Setting, an interdimensional addition to our everyday flatware; neither silver nor even probably very good plastic, they will nonetheless sparkle and glisten, somewhat jewel-like, in the celebratory candlelight of the year’s most important meals.

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I’ve never quite understood why people take pictures of their plates of food. Photography very effectively records events, but display – while delightful – is food’s least useful aspect, and photos do not hold smell, taste, nor significant nutrition.

I do have two photos of me with a birthday cake. In one I’m 13, and the other I’m 49. In one, I am giddy and giggling with delight. In the other, I am 13 years old.

Those were both really good cakes, and I distinctly remember the taste of each cake when I look at those photos, even though I do not remember other details about those days.

In a sense, BIRTHDAYS ARE CAKES, or at least candles in a sweet thing that you end up eating for dessert, or really dessert-and-a-half because you didn’t fill up on dinner in anticipation of the sweet thing with the candles in it that you were going to get an extra piece of because it’s your birthday.

I mean, we can have cake any other day, but that wouldn’t be birthday cake.

With Halloween, it’s the candy.

I suppose the special part could be that you’re allowed to go door to door and people just give it to you, but it wouldn’t feel the same if we were getting school supplies or tax advice. It’s the candy.

Yes, there is candy at Easter but we have to search for it, and complications regarding the social contracts involved in Valentine’s Day candy weigh it down – sure, it comes straight to you with little effort, but then somebody wants to hold your hand or something. Halloween night it’s just us, a bag, and the six carbon molecule glory of sucrose. There is no other night like Halloween.

Except that there is. Every other night is just like Halloween. Save solstices and equinoxes, days and nights are pretty much days and nights. Halloween is not a holiday because of the night. It’s the candy.

Somewhere through the forests of fir trees, beyond the fields of pumpkins, behind the shiny shelves of Target™ stores stand The Holidays. Maturity, (which I haven’t yet experienced directly but have waiting in my Amazon cart) brings the wisdom which allows one to define such days on one’s own terms; not measuring against Martha Stewart’s style or Andy William’s glee, but instead challenging us to discover and defend what we believe is Most Important. To me, the Holiday Meal defines everything.

Meals are essential and ephemeral; they briefly exist, are enjoyed, then disappear like sunsets, yet can be quite powerfully anticipated. The most intense demonstration of this principle is of course displayed by the domestic housecat every morning at 4:57 am, but a more measured example comes at the specific days this time of year where we look forward to sitting with our chosen or randomly genetically assigned to us families, eating foods traditional for our house but maybe not anyone else’s.

In my experience, holidays don’t just surround these meals, HOLIDAYS ARE MEALS, the brass tack moments at the center of the entire endeavor. I’ve sat at a kitchen table in an uncomfortable suit surrounded by cousins, on the floor cross legged in a college apartment with a paper plate, at a San Francisco dive bar with absolute strangers and as a guest in a strip mall Chinese restaurant, and none of the food was exactly the same, but ALL of these were absolutely HOLIDAYS. It isn’t even necessarily what you eat, it’s that you’re eating it at that time with those people.

A very, very wise man once said, “Take a picture…it’ll last longer.”, but unlike practically everything else in the modern world, the holiday meal must be experienced LIVE; moments impossible to duplicate or store, temporal check points that are reassuringly analog. Besides, my best holiday memories are the least fancy; laughter and wine in water glasses and not nearly enough napkins. It’s probably pretty lucky we didn’t take those pictures after all.

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The roller coaster of the year:

Clackety clack clack CHUNK clack clack. It’s Spring. Clack chunk clack It’s Summer.

And right now, when we start dressing in layers and appreciating cinnamon, is when the ride really starts. We rocket past pumpkins and turkeys, barrel through Black Friday and race through the glow of colored lights and fireworks until the ride suddenly PSSSSSSHSSSHH stops on January 2nd and slowly crawls back to that little dry dock where we all got on.

Before all that happens, let me say thank you for reading this column. I’m taking a quick break in preparation for Holiday Hijinks, but I wanted to begin my season by thanking you, once again, for your time. I know that it marches on and waits for no one and apparently can’t be put on a bottle, but time is not a renewable resource: I deeply appreciate you sharing yours.

I’m a big fan of time. It’s kooky: inescapable, relative and arbitrary at the same time. I’m surrounded by remnants of my attempts to chronicle it, as if time was a concert and I bought the t shirt (actually, that does explain all the t-shirts). The books on my shelves are the times that I read them, warm and validating memories mapping my journey: conversely my Netflix queue is a unnavigable yawning chasm of time yet to be spent. Time’s a little overwhelming (can something be a little overwhelming? I’m gonna have to look that up…) but when I think about meals, I feel better.

Meals are experiences, and you don’t capture them, even if you take a matchbook from a restaurant or a photo on your phone. A great meal becomes a memory that you wear for a while. During this season we all have at least one meal to look forward to, whether a sumptious spread or that special fancy coffee they only serve around now… it all reminds me of the quote where Auntie Mame says “Life’s a banquet…”

It goes on, but we’ll get to that part later.

Keep warm. Find your gloves. You look great in that hat.

See you next week.

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Welcome, Honored Guest…

to my Halloween special. It’s nothin’ fancy, like a 45, a single with two sides.

(…while maintaining accessibility, I must inform you that a great deal of audio elements are involved: so you may want to listen as well!)

First, I’d like to welcome my special guest, star of stage and screen, Mr. Vincent Price.

I interviewed Vincent Price in college: I worked for the film studies center, and he came to town, and someone arranged an hour for us to interview him, and because I was from Kansas City (his hometown) I convinced my boss that I should be the one to do it.

He was all kinds of charming, and his voice and tone was so warm that I made the classic error of saying,

“I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but I’ve known you all my life as a terrifying figure, but you are (and I’m not kidding) about the nicest person I’ve ever met. How did you get into being scary?”

“Well,” he responded, “I think that everyone in the world, no matter who they are, has a scary side. I just let mine out through acting. It’s the difference between this…”

And here he did exactly what you think he would;He didn’t change the way he was sitting, he didn’t lean forward, he didn’t raise his voice… he just said the words,

“…and this.”

I’d like to find that videotape to see how loud I actually yelped. It was over in just a second, and that nice guy was sitting in front of me again. It was the best acting class I’ve ever taken, and it was free, and like, 4 seconds long.

When I say he’s our guest tonight, IN NO WAY do I mean there’s gonna be some awful AI tech involved (yuck); instead Mr. Price visits us from a record album he made in 1958 titled “CoStar”, one of a series of long-playing records where famous actors performed scenes as characters from classic plays, and YOU were supplied a script inside the album cover to act along with them.

It was marketed as a party game, with a variety of very random actors, but in my personal opinion, the two most amazing editions were Tallulah Bankhead, an actress with a voice so singular that it has not yet and may never be equalled (see Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat”: even her everyday laugh was EPIC) and that of our special guest, Mr. Vincent Price, with whom (on tonight’s accompanying audio) I will reprise a bit of my high school role of Algernon in Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”.

Now, my costume. I stayed up til 1AM “sewing” it together, even though I’m not wearing it.

This year we lost an American composer who defined what I thought a composer was - his style was unmistakable and his range was vast.

I’m not dressing as the composer, goodness me, no: instead I, inspired by a bootleg online video of his 1968 musical, got all inspired to create a song in his style, something that could be sung in the middle of a Broadway show in the middle of a darkened stage, about a STORY, with CHARACTERS, with a further nod to all the songwriters who create happy songs with sad lyrics or sad songs with happy ones (#robertsmith).

So I came up with a whole plot (that I think would actually work for a new Netflix Christmas movie) and then put together this song. The emotionally jaunty 1960’s way-too-frank lyrics filled with sad optimism would be best sung by Dionne Warwick, but I’ll just have to do.

So, for the Halloween Brave-Of-Heart, I present… this year’s Halloween costume:

Ladies and Gentlemen, Burt Blacharach.

BACHARACH. Sorry! It’s the thematic unity, it gets me every time.

Enjoy your Halloween!

See you soon.

I don’t expect

You to reflect

These feelings.

That’s my burden.

Yet part of me

Craves harmony

The likes of which

aren’t certain.

A world ago

This did not go

The way that I

had hoped for

Yet here we stand

Now, hand in hand

In hopes that

this might be more.

this might be real

this might be new

this could be home

If I could be with you

I’d let you break my heart again

Take the chance faith is stronger than fate

And then

I’d give my love without regret

Forgive and forget

Let you break my heart again

Fair to suggest

i’m not the best

Relationship Advisor

Such sad affairs

Uneven pairs

Is older really wiser?

We crashed and burned

So this new turn’s

Completely unexpected

Are thoughts of we

Pure fantasy

Or errant paths corrected

Now this seems real

This feels so new

This seems like home

If you feel this way too

I’ll let you break my heart again

Take the chance faith is stronger than fate

And then

I’ll give my love without regret

Forgive and forget

Let me take your heart again

Please let me take your heart again

Take the chance faith is stronger than fate

And then

Give me your love without regret

Forgive and forget

Let me take your heart again

©2023 Jd Michaels / CabsEverywhere Productions

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I’ve been working on my Halloween costume. It’s a little bit tricky, because I’m trying something new. I’m not wearing a costume this year as much as stepping into an identity... it’s a little hard to explain, and if I seem overly mysterious it’s because I don’t want to tell you exactly what I’m going to do just yet. I kind of want a “reveal” moment, and I have a little time left to keep working on it. Maybe I’ll have a little Halloween Special this year.

That would be fun. I already know the title of it. A few years ago, the random lady on the street in my neighborhood called me an “elegant monster”.

She is not wrong.

That would be the name of my special. An Elegant Monster.

Oh, well, now I have to do it. It’s got a title and everything.

I’ve worn three pretty classic Halloween costumes.

My most dangerous costume was after college, when I lived in San Francisco and splurged on a full ninja outfit. San Francisco loved Halloween in the early 90’s, it seemed like everyone dressed up, no matter what age they were. There were literally thousands of people on the street wandering about Halloween night.

But I took a shortcut on the wrong side of Guerrero and guys started coming up to me wanting to fight. I’d walked this way before and nobody’d ever stepped to me looking for West Side Story action.

“Hey, ninja, let’s see what you got!” they called out, or “Hey man, you a real ninja?”.

Now, let’s be honest, if I was a real ninja you wouldn’t see me at all. I’d be deadly shadows, an invisible master killer… I certainly wouldn’t be buying a Dr. Pepper at this bodega. But things got tense, there was adventure and some shooting, it became a whole thing.

I’d never had to take responsibility for a costume before. It was like I’d dressed as a doctor and suddenly somebody dragged me in to do surgery.

The costume I wanted most when I was a kid was a full head werewolf mask with hair. Lots of hair. You could put it on and it would be your entire costume, because back then the special effects hadn’t been invented to turn people into actual giant wolves in the movies, just folks in regular clothes (with lots of hair).

My mother didn’t think this was appropriate for an eleven year old, but when I was thirteen she allowed me to buy it with “my own money” from my own job at the bookstore. I did wear it trick or treating (at the mall, not in the neighborhood, saints preserve us, that would be dangerous) and discovered that it was a portable mini-sauna. I kept it on that night until my head felt like it had lost a few pounds, but wore it randomly for years at home, while cleaning my room or reading a book.

[Side note: I was a panel speaker for a national diversity and inclusion event at CNN (not on air) and they asked us each to begin with our name and something about our background and identity.

I said, “My name is Jd Michaels. I’m a werewolf.” then passed the mic. The next speaker cautiously passed it back to me.

“What?” I asked the crowd. “Look, I’m fine now, the full moon’s not for 18 days, but isn’t it interesting that you view me differently? When I walk into a room, it’s assumed that I’m naturally carrying this raw deadly rage, even though I’m smiling and wearing a suit. People don’t even listen to what I’m saying half the time because they’re too preoccupied waiting for the wolf. Because they’re afraid of wolves, and think that this is just a disguise, even though I’ve never done anything angry, violent, or ambivalent. See, it’s not my actions I’m judged by, it’s my percieved potential. But I know we’re all friends here, right? None of you could be called a lycanthropist.” and I passed the mic again.

There was applause, and one lady started crying, and the organizer looked super freaked out. Best Halloween ever, except, y’know, it wasn’t Halloween.]

My best Halloween costume was the one I never got to wear.

When I was eight years old, I was invited to Kenneth Herrera’s birthday / Halloween party. I wanted to dress as “The Human Torch” from Fantastic Four.

To prepare, I -• collected information on fire safety from the library

• called long distance from Kansas City, Kansas to Los Angeles, California to speak with the stunt department at Universal Studios (I told them it was a school assignment; as my voice dropped early, they actually patched me through and answered most of my questions)• completed several levels of test runs on my homemade protection suit design with the bunsen burner from my Gilbert chemistry set; first using my Captain Kirk action figure, and then my index finger.

The plan was to ring the front doorbell, then when Kenneth opened the door yell “Flame on!” at which point my mom would ignite my flame suit, prompting a 7 second full burn after which she would douse me with an extinguisher – not a foam one (because that would get all over their porch) but a CO2 one, which would double as an excellent fog cover for me to zip OUT of the flame suit and protective layering, revealing bright red pajamas (my indoor costume) underneath. My mother taught 5th grade GT. I knew this might be a hard sell.

Sure enough, she refused to let me set myself ablaze, not even “just for a minute”: full stop. She did, however, appreciate the written proposal, extensive research, and mini-demonstration, and as a compromise she taught me to how to use the sewing machine while making me a (non-flammable) Golden Age SHAZAM costume instead.

I had even written a note and signed it, giving her express permission for the whole thing so she wouldn’t get into any trouble, but she pointed out to me later (when I was 27 years old) that a handwritten note from an eight year old would not have stood up in court, and if she had allowed this to happen I would certainly have grown up in another household having been only allowed Sunday and holiday visits with her. Excellent parenting on her part.

She also described, in detail, what the reaction of the Herrera family would have been the sight of a flaming little black kid on their porch. Perversely, I kinda would have liked to have seen that.

Their neighbors would have talked for days.

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60 seems younger than 57. 57 is my Heinz year. It’s one of my three food slogan years.

You get three food slogan years. You know that, right? 11 (herbs and spices), 31 (flavors) and 57 (Heinz).

11 is when you come into your own, become a young adult, begin to navigate the chaos, at the start of the adventure;

at 31, you accept the responsibilities of adulthood, begin to establish stability and reputation;

and at 57, you put it all together, the total of innocence and experience, enthusiasm and perseverance, and enjoy the life you’ve built.

57 was originally the number of pickle varieties offered by Heinz; in actuality they offered more than 60, but 5 was Henry Heinz’s lucky number and 7 was his wife’s. Yes, I too thought they might have aspirationally used “72”, but his deep seated honesty wouldn’t let him. In any case, I’ve been the spring chicken, and tasted life’s sweetness and frigidity, and am now prepared to focus on the spice of life.

It’s my birthday. And yes, I invented the food slogan year thing, but that doesn’t make it any less true, and you are free to incorporate it in any way you wish with no fear of legal reprisal.

I just found out that your nose and ears keep growing your entire life, but they are not really growing as much as stretching, because collagen and cartilage are subject to gravity, moving them a fraction of a millimeter downward every year, like cathedral windows.

We are not made of stone. There are specific and non-blame oriented reasons that clothes don’t fit anymore.

I’m actually in better shape that I was 26 years ago.

This is less a statement concerning my current condition than a criticism of my former one, and less focused on my overall health than my actual shape, the one someone might outline in charcoal or pencil if I volunteered as a life drawing model.

26 years ago I worked 12 hour days 6 days a week and had yet to discover the effects of gluten or lack of sleep. Before long, I looked as if I was stealing one of those balloons you can twist into animals by hiding it around my waist, inside my shirt, just above my belt.

In my 30’s, someone took a photo of me playing football in the park with my shirt off.

(The red flags are: I have my shirt off outside my house and I’m playing football.)

I don’t know what I was doing, but somebody took a picture of me from the back and it was the kind of thing that motivates one to action. It looked like it could have been handled in a simple way, well, love-handled in a simple way: I just looked kind of wrinkled around the middle, like a sock that had ridden down, so for a few months I tried to stand up taller as if my height was the problem, and not my width.

I eventually discovered my gluten thing, which was very transformational as it included my Guinness thing and my Cinnabon thing.

Getting enough sleep, water, and exercise don’t really read as “wisdom”, but it’s hard to do. And eating right means learning how to cook, because convenience always costs more that we pay. And no matter what, time does seem to catch up with us. I fell on a skateboard (read: plummeted from a skateboard at about 15 mph) over five years ago and still have a crik in my neck that a cloudy day exacerbates: in much the same vein I’m finding that the choices I made during my Kentucky Fried Chicken years (11 to 31) formed the base of situations dealt with during my Baskin Robbins phase (31 to 56) which will no doubt have to be dealt with in my Heinz years.

I couldn’t shake that photograph of me leaping up to catch a ball and the sides of me moving up a bit afterward, so about 20 years ago I dealt with these emotions in song form. Think Tom Waits, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan… the American Storyteller, conveying the spirited life of the Everyman. I mean, think that, while you’re listening, because I’m none of those people, but y’know, #squadgoals.

