The Year of Living Strangely

A year ago this week, I had a close brush with death: house fire in the middle of the night.  The story I wrote shortly afterwards, and the follow-ups, do a nice job of describing all the emotions you go through with something like that.  I was under the impression that I’d be out of my apartment for X number of weeks or months, but raring to get back and start living there again …

Well, I’m still not there!  Long story short, the NYC Department of Buildings is a pretty foul organization.  The landlord had to get three separate building permits, each of which took 2-3 months to be approved, and during which time no work was allowed on the house.  More than anything, the house laid dormant for most of the past year, with weeks-long fits of construction activity, followed by two months of waiting for the next permit to be finalized.

I haven’t been back there since late March, at which time I was bagging up all my belongings as the decision was made to take down and replace the walls and ceiling in my place.  I guess it was within the budget, and I can’t get mad at anyone for that as it made sense.  The last permit was approved in early June, and I’m gathering this should all be wrapping up in the next month or so.

I wish I had known it was going to take this long!  I don’t think anyone did.  I can still recall the landlord’s daughter telling me, “We should have you and the upstairs tenant in by Christmas, and my mother by Easter.”  The original concept being they’d first fix these much-less damaged apartments and then go in for the big fix on the ground-floor apartment where the fire was.  (Mostly the back extension where the kitchen was … there was only smoke and water damage on the rest of that floor.  Admittedly, every time I’d been in the house, the stench from the completely-burned extension was hard to handle.)

But then it changed to refurbishing the whole house, floor by floor, rewiring the electrical and moving the motherboard up to my landlord’s apartment, re-doing the plumbing as they noticed it could use some work.  And that’s when it became a multiple-permit, year-long endeavor as opposed to a project occurring in stages with people moving back in as each floor became livable.  I gather the entire extension was torn down and rebuilt.

The house should be in top shape when it’s done.  The wiring, especially, was a constant worry, and what caused the fire to begin with.  Every time I plugged something into an outlet, I half-expected a popping sound and burst of smoke.  Not a good feeling!  But also new refrigerator, new walls, ceiling, maybe even flooring, essentially a rebuilt house.

Life has surely gone on, albeit strangely.  You learn a lot about yourself when you reduce your possessions to clothing, a comfy lawn chair, a wire-frame, roll-out bed, cooking utensils, a laptop with a broadband USB connection, an iPod and a Kindle.  I learned that air mattresses, while comfortable, aren’t made to use for indefinite periods of time.  The two I bought went pffft after about two months, although that might have been my fault for routinely putting in too much air.  The roll-out bed that the landlord’s daughter gave me shortly thereafter, while no frills, has worked out fine, although it makes me feel like an inmate sleeping on it.

I’ve realized that so long as I can listen to music, watch DVDs, get on the web at night, read books and exercise … life is fine.  This is pretty much what I did in Astoria!  It’s pretty much what I’d do anywhere.  And go out to eat at local eateries.  Shop at local stores.  Do a lot of walking.  As I’ve mentioned previously, most people I know in the NYC area are spread out, so it’s not a matter of being ripped from my old neighborhood … as I had originally felt.

At first it was unsettling to realize my surroundings were this inter-changeable.  But it dawned on me that this makes sense.  My life as an adult isn’t based so much on where I live as on how I choose to live it.  Once that realization sunk in , probably around Christmas, I started feeling like a normal human being again, just one thrown into a strange circumstance that he had to roll with and see where it went.  That day, I got my ass out to Bed Bath & Beyond, bought their over-priced cookware to make up some chili, and got off that asshole “college kid in a dorm room” diet of Hot Pockets, Ramen and canned soup.

Would I do it differently if I could go back?  Hell, yes.  Get one of my recliners, my mattress and my TV/cable box.  Life without TV?  I’m not here to lecture you on how much better it is.  It’s really no better or worse.  When I’m around TV now, like when I go back to PA for a routine visit, I don’t go insane watching everything for hours.  I’ve missed TV mainly for sports, but have come to realize, most times I have it on, it’s just sort of on, and I’m watching to pass the time.  A force of habit more than anything.  I’ll need to think about exactly how I want to have cable internet and TV in my life when I get back, as the internet hook-up is essential, but I’m no longer so sure about TV.  The monthly bill for both was creeping up to $120, which was grating on me something terrible before all this happened.