(I was going to create an EP with several songs on it and call it my “Birthday Suite”, but I settled on this one and tried to make it extra spooky.)

When I was 25 it seemed that I could eat most anythingLike a chocolate twizzler, I was scrawny.

I lived on rice, bread and ramen…whatever came my way, back then(mostly, this was ‘cause I had no money.)

Like most boys in the USA, I would usually start my day at the mirror lookin’ at my muscles.

I’d count off pull-ups - 1 to 10 and do some sit-ups (now and then)Like that Jean-Claude Van Damme who’s from Brussels.

But one mornin’ last year, my jaw hit the floor‘Cause there were lots more “muscles” than beforeThen my gut began to illuminateAnd a mournful sound did eminate.

OoooooOooooo. Oooooooo....

Thus the victim I’ve now beenOf horrors all too easily seenLike some monster writ by Mary Shelly

For all the junk food I did knowAlthough eaten years ago

Now are ghosts inside my Haunted Belly.

I raised my chest and tucked my chin to pull the haunted portion inBut it was getting harder everyday.Good friends never asked my why I began to jellifyThey just smiled and turned their eyes away.

Then me and the fellas, back ‘round last fallWere playing around with an old footballWhen suddenly I heard a gurgly BOOWe had our shirts off in the sun

Which is how I found out every one of their bellies seemed to be haunted too!

Although the past is dead and goneSomething of it lingers onfor now I’m carrying down belowdelicious meals that I ate years ago!

Those chili dogs and pre-sweetened teaKinda just snuck up on meWhile I was flippin’ channels on the tellyWhen the ghosts found space they lackedThey started moving to the backThus expanding out my haunted belly.

Yes, every bite that’s touched my handIs at a party down in TummylandA dear-departed dinner dance that I canbarely squeeze in these suit pants.

OoooooOooooo! Oooooooo!

So now I’m on a fitness spreeto set those little spectres freeso they’ll fly off to some ethereal deli.

And by spring, like a miracle my shape may be less spherical.

And that’s the story of my Haunted Belly.

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My daughter made me a pillow. She makes things.

She got a doll one Christmas when she was seven and spent all of Boxing Day making a very detailed spaceship out of the box it came in, complete with a control panel and a small but elegant closet. Later, dissatisfied with plastic dreamhouses™, other dolls were lucky enough to live in an apartment building that she fashioned from a tall cardboard box, complete with a working elevator made from a smaller box, with furniture made of even smaller boxes and a shower made out of aluminum foil.

Then she started actually making dolls, first with a large dull needle, and very (almost too) soon after that, with a sharp one.

I would like to say she “gets this” from me, that my mad scribbling and singing and fol-de-rol are the root of her interests, but her mother is the truest artist in her heritage, a serious artist who pays attention to things like “detail” and “structure”; it is her mother that stands bravely before the infinite blank canvas of existence, recognizing the yawning, bottomless chasm over which the simple rope bridge of creativity spans, while I dance through life like a chocolate Martha Graham.

So my daughter is born of frolic and fury, chaos and order, madness and duct tape; to arrange, align, and adhere disparate elements, ideas and objects together is a her family legacy, destiny, and heritage. She’s a mad scientist, born of mad scientists.

Anyway. The pillow.

It is pink, but only because that’s the color of the material.

Much more importantly, the pattern of the cloth: a little tiny taxi, a Checker, is repeated over and over facing many different angles – curvy white lines emanate from the vehicles as if showing the direction they are going, except that the lines are tangled together like a skein of yarn after a cat’s played with it. My daughter found this material in a scrap box, her classmates were somewhat confused at her absolute glee having discovered it, but then again the name of their family business wasn’t CabsEverywhere.

At only a foot wide and 9 inches tall, the piece seemed destined for a small pillow.

She sewed it by hand and gave it to me and it’s on my chair, supporting the spot in my back where I keep all my age.

Macaroni necklaces. Did you make one? Maybe a kazoo from a toilet paper tube? A diorama for a book report, or a magic wand from a twig you found outside? A sheet of paper can fly if you make it into an airplane, or transform you into an NBA star if you crumple and toss it. Long before formal training of any kind there was Elmer’s Glue™, a magical substance. I’m old enough to remember mucilage, which I still think was a mean trick to play on children, but got the job done. Some of you had glue sticks (fancy pants); I never really got into that scene… I need that moment when the paper buckles into little waves and you have to press it flat and wipe around the edges… that’s a true bond, that’s not coming off in twenty years, you’ll see that again in the attic or garage when your parents ask you to move those boxes because they’re retiring and need the space for the Peloton and IT WILL STILL BE STUCK TOGETHER, believe me.

As children, most of us didn’t see ourselves as consumers, we were creators, with only the most basic of tools and skill sets. Making things was often characterized as “play”, but seemed like part of our job as kids. Where and when did creation get sidelined to celebrity chefs and home makeover gurus? Oh, and superstar DJs, because I think if any of us had been at class the day they said you could grow up to wear comfortable clothes all the time with a private plane flying around making people dance for a living we would have all signed up for that.

“Adults” often stand outside creation as if it’s not a verb they are heir to; even worse, those deemed creative are placed on society’s edges… the fascinating misfit, the genius outcast. So it takes a brave parent to offer artists as role models for their child, the whole “steady income” and “stable personality” gets thrown out the window in the hopes that this young person grows to be a catalyst of ideas and passion and possibility.

And so, at this special time of year, our family looks to Victor Von Frankenstein as a key figure; a noble dreamer who used his talents in science and quilting to create something… very unique.

Sew, my daughter. Take the lifeless scraps of what the world deems worthless and make something new that’s…ALIVE.

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Make a noise like a vampire.

Chances are (inside your head) you either snarled or said the word “blah” in a technically inaccurate yet authentically dramatic Eastern European accent.

Now, make a noise like a GHOST.

“Boo!” Exactamundo. Ghosts say BOO.

The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (the two volume blue one with the magnifying glass) doesn’t list the word “boo” at all; I had to refer to the app version, which cites a 1639 poem as one of the first formal usages of the word as an exclamation. Which makes sense, y’know, ‘cause ghosts are old.

Another historical usage is a Scottish expression where one describes an extremely timid person as someone who “wouldn’t say boo to a goose”, but geese are terrifying. I found more than one website offering step-by-step instruction as to what to do if a goose attacks. They peck from the ground and then fly at your face. And don’t take a swing at them; it just makes them more angry. Being scared of a goose? Totally understandable.

In fact, making fun of people because they’re scared of things they should be scared of is weird. I mean, people are scared of a lot of different things for a lot of reasons. I don’t have a pet tarantula [y i k e s], but I don’t hate tarantulas, I hate flies, and they don’t scare me, I’m just admittedly flyist, which puts me square in the middle of Team Tarantula, but I don’t have one.

Do they eat flies? I am not looking that up on the internet.

Most fear is like that, where we are scared of something that isn’t necessarily life threatening. Scared of being embarrassed, or being late, or having all your teeth fall out.

That last one wasn’t in the same category as the first two, was it? Sorry about that… let’s substitute “the unknown” for the teeth thing.

No, that also seems a little bit heavier than embarrassment and tardiness. Hmn.

My point was going to be that cats are afraid of snakes, but scientifically, they’re faster than snakes, and 9 times out of 10 will win a straight-up fight with a snake, but they still jump every time they see a cucumber or belt on the floor, and like cats, I don’t think any of us are scared because of facts, exactly. We’re scared because of threat: – If you don’t hurry up, you’re GOING to be late! – If you don’t brush your teeth, they’ll ALL FALL OUT!

(Ok, the teeth thing works now.)

First encounters with vampires are terribly threatening because anything bad that might happen is only just beginning, but the apex of most ghost interactions peaks at the “Seeing Of The Ghost” after which you are just in a room with an angry entity trapped somewhere it doesn’t want to be, waiting for some important reason it’s not totally in control of. Like a spooky DMV.

The BOO is a jump scare, sudden and aggressive: but to be honest, everything that’s terrified me in the past decade was lumbering, slow-moving, ominous. Not so much a BOO as a ubiquitous rumble from a far-distant horizon, blazing with fire, forcing forward clouds of murder hornets through billows of orange grey smoke. That’s not BOO. That’s not even a threat, that’s, well, dread. “Nothing to fear but fear itself” is nowhere near as comforting in practice as in oratory.

I say all this in celebration of Spookytime, which is not just Halloween, because if you really think about it Thanksgiving is a part of Spookytime too. That can be a long trip in the car.

But while you’re enjoying your pumpkin spice everything everywhere think about this: Spookytime is not just about us being scared. It’s about us being scary. Looking at the deepest parts of ourselves and wondering what we’re capable of.

And let me just skip to the end: we are all capable of everything.

Look at the news. See all that horrible stuff? Any one of us could’ve done that, because we speak and move around, and all words and actions can create or destroy, every tool is a weapon if you hold it right. And it’s not just the drastic sudden BOO things we didn’t do, we also avoided apathy, malice and contempt. We are actively CHOOSING not to be awful. Every single second.

Good for us. Yay. Time to celebrate.

If “Halloween is every day” then kindness is a costume we can wear all year ‘round. There’s plenty of janky and preposterous stuff out there, but if we’re choosing not to create fear, we can also choose not to consume it.

Although, I do believe in spooks. I do. I do. I do.

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I haven’t been on a school bus in a while: do they still have those super slick seats where you slide all over where the bus makes a turn – unless you’re wearing shorts, and then they stick to your legs like duct tape? Are they still cold in winter, and hot in summer, and super duper loud? That’s so cool.

I didn’t get to ride them everyday, I either lived too far away or close to school, so my only opportunity to enjoy them was to and from field trips.

Regular schoolwork is exposure and repetition; field trips add “direct experience”. This is a Symphony Hall. This is a Working Farm. This is a French Movie. My favorite was The Rodeo, which wasn’t even a trip for my school, but something my mother took me to: I still remember being given a small square of bright green alfalfa; the smell was absolutely Verdant Green.

My mother’s career in classroom teaching was jet-fueled by a personal manifesto that “there is, always, something to learn”. So every time we left the house was a field trip. The amusement park was a festival of physics, the grocery store a study in economics, and every person you could know: sociology.

But history has always been tricky.

My picture of the past has always been a bit disjointed, like a Saul Bass title sequence. In the United States immigrant cultures, native to other geographical locations, thrive, flourish and connect their current lives to centuries of tradition from their ancestral homes.

As an African American, my true home is… here. And my cultural identity? Well, this is just me I’m talking about, but it’s always been more closely aligned with the future and expanding possibilities than the past.

Or so I thought. Before our field trip.

Zoe took the entire family to the African American History Museum last weekend. Three generations of us, 11, 56, and 82.

My reality living as an African American has always been a bit of a scarlet letter situation, where the meaning of my appearance was not at all personally defined (or even tied to a specific place, language, or culture) but instead hijacked by observers, critics and frankly madmen; a razor’s edge where it was difficult not to fall on either the side of victim or threat.

This visit changed that by displaying the through-lines from one event to another, from one action to another, one person to another. The visitor walks a four-century long path from no choice to in charge, literally rising from nothing at all to quite a bit actually, seeing facts that you already knew but learning how they all fit together, a slow motion quest for dignity, for opportunity, every small action feeding another, every short life inspiring another, every step creating that path.

The importance of history is moving time forward, like passing a note in class. You remember how important that was, if the transmission was interrupted you’d never find out if they like you or “like” like you. Experiencing that museum was finally getting the note.

Oh. They don’t like us. No. Not at all.

But that’s not the point. It’s not about them, whoever they are.

I’m not from a piece of land elsewhere on the globe that represents my heritage. Instead, the actions of others constructed my homeland on this soil. It wasn’t always allowed to thrive or flourish; more often than not people tried to just set it on fire, not realizing that you cannot burn a dream, and that is my homeland, a dream of dignity and survival. I’m the descendant of a dream, and my responsibility is keep dreaming, and somehow pass the dream along.

My native tongue is perseverance. Patience. Focus. To be African American is not one single culture, but a rich soil enabling an infinite ecosystem; what we each grow into is unique, but it’s not so much a family tree as a Rainforest.

We also visited the Air and Space Museum, and I saw the original Enterprise model from Star Trek and got a bit weepy about that too. Look, I know who I am, I’m a geek, my heritage is… complicated. But on all fronts, I am very proud to represent it. I don’t know what it’s like to be anything else, but now I do feel a bit more connected to other people who’ve felt this same way.

The struggle isn’t gonna be over. Conflict is ever and everywhen. But dreams last longer than empires.

I do wish Wakanda was a real place, though. Just for the dual citizenship opportunity.

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There is a small park in Queens, New York, on the site of the borough’s last one room schoolhouse. Built in 1879, just five years after citywide compulsory education had been established, the small building held six rows of nine desks, with each row being a different grade level, starting with the youngest. The students were mostly farmer’s kids from the area. There was a blackboard and a US flag and a potbellied stove to keep the kids warm in winter. There was not a bathroom.

Only ten miles away from One Room Schoolhouse Park sits the nation’s largest high school, Brooklyn Tech, serving over six thousand children. I’m not sure how many rooms it has but a lot of them must be bathrooms.

Schools aren’t a collection of rooms, they are a collective of teachers, yet while I remember many teachers fondly, there is one school room that I can’t quite shake the experience of: the gym. If you know me well, or even at all, you’ve already realized that my time in the gym was that of a stranger in a strange land, spindly and not entirely committed to the concept… let’s call it unenthused.

My grade school gym was an indoor basketball court, sunken into a sub-basement with one door for access. There was a small row of built-in bleachers a floor above it that looked down into it like an auction pit at a rodeo.

While a myriad of slight to significant humiliations occurred to us all there, my most memorable involved the gym’s basic design, where the line designating the edge of the play space was less than three feet away from the concrete walls surrounding it.

I won the race. I don’t want to burden you with suspense. Our team won the relay race, and it wasn’t an “in the cards” sort of win; Beth was never the strongest sprinter and the other team had Lester on it… let’s just say he grew up to be an award winning coach, this was in his blood. And putting me as anchor was not a decision, it was the result of the order of selection of the teams, and I’m not wingeing about being picked last, I’d have done it too, it wasn’t a situation where they needed Star Trek facts or magic tricks.

But I ran. I won’t waste time explaining it in a “slow motion you can only hear my heartbeat as we cut between my feet and eyes” kind of way, but I am 45 years from the event and I still remember that particular instance of running. And it wasn’t just the run (not to brag), it was the TURN, the perfect number of harried steps to the opposite line, the touch of the tennis shoe (as we called all athletic footwear back then) that served as both tag and the ideal transfer of velocity and weight in the complete opposite direction to propel me back to the other side of the room.

Kids had gathered on the floor above and were looking down at us. Encouraging shouts reflected from every inch of the entirely non-acoustic space. I didn’t even see my opponent, my focus was the dash to that other red line on the floor, this was my chance, this was All There Was. When I hit the finish line, there were cheers.

For one second. I didn’t stop at the finish line,

I hit the concrete wall with my entire body. It was like falling off a building sideways.

The space became silent. I lay on the floor, that familiar high pitched sine wave sound in my ears, eyes watering. Due to my particular physical architecture, my forehead had taken the most damage.

A teacher asked if I was ok. “What?” I kind of replied.

“Are you going to be ok?” she said slower.

She took a closer look. It must not have been very encouraging.

“Let’s get you to the nurse’s office.”

I wore the egg sized lump on my forehead like an Olympic medal. It was there for three weeks.

That was about as good as it got for me and gyms. Though, to be more specific, my main problem was the locker room. School is supposed to prepare you for life as an adult, but there are very few work situations that require disrobing, barring those where the job itself is focused on disrobing. I suppose that nurse and doctors put on their scrubs, or beekeepers change into that spacesuit thing, but other than Superman I didn’t have an inspiring example of a reason to take my clothes off outside of my house.

And gym clothes were disappointing. The socks and shorts utilized The World’s Worst Elastic; the web-like white strands seeming to melt before our very eyes each week until every knee sock became a leg warmer. Putting it on was the very opposite of a super-hero suit.

For Lester, it must have felt amazing to shed that light blue short sleeve button down and put on that t-shirt, because he knew deep inside somewhere that this was part of his destiny, his legacy, who he was always going to be. The experience also signaled truths about myself to me, but every one of them was entirely less impressive.

My high school gym was much larger, and had fancy wooden seating that extended from the wall if you turned a key. You had to be careful while it was closing as it was all engineered before they invented “safeguards”.

My experiences there, also somewhat socially awkward, were not athletic, but best summed up by the words “Pep Rally”. Somehow I got tapped to do loads of presentations to the entire school at that strange part before they introduced the teams and the cheerleaders; the warm up acts, an awkwardness compounded by my role in these events as the president of our school’s Latin and French clubs.

For the Latin club, we presented “Tres Porcus Parvus”, a dramatic interpretation of “The Three Little Pigs”. At least I was the narrator, so this event holds a bit of subtle dignity - it went over well with the confused Midwestern parents waiting to cheer for the athletes.

But for one of the French club presentations, I translated “Every Breath You Take” by The Police and performed it on acoustic guitar, and by the time I got to “Je criais ‘bebe s’il vous plait!’ ” the place went totally wild. The nice part about both these events was that I got to wear my regular clothes.

I spent most of my high school time in our theatre, where, come to think of it, we changed clothes all the time, but those costumes proved much more aspirational since I was never cast in the role of a spindly out of breath kid wearing leg warmers. Perhaps that is a gap in American theatre that’s ripe for a Tony™ award winning play.

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Recently, I’ve seen a lot of children wearing Nirvana shirts.

By children, I mean people younger than, say 26 and a half, and by Nirvana, I mean the essential 1990’s American grunge rock band.

The band, if you’re not familiar, is an icon of raw emotion, unfiltered and in most ways we use the word, genius. Words that are poetry mixed with tunes that are musical. You don’t get either of those all the time anymore, but this particular combination was…well, it was an anthem to those who felt lost in a world of More More More, and just wanted to be Enough.

I like the band. A great deal. I was in a band when they came along; no costumes, second hand instruments, clothes from the thrift shop – old jeans and flannel shirts. After they hit it big, Macy’s began selling “distressed” flannel shirts for $45 dollars that matched the 25 cent ones in our local Goodwill store… y’know, for the folks who wanted to cosplay as “authentic”.

But these kids today (ok, fine: “young adults”) were not actually on the planet yet when the band was popular, or even existed, as their lead singer (quite sadly) left the planet in 1994. What does the band mean to them?

And it’s tons of different kids, all races and backgrounds, wearing Nirvana shirts, not The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. Maybe they’ve heard the music, or maybe there was a huge sale at Hot Topic, but those shirts represent a stand for simple individuality which echoes even louder in their infinite forest of social media.

And so many black kids in these shirts. I love that. (There was this great punk rock band, seminal to the genre, born in Detroit, where all the members were black, but they did not crack the hit parade, and nobody’s wearing their t-shirts because their name was Death, which I’m sure is against a school dress code somewhere.)

Nirvana’s music was fused to the events of my young life so completely that when I entered corporate America, I couldn’t bear to listen to them anymore. Every lyric strained my very soul, every power chord tore at my being.

How how how can I go in this building again? Why why why am I part of a broken capitalistic model? You know: your late twenties. I had to swallow so much of who I was everyday (like seawater) that I listened to a lot of Judy Garland on the way to work instead, although her life ended up being pretty punk too. (I would have loved a duet between her and Iggy Pop. Oh, c’mon, think about it, that would be amazing.)

Not for nothin’, but it’s hard to be a human cog. We’re not really built for that, no matter how ergonomic the chairs or the keyboards, it doesn’t feel right. For 12 to 16 to 20 years we go to a place everyday where we learn things and then prove that we either understand or at least remember what was taught. And in between that, we chat with our neighbors, have a little bite to eat, and go to recess.

Now it’s backward. People go to a place everyday where they don't learn anything but they get free coffee, and for a break they go outside to get more coffee or (if they’re kicking it old school) top it off with a little nicotine. Then it’s back inside to let all that jitter juice and tarry resin work medical black magic on their insides. No recess.

That’s actually a lyric by Nirvana, but, digression.

The logic of recess was always that kids need a bit of time during their routine to romp about and reduce their stress, to let out all the bad air and take in some good air, to calm down. So here we are now, filled with caffeine, and (not for nothin’ but) most of us are more stressed than when we were seven.

Honestly, recess as a kid was its own kind of stressful. In the classroom, no one was allowed to hit you in the face with a red latex ball, but on the playground they were instructed to do so, and praised upon impact.

Yet, I am convinced that, as adults, we still need recess. I’m also convinced the reasons we don’t have it anymore are purely legal, as the red ball thing would most certainly lead directly to a courtroom situation at this point.

I’ve tried to add healthy movement to my day, fill the rings on my watch by walking briskly to Whole Foods to get more corn flakes, but it doesn’t compare to a good game of kickball. At least we could go outside once a day and play on a swing, or a slide, or a jungle gym. When’s the last time you said “whee!” during a work day? That’s all recess is, y’know, a bit of joy within routine, a scheduled rebellion.

Hmn. Maybe I’ll walk the other direction today, down to the comic book store, my grey tie and black button-down hiding the Queens of the Stone Age t-shirt underneath.

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First day of the school year here in Brooklyn. Lunch has been packed, the pencils sharpened, a brand new Keeper has been Trapped. I know I’m not the one going, but it’s exciting nonetheless, anticipating new homework and classes and conversations and memories being made, like when Potatohead made that ridiculous face that we all found hysterical at lunch. Ah, Potatohead.

I was not a fan of homework as a child. I am not a fan of homework today either. I did enjoy “word problems”, challenges that put me in the role of a young investigator seeking answers in clever mysteries, like “two trains leaving opposite towns at the same time”. But I’ve always really loved learning practical knowledge; things I could use, building blocks I could make something out of.

My sources of knowledge were limited, but I really do believe that it used to be easier to learn stuff. I know that sounds naive, given that we carry the knowledge of all ages in our pockets, but that often feels like drinking from a firehose: everything I’ve managed to know I learned individually, one fact at a time, and most everything was related to something else I was interested in. I was an investigator, collecting clues.

• listen to an album by a favorite artist, • notice the amazing guitar player, • go to the record store to figure out what other albums they’ve played on • discover a new artist

I can discover an artist on my phone, but for the most part they are spoon fed to me, pushed in my face like 3D pancakes. I used to actually hunt for knowledge, a human search engine with 3 TV networks, maybe five radio stations, a handful of magazines and a couple of giant reference books with credits for music and film. No internet, but lots of conversations with people about art and history and science, books and food and travel. I built a mosaic of passion and experience that felt more personally curated than logarithmic.

Ok, that made it sound kind of cool. It definitely wasn’t. I was a middle school kid that watched what I’m going to call an entirely disproportionate amount of PBS. That’s where Monty Python was, and Doctor Who, and the most wonderful show I had ever seen, a series of historical lectures (told you it wasn’t cool) called “Connections”. Helmed by the jauntily British James Burke, the show demonstrated cause and effect throughout human history, a series of if/then statements connecting, say, the invention of the plow directly to the jet engine. It was like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon if Kevin Bacon had six degrees from Oxford.

That’s what I thought learning was, because my other two influences were my mom (who believes there is always something to learn anywhere) and the World Book encyclopedias. Between the three of these, I found everything interesting. I still do, kinda, and the most wonderful coincidences happen. A quick example:

As mine was a bold youth during the reign of Michael J Fox, I enthusiastically saw everything he was in. The other day a movie of his popped in my head called “Light of Day”, where he was a punk rocker whose sister was played by Joan Jett. I did not remember it as a classic, but I kept humming the theme song for some reason, so I looked up the movie in The New World Book = Wikipedia. It was indeed not revered as a classic either in its time or any time after. It is NOT available on iTunes, and its current rental price has been reduced from 99 to 72 cents on Amazon Prime.

But I learned that original star of the film was supposed to be Bruce Springsteen, and whaddya know? He wrote that theme song I couldn’t get out of my head. Oh, and the original title of the movie? “Born in the USA”, which Bruce took with him as a little souvenir and put to a much better use.

What was really surprising is the screenwriter’s credits. The very next film he wrote was one of my all time favorites, The Last Temptation of Christ, and his two previous scripts?

Raging Bull, and Taxi Driver.

I learned all that in a 2 minute break from doing dishes. See? Learning is fun.

Awkwardly, I collected what I’ve learned in paper form, so we now have loads of books that explain how-to do things, like how-to repair anything, or how-to read secret codes and ciphers, or how-to make a movie on a used car budget. Cookbooks and biographies and maps and The New England Journal of Medicine… we never really leave school. But it is wonderful to get a few unnecessary pens and new notebook once a year. To be perfectly honest, it was always getting a new lunchbox that defined the season for me. I guess that’d be silly now… unless they make an “Oppenheimer” one.

Oh, who am I kidding: I’d get “Barbie”.

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I find no state of being quite as deeply insulting as insomnia.

Because it isn’t just about being awake; it’s about the knowing the state I’ll be in the following day. I know exactly what 3PM is going to look like when I’m up at 3AM, which is immediately stressful, bringing a tide of adrenaline that self-perpetuates the situation. Oh sure, I might drag myself into work, but by 11:30 I’ll be struggling, and by 2PM consciousness falls and the world drifts into a haze of low noise and deep inner struggle.

It’s not like I’ve come here dishonestly: the world’s very often a madhouse, lacking logic or structure: and the most challenging part is the breakneck speed I must employ in order to stay on top of everything, which doesn’t give anyone ample time to really soak it all in, so of course everything comes bubbling to the surface after I’ve had a bit of sleep.

Only at 3:30 in the morning can I properly contemplate the subtleties of inequity, brutalities of narcissism, and Crocs. I don’t think they’re shoes. I do find comfort in the fact that no matter how crazy The World is, MY world is a little bit better, if for no other reason than that it’s smaller than the entire world, so it wins, comparatively, by scale.

I’ve developed a few tricks to get to sleep; they aren’t great, but after a few hours or so they each seem to work.

Sometimes I practice the alphabet in American Sign Language, left and right hands at the same time. I give myself challenging phrases and try to fingerspell them. I keep forgetting how to sign “x”, “f”, and “p”, but there’s not really a great phrase with all those letters in it anyway, since nobody faxes anymore.

Corn flakes are good - not the frosted kind (too much sugar). I’ve had some success with reading, but it’s hard finding a book interesting enough to get into but not so intriguing that you can’t quite put it down. And it’s difficult to be productive or accomplish anything that requires a clear head, like writing or music scoring, because at least that part of my brain is absolutely asleep.

I try to stay away from my phone and computer, but then I discovered ASMR: if you haven’t heard of it, it’s little online films that maximize the intimacy of the medium by mimicking eye to eye contact while employing soft, nearly whispered dialogue in roleplaying situations that are supposed to be, on the whole, relaxing. They cut your hair or give you a vision exam or demonstrate the many sounds they can create on a nearly impossible range of interesting objects purchased at a nearby Target.

In my opinion, in all the internet there is one person really good at it; her most effective strategy is a very convincing imitation of genuine empathy:

“You look so tired!” she’ll say, brow slightly furrowed in worry.“You work too hard. You deserve a vacation!” The warmth of my enthusiastic agreement lulls me right back to sleep.

It doesn’t seem to really matter what I do; time isn’t finicky – it eats whatever I feed it for 90 minutes or so and then leaves me about half an hour to snooze before the cats wake me up for their breakfast (which I find particularly unsympathetic, as they literally sleep all the time).

What works best for me is just thinking. I usually pick a word and begin free associating. This week the word was infrastructure.

I started with bridges; there are some around here so unstable that entirely new structures have been built around them just to keep them standing. Then I drifted through the Key Utilities (gas, water, power, internet, phone) and all the Essential Services (housing, sanitation, education, transportation) and then commerce… all the little plastic pieces you would need if Catan was an actual place.

If I was on a farm, I’d have to provide all that for myself. A well for water, solar panels for power. I’d have to build a house and buy a truck – a big one, for hauling… I’ve never really hauled before…I’d probably need to learn how to haul…on the commercials it’s always logs…so I’ll guess I’ll need an ax or a chainsaw or something –

– if infrastructure represents the building blocks, the basics, then what constitutes our personal infrastructure? (Beyond food and water and, y’know, sleep.)

I think we truly need empathy; we have to care. And we need passion and courage, because we have to want something, and we have to be brave enough to try new things. Empathy stands against despair, passion stares down apathy, and courage conquers ego. That would be a good base to build on.

Yawn.

Ok, cats, I’ll feed you. Good grief. look at the time. It’s actually a little chilly.

Yawn.

Thanks, Summer. See you next year. I’ll be sure to tell winter you said hi.

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Somewhere in Peru, an aged schoolbus with no working windows (all permanently open or closed) roughly winds its way along a jungle road, picking up villagers on their way to or from the market. Loaded with baggage and animals and children and laughter, it is a loud, bumpy, and uncomfortable ride, yet so much a part of the community that every passenger experiences a warm familiarity.

So last week, I could have squeezed my way onto that subway train, surrounded on all sides, hands full of grocery bags, deeply “engaging my core” to keep my face from pressing up against the window: instead, I chose to wait 10 minutes for the next train, because I just couldn’t do it. The doors opened at the station and there was about a foot of space left in the car. I did not experience a warm familiarity, although it was 92 degrees and I suppose standing shoulder-to-shoulder is as familiar as strangers get.

But I just… couldn’t.

I believe that I am middle-aged now.

It’s not my back or my knees, it’s my perspective. The glass isn’t half empty or full as much as now it’s dirty and I’m gonna have to wash it by hand because it’ll break if I put it the dishwasher and I don’t have one of those sponge/stick things to properly clean it so I’m gonna have fold a regular sponge in half lengthwise and kinda dial it around aggressively and then shake it like a bartender to rinse it out.

I don’t always wear matching socks anymore because I wear Doc Marten boots so who’s gonna ever see ‘em? and my daughter stopped wearing matching socks years ago and look how happy she is.

And I just can’t with the rushing and worrying about everything, and I have acquiesced to the fact that my waist is below my tummy now, and not straight across it.

On E-Bay I’d be listed as “used, but in good condition”.

That’s middle age, right?

I’ve been watching a lot of those home renovation shows on tv. Those shows are fascinating, celebrations of tools, skills, and imagination. My favorites are the ones where they just move some things around, take down a wall or two, and voila, new space.

I think it’s cheating when they do a full demolition and just rebuild a new house there… that's not renovation as much as architecture. It seems like cheating, the DEMO route, because you’re just destroying old and making new, not improving on what’s there already. If you take it all down to the studs and build something different, it’s not as impressive when the people who live there come back and say “I don’t even recognize it! It doesn’t even look like the same house!”

Because it isn’t. Sure, the house can have “good bones” but we’re more than our bones.

Ok, well, yes, I see it as a metaphor. I do, yes.

We all have good bones. And we can renovate ourselves without replacing ourselves. The Earth has good bones: there’s a lot to work with, some really great features, impressive details, a natural flow: seeds are planted, flowers spring up, then Jack Frost brings his demolition crew to blank out everything. But we don’t get All New Trees every spring. The planet builds upon itself, expanding the growth of the years before, thriving less on re-invention than evolution.

Age doesn’t “demo” youth, it feeds into it, deepening its roots: youth gets stronger and smarter with every passing day, able to weather the winters and cherish the summers. And then, when we no longer require any more discouraging hot and crowded commutes, we can toss out all that urgency we really never needed and make room for the pop hits of 1973 in those 10 minutes we have on the platform until the next train arrives at the station.

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I’ve been stationed in many a cubicle in my work life: beige, grey, light green (I think that was my favorite), each a definitive non-statement of industrial design, constructed from canvas and oddly non-magnetic steel, semi-surrounding us like parentheses.

It’s the evolution of sitting at one’s desk in a classroom. The desk was never really yours, you just sat there. But often one found the names of past inhabitants written or (even more boldly) carved into the wooden desktop, concave letters embellished with the ink of many a ballpoint pen, decades of students drowsily following the original lines, deepening them, while listening to others “read aloud from the book”.

Wooden schooldesks represented a historically significant yet unauthorized sculptural legacy, ruined by the development of space age mar-proof materials which resisted even the permanent marker, soulless surfaces where the pointy end of a compass could never produce a truly satisfying result, impressions too shallow to leave one’s metaphorical mark. Plus, schools eventually reclassified the compass as a weapon rather than an essential educational tool. There lies tradition.

The new “desktop” of the computer screen, while infinitely customizable, holds no legacy. It is the very definition of ephemeral, leaving no mark whatsoever, in fact disappearing entirely while you’re still sitting there if not engaged with.

I’ve never left my name on a cubicle. Underneath the rolling drawer unit at my current job I found a lipstick that looked expensive, but my co-workers quickly reclassified it as mid-level at best. It was not a name, just some light evidence that a previous resident of my current space had experienced the loss an easily replaceable cosmetic.

Although I have inhabited many a cubicle, I feel extremely lucky that I have never been farther than the flight distance of a hastily folded paper airplane from a window.

I was once offered a job that paid nearly ten percent more than the one I had, but it was in the basement of a twenty story building. Oh, they interviewed me (and told me the part about the salary) on the eighteenth floor, high above the hoi polloi; then we took the nice elevator (with the wood paneling) down to the first floor, went through a large set of metal doors at the end of a long hallway, transferred to a service elevator with blankets on the walls, and went down FOUR FLOORS.

The room we entered was vast, ceiling almost two stories high, but I could still feel the weight of the entire building above us as the air conditioning audibly struggled to pump enough oxygen into the space to support a free range pen of professional graphic artists. One of them had printed out a photo of a window and placed it on the wall beside them. I did not take the job, and have since considered window access part of every pay package.

The modern interpretation of ergonomics (or the science of understanding humans within a system) seemed more clearly rooted in economics when the cubicle was abandoned by many larger corporations in favor of the Open Layout. Here six, eight, or ten people shared a single long table, like in a dining hall at a summer camp. The pitch was: with no walls at all, employees will be granted the freedom to better communicate and bond. The reality was: you could fit 1/3 more people in a room that way, saving millions in rent.