About the only thing that makes me feel strange living out where NYC fades into Long Island is walking … and how alien that simple function is to the vast majority of people who live out there.  Nobody walks out there.  Anywhere.  Walking three miles back from the gym on a Sunday afternoon?  Or a few miles home after getting off the bus early on the Union Turnpike so I can get in a workout?  You’d have to be a lunatic to do these things to judge by how people react when I tell them this.  Or a Sikh!  Those are the only people I see walking for exercise, old Sikh couples who nod and say hello whenever we cross paths.  (For the uninitiated, Long Island and the far edges of Queens have seen a tremendous influx of Indian immigrants over the past few decades.)

The suburbs of NYC are heavy car cultures, as everything is more spread out.  As a result, the concept of pedestrians walking to the laundromat or supermarket – things that are normal in any NYC neighborhood – are viewed as laughable anomalies by most people with that suburban mindset.  The pain of it being their communities are perfectly geared to handle this.  You’ll find mile after mile of sidewalks that are wide, unbroken and immaculate.  That walk from the gym, between towns, is along a rural/suburban four-lane highway with a paved walking path recessed about 10 yards from the road.  My weekend five-mile run skirts a major roadway, then a few huge hospital parking lots, then two industrial parks with no traffic so that I’m essentially running without stopping the same way I would in the country.

Yet people in cars gaze at me as if I’m in a Satan costume when they see me walking by the side of the road.  I’ve made that afternoon walk without seeing another soul, a few dozen times, in perfect weather.  There are more people riding bikes, but seeing them is almost as rare as seeing pedestrians.  You need a Texas-sized set of balls to ride a bike in the suburbs of New York.  So many car drivers have no respect for anyone else on the road.  Bikers?  The smart ones I’ve seen travel in small groups, so they’re less likely to be hit-and-run.  If I’m not mistaken, most highways in that part of New York, be it the city or surrounding suburbs, have speed limits of 35 mph, surely no more than 45.  Yet I’m constantly seeing cars doing well over 55 mph.  And walking over glittering pools of broken car window glass in so many intersections.

 

It’s a ramped-up way of life out there that extends beyond how people drive.  With no hope of ever ramping back down.  The odd thing is people are ramped up so they can try to relax: a self-defeating way of life.  You can’t relax when a good part of your day is spent seeing other people as necessary evils you need to dominate in some sense, whether we’re talking some guy in an SUV on the Northern Parkway, or your neighbor turning his humble bungalow into a grotesque three-story fortress that takes up every inch of his property.  Which is not my problem.  I can’t relax if I’m overly concerned with all this extraneous bullshit, so I’ve learned to let it go as much as I can.  Can’t single out Long Island for that – it’s all over, not just New York City, pretty much everywhere I go these days.

That’s the main thing I’ve learned living out there.  My way of life is no better or worse … simply geared towards less consumption, less material wealth, more mental and physical well being.  No sense of false superiority … just an urge to simplify my life as much as possible.  Which is wildly out of place with the general consensus, but I’m sure everyone out there has something in their lives that’s just as out of step with everyone else.  I do get a sense of the city falling away when I get on that Union Turnpike bus and take it a few miles farther out to the edge of Queens.  It’s much more quiet at night, a little cooler.  Less people along the road?  Shit, NO people along the road!  They’re all in their houses or driving like lunatics to get from local retail establishments back to their houses.  Where they bolt the door and fire up the cable TV.

Neighbors don’t talk to each other as much I’d think they would.  Again, same story in Astoria.  Same story in rural Pennsylvania.  There are certain neighbors you really get along with and make a point of saying hello to when you see them.  But it seem like the whole point of living in a house is to separate yourself from everyone else, to have this calm little oasis you can call your own, hell, even if you’re only renting.  I can’t bemoan any “loss of community” because I haven’t really felt that since I was a kid in the 70s.  When I go back to PA, I don’t talk to most of the neighbors unless I see them on the street. 