I was deep in corporate America when this wave hit, and remember being told that each employee would get 32 to 36 inches of space, not on each side, but in total. No room for phones anymore – they’d have to use their own. Plus (special bonus) when an employee was out for any reason, another employee could use the same space. This office space design logic was obviously based on that of the “food court”, money saving trends which dissolved once we all had to stay six feet apart from one another.

While I’ve had offices, they can be isolating. I liked to use them best as meeting centers for my department, both for official business and random celebration. But thousands of hours were spent alone, hidden away, awash in light toil, where one might appreciate the unintentional sigh of a nearby co-worker awash in their own.

Thus experience has led me to appreciate the cubicle as both a literal and figurative middle ground between open and closed workspaces, a non-permanent home away from home, seemingly designed by the fourth little pig, the one between the sticks one and the brick one: the prefab pig who loved walls but didn’t really want to get mortar all over his hooves and got eaten by the wolf since he was only surrounded on three sides.

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My junior high daughter has started doing math for fun, so I guess that summer is coming to a close. Not quite the swallows coming home to Capistrano, but it does indicate that it’s probably time to wrap it up and get ready for the rest of the year.

Summer has been what it always is in the core of the northern hemisphere; dependably warm and lush, tree-wise. It’s strange to think that it’s snowing in Argentina: it’s 37 degrees in Ushuaia right now.

(I did look that up. Ushuaia. I don’t have the southernmost cities of every continent sitting in my mind’s back pocket.)

The crunch of Autumn leaves, the peal of Winter’s bells, and the tweeting of the birds in Springtime have no parallel in summer. Ok, maybe crickets, but they really get going at the end of summer, into the fall, and it’s hard to hear them in the city sometimes.

But I do love the crickets. Apparently those are mating calls, so the whole thing probably sounds like a crowded singles bar from a cricket perspective, but that’s one of the kindnesses of there not being a Babel Fish in my ear (as of yet).

Summer’s not over quite yet. There’s a couple of “dog days” on the way, the heat where my DNA reconsiders its prehistoric choice to leave the protection of the cool deep caves. For those of you already surviving blazing heat, the season may have been a bit too thematic, and you’re waiting for the night you can sleep in the specific silence that happens when the AC isn’t going full blast.

By definition, seasons come and go, that’s the strategy of them, a character arc, plans that evolve into memories, perennial traditions like old friends. Around here, we have just arrived at our annual festival of the summer fruits, which is 49% about eating them, and 51% about singing this song:

“Summer = summer fruits: it wouldn’t be summer without ‘em!”

The peach. The blueberry. The sensational nectarine. Fruits literally ripe with aroma and flavor, best enjoyed alone (reportedly), yet always so deeply appreciated atop two scoopfuls of vanilla ice cream. Or on a hearty morning bowl of corn flakes. Mmn.

Of course, now we can get peaches in December. Plums in January. Blueberries in March. Where is the anticipation of the season? That delicious last bite for the year, followed by the “I can’t wait until we can have this again!”? The sweet and delicate patience that buffets you through pumpkin spice and peppermint, past snap peas and ramps, back to the sun-drenched sweetness of cherries and berries?

Most theme parks above 1-70 Highway are not open all year - snow and roller coasters don’t go together. Beaches close as well, even though most are technically parks and public land (guards at the ready yet some ne’er do wells attempt an autumn picnic). Here in New York, ice cream shops will turn to soup huts, and dollar store pool noodles will be replaced with sleds. Summer moves along, everywhere, except the produce section of the grocery store.

On television, Summer Replacement Series were supposed to be temporary, you knew that going in, they were experimental and a bit cheeky because they knew that in eight weeks you’d be watching Matlock again in this time slot. My Summer Replacement Series has allowed me a break from heavier topics, issues, and ruminations – I hope it didn’t seem too frivolous, as I’ve enjoyed it very much, and I’ll be finishing the summer in a similar tone. But I may keep a bit of this Sonny and Cher variety show vibe, like a vial of sand from a well groomed beach vacation. Or actually, more like a Dixie cup full of little seashells.

We have to retain a little bit of summer all year round. But just a little.

There is a chain of Christmas stores that is open all year long, not just the three months before the holiday and the month or so after when everyone is looking on a “good deal” for next year’s decorations. Nope, they are open in June. Some stock flags for the 4th of July and jack-o-lanterns in October, but the purists remain, noël three-six-five, anticipating the tourist desperately longing for that August nutcracker.

But unlike calendar based holidays, seasons are always happening. We can keep a little bit of the summer because it’s always summer somewhere on the planet… the mystery of the hemispheres. I realized yesterday that every single Winter Olympics has been held in “winter” in the Northern hemisphere. That’s so hemispherist. We could hold them in August if we went to Ushuaia. Or La Paz. That’s in Bolivia. I looked that up too.

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languid: exhibiting a natural disinclination to physical exertion; leisurely; unhurried

Under a giant beach umbrella in a sturdy beach chairsits a woman wearing a wide brimmed hat and sunglasseswho sips something very coldthrough a colorful strawfrom a very tall glasswhich she sets downlightlyon the little white table beside herso that she may continue to

read a book,

languidly.

I’ve read booksI’ve been on a beachand I’ve even worn a pretty big hatbut as of yet have not hit the tremendous trifectaof this image.

It is ubiquitous, aspirational,and utterly, utterly fictional.Absolutely.

(two utterlys and an absolutely)

It has haunted me for a great deal of my adult life as an iconic renderingof a perfectsummer vacation.

There is no doubt that the book she’s enjoying is a“summer read”,one of those novels specifically designedto be carted about in an oversized canvas bag;lighthearted faremeant to lure one gently awayfrom the frenetic reality of realityto share the adventures and mis-adventuresof delightful charactersplagued with relationships,and circumstances.

Summer reading is meant to be read outdoors,pages designed to be illuminated by the light of the sun,(not directly, but saucily bounced off of groomed sand).It is a dream that they’re selling,A formula. A recipewhere all you need to add is time

to read.

But they don’t sell you the time. They only sell you the book.

And there it sits, on your table, waitingfor the time to read it. Outdoors, at that.

The book costs, maybe, $15 dollars.But that experienceOf the woman on the chairis a premium onebecause she is never sitting close to anyone elseshe doesn’t have a phone outno kids within earshot(certainly not her ownor her bag would have beenladen with other people’s things instead ofher shawl, sunscreen and keys(and, of course, the book))and she’s never on her first drink

sometimes there’s a young person wearingcrisp white clothingbringing those drinks to herso that she doesn’t even have tolift her eyesfrom the page.

So it’s $15, plus all that. Which adds up.Plus, the time.

I’m watching peopleOn my way to workOn the subwayFar from the rays of the sun

Each of themDeserves a relaxing stretchOf eight to eleven hoursWithout mayhem or consequence

But insteadThey are hereEyes down

Gripping a railOr packed in the seatsElbows close to their sides

Holding their “summer read”pastel cover awash with florescent lightNo breezeNo drinksAn experience incredibly affordableBut not quite alignedWith the genreof the bookAs any fantasy within itIs overshadowed by

the image of that womanon a beachin a chairwith her quietand her space

and her timeto read

languidly. Next stop: Fulton Street.

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It was after church, right after church, so I didn't even get to take my tie off. The basement was finished and furnished, but it was still a basement, without windows, and my suit felt hot; polyester not breathing, and I was eleven, and church had already been 3 hours long, and then we all said we'd come to Miss McClaine's house after to see her slide show.

She'd laid out nuts and dried apricots along with jell-o salad. It wasn't as heresyish as it sounds because she'd been to Egypt, that's what the slide show was about; so it’s Thematic Snackery. Somebody made a joke about eating a camel that made everybody avoid the meatballs, but the jell-o went pretty quickly. There were marshmallows.

We sat in the front row, my Mom and my Grandmother and Grandfather and I. I had a little paper plate filled with dried fruit. My mother filled a little plate with almonds. I liked dried fruit, even though it was hard to chew, but I only took the appropriate amount at first; then, when nobody else wanted any (this was in the era before dried fruit had really hit the states, save the mighty raisin or noble prune), I went back before the lights turned off and really stocked up. We were missing dinner for this.

Lights down, slide projector on, and that super familiar "Shatook-ik!. Clak!" sound began.

Splo MacClaine, our host, stood to the left (her right, my left) of the screen. She even had some music for the background. It was what my Grandmother called “foreign music”. My Grandmother called lots of stuff ‘foreign’. Ms. MacClaine told stories about the heat and the sand and of course, the pyramids. And sphinxes. Or is it ‘sphinx’ in the plural? There were camels and men wearing long robes and music-that-was-foreign and sand (again).

On the way back home in my Grandfather’s car, my Grandmother said, “Well, that was nice. Now we don’t have to go there.”

“Grandma, “ I said, “she told us that she hoped this might inspire us all to go.”

“Well, that’s ridiculous. Why would we go now? She just showed it to us. I’ve seen everything now. Now we don’t have to go.”

This bothered me. You can tell, right? I mean, the whole 44 year retention of incident thing probably tipped you off. It’s just that I hadn’t been anywhere yet, and I was unconvinced that going places was just seeing things. You could do that with a ViewMaster (Oh look! Now I don’t have to go to the Grand Canyon! (click-ik) or Oz (click-ik) or the Moon!). To truly experience a place you have to use all your senses. True, Ms. MacClaine used sight, sound, taste, and even smell in her post-worship TEDx talk. Oh, she wore a “traditional dress” too, so I guess she got touch in there.

Still, that basement was not Egypt.

I’m sure you must have thought about the chance that maybe my Grandmother was just upset that Ms. MacClaine had gone there FIRST, that this story was hers to tell and why do you go somewhere if you can’t come back and tell everybody? But my Grandmother never took a lot of pictures when she went anywhere, and she did have to travel with my Grandfather. There were a couple of airport souvenirs with “Hawaii” or “San Francisco” on them in their house somewhere; I believe the Hawaii one had a little volcano diorama, and they did have one of those spring loaded hula dancer figures (but they never put it in their car).

I think it was less jealousy than water. Grandma liked water. She and Grandpa enjoyed fishing; in lakes, off dams, and especially in the ocean. A little girl born and raised as landlocked as they come, but any boat my grandmother hit the deck of? She was Captain. I once saw Grandma light a full charcoal barbecue grill and cook twelve hot dogs on a pontoon boat no larger than a good sized area rug.

Egypt didn’t have enough water. Now Venice, she’d have LOVED Venice. Except it was in Europe, and she didn’t really enjoy the idea of Europe all that much. Foreign stuff.

We weren’t really a “vacation” family as much as “people who took trips” occasionally. Trips are like vacations with a thing to do added. We went on a trip to look after my pregnant aunt. You could take a trip to the mall to pick up something. Business trips always made sense to me later on because of course there was business, that was the point of a trip, getting something done, and maybe experiencing something the way there. Or back.

And “vacation” never really involved going anywhere, it was defined as the temporary pause of the otherwise necessary. We didn’t “go on vacation”; vacation was just the time circled on the calendar where there was no school or work; at my house it was always a time of contemplation and relaxation… no, I’m sorry, I must have fallen asleep there for a minute - at my house, it was ALWAYS time for accomplishing tasks you didn’t have time to do while you were working or at school. So there really wasn’t much of an opportunity to leave the house for an extended period when there was so much to do, right? Maybe we’ll take a trip to the store and get a Dairy Queen dipped cone on the way back.

“Traveling” was, to be brutally honest, what rich people did. No agenda, nothing to get done, no reason to be there except to… enjoy yourself. Yeeesh.

I would watch “Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom”” on TV and try to imagine what cascading miracles of circumstance might lead me to ever see a real water buffalo. The most feasible scenario is that I might add a major in Zoology with a Radio, Television and Film minor and then join the crew of “Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom””. Then every episode would be a trip that I was taking for work, and oh, look, there’s a water buffalo…cool. But the very idea (and let’s be honest I have a pretty good imaginatory thing going on) that I would just wake up one day and say to myself, “I want to see a water buffalo!” and then spend money to do so seemed pretty impossible.

But that’s what traveling was, aimless adventure, best accomplished by circuses, sideshows, and basketball players though I really never understood how that works.

Zoë is the one to plan all the trips, and they are trips, there are things to learn everywhere she’s taken me… it’s only when I try to amble that she becomescross and bit boneless… “Do you need to go to another record store/comic book store/magic store/toy store?”

“Well, the records/comics/magic tricks/toys here are different.”

“How, are they different?”

And here, I take my gentle stand against my Grandmother’s opinion in that car. I stand tall, in these international places of business, spending my trip allowance on a set of light-up juggling balls or a disappearing flower arrangement or a bouzouki, and I know why exactly I’m drawn to these objects… the subtle difference in size of playing cards in Italy, the unique smell of that particular Moroccan candle… they’re foreign. In fact, it’s the opposite; I’m the foreign one… all those objects are right where they’re supposed to be, they’re at home, I am paying with foreign money and saying “thank you” in a foreign language (or at least accent in the UK). And I like it.

Maybe that’s how my grandmother felt on the ocean; a woman from the Great Plains, adrift on the waves, far from the shore, a foreigner, somehow at home, and the sand dunes of Africa just didn’t do it for her. Or maybe she was hungry after church and the jell-o salad just wasn’t cutting it. I believe we all got barbecue sandwiches on the way home from that event.

Officially, that made it a trip.

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My wife is from California. As a little girl she saw The Wizard of Oz, where, as you might remember, the plot is driven by a tornado’s direct effect on an impossibly sturdy wooden cabin. Zoë didn’t like that much, and decided that she’d never like to visit there, that was crazy, clouds attacking people was not the kind of thing that was supposed to happen, that was really bad.

I am from Kansas, and as there are many more films and television shows about the edges of our landmass than the middle, I saw a great deal of California based entertainment. I saw “Earthquake”, a movie about an earthquake, filmed in a technology they called “Sensurround”, an early version of multitrack audio where the sub bass was separated and the speaker POINTED INTO THE FLOOR of the theatre to make a kind of rumbly rumbly feel. In Brooklyn some people seem to have this installed in their cars now. It was nearly deafening. One could barely make out what Charleston Heston was shouting.

In any case I decided, much along the same lines as Zoe did, that California wasn’t right, the ground attacking people was not the kind of thing that was supposed to happen, that was really bad, I shouldn’t ever go there.

I did, of course, and I was in an earthquake, which didn’t ruin California for me because the true appeal of the Golden State for any midwesterner lies firmly in the mysteriously shifting topography of The Beach.

BEACH.

Land, meeting water, with NO LAND VISIBLY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF IT. Wow.

The beach was a perfect place to dance, according to the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello week of after-school movies on local tv. You could have a cookout, or hang out, or lay out in the sun for hours. I didn’t understand how the sun worked on fairer skin, past the dubious science presented on the Coppertone commercials (which was Jodie Foster’s first job, if you didn’t know…she was 3: she was the little girl with the dog on the bottle). Anyhoo, on TV, beaches were a magical place where folks fell in love.

I eventually went to a beach, of course. I did not fall in love there.

My coastal friends said that the beach was like a midwestern park, but in the park there is shade, from trees. I had thought there might be palm trees on the beach, like on Gilligan’s Island, but that was a different kind of beach. Most parks also have suspicious yet existent restrooms, which were lacking, along with their sketchy water fountains. And the sun was super fun, up until the moment I discovered that it was the one having the cookout: I, was on the menu.

I liked playing with sand, even burying myself in it, but that was ruined by a tv commercial for a horror movie called “Blood Beach”. The commercials were, quite famously, better than the movie: a no-budgeter about the invasion of a hungry creature beneath the sand - an idea later cribbed by George Lucas for The Empire Strikes Back, when the bad guys tried to feed the good guys to a big toothy sinkhole in the desert.

Even before that, there was JAWS. But the funny thing is that movie wasn’t even set in California, it was Martha’s Vineyard. The nerve. The true horror was the drop in property values. As iconic as that original film (and poster) was, it was the by-line to its sequel a few years later that struck home for me:

“Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.”

My mother thought that was hilarious. “When was that supposed to be? Safe in the water! Who even thinks that?” she scoffed, mocking the newspaper ad from the kitchen table of our landlocked apartment.

Yet beyond both experience and cautionary tale exists my true beach-based obsession. The nexus of extreme sport and high art: surfing.

They called skateboarding “sidewalk surfing”, but I knew that I wasn’t shooting the curl or hanging ten as my wheels ground over the pavement, teeth rattling, legs vibrating at a frequency high enough to produce sound.

Surfing was smooth. Effortless, yet a display of mastery over both gravity and bravery. There was a reason that the James Bond theme sounded like surf guitar; roundhouse cutbacking into a tube ride and ending safe and sound on land, board beneath your arm, one hand casually pushing your hair from your eyes (which was, incredibly, still dry), surfers were earthbound astronauts, navigating the rhythm of the planet itself.

I have not been surfing. Maybe it’s that thing about never meeting your heroes, but also I haven’t lived long enough in places where there was great surfing, and haven’t ever been on that style of vacation where you snorkel and pay with beads and have time to learn things like that.

Instead, I watch The Endless Summer, a movie about surfers literally following summer around the globe, enjoying worldwide waves for a year. There’s also Step Into Liquid, and Riding Giants, and this summer I think we’ll add Blue Crush.

Oh of course I’ve seen Point Break, but that’s more of a crime cupcake with surf frosting. And I can’t forget Frankie and Annette: ooo, here’s a little something, if anyone ever asks you, “What’s the connection between Boris Karloff and Stevie Wonder?” tell them they were both in the movie “Bikini Beach”. (On second thought, if somebody ever asks you that specific question, you should probably just quietly walk away.)

The freedom of the beach is, for me, the majesty of the waves, and though I’ve never been on a surfboard I’m in awe of the spirit of surfing; navigating the unknown and ever changing with grit, balance and focus. I can’t accomplish that in the water, but every now and then, after a long day of work, I get in the empty elevator, take my hair out of its band, and push it back from my eyes with one hand, imagining Dick Dale guitar riffs as I’m taking the subway home.

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Drive-ins don’t have anything you go to the movies for; there’s not great sound, the picture is ok but not pristine, there’s no quiet, no comfy seats, there’s not even dark, really.

But it’s amazing. You can eat whatever you want, you can lay on a blanket, the stars are up above your head. It’s a cinematic picnic - with no grass or sunshine, not entirely about the movie, really. Sure, there’s one playing; usually there were three – the first one was great, the second was always “ok”, and the third was usually an excuse for kids to make out. It’s just not n exclusively movie-focused evening, more of a film adjacent event. You wouldn’t take Martin Scorsese to the drive-in. Eeesh. He’d be really grumpy. Probably not even finish his hot dog. Truffaut might have fun – he’d probably bring really great wine.

Summer movies always had a different feel as a kid because you could see one on a Tuesday or Thursday, not just the weekend. But the summer event movies, the blockbusters, began with Steven Spielburg’s JAWS in 1975… the first movie that people stood in line for and saw over and over that made 100 million dollars. Apres shark, le deluge: all the tentpole franchises: Star Wars, Raiders, Jurassic Park, Back to the Future - came out in the summer. We looked forward to being amazed by something so incredible that we’d talk about it for months and maybe get the lunchbox for school next year.

My favorite drive-in movie was Can’t Stop The Music, the (probably) fictionalized story of the Village People, history told in song, much like Hamilton. It starred Steve Gutenberg and Olympic champion Bruce Jenner. As the images filled the screen, all leather and fringe and mustache wax, our little parking lot of midwesterners were gifted a glimpse of a world intriguing as any crafted by Industrial Light and Magic, but with music and dancing and super-tight pants. Every other year or so I watch it again, appreciating its sly style, optimism, and prophetic accuracy.

My favorite summer movie experience of all time was watching Caddyshack with my mother that same summer. My mother doesn’t think things are funny. I mean, she doesn’t automatically begin laughing when presented with “comedy”. She grew up on the greats - Sid Caesar, Jack Benny, Lucille Ball… it was hard to top these legends because they were always telling a story, building a narrative, not just telling jokes. But Caddyshack had some people from Saturday Night Live that she was familiar with because I had started watching it every week, and I believe I begged a great deal and told her it was about sports. Which should have been a red flag, really.

We got there a little late and ended up sitting in about the third or fourth row. For the first 47 minutes of the film, Mom enjoyed the air conditioning and the popcorn and maybe a little nap, but not really the movie. Then came Harold Ramis’s brilliant swimming pool set piece, a long burn that builds and builds. My mother began to laugh.

Then she laughed more. And more. She wiped tears from beneath her glasses. By the time we’d reached the gag’s denouement, she had one knee on the floor of the theatre… I’ll be honest, we all did, I did too, half the theater was literally on the floor laughing. But I’d never seen my Mom laugh like that before. As we left the theatre she told me not to tell anybody she had seen that movie, she was a schoolteacher, what would they think? “But you laughed, Mom.” I said. “Yes, that was fun. That was like my summer vacation.”

The movies I enjoyed in the 1980’s were mostly the haves against the have-nots (“…the cinderella story”). Ghostbusters, Dirty Dancing, Say Anything, The Goonies. The "little guy" was the hero, and I was that guy. There was honor and merit in rejecting status and defending compassion. I remember bonding fondly over the dignity of the underdog - all confidence and hustle and, again, compassion. Watching those movies created a crazy quilt of memories representing my American Dream - not what I could get, but who we all were.

But movies always reflect the world around them, and I realize now that there must have been kids with central air and wall to wall carpet who felt the same way about Risky Business and the mean kids in the John Hughes movies, who feel about the 90s the way that I feel about the 80s. Heck, there are tons of people who feel about the 1890's the way I feel about the (19)80s... just like me, they recognize themselves in those stories and characters and want to hold on to that feeling, but some want it so badly they are willing to burn the book rather than turn the page.

But a friend of mine once told me that I didn’t have to worry about burning books, because I had the power to write a new ones. Maybe, if I'm lucky, they'll turn one into a summer movie someday, and you can watch it, in your car, stars above you, eating an ice cream sandwich.

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Two mimes.And they’re married.And they are on tv.Not only that, they have their OWN tv show.On a major network.In prime time.Weekly.And it’s an hour long.And it’s a hit.

Hahahhahahaha…

…ah.

That’s real, by the way. If you can’t imagine a future where that could possibly happen, it’s probably because it has already happened.

In 1977 (and 1978) Shields and Yarnell had a summer replacement series on CBS. He was a mime, she was a dancer, and together they created this new thing that had never been seen before.

I was 11, and I thought it was kind of cool, but it wasn’t kids that made them super famous. They “invented” the robot moves made popular on disco dance floors, trained with the legendary Marcel Marceau, performed for two US Presidents and the Queen of England, and won a primetime Emmy. And they were everywhere on tv, from Bob Hope specials to American Bandstand.

If I walked in to any broadcasting network and suggested this idea, I’d be thrown out on my ear. I’d be lucky if it was my ear.

Yet, such was the magic of the summer replacement series. There seemed to be no rules whatsoever. Fictional characters stepped out of their shows to sing and dance, network stars battled in obstacle courses, hard rockers sang duets with colorful puppets. It was like every summer for almost a decade was curated by David Lynch.

The best of these were The Sonny and Cher Show and Hee Haw, both promoted to full series after the summer run; in fact, Hee Haw ran for 20 years. Whaddya mean you don’t remember Hee Haw? It’s rural Laugh-In. Whaddya mean you don’t remember Laugh-In?

The worst of these, the absolute legend, is the wreck of the train called Pink Lady and Jeff. Dateline: Hollywood, 1980. Fred Silverman, TV producer, is desperate for a new hit. Eureka! A variety show with the most popular musical act in the world teamed with the most hilarious comedian alive!

The problem wasn’t the recipe. If you had a show with BTS and Wanda Sykes I’d watch that right now. The problem was the ingredients.

Pink Lady was a female duo from Japan who were, at the time, kind of like BTS - millions of dollars in music sales, selling out stadiums, charting on radio worldwide. Of course they get offered a shot in the US, no brainer, but when Pink Lady arrived at the studio, they discovered that their show would be entirely in English. They didn't speak English, so every single word they uttered (carefree banter, comedy sketches, the translated lyrics of their very own songs) had to be memorized phonetically.

Oh, “and Jeff” was Jeff Altman. He was a “guy you’ve seen in things”, perennial special guest now thrust centerstage into the spotlight as playing the role of the everyman, the viewer at home, exactly as befuddled as we were about what was going on, only he was actually there, being pushed into a hot tub once a week. Which happened at the end of every episode. For some reason.

It Was Bad.

In fact, Pink Lady and Jeff represented the very first time that I, a kid, realized that something made professionally by grown-ups could be bad. As a kid you don’t get to decide what’s bad; saying you don’t like something only spotlights your inexperience, because if you were older and wiser, you’d get it. I am both those things now. Doesn’t make it any better.

This was the summer that my eyebrows, which until that time had been perpetually lifted in an open expression of childhood wonder, began to lightly furrow. The world shifted, as if in a Hitchcock film. I contemplated why Battle Beyond The Stars didn’t give me the same feeling as Empire Strikes Back, and why You Can’t Stop The Music left me entertained, yet… uneasy. I began to discern, not merely seeing, but actually looking.

Or not looking, but seeing. I don’t know, whatever, this show was really bad, but I have never forgotten it. I’ve seen every episode. I have it on DVD. It was bad in an amazing way, a way that showed me that everything didn’t have to be polished and perfect. The world had room for a lot of stuff. My stories and songs might make it, somewhere. I might even get to be on Match Game.

You are right, young one, sitting in front of your cathode ray tube in your t-shirt and gym shorts with that giant plastic tumbler full of ice water and a Silly Straw. That is an awful show. Embrace your instincts. Discern. Begin to trust your life experience. There are some things that age and wisdom do not improve. Perhaps the lima bean is not an acquired taste.

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I have that same t-shirt.

With the blueprint of the Voltron robot. That exact shirt – from the subscription boxes I used to get. Heh.

Hmn.

It looks way different on that guy.

A different size? He's my same height, though... you could only order it in small, medium, and large; and the small fits a little kid - and the larges are for, like, The Rock.

It’s gotta be the medium.

It really does look different, though.

Maybe it’s our laundry detergent. Maybe we have hard water. Does hard water make cotton relax? That’s probably why my all shirts seem more… baggy. Chemistry. But my jeans are made of cotton, and they seem to be getting less baggy, dramatically less, particularly in the thick parts. Like the waistband.

(Probably a different type of cotton. Denim production must be a really complicated process.)

Which drawer is that shirt in? I think it’s the same one as the Captain America shirt I wear every Fourth of July… ooo! Gotta find that shirt for next week.

Maybe I should take better care of my t-shirts. Maybe I should hand wash them and then hang them in the bathroom to dry, or put them on a warm towel or something. No, I would still be using the hard water. I guess I could just boil the water first. Or use filtered water. That might help.

Maybe he’s one of those guys who has all their t-shirts on hangers in their closet. I’ve always thought that was kind of crazy, but look at that shirt, man: if that’s what he’s doing, it’s working.

Just think how many really nice shirts I’d have; both Black Panthers, the little orange lamb from Amsterdam, the Veronica Mars movie one… oh, and the Reading Rainbow would still look new!

His looks better than mine did new, though, somehow. It’s almost like he’s 25 and does push ups, and those things with barbells and free weights.

Yeah.

The Rock does those. That’s explains a lot about the large shirts.

Yeah. He’s definitely 25. Well, I mean, I was 25 too, but apparently a generic brand sort of 25. I mean, not Kirkland 25, but more of Cragmont 25.He’s the 25 where you lift stuff. On purpose.

Yeah, it’s probably not the shirt.

Yeah.

I bet it looks exactly the same as mine when it’s in the drawer.And our water’s probably fine.

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Let me tell you a little story:

I arrived in New York City, winter of ‘93. I needed a job.

So far I’d been a tutor, office assistant, café worker, cabaret performer, security person, housecleaner, lead singer, film editor, data input guy, nanny, scriptwriter, and telephone fortune teller. None of these stuck as a career. Now I was a husband and suddenly, a New Yorker.

I put on a blue suit, the nice one I used to wear on Sundays, and started interviewing, my goal to secure work in the city while my wife was at college upstate. Amidst record breaking blizzards I got a roommate, a room, and was offered two jobs right away, but in each case the interviews were on the telephone, and when I showed up in my clean blue suit I was told that the entire thing had been a terrible misunderstanding. One woman actually told me in what she called “confidence” that I was intimidating. Skin wise. She hoped I understood, and I did; comprehension wasn’t my problem.

A friend from San Francisco, who had lived in New York for a time, helped me out by introducing me to her temp agency rep, who found me a short-time position as executive secretary at a very fancy advertising agency for the Chief Creative Officer, who needed someone quickly because her assistant had suffered a complete and total nervous breakdown and was out for six weeks on multiple doctor’s orders. I jumped at the chance.

I was a pretty good secretary – I’d been trained pretty well by some excellent people. Most of the staff were confused enough when they saw me to either avoid me entirely or speak very politely. One person stared at me from down the hall, then turned around, went back to their desk and called me, but for the most part I was considered a bizarre oddity, the kind of which a powerful creative leader had the authority to conjure and display. Anyway, she liked me, and after about four weeks asked me what I was going to do next.

“I’d love to work here!” I said enthusiastically. “I think my creative side and my business side could really work in this environment.”

She stared at me. It was like I was being cast in a movie, or a plastic surgeon envisioning what the changes would look like once the swelling went down.

“Hmn.” That’s all she said.

“How does somebody get a job here?” I asked.

She brought me into her office and explained advertising to me, everything, from the bottom up, and then said, “Take a crack at this application. Fill it out and bring it back next week.”

Except it wasn’t an application; it was a test. I’ve still never seen anything like it. It was five tiny little briefs of problems that needed creative answers; a concept, an image, a print ad, a script, and the last one was the best:

“You have been hired as the main songwriter for Polly Piledriver, the world famous punk rock star. But when she arrives at the studio, she has had a change of heart, and wants to record a country album, and she wants her first single to be a love song about rancid butter, flat beer, and cold pizza.”

Aw. You shouldn’t have.

I finished the test over the weekend and turned it in. I didn’t hear anything, which wasn’t weird because she was incredibly busy. But Friday morning we both arrived at the elevators at the same time, and I finally asked her what she thought. She pulled me into a wider part of the hallway and looked me dead in the eye -

“I hope you appreciate what I’m going to tell you, because I really don’t want to say it, but I think somebody should be honest with you.”

Well, this wasn’t going well.

“You would be incredible in this business. But you can’t work here.”

Ok. A bit pear shaped.

“It’s not you it’s… well, I said I’d be honest, there is no one like you around here, you’re young and different and I would hire you today, but this business is all about collaboration and you just wouldn’t have that, not at first, and maybe not for a long time. And I don’t want to put you through that. There are other, specific, agencies that I will call right now and get you a job there.”

“Isn’t there anything I could do here?” I asked. “Mail room? A lot of people start there in the movies.”

“But you wouldn’t be doing the work that I do. It would just be work.”

“Let me be honest, then; I need work. I need a job. And at least if I’m in the building, then maybe I could learn the ropes that way.”

Again she looked at me. A shorter amount of time, like the puffiness had gone down nicely and the scars were barely visible.

“Fine. I’ll find you something.”

And she did. That’s how I got started in advertising. The very next week I started as a secretary in the print department, then after organizing the office learned how to set type and during a crisis where they had no other option, I became an official digital artist and so on and so forth.

So after investing in a high-profile education that I wouldn’t pay off for a quarter century, I began my career by songwriting. Which is not what I went to school for, technically, but has served me well in several odd situations, a few of which will serve as the core of this year’s Summer Replacement Series, a concert of gentle anarchy, respectful protest, warm and cuddly rebellion.

We begin with that smash hit for Polly Piledriver. I wrote this 35 years ago and probably recorded it on the old TASCAM 4-track, but I can’t find it on any cassette tape, so I have faithfully recreated the incredibly amateur glory of my enthusiastic youth. If you read these rather than listen, please, do listen. It’s ridiculous.

Thank you so much for your time, and Happy beginning of Summer.

As a girl, I was rude

I thought love was just fast food

Anything more substantial was

not on my mind

as I dated and courted

the confused sad and sordid.

But you were the home cooked meal I’d left behind.

Like a fine wine you aged

Burning’ into my memory

Looking into your eyes

I forget all those deep fried guys

Butter goes rancid

And beer goes flat

If you refrigerate ‘em you still can’t stop that

Honey pizza gets cold

You know all that gets old

But you are a staple in my Pantry of Love

Oh sugar, the thought of you sends my heart reeling

These flowers you brought me lift me to the ceiling

They’ll throw rice at our wedding and our eyes will tingle

As the salt on our tears of joy commingle

Yes, butter goes rancid and beer goes flat

If you refrigerate ‘em you still can’t stop that

Honey, pizza gets cold

You know all that gets old

But you are a staple in my Pantry of Love

Yes, butter goes rancid in sticks or in pats

and a Twinkie’s just full of corn syrup and fat

But, baby, you’ve got it all

You’re non-perishable

Yes, you are a staple in my Pantry of Love.

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For the last 41 years I have had a one second summer vacation, right at the beginning of the season. I uncontrollably smile, my whole body relaxes, and I look so forward to eight to twelve weeks of sleeping late and watching Captain Kangaroo every morning while eating cereal for both breakfast and lunch, reading books in three hour long stretches. enjoying a popsicle from the freezer after a full day’s work cutting the grass (and hand trimming around the front steps), then lying on a blanket atop the living room floor listening to entire albums while sipping ice water through a Silly Straw™ from an absurdly gigantic plastic “cup” that I get to purchase every year from the 7-11™.

One-one thousand. Then it’s over. It’s just a feeling I get to have once a year. I only had one actual summer like that, but it was great. Once I could drive (15 in Kansas City) I started working as a stage performer at the local theme park. These were gigantic revues with elaborate sets and costumes, and for the first two years a full live band, for six shows a day.