That sense of “stoop sitting because no one has air conditioning” that so many older New Yorkers are fond of recollecting … man, long before my time.  About the only situation I’ve had like this out there was the time the landlord inadvertently turned off the sewage pump to the house, thus causing a minor shit-water flood in my place, that surely provided for an angst-ridden few hours.  But when I got home from work that night, she had contacted a coworker who was also the super of his building in Astoria.  He had immediately diagnosed the problem, helped with the minor clean-up, and we sat around the backyard afterwards having a few Coronas while he regaled us with “building super” stories of finding days-old corpses and being left with valuable antiques and such because relative never came by to pick up possessions left behind by dead and missing tenants.  That was nice and reminded me what it’s like to have a few beers in the backyard in the summer, as opposed to scurrying home and closing the door on the world.

This is why people go to bars.  This is why I go to bars!  Or restaurants, to catch up with old friends on occasion.  It used to be my life was filled with these sort of engagements, but I noticed this in my 30s, everyone gets so spread out, and involved with their own lives, that these meetings spread themselves out accordingly as opposed to happening all the time.  I guess I could force these things, but they’d feel just like that, forced.

Whatever I’ve learned the past year in that regard, I’ve been learning all along, and the lessons really had little to do with the fire.  What I learned from the fire?  Simply that the possibility of you being here one moment and gone the next is ever present.  And this doesn’t compel you to jump from air planes or visit Tibet or call up old flames and read them the riot act.  You just sort of quietly grasp this quality of life and go on living, knowing that you could wake up one night to a wall of smoke and flames, and that might be all she wrote.  What can you do in the face of that, but go on living, not with any sort of vengeance or new-found knowledge, but with the understanding that we’re all living on borrowed time.

I don’t think that should be depressing or have any more depth than the same way you notice a bird outside your window, or how much cooler the mornings are come late August.  The defining characteristic of adulthood is an understanding of death.  What we have now is too many people who cling to their youths and that mind-set for decades into their adulthood, rather than moving with the tide and knowing that every wave expires on the shore.  Horror movies are effective because they play on a childlike/teenage fear of death, and it only makes sense to be afraid when you’re that age, because it’s all laid out in front of you, waiting to happen.

But halfway through?  You had better come to terms with this thing.  Because you will see it happening to your parents, your relatives, and even a few friends as you go along.  Nearly happened to me one night this time last year!  It makes you hard in ways that you were meant to be hard.  And it opens you up in a strange way because you realize that ultimately you have no defense, you can only fight so much, because in the end, everyone goes.  That might be the only thing I learned from the fire, and it’s an ongoing lesson that first truly registered with Dad’s passing a few years ago.  I’ve always appreciated life, but sooner or later, you need to appreciate death.  And see it clearly sometimes, like your shadow.

Rock and Roll High School

Not going to be writing about the bad movie that so many Ramones fans claim to be a cult classic.  I’m thinking more of the odd memories I have when rock and roll crept into our routine high-school lives back around the turn of the 1980s.  When teachers caught wind of the sub-culture and realized: we really were a bunch of assholes.  I’m sure nothing has changed.  But here are a few situations I still recall.

Harry Chapin.  This one isn’t so much rock and roll, but it sticks in my mind.  Ms. M was one of my favorite English teachers, a former model who came back home after her time in NYC must have not agreed with her.  She became a teacher and was known for having a big, horsey laugh, which seemed out of place on such an attractive woman.  It wasn’t unusual for teachers to bring rock records into class for a certain theme or lesson, always English class, anything to stimulate kids into writing a tolerable 500-word essay.

I still remember how hard it was for so many kids to write anything.  They just couldn’t formulate their thoughts into even the most basic themes.  It’s strange to me because I took to this like a duck to water, one of those rare kids who longed for essay questions, because I knew even if I didn’t know what the hell I was writing about, I could make the teacher see I was a smart kid trying to grasp the concept, and thus get a better grade. 