I had tap shoes. I still have tap shoes, safe beneath the bed, where they cannot offer anyone the false impression that they could, while attached to me, offer a consistently rhythmic percussive experience of any kind. (I do a great jazz hand, though.) So that was three summers in row.

Then I was a tour guide at Universal Studios in LA (The audition was talking. You had to riff for 20 minutes. They hired me two weeks early.)

And then a record store the next year, and then I was out of college, where summers seemed to disappear, split between Elder Spring and Nascent Fall. Dangit.

Am I whining? I apologize, it’s just that I worked somewhere for many years where I earned 6 weeks vacation per year, plus personal days and sick days and holidays. I could have been a guest star. Now, I’ve decided to amend my retirement by doing something I care about, and vacation time is down to two weeks again. Actually, not even two weeks, it’s like, 56 hours. A bit of a shock.

I don’t need MORE vacation as much as a certain style of vacation. Ok, more is better, yes, I see that clearly now that I’ve written it down. But I find that, despite my Tardis talk, I don’t want to travel through time so much as slow it down. There are fun and relaxing things to do, and if I’m wistful for summers past I can certainly lay on the floor and drink water through a straw; for goodness sake, that’s both delightful and economical.

I found a video of my daughter and I sorting LEGO. She was six. It was a basket of every shape, size, and color imaginable; we transferred them into an old makeup case while listening to a compilation of guitar heroes on vinyl from Third Man Records. I taught her how to spell “Johnny Cash”. She kept correcting me when I put brown LEGO in the tan section.

It’s 11 minutes long. It’s incredibly relaxing to watch it, it’s ME S M R, very vacationy. I think it qualifies as a Treasured Moment, which are rare, and I am hungry for them, as we all are, but I don’t want to gobble them up…I want to savor them. Slow it all down.

So allow me to present SUMMER REPLACEMENT SERIES, a collection of artworks I’ve never been able to properly share due to lack of logistics, technology, and principally, time. It’s a variety show of sorts, imbued with the spirit of experimentation and questionable programming choices that brought the world both Sonny and Cher and Pink Lady and Jeff, both of whom we’ll be discussing.

Not a 180, just a little shift, like a limited time flavor of coffee, or fiddleheads. Seasonal, if not artisanal. It also gives me a little time to recharge and gird up. I very much appreciate your time, and as the days get warmer (or colder in the Southern hemisphere…that always twists my brain a bit).

I hope these will be refreshing breaks. Or warm, cozy cups of cocoa, if you’re in New Zealand. [See, that really is confusing: I’m sure I’d show up there in July and be the only idiot on the beach…

…in the snow.]

Thank you for your time.

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As a kid, you feel invincible.

Your body is just one thing: you don’t think about your knees or your back or your eyes as separate, they’re part of a bio-spaceship you’re piloting around.

The older I get the more I become a jigsaw puzzle of discrete physical pieces, each with their own set of verbs.

My ears? Ring. My jaw clicks. My gut… roils. And the rubber-band physics that used to define motion have been separated too; up and down is now: down.

And up. Two choices. Two clear efforts. Neither in any way dependent on the other. It’s automatic transmission to manual, more control but clearly a bit less raw horsepower.

I’ve been a bit under the weather recently, a phase I’ve just learned was derived from ship travel, where if a sailor was ill they were sent below deck to recover, thus “under the weather”. Anyway, I am below deck right now, far from the currently bright amber skies over Brooklyn, recovering. Well, I didn’t lose health – I’m not retrieving it, it’s right here, I just either need a new one or a bit of time to mend and properly iron this one.

The vulnerability of illness is such that one seeks out comfort with little energy to pursue it, so comfort needs to be close at hand, like a cool pillow or a cup of hot tea or a bag of camp-sized marshmallows. But of course, even after the lessons taught to us by Covid, a sick day is not a day “off”, unless you are entirely unconscious, and even then you probably need a doctor’s note.

So though I’ve been laying down, my phone was near my hand all day, more than occasionally dinging or ringing or asking for something to be done, which I did, then closed my eyes the requisite 11 minutes it takes to both, coincidentally, fall fully asleep and have the phone buzz again.

So I thought I might watch a relaxing show, but I’ve recently changed phones, so I was locked out of nearly every app.

People used to recognize either my face, voice, or name. This is how humans engaged with one another; in person, on the telephone, or on paper. You could see someone, hear someone, or read what they wrote.

You didn’t need all three, you just looked at the tv and said “Hey, that’s William Shatner” and were pretty sure that was him. If you weren’t sure, you just waited until he started talking.

“Yep,” you’d say, “that’s William Shatner alright.”

To prove we were us, we used ID. Driver’s license, or a passport if you were a, y’know, passport person. Those pieces of nothing but paper products allowed a human being to write a monetary amount on another piece of paper and turn it into legal tender. The salesperson would check the randomish scribble from one of the pieces of paper to that on another, lift the money till in the cash register, and place it underneath.

Yet I, ill yet surrounded by an Age Or Miracles, found myself adding to my full body ache – head filled with cheese – roiling and exhausted state the specific frustration of not being able to prove my identity to a machine with detail enough for it allow me to enjoy services that I had already paid for.

Name: it doesn’t care about my name, it wants an email. I have seventeen different emails.

Password: Well, that’s what it comes down to, right? And I understand that I changed it 4 months ago, thank you very much but that doesn’t help me remember what lyrical maniac word I created back then in anger (with caps and numbers and symbols).

The Picture Box: where I need to “prove I’m human” ( I believe the words I was clearly muttering accomplished that nicely, but the phone aloofly pretended that it wasn’t listening ) .

And then multi-factor authentication, where I had to find a device that was a friend of the device I was holding who could vouch for me.

I was in front of a digital condo board. I was applying for citizenship in Tron. All saints forbid that someone on the Dark Web should watch an episode of “Picard” on my dime… I was protected fully from such chicanery, even though I’ve been sent four bank cards in two years as a “security courtesy” and all my passwords trigger alerts that they were found in a data breach from somewhere or another.

I don’t go online for security. I don’t go outside for security. I do it because I have to, for one reason or another, and the calculated risk of engaging in any kind of communication or connection is something I’ve accepted, I just don’t feel well and I want to see a classically trained Shakespearian actor make money pretending to be the retired captain of a spaceship, that’s all. My bio-spaceship is tired, the weather outside is (literally) frightful, and I want to be below a metaphorical deck for just little while. That is all I’m asking for.

Why so many questions? Do you really want to get to know me? Should I tell you my deepest desires and grandest hopes, not just for me, but for generations to come? Are you waiting for the moment I reveal, I mean truly reveal myself? Take down all barriers and really allow you to understand who I am? The raw, open, jigsaw puzzle that defines my life? Is that what you’re waiting for? Is that what you really want? Is – oh, hold on… here you go:9 8 7 4 8 2.

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When my college reunion was announced, I began writing a poem. I missed the physical event due to the complications of our car being filled with water, but I finished the poem anyway. That’s what this is.

A while agoAn age ago

I left a Universityfilled with a stomach full of hope and half a head of let's just see

having traded anecdotes and studied some and kissed some folks and sung a bit and played guitar I looked ahead (well, not too far)

I broke a pipe and launched a hatand made no further plans save that I’d(while respecting social norm)not necessarily conformto labels, roles and shapes expectedby society’s architects.

So if, in future situations,I was challenged by a nationwith a cruel acquired tastefor broken souls who knew their placeI promised to state

(nay, I swore)

“I’m not the droid you’re looking for”

I didn’t think I’d say it much except job interviews and such where queries for positions billed concerned mere roles they wanted filled instead of work they needed done.(Which is a shame. I find work fun.)

But much of what I’d hoped was lasting ended up as central casting.

Some dates judged less on connection than a template of affection,then appeared somewhat annoyed when I explained

“I’m not the droid you’re…”

Looking for a fantasy projected?Status quo protected? Low risk liability and servile safe utility?

Well, I’m not offering resistanceto this templated existencehonestly,what seems defiance to traditional complianceisn’t. It’s a never-endinglack of skillin bad pretending.

A true momentis combiningthoughtsor energies aligningat long tablesin small bedswhispered softlyloudly saidI’ve found myself reflected best in timeswhen ego acquiesced to harmony with people whocombined to create ever-new ideas and possibilities.

That’s what I learned in college.

Easy? No; the path from there to here has been uncharted,

vague, unclear

chaotic, dangerous, disjointed

but I’ve not been disappointedwhat I’ve lacked, I’ve never neededserial failed ’til I succeededlong endured with low complaintgotten what I’ve given.

Ain’t itfunny all the effort spent towardstrengthening a “permanent record”when no one’s checked my attendance,or my grade point average?

If there is one thingthat I’ve protected it’s no image I’ve projectedbut my choice to go through wallswhen the world presents long hallways filled with nothing but locked doors.

I’m not the droid you’re looking for.

I hope you find the perfect model of your new automaton.I’ll just go about my businessand then quietly

move along.

[ 29 May 2023]

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I cannot remember names. I never could. Delightfully, there was lockdown. During online meetings everyone’s name was right below their face like a caption in a Criterion film. Cheat codes.

“Hello, Patricia!” I would say at School Leadership Team meetings. “How was your weekend, Rebecca?” I would nonchalantly add.

Now, if I see you face to face, my background isn’t blurred, but my foreground is. I have no idea what your name is. Names are not part of my relationship with memory.

This column stands firmly as a chronicle of black history from the perspective of me, a black person, and things have happened to me, which are history, so I end up doing a fair share of remembering in the space.

Memory is far, far cooler than the internet. There’s still so much mystery there. The internet is a sunny day on a prominent hill with near perfect visibility in every direction, while memory is what you can see in the dark with a less than average flashlight; not even one of those LED ones, just a D cell battery job where you can only see what’s right in front of you. And Memory is best friends with Imagination, so who really knows what’s going on out there? In there. Wherever.

What I like the best about memory is that I cannot remember your childhood. Even if we knew each other as kids, I don’t know what it’s like to be you. Online, we can binge-watch the exact same thing on a streaming service from opposite ends of the earth, but if you sat at the desk next to me in every class from 3rd grade to 10th grade because our names were right next to each other in alphabetical order, you would still be living a entirely unique show on a completely different set of software and hardware than I.

Each of our realities is infinitely different. No two living things are exactly the same. But at least for human beings, there are patterns and nodes of experiential intersection where some specific aspect of life may be true for many people. Something I remember might be something you remember, even if our last names aren’t anywhere near one another, alphabetically.

My memory uses what adventurers in blue police boxes from foreign planets might call “fixed points in time”: frozen moments, single images - usually associated with an object. A tiny toy flatbed truck carrying plastic logs. The emergency stop switch on an elevator. A string of pearls. A streetlight. The memory happens in a kind of peripheral vision; I see the object (in my head) and if I keep staring at it, the memory kind of plays around it, as if the object is the needle on a record. And if more than one of us share the significance of that same object, we may not hear the same song, but I believe there is a harmony of sorts.

So, to the aspic.

We stand at a moment in human history when machines are being used to create art. No decisions, self discovery, or craft are involved. To many, this is a terrifying concept.

But I am neither panicked or disrupted, because, well…the aspic.

The category of food has long since been mimicked by industry, yet the overall truth remains that carefully cultivated foodstuffs, prepared by the hands of an actual human being, cooked by heat and time are far more nourishing and delicious than pre-prepared microwavable fare. Both can exist in the world, but corporations only mass create foods they feel that a mass of people might buy. There are pork cracklin’ people and frozen burrito people and nearly all of us were instant noodle people at one time or another.

But the aspic. Aspic = savory jello. Yes, it’s a very old recipe and I am not going into how that particular sausage is made (though sausage is often involved) but instead touch on its uniqueness, and the fact that it is nearly impossible that any corporate entity would ever decide to mass produce it. The aspic is proof that no matter the power of the corporation (or the algorithm), true artistic individuality is something only a human being can do.

The aspic itself is not my focus, let’s just get past this as quickly as we can and for goodness sake don’t look it up online, it’s ghastly.

My focus is on a particular aspic mold. See, the point of the aspic was that it gave gelatin the chance to serve as main course rather than side dish, a concept so metaphorically rich, but I digress. To take on this challenge, the aspic had to take center stage on the table, and to do that required drama. So during the time that aspics were popular (I don’t know when that was, but there were tons of aspic recipes in “The Joy Of Cooking”) the aspic mold also gained prominence.

Thus (and I’m gonna go out on a limb here: many of you may not have heard of this object, but for those who have, this should generate a significant jolt of recollection) The Copper Fish Pan. I believe it is a koi, or salmon, and it is curved in an elegant inverted “U” shape. I never ate anything prepared in it, because it was always hanging on the kitchen wall in my grandparents’ house. There was a Copper Lobster companion piece as well.

My time in my grandparents’ kitchen was liberal yet limited, but when I was there that pan, which my Grandmother told me was meant for aspics (but she really didn’t like aspics), shone brilliantly, no matter the season. Then I found out it wasn’t just my grandmother’s house; they were in many more homes - you’d go to a birthday party and there was one in the kitchen there, I’d pick up a date at their house and there was one in their kitchen…

“My grandmother has one of those!”

“Yeah? It’s been here forever…I don’t even know what it’s for.”

“It’s an aspic pan!’ I’d say excitedly, because dates love salad trivia.

I’ve found copper fish pans in kitchens from New England to Northern California.

Ring a bell? A few of you must be familiar with them, and at least one of you actually has one: it is you, brave decorator, that truly understands the bequeathing of legacy through generations, passing forward not only photographs or even stories, but experiences. This entirely non-aquatic wall hanging, sparkling brightly with quasi-usefulness, is an heirloom not of utility, but purely of memory.

Someday my own child may bring a date home to bond over this penny-bright oddity, and I will listen as she explains what an aspic is, and a gentle yet charming hilarity will ensue. Perhaps her date will recognize the object, and we’ll take comfort in the knowledge that their family in some true yet ethereal way connects to our own. And if this relationship deepens, our copper fish pan will someday belong to them, a new generation, my daughter and…y’know…what’s-their-name.

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Have you ever had that dream where you’re back in school and it’s suddenly finals time and you haven’t finished the work? So have I! Also, I’ve had that happen to me when I was awake, more than once.

The first time was in high school, when I decided to try to write a piano concerto. I did not know how to write a piano concerto. But I had MOXIE.

I approached my music teacher with the idea that my school’s concert orchestra might play it for me. He regarded my request with ardent curiosity. I don’t think he took me seriously, which may have been my fault. In the spirit of Bugs Bunny, I was known for a predisposition toward “harmless antics”, which he may have misinterpreted as a predisposition toward “general madness”. He actually signed my yearbook “You are abundantly talented. Lots of luck in all you do. I’ll be looking for your name in the headlines, “7-Eleven robbed by good natured black kid who sings and dances.” “which was ridiculous, because I’m much more of a “brilliant plan to burgle Nakatomi Plaza” kind of guy.

But he did teach me an most important lesson: when I wasn’t able to play a particularly tricky saxophone part in concert band, he gently shouted,

“Jd! Think!”

I focused hard enough to telekinetically move the music stand, and played the part correctly, but incredibly mechanically, so he (less gently) shouted,

“Jd, Don’t Think.”

And that did it, because music is right between thinking and not thinking. #formativemoment

He told me it would take longer than a couple of weeks to instruct me as to how to score a concerto. I did not have a great deal of instructional options as there was no internet, only the Kansas City Kansas Public Library and the Waldenbooks at the far end of Indian Springs Mall, neither of which had a book on scoring classical music. But I had MOXIE.

I got some fancy staff paper and a red pen (no idea what I was thinking). I set about it with a piano after school for a month or so. I copied the finished score on a Xerox machine, and cut that into strips which I scotch-taped to letter size pages to make individual instrument parts,.

And my music teacher did allow me to distribute this Frankensteined mess to the concert orchestra, a room full of confused midwestern faces behind rented instruments. And let me be clear that the music they were attempting to read was a maniacal travesty of time and key signatures. It must have been like trying to play a Mandelbrot set. They feverishly attempted to jot down the correct rhythms and notes. But I stood on the podium, and eventually we played about two pages of it.

Was I embarrassed? Heck, no. I knew what it was supposed to sound like, even if it wasn’t written down correctly. “I’ll hear it someday!” I said, with the same dreamy tone of that African American kid who swept up the diner in Back to The Future, when he says, “Mayor! You wait and see, Mr. Caruthers, I will be Mayor!”

MOXIE.

Perhaps it was that very passion, so elegantly represented by Hill Valley’s Goldie Wilson, that pushed me forward in my own journey through time, but I have discovered a little secret I’d like to share with you. Because we’re close.

Time cheats.

Time doesn’t abandon the past, it brings it along for the ride. That score has been with me since then, a sturdy piece of paper, virtually unchanged. But technology changed around it, and I did too.

So it occurred to me, after wrestling with the ballet that I still owe you, that I had never actually heard, outside my head, the first major piece I’d written.

And neither had my music teacher. I was supposed to turn it in at the end of the year. 39 years ago.

So I’m sending it to him this weekend. I tried to keep it exactly as it was “written”originally, but even I couldn’t read some of that anymore, total mayhem, the scribblings of a madman, unrealistically enthusiastic –

– but not entirely delusional, because I never did stop believing that I’d hear it, someday. And now I have.

Just like at the end of that recurring dream, I realize that I don’t actually have to turn this in, I’m done with high school. But it’s strangely satisfying to close this loop, to honor possibility, and celebrate a life’s path entirely free of musical theatre based convenience store heists.

If you’d like to listen, it’s at the end of this week’s recording. Thank you for your time.

finaledellarte: a piano concerto. ©1984 Michaelsongs℗ 2023 Jd Michaels/The CabsEverywhere Creative Production House (ASCAP)

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I would not dare to refer to myself as a professional writer; perhaps more of a storied amateur, a local craftsperson, an inspired aspirant. I’ve just begun writing things people could read, and you never learn anything at the beginning. At the beginning it all seems to be going well because you don’t know the difference.

My first class in college was a Literature course where we began with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The professor copied part of the prologue on the blackboard and had someone read it out loud. He waxed about the meter and pointed out the rhyming patterns and informed us how incredible it was that this had been written at all, how incredibly different it was, had anyone EVER heard of something this unique.

I now understand that this question was rhetorical. I see that now. Hindsight. 20/20. But in my myoptic youth I thought he was asking us a question, so I decided to answer it.

“It’s a rap.” I told him. (I did raise my hand, and he’d called on me.)

“Excuse me?” he asked.

I realize that he heard the word “rap” with a “w”. I realize that now. “Wrap”.

“It’s a wrap” is a phase he was certainly familiar with, had he seen any of hundreds of episodes of 1950’s television or several select films about filmmaking.

And I should have answered his question. That seems super clear, at this point, but instead I did something I had never actually done before. It shouldn’t have even worked, it was right out of a John Hughes movie.

“Gimme a beat.” I said to no-one in particular.

And no one in particular happened to be this black haired kid from New York City, who immediately began beat boxing. Without turning my head, I began -

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,And bathed every veyne in swich licourOf which vertu engendred is the flour

And that was a mistake, I see that, of course I see that, but then everyone started tapping the desk in time and I got all inspired and did another four lines or so. I’m not sure how I nailed the Old English, but we’d read it in high school.

The professor thought I was a witch, and I had taken over the classroom with some kind of spell of some kind or something, because he asked when I finished, “What was that?”

Another student explained to him that this was a new form of expression called “hip hop”, born around five years ago in New York City, where entire pieces weren’t sung but indeed spoken, much like the prologue.

He seemed shocked that everyone was familiar with this specific cultural phenomenon, given the room’s source demographic.

I might have been able to fly under the radar had I not turned in a final paper titled “Bald Headed Babies from the Other Side of Town”, a musical in the neighborhood of Frank Zappa that also tripled as my final paper for my Sociology and Music classes. It had a companion cassette tape with the soundtrack, which I’d recorded using a piano, and my saxophone, and intriguing lyrics which told the story of a scientist who faked evidence proving that the amount of hair on a newborn baby’s head directly correlated to their eventual role as a miscreant of some kind, and thus wanted them all to be gathered up and arrested, but when the government tried to do just that, the bald headed babies revolted, resulting in all manner of formula based assaults.

I got three B minuses. It wasn’t purely that I didn’t know any better. I began to suspect it was going pear shaped somewhere in the middle, but nobody told me not to so – forgiveness rather than permission.

I was told that all three professors met in a teacher’s lounge somewhere and discussed what to do. “A cassette tape,” the literature professor said, “No one, has ever given me, a cassette tape.”

He had written the books we were studying from. I thought all professors did that, like their perfect bound lesson plans, but when I went back to Kansas City and my friend was studying from that same book I began to realize he was probably a big deal. But I was just starting out. The beginning. I didn’t know anything, I just put everything I had into everything I was doing and hoped that worked.

I don’t know if it worked, but I made it from there to here. And here I am, back at a beginning, but slightly farther than the very beginning. This year there will be more music, and perhaps slightly more fancy title sequences, and if things go well I will have enough material for an album. Ooo.

Welcome. Thank you for your time. Let’s begin.

[If you’d like to hear “The Bald Headed Baby Tarantella”, it’s at the end of this week’s recording.

Just in case y’know, you thought I made that up.]

audio: The Bald Headed Baby Tarantella©1984 - Jd Michaels

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I called my Mom to say hello, and she asked if I’d heard a certain story “on the news”. I said I hadn’t. So she told me the story. It was “the news”, so the story wasn’t really a happy one. I don’t expect news to be happy; the words “have you heard this” or “I’ve got to tell you something” rarely lead, in my limited experience, to a happy story.

“You’re listening to BBC World News. Today, kittens…”

Growing up, news wasn’t happy either, but it was at least assumed to be “true”. Now if someone tells me a news story I ask them who they heard it from, as if it was a rumor heard during first period in high school. “True” isn’t “happy”, but it does allows us that shrug-shoulder-look-up-to-Heaven-what-ya-gonna do thing we’ve all gotten so good at.

It’s better to “know things” than “not to know things”, but still, I’m trying to steer my mother’s attention away from the news. She gets her news from reputable sources, it’s all journalism, but at some point every news source runs out of news and begins offering “information” instead, which is less grim, but still excites her keen sense of danger and mayhem.

We would all probably appreciate a little less “what we should be looking out for” and more “what we might be able to forward to”. The weather report rides that line; no matter how jovial the chosen meteorologist, I am really only concerned about bad weather. The sky looks cloudy, so I check the forecast to see what’s gonna happen, or how long until whatever’s happening is gonna happen, so I can dress appropriately. But when the sky is blue, and it’s going to be great weather, in the back of my mind I’m kind of wondering how long I’ve got before it’s bad weather again.

I appreciate the news my mother tells me. A cautionary tale is still a tale, and I love stories, though it’s confusing to hear the news in the same voice that told you about the three little pigs. I do believe that wolf is still serving hard time.

——

You’ve read a year of things like that. Bless you. I began this on a bit of a dare, then wanted to collect enough stories to make a little book, then maybe a bigger book, and now it’s a seed that’s taken root and grown wild. And here we are. This is nice.

It’s the end of Season Three, due to some really weird numbering on my part (I started at “00”, which Zoë says nobody does, but now it’s a tradition). If for any reason this is your first time visiting :lowerblackpain, welcome, and if you’ve been here a while, or even (gasp) since the beginning, Thank You.

I’ll be honest with you, I’m exhausted. Not due to this column, but the post-lockdown pace of the world surrounding it. Leaving the house. Yipe. Talking to people. Eek. But I’m lucky to be sharing this coordinate in space-time with you, people who are doing things, making things and making things happen.

As I close out a year of doing this, I’m going to take this specific moment to share a few updates.

The lollipop lady likes me now.S03E03 https://lowerblackpain.substack.com/p/the-lollipop-lady#details

You remember that crossing guard who was very, well, cross with me?

She likes me now. This is a huge comfort.

I walk to work everyday and offer her a strong “Good Morning!” and a heartfelt “Have a good day!” and she reciprocates, with a smile, even. I am part of a community of people passing her, and for each of us it’s a bit of a blessing. Heck, it’s New York, it might be the nicest thing anybody says to us ’til we get back home. She couldn’t be more comforting if she was a nun.

My name is (also) Jd Michaels.S01E14 https://lowerblackpain.substack.com/p/six-names-of-four-things#details

You know the history of my name, but strangely, even after all the twists and turns, it isn’t entirely unique.

There are two other Jd Michaels.

• Owns a landscaping company (and the url of my name with .com after it). He lives in Guilderland, New York, which sounds like it’s between The Shire and Camelot, but is just 30 minutes west from our state capital. He does beautiful work, and must be incredibly annoyed by my constant online shenanigans. It’s an arm wrestle between us; one of us is going to have to say “No, I’m not THAT Jd Michaels” someday. Though, to be honest, given the demographic makeup of Guilderland I don’t think anyone assumes that he’s the author of this column. Just…y’know.

• Is a professional wrestler. He is the reason that the WWE video game has my last name programmed in it. With a bit of finagling I actually created an animated entrance sequence where the announcer says “and now, coming to the ring, weighing 150 pounds, from Kansas City, The “Professor”, JD MICHAELS!” And then there is pyro and smoke and I jump out from behind the screen and the lights hit my sparkly shorts and I rage down to the ring. It’s cathartic.

• Last weekend I heard, for the first time, an album called “Donuts” by arguably the most famous Jay Dee, a man whose full name was James Dewitt Yancey, but was known best as J Dilla. He was a hip hop sample artist who created some amazing work and stands as a primary influence to modern music. And where did I listen to this incredibly important chronicle of genius? Home Depot. The sink was broken. As a fellow African-American “j-d” I wanted to bond with him, in a way, which happened in a big way over by the rubber faucet washers. He sampled not only Frank Zappa, but also Raymond Scott, two of my top five musical heroes. I was actually tearing up by the time I got to the checkout. I am proud to lose the name arm wrestle to that guy.

The first lap.S02E14 https://lowerblackpain.substack.com/p/gifts-of-thwipmas-past#details

I never did find the photo of me and Spider-Man. I looked in all the photo boxes, it just wasn’t there. I found one with a cardboard cut-out of the magician David Copperfield levitating me (the Polaroid camera and his cutout were both mounted sideways to create this illusion). I found one with my grandfather at Thanksgiving; I’m probably 17 and I’m wearing what I must have considered a “nice outfit”.

I did discover one I don’t remember seeing before, of my mother and I, as a tiny baby, maybe a few weeks old. The photo was taken from a weird distance away, not really a portrait but more of a journalistic piece. I’m doing nothing at all useful, I’m a potato, but my mother looks confident, sitting in a housecoat, calm, focused, even though she was surrounded the late 1960’s and riots and war and unrest.

But soon, she will tell me of the three little pigs. Shortly after that, she will call me at my home in Brooklyn and make sure I don’t eat the recalled spinach, or give my social security number to the wrong person, or get caught up in an international deepfake conspiracy, because she heard it on the news and it might be important information I need in order to stay safe. And I will appreciate this information, and check the dates on my food items and not answer unknown numbers and avoid professional spy networks.

And we will talk about the weather, even though we know it’s changing, and tell each other stories. And then I’ll tell a year of them to you.

Thank you for your time. And yes, I will see you next week. I mean, next year! Wow.

- Jd Michaels.

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I just read an article that said getting six hours of sleep a night was as bad as not sleeping for two days straight. There was research, in a laboratory, with subjects and pencils and numbers.

I’m proud when I get six hours of sleep. I’m not saying that I “get six hours sleep”, like, every night or anything. I don’t know where you even heard that, that’s incredible, what an imagination you have. No, I’ve always felt that I physically REQUIRE six hours of sleep a night to achieve what I’m going to call “Basic Human Functionality”.

But this research revealed that only those who slept eight hours a night were “properly rested” or whatever (the smarmy jerks), while my noble Sixers faltered on the 10th day, breaking down in tests doing things like…cognitive stuff. Vocabulary things. Maybe memory stuff too; I don’t really recall.

So much modern talk mentions a “work / life balance”, and we live in a world of such stunning convenience that surely it is nearing Utopia: bon bons on chaise-longues in self-driving cars while wearing VR helmets. In this world of absolute wonder, I can definitely get two more hours sleep every night, right?

Going to sleep isn’t staying asleep. And if I roll the wrong way, I snore loud enough to be heard on the street. In Brooklyn. With our windows shut. And at 3:30 AM I’m up for no apparent reason (they say it might be stress but who are they and why should I listen to them whoever they are and what do they know?), and no matter what I do the cats always wake me at exactly 5:30 AM to be fed. No, I tried that. Yep, I tried that too.

The article vexed me because I really thought I had cracked the life/work balance code with the six hour thing. I was proud - I had my Apple Watch all set for my bedtime and wake-up time. More than I used to get… I used to be exhausted ALL THE TIME. I got home from work at 8:30 and to bed by 11:30 and then up again at 5:30. Oh. Wait. That’s six hours too.

Anywise, 8 hours of sleep a night seems to scientifically be the answer to everything, which isn’t surprising. We’ve heard that our whole lives.

Somewhere around 1817, a Welsh gentleman named Robert Owen promoted a revolutionary idea he called “the workday: 8 hours labour, 8 hours recreation, and 8 hours rest”. He owned a factory, so he tested this hypothesis on his employees as one of his first efforts to create a “utopian society”.

He never really hit that mark, but he did became an originator of the trade union movement, which later adopted this theory: “8 hours work. 8 hours rest. 8 hours for what you will”.

You’re doing the math in your head, aren’t you? 8 and 8 and 8 is 24? Really? I could really sleep for 8 hours and then go to work and have 8 hours left? Every day?

Of course not. Clocks were more… theoretical in 1817. And the sun was younger, and more forgiving.

When’s the last time you had 8 hours of sleep, then had a super productive 8 hours at work, then partied for 8 hours? Never, is the answer, because it doesn’t work that way. 8 - 8 - 8 is a beautiful numerical fairy tale that has inspired civilization, but QUITE LITERALLY doesn’t add up.

You know what hadn’t been invented in 1817? Commuting. That’s an extra hour on either side of work. Then they must not have had any errands to do, that’s an hour, and two more for morning and evening ablutions and eating meals. At least an hour for some kind of home maintenance or reading the mail or the news or anything else that’s necessary instead of a fun choice…that’s 16 hours of work a day.

Sounds more like it, right? We’re getting there. Because now it’s 16 hours of work, with 8 left over to try and get some sleep and watch a couple of YouTube videos.

The “weekend” was an idea that occurred to several people at the beginning of the 20th century: a mill in New England offered Saturdays off to its Jewish employees along with Sunday, then Henry Ford tried it, but in England it was a gift from John Boot, whose pharmaceutical factory in Nottingham was experiencing a significant surplus, so to slow production, but keep staff employed, he gave them two days off without reducing their pay.

The 40 hour workweek, along with the weekend, was formally adopted the USA in 1937, as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act, under the New Deal, and it wasn’t so people could get more sleep, it was all a numbers thing of keeping people employed and factories open and numbers up or down or whatever.

And the weirdest fact about all this is that humans used to sleep in two four hour chunks, back before we had artificial light. They’d wake up in the middle of the night for an hour or two, get some stuff done then go back to bed until morning. But candles and street lamps changed all that; then of course electricity, and Johnny Carson.

Even if I have a couple of hours for “what I will” I usually spend it decompressing. Decompression is the time it takes to get over the time directly before it. If I don’t employ some discipline, I end up using all that time to scroll through one thing or another on my phone, which is never productive.

“What” I should “will” is to read a book. Or write music. That’s a good thing to will. Or maybe a little pilates, I should be willing that. But if I only have 8 hours that I’m not working, should I spend all of that time sleeping? Really? I mean, what do I know, I’m a just a six-er, you eight hour sleep people have all the answers, you tell me –

– oh, sorry, I didn’t see you were… I apologize. Just give me a call when you wake up.

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Hey.

If you’ve been here for a while (thank you very very very much) you probably know that my hometown is Kansas City. Long before it was cool to wear a Chiefs or Royals cap, I rode the Yankee / Mets gauntlet of the subway proudly sporting my ancestral brands. Ok, I was a 49ers fan for a while back in the day, but everybody was, it was like science fiction - Montana and Rice? and I don’t even follow football… and then Montana went to Kansas City, so it all seemed like kismet.

You don’t get to choose your hometown, it’s yours forever, and I’m proud of mine, but there’s been some stuff about it in the news that I don’t want to talk about.

Ok, I want to talk about it a tiny bit because this is a column called :lowerblackpain, where, as you know, the lower is a verb. So I feel its title - if not its formal charter - if not to address pain, is in some way to counterbalance it.

The pain I wish to counterbalance is not a new one. Nor is it eradicable, like smallpox, because it’s a human condition that will exist forever: in the words of a pure dear friend: some people are garbage. They may not start out that way, but as there’s only two paths in human development; confidence and fear, they chose poorly, and drank from the shiny golden goblet of ego and anger instead of the dusty brass cup of compassion. #lastcrusade.

I am not an optimist. I am a proud pragmatist. It’s served me well in a world that didn’t have an infinite amount of automatic options for me. Instead I found bits of wisdom and information that I could put together like a kit to make a way to move forward. My Grandpa gave me Count Basie, my Grandma gave me Tchaikovsky, the early seventies gave me The Partridge Family: boom! I’m writing music filled with the funk, rococo pastiche and warm G-rated harmonies only that combination could deliver.

But the most important kits were the ones I put together to survive. You’ve got to survive: that’s the basic goal.

This is true for all of us. What memory floods your head when I say the words “close call”? Hmmm? We’ve all had at least two. And they don’t have to be the ones where you’re on vacation and the zip line looks dodgy or the last oyster tastes a little funny. They are most likely (because I know you guys, and you’re all super cool) choices you’ve made where you look back and realize the road not taken needed desperately not to be tooken. Took. Whatever.

Let me come at this the long way. I appreciate your patience.

So a newly famous actor, a black man, recently had a public altercation that is probably going to stall if not entirely maroon his career. I didn’t know if it was his fault or not, but this week I ended up following a thread on the internet and accidentally researched it.