But your average kid in high school, despite reading plenty of books along the way, newspapers every day, magazines routinely … couldn’t put together a single, readable paragraph.  There would be kids in high school writing these short pieces that read like a second grader describing the sky.  All because they froze up and viewed this as something they never tried before, and would be judged harshly because they didn’t know what they were doing.  And that rigid sense of impending failure is something that would freeze up any writer.  If you think you’re going to suck, you will suck.  That goes for a lot more than writing.

Thus, some music to help open up the kids creatively.  I can’t remember why, but for one writing class, she brought in some Harry Chapin albums.  Chapin had passed away that summer, in an automobile accident on the Long Island Expressway.  We all knew “Cats in the Cradle,” a massive 70s hit absorbed into everyone’s musical DNA.  But not much else.  So she started playing his hit album Verities and Balderdash on the turntable.  (I remember this album because Brother M freaked out over it upon its release in the mid-70s; he zoned in on “30,000 Pounds of Bananas” as the song mentioned a banana truck having an accident just outside Scranton, PA.)

Some kids started to snicker.  Folk music.  This is the guy who did “Cats in the Cradle”?  Oh, man, what next, John Denver?  That’s how kids are, they laugh at new things they don’t understand, and most kids surely weren’t on the aging folk-singer bandwagon.  Hell, most of them thought Styx was better than The Beatles.

I don’t think she dragged the needle across the record to make that horrible scratching sound, but everything stopped cold.  And Ms. M freaked out.  Tears in her eyes.  Raised voice, nearly screaming, words along the lines of, “Harry Chapin was one of the best folk singers who ever lived, and I will not have you laugh at him like this when he just died a few months ago.  I try to broaden your horizons, and this is what I get in return?”

Most kids were shamed enough to stop snickering and avoid eye contact.  We sat there in silence while she quietly wept at her desk, clearly having one of those “what am I doing with my life” moments.  Honestly?  I thought Harry Chapin sucked!  I’ve since become more of a fan, have about a dozen of his tracks on the iPod, and like the pop-folky story/song vibe he had going.  But his image had that “overly serious, hairy-chested, pseudo-macho, pop/folk singer wearing boots and being taken way too seriously for his own good” vibe about him.  Started in the 60s by Barry McGuire with his silly song, “Eve of Destruction.”  We’d all seen too many variety shows on TV that would always feature a singer like this, like Neil Diamond or Gordon Lightfoot, gazing off in the middle distance, gold medallion gleaming on hairy chest, because his leisure suit with ruffled sleeves was open to his navel,  while an orchestra swelled behind him … and the whole thing felt like a 10-ton bag of shit falling from the sky.

Ms. M, while not considered hip by the kids, actually was pretty hip.  We had another project where we had to go through old yearbooks and note changing trends among kids over the course of years, and we found her graduation yearbook around the turn of the 70s, with her stunning picture … and the notation that she loved Jimi Hendrix!  This would have been a much hipper personal tidbit to spring on the kids, but she kept it hidden.  Kids regarded her as a strict disciplinarian, but I always got along with her because I could see this side of her.  And understand how someone born and raised when she was would be a huge Harry Chapin fan and hold that music dear to her heart.  But kids are pricks!

The Clash.  We’re in that same class, later in the school year.  Once again, Ms. M turns to music, but this time, it’s our turn.  We should bring a copy of the one song we love the most, write an essay about why we love it so much, and read it while the song plays in the background.  I’m sure I picked a Beatles or Kinks song at the time.  “Lola” was my favorite song in the high-school yearbook, a choice I’m still comfortable with.  Most kids picked the usual dreck floating around at the time: Journey, Styx, Boston, some disco, Barry Manilow.  Man, high-school girls, especially Catholic girls, loved Barry Manilow.  The metal kids would bring in Sabbath or AC-DC … it was pretty predictable.  A metal kid wouldn’t bring in “At Seventeen” by Janis Ian, even if the song nailed that teenage sense of dislocation he knew intimately as a stoner.  Most kids simply weren’t that generous or smart enough to recognize different people going through the same shit.

But there was one girl in that class who freaked out everyone.  She was a pretty girl, not a knockout, but I remember her being attractive, a grade behind me.  I always liked her, but never acted on it, which was my mistake, because I recall us making eyes at each other a few times.  And I would learn why in this class.  The day it was her turn to read her essay, she came in “dressed like a punk.”

That wasn’t true.  She was more a new-wave, slightly pre-Go-Go’s chick, but close enough to punk for everyone to think she was punk.  I think she had a neon blue headband, a very sexy short leather skirt with black stockings, and some sort of black/gold striped top that showed off her cleavage.  She looked great – all the guys were looking at her differently that day.  It occurs to me that she must have looked a lot like Pat Benatar … without the buck teeth!

Her composition was on The Clash, the song “Lost in the Supermarket” from the London Calling album.  You have to understand something about rural America, the early 80s and punk music.  Which is to say most of those kids thought “punk” sucked.  Punk meant anything from The Sex Pistols, to The Ramones, to Elvis Costello, to The Clash, to The Talking Heads … even to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.  Punk was really rock and roll and new wave, but had been marketed as such to be the next step in rock.  And most kids were entirely comfortable with their older siblings’ taste in Classic Rock (Floyd, Led Zep, Beatles, Stones, etc.), Heavy Metal (Sabbath, AC-DC, Deep Purple, etc., a long list) and their own taste in current big rock bands (Styx, Journey, REO Speedwagon, Boston, etc.).

Punk was for faggots and weirdoes.  I know … because I was one of about five people in the high school who owned any “punk” albums, and at that point, we’re talking the most cursory, plain collection: Elvis Costello, The Talking Heads, etc.  I’d hear a song like “Mirror Star” by The Fabulous Poodles on WZZO, the classic-rock station out of Allentown, recognize it as a good pop-rock song, rush out and buy it, which wasn’t a mistake, that was a good album.  But most kids would have viewed a relatively harmless, tasteful rock band like this as “punk” because they were British and being marketed that way.

I really didn’t like the driving, chainsaw sort of punk that The Ramones helped create … still don’t, it’s boring as hell.  The Ramones were different in that they were actually a rock-and-roll band.  But a lot of what sprung from them, the mohawked bands who would play underage shows, barking out their unintelligible lyrics and slam-dancing … I hated that shit.  That was punk to me, as opposed to the new wave I grew to love.  Green Day was probably the last big band to break out … starting as this bratty, loud punk band … only to realize their lead singer had some raw talent and could grow … which immediately meant all the punks hated him.  It seemed like a shit proposition to me, like wanting to be 15 years old forever.  Man, I was more than glad to leave 15 in the rearview mirror.

But this pretty girl brings in London Calling and starts expounding on how much she connects to “Lost in the Supermarket” (which I did, too, the song on the album that initially grabbed me), which is really a disco song done by former punks.  Even worse! 

Kids just sat there stone-faced.  If this was on a stage, you’d have seen a huge hook extend from the side curtain and pull her off.  The vast majority of kids at that time hated punk/new-wave music.  The sales numbers bear this out, too, from that time period.  Older fans, people in college and their early 20s, were buying this music in droves.  But that huge driving market for pop music, teenagers, simply were not buying this kind of music.  They would shortly.  The Clash would have a huge hit two albums down the road with Combat Rock, but it took that long, a few years into the 80s, to slowly turn things around.  At which point, MTV and synth pop took over, and things got  very strange and hollow.

But I’ll never forget that pretty girl in her headband, standing there about as alone as she could be, and listening to “Lost in the Supermarket” with her.  When the song ended and it was commentary time, most kids were too embarrassed to say anything.  But I immediately chipped in and started a dialogue with her about the album, saying how much I liked “Train in Vain,” too, and had just bought the first two albums as a two-fer set up at Record Town in the mall.  The look on her face – she just opened up and smiled, thank Christ, one person out there gets me!  We should have left that class, arm in arm, and started a relationship right there, heavy petting and hand jobs while listening to Give 'Em Enough Rope on the stereo console in her parents’ rec room.  But I surely had my head completely up my ass at the time not to recognize this perfect opportunity.