He went to the same college I did. That was in every article. It shouldn’t have been, but it defined him a bit differently. Below the article was a collection of comments from other black guys who’d attended the same college.

They were all really mad. All of them. One said he had graduated with various degrees from several prestigious higher learning places and had never been treated as poorly as he had at my alma mater. The others followed suit.

I did that thing with my lips where you go “Really?”. Pursing, yes. Then I read: “Every black graduate I know has had an anonymous white person turn him in for a made-up charge of something that he had to defend, like going to the principal’s office.” And I said, “Well, that never happened to me!”, but it did.

There was this prince of somewhere who behaved very badly his sophomore year, buying up a lot of stuff and basically partying all the time, and then the next year he was definitively gone but all the stuff he bought was there, including this “big screen” console TV, a giant wooden cabinet of a thing, and the next people in that room were me and my two roommates, so we didn’t move it out, we just kept it there, and everybody knew it, and the next year the people in the room didn’t want it and they said we had to move it out so we took it to our next room where, again, everybody saw it all year, even the Dean knew about it (but had no clue as to who to call about it), then the next year we put it back in the place we originally found it and somebody apparently took it.

So I was called before a huge long table of very angry people who told me that I had stolen it. “I don’t have it,” I said. “We can go to my tiny off campus apartment right now and it won’t be there.” I told them the entire story. “How could I steal something which everyone knows the location of, all that time?” They had no answer for that. “What is my exact responsibility towards abandoned furniture?” They had no answer for that either. Though they threatened my educational future quite seriously, by the end of this interview with me they seemed as exhausted as Elmer Fudd dealing with Bugs Bunny. I’m sure you can imagine.

And nobody told me who quote-unquote “turned me in”; I was just told by my Dean to “trust no one”, which is cool to hear in a movie but, y’know, not so much when you’re still on a dating circuit. I always thought it was a one off, a fluke of weirdness borne of royal misbehavior, but reading a series of similar incidents from similar looking people made me sad. A few of them were way more famous than the newly famous actor was.

But I digress. Kind of on purpose. I’m stalling, actually.

My worst Kansas City story, told as briefly as humanly possible, was driving home on a summer evening from my job performing at a local amusement park. It was the summer between freshman and sophomore year, I had the sunroof open on this beater car I was driving and was singing 80’s hits on the highway, when I pulled off and stopped at a light and the guy in the huge truck next to me started spitting into my sunroof. He wasn’t a great shot, but the principle of the thing made me a bit rebellious.

I said hello. He said hello back, and added a word.

I set off to the next light, but pulled a trick I had seen in a movie somewhere; I waited until the light was yellow then SHOT through the intersection at the last minute, leaving him stranded on the other side of a six lane road. I may or may not have waved at him through the sunroof. I may or may not have used all of my digits to do so.

I sped down the street and turned down my mother’s block and quickly got to the garage door and hurriedly opened it and a lawn mower was blocking the space. I jumped out and was pushing it as the guy’s truck pulled up and he took his rifle from his back window. My mother was at one of the three evening events she’s been to in her entire life, so I ran through the back door and jumped over the fence to the neighbors yard, who was a formidable ex-marine, though I realized I was now between a rock and a hard place, so I kept shouting whose son I was and they opened the screen door and listened to my abbreviated tale and he went to the kitchen to the drawer where you probably keep the Handi-Wrap and pulled out a loaded Magnum and walked out the front door in his stocking feet and fired two times in the air. There may have been words.

When the cops showed up, two of whom were black, they told me the man in the truck was friends with the sheriff (who was away fishing this weekend) and he was only upset because his daughter had gone to the prom last week with a black guy. He’d showed up there all liquored up with a baseball bat, not realizing his daughter’s date was the captain of the football team. Which hadn’t ended well for him, and he held what I’m gonna call a general grudge concerning the situation, and I just kind of drove into that.

My worst Kansas City story is not getting shot there. I think it is a very fortunate story. But then, I’m a pragmatist.

A friendly neighbor. A faithful educator. The elements that have combined to get me from there to here have ranged from the extraordinary to the unimaginable, and I have nothing to complain about. But it would be ungrateful to go through the world without trying to make something better.

I don’t believe there’s a sequence of temporal events after which all people de-garbage-fy. I don’t believe there is any object in the world that can protect us from everything. I don’t believe there are answers to problems when the problems aren’t questions. But I do believe that there are tons of non-garbage people everywhere, never more than two or three folks away from one another.

We should have a secret word so we can recognize each other, a call-back to epic courage and savage conflict, yet a shared statement of compassion, illustrating how absolutely and entirely nonsensical everything’s become.

Perhaps, “Jabberwocky”.

Thanks for your time. And your patience.

Next week, so lighthearted, I super promise.

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I used to say that I wasn’t a math guy, but I’ve learned that what I’m not is an arithmetic person. It turns out that actually enjoy mathematics. Reaching beyond arithmetic’s addition, subtraction, division and multiplication, mathematics serves as a dynamic modeling science of measurement and pattern.

I didn’t actually know the two were different until I looked them up.

I’m thinking about numbers a lot because my reunions are coming up. College and high school. I’ve never been to a college reunion, and because I went to a 5 year high school (where 8th grade was included) these events are always right next to one other, rather than in the “every other year” pattern that most people have.

So college 10 was the year before high school 15, 20 was right before 25 and now it’s college 35 and then high school 40. Wow. That’s the number of years where, if we were trees, we would be considered officially fully grown, ready to be cut down for IKEA furniture. I think I’d better go to this one.

It’s assumed that the reunion years up to 15 are where everybody’s getting started, building a base, becoming established, pushing forward…so many good phrases for that. Around 25, you begin riding it out, staying the course, keeping stride…a lot of what seem to be horse racing metaphors. At some point you pack it in, or just take it easy.

I’ve been listening to a load of autobiographies by octo- and nonagenarians. Betty White, Dick Van Dyke, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks. I’ve learned so far that:you should be born or live in the midwest or Brooklyn (so I’m pretty much covered there), always take your vitamins, keep moving, keep learning, and keep making stuff… all good advice. But they never spoke of packing it in or taking it easy. And all of them said that they don’t really “feel” old. I guess I don’t either. I have no desire to be young again, but hanging around people you knew in the past, in a place you lived in (in the past), talking about things you barely remember in the past seems the surest path from dirty martini to Geritol Spritzer.

I’m only going for one day. My chief reason not to go before was social media - if there was anyone I wanted to talk to, I thought I could just chat them up online. But that isn’t really true - because something special happens when people gather together in the same place. Relentless judging.

While I’m enjoying who I am now, I haven’t really been graded on it yet.

Reunions seem designed to determine just where we stand between potential and decay. I am neither a mighty seed, nor a hollow log atop the forest floor. Am I more highly anticipated food order or post-meal empty plate? More New Year’s resolution or stationary bike used as a clothes horse?

Like a talking hat at Hogwarts, reunions sort us like a social pachinko machine. Clickety clickety clickety boom SUCCESS. Clackety click clackety click click DISAPPOINTMENT. Clackety clickety click clickety click -

– and here my metaphorical metal ball falls out of the board because I’m just not done yet. I’m taking my vitamins, I’m moving, I’m learning. I’m not done building yet. I don’t know if this means I haven’t applied myself, or that I didn’t catch a break, or maybe I was busy paying off my student loans for 22 years. Oop- yeah, it’s that one, I recognize it now.

In any case, I’ve got no regrets to complain about and no incredible achievements to crow about. I am neither hobo, nor movie star. Clickety clackety clickety clack.

It would be easier if we were all movie stars. That would be like the Met Gala. We would all assume each other’s achievement, even we didn’t recognize each other.

There’s still be judgement, I guess. Let’s see, there’d be:

The Tabloids: I mean, you knew they were always headed that way. But wow.

The Methods: still forging the paths they were on years ago with keen determination.

And the Legendaries: propelled by the winds of some epic achievement that defined them, leaving them nothing more to prove, or in some cases, even do.

Again, I am none of those.

A friend suggested two more movie star categories: the Workhorses, and the Show Ponies.

Show Ponies have very expensive watches and haven’t scooped a litter box in a long, long while. They have staff. They have mastered the discipline of delegation, allowing them to control resources far beyond their natural reach. They don’t DO the thing; but they’ve put themselves central to THE THING GETTING DONE. They’re probably not actors… they’re more like Executive Producers.

But the Workhorses are the actors you remember from dozens of movies and shows; the police chief, the sommelier that ended up being that spy, the Vice President who fought the werewolf. You’ve seen them around. That one is probably me: never stop working, ends up being the Great-Grandpa in some Disney+ show.

Of course, it’s good company. Samuel L. Jackson is a Workhorse. And Dame Judi Dench. And, saints preserve us all, Harrison Ford. Now there’s a man who’s cleaned a cat box. He’s probably mucked a stable. Recently.

I think the whole reunion experience may be best enjoyed by those who have been to all of them. It’s like a show they get to watch twice a decade. From the “What have you been up to?” brunches, to the “Well, why didn’t we?” late-night parties, there is intrigue and gossip and schadenfreude.

But I realize that, ironically, my life is more arithmetic than theoretical equation. It’s all added up. So while it might be more fun to have an agenda, I just kind of want to talk to a few other workhorses. People who are doing rather than people who are done. I guess I’m more interested in what people make than who people are.

Hey look! Who is that over there? Is that Jd Michaels? Wow, he is covered in cat hair! What a scooper!

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I was washing the dishes last week when my daughter danced by. She’s growing, quickly, and every night her bones begin to stretch around suppertime. Her answer to this pain is to defiantly strut through our apartment like it’s a fashion runway, listening to music in her headphones, dancing out the lyrics to the songs, applying the healing miracle of being entirely fabulous. It’s kind of like watching Mick Jagger.

I usually watch a tv show while I’m doing the dishes, but the iPad was out of power, so every time she passed the kitchen I could hear the sound leaking out from the speakers strapped to the kid’s head.

They’re really nice headphones.

I used to wear them myself. She’s just borrowing them.

It’s been about two years now.

I’m not getting them back.

We actually call them “her headphones” now. But they’re part of a plan; I wanted her to have music as a universal coping mechanism, since we live in this age of miracles where we can hear any song at any time now.

And it’s working, her relationship with music is great. But computers aren’t DJs. They can offer us playlists calculated by analysis of song tempo, music key, keyword categorization, personal listening pattern – it’s the ultimate jukebox, right in your pocket, but it is only that, a jukebox.

It isn’t a DJ.

On a dance floor, a DJ can blend disparate musical sources to create amazing moments where they seem to know exactly what a crowd is feeling. In my mind’s eye, do I see this kid in those same headphones flying to Ibiza for work once a week in her private plane? Yes, yes I do. My mind’s eye is quite imaginative, particularly in regards to my eventual retirement plans.

But that’s not the kind of DJ I’m talking about.

I’m lost sometimes in these infinite music programs: I open them up and am suddenly transported to this giant warehouse where I can’t think of anything I want to listen to. I used to buy music I liked, and very often discovered that music by hearing it for the first time on a radio show.

A great radio DJ – and I’m not talking about on-air personalities talking in between pre-programmed lists of top hits, I mean those noble few who serve as curators of audio greatness – they dig through crates of old vinyl or check out the newest bands at the smallest venues in town.

You need a curator in this world. There’s just too much everything. First Thanksgiving at the in-laws, you need the honest person who tells you not to look great-grandma in the eye or she’ll think you want to fight, and not to go into the bathroom after Uncle Louis, and never to try the white gravy. You need somebody whose job it is to go where you can’t and find what you never imagined existed. THAT’S a DJ, a trusted sonic sommelier.

You can still find this kind of thing on college radio. Even the call letters KCRW or WFMU relax me. A great DJ can play math rock next to easy listening and follow it up with a bluegrass song, and it all just works. They’re becoming increasingly rare, but to listen to a DJ is not listening to a list of music that you’re supposed to like, you’re listening to the music that THEY like. You’re listening to a person, not an algorithm.

I was stuck on the subway underground yesterday for what seemed like forever; I looked on my phone to see what I had downloaded and found shows from BBC Radio 1 I had recorded over fifteen years ago. I chose one from Rob De Bank - the first song was “Anarchy in the UKulele” which was exactly what it says on the tin, punk rock ukulele music. He had found the song on MySpace. It is not available on iTunes.

I have tons of shows from Annie Mac, a woman who provided the soundtrack of our lives for over a decade, and a few from the legendary John Peel, who brought more musical artists from obscurity to national fame than any other single person. Growing up it was Dr. Demento every week, or Casey Kasem, whose “American Top 40” was probably the ultimate in corporate radio, but his stories, shout-outs, and long distance dedications made it all feel personal.

Siri is a lot of things, but she isn’t Wolfman Jack. At least not yet. Though that’s an amazing idea, can you imagine that voice? “The temperature outside is 41 degrees, baby! Wooooo!”

As a parent they say you have one job, and it can’t just be to protect (you can’t be everywhere) so it has to be to prepare. I’m not gonna tell my daughter what to listen to, but I have ever-so not-subtly added in things to the mix.

I picked her up one day from fourth grade and she seemed pensive, which looks weird on a nine year old’s face. I didn’t ask her any of the usual “what did you learn in school today?” questions. Instead I just took the slightly longer way home, and I played her “Kashmir” by Led Zeppelin.

She didn’t say a word. She looked out the window and her head ever so incredibly slightly bobbed to the beat, her spirit visibly transforming from exhaustion to absolutely defiance. Then we parked the car and didn’t mention it. But now she has that, and can refer to it whenever she wants.

Anyway, I was doing dishes, and my daughter was marching around listening to music, and I could hear it as she passed by, and it was a song from the My Little Pony movie – not the last one with the new ponies (though that one’s just fine) but the big one with the original ponies and Kristin Chenoweth for some reason. I finished up and went to find her – she was in the bathroom cleaning the tub, singing along with the next song…

“Fight the Power. You’ve got to fight the powers that be.”

And I was very proud that I’d done my one job well. I am the DJ.

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So. Have you ever not been able to find something, a tool maybe, a stapler let’s say, and so you just finally end up getting another one, and then you end up finding the first one?

Please say yes.

Great, whew, well, then this’ll be a fun story.

In an effort to live bold, wild and free, I erased 9000 computer files this week. All of them were copies of copies of backups of other copies of files relating to the music I’ve been talking about for the last eleven weeks. In total, it looks like there were about 250 core files created, scores and sequences and notes and mp3s and even QuarkXPress digital mechanicals, which is kind of an inside joke for people who do that sort of thing. It’s like finding an Betamax tape or a rotary phone.

In any case, I made one copy of every file, and then backed it up JUST ONCE, to one other drive.

I felt better. Responsible. So much hard drive space… maybe I could put a plant there now, or a little bookshelf.

But I found a file called “ballet plot lines”. It’s a pretty well thought out and kind of expansive set of liner notes for this work. I mean, it’s extensive, it explains each movement in terms of an overarching theme and an inspirational mythical figure and a key element. I wrote it for a friend who was interested in choreographing the piece, she worked in the San Francisco office and I was shuttling between there and the New York one. I remember emailing it to her, so I wondered what happened, or why exactly this didn’t happen?

The last “date modified” on that file is September 10, 2001. 2:56 PM.

Right.

This file didn’t get lost on a hard drive, it got lost in time. In 24 hours it would be forgotten, completely, as the world became this other place. My next project file, in chronological order, is dated January 2004.

—

So this week I wanted to create something that would allow you to see my ballet in your head as you listened to the music, but of course I’m not quite ready to have you listen to it. It’ll be a few weeks. I wish it could have been today, that would have been so delightfully unlike me, we all would have been so surprised, victorian hand fans would’ve unfurled to cover shocked and whispering faces. But it’ll be a few weeks. Thank you for your patience; I’m honored that you’ve taken this experimental journey with me, and if you’ve been here for all of Season Three, thank you so much, I hope you haven’t found it an entirely aimless ramble.

In any case, the liner notes I found on that old file are so much more detailed than what I was trying to write, but they’re not what I wanted to write. I didn’t want to send you off with words about a dance, I wanted to make the words dance, kind of.

The beginning of that original piece reads, “The World And Me will tell the story of a woman’s life, from wonder to knowledge to wisdom.”

It is now 1:30 in the morning. I normally write these a bit ahead, but life has been pretty persistent if not entirely daunting, so I may not be making the best decisions right now, but I offer you this poem, which is kind of like words dancing, if you stretch that premise super thin.

It’s not fancy, but neither am I; it’s an emotional outline of six movements of music you haven’t had the chance to hear yet, but you’ve supported its creation through your presence here, so I thank you for that kickstart…pun kind of intended.

Oh, and what’s next? I don’t know.If I keep this up for 8 more weeks, it’ll be a year. That sounds fun.As always, thank you so very much for your time.

At first, she wonders what they’re for

since they never touch a floor, but dangle

or are trailed behind

two feet she sees but bears no mind.

The world is safe. That’s what she’s feeling (mostly)

as she faces ceiling,

sky and happy faces, smiling

down at her. No moment wasted,

every breath her new tomorrow.

She begins to see, and although

there’s no mirror