The Vo-Tech Guitar Hero.  There were a few kids like this.  My friend Jim R was one of them.  Guys who got stoned.  A lot.  Smokey vans in parking lots.  Clandestine meetings in the woods where the peace pipe went around the circle.  These guys didn’t smell like cigarettes.  They smelled like pot.  And it didn’t seem like fun.  It seemed like a job, like a three-piece suit they had to wear every day as part of the stoner routine.  Drugs were meant to be fun, relaxation, blowing off reality for a few hours.  These guys wanted to blow off reality forever.

Vo-Tech is short for “vocational technical,” and back then, kids who were interested in acquiring skills for a trade, like carpentry, farming or bricklaying, would go to the vo-tech school for part or all of the school year.  They got to take a lot of these construction-type classes, or also food preparation and things like that.  It was a strange sort of academic defeat to go to Vo-Tech, a mild copout, because if you went to Vo-Tech, you weren’t going to college.  You were probably going into your father’s construction company or farm or something along those lines.  Or you were just a kid who got high a lot and wanted out of the more academically-inclined high school.

But I’m sure some of those guys are having the last laugh now, with their own construction companies, possibly making six figures and taking some satisfaction in barely getting through high school, yet coming out so well decades down the road.  Or at least I hope that’s the case for a lot of them!

Jim wasn’t a Vo-Tech kid, but he would sit in the cafeteria sometimes with those guys, and they all had acoustic guitars.  And they weren’t bad!  Jim was a huge Neil Young fan, and we’d have constant debates over which was better, After the Gold Rush or Rust Never Sleeps.  He really could play, just about any Neil Young song, and that wasn’t easy.  But he’d sit with these guys, future plumbers and welders, often playing “Hotel California” … and they’d be note perfect.  If not that, then “Pinball Wizard.”  Which sounded fantastic with three guys blasting away on acoustic guitars.

At one of the big auditorium presentations we had periodically, one of these guys served as a guitar tech and roadie for the band that had played.  I can’t even remember what they played, but high school feeling like prison, it could have been a hand puppet version of Waiting for Godot, and we would have been overjoyed just to get out of class and do something different.

Well, the show ended, and this kid, with his long, straggly hair and nicotine-stained fingers, got hold of the guitar he had set-up and started wailing.  It had to be “Stairway to Heaven.”  When he started playing, everyone stopped leaving the auditorium, went back to their seats and started applauding wildly.  It was spontaneous, and the teachers didn’t know what to do.  So they let him play.  And play he did, even handling that 12-string guitar break where the song then speeds off into a faster solo.  He had obviously played this song a thousand times in his bedroom – his eyes were closed the whole time.  And the kids went nuts the six or seven minutes he was up there playing.  Those few minutes were as exciting as any professional show I’d see as an adult.

But like a warden who knew when to reel in the inmates, the principal waited for the song to end, and pulled the plug, escorting the kid off the stage.  He was raising his clasped hands over his head like the heavyweight champ of the world.  Standing ovation.  I often wonder what happened to him.  Not then.  I’m sure he got some after-school detentions for his impromptu performance.  But I gather he never turned into that Joe Perry-type rock star, who was an outcast in high school, but turned that confusion and rage into rock-and-roll superstardom.  Most guys weren’t Joe Perry.  They were just guys who liked to get high and play guitar with their friends.  I would hope they still do!

And I noticed something weird on the recent tour I took of the high school as part of my high-school reunion.  This is the music room.  Check out that back wall.  There must be a dozen acoustic guitars hanging there.  I can assure you, they weren’t there when I was a kid.  All we had was a few boxes of percussion instruments and a moog synthesizer, which we could only play on special occasions.  Do you know how overjoyed I would have been to have a music class where I could have learned basic chords on a guitar?

So I have to believe, that lonely stoner kid on the stage, taking a chance and letting everyone know who he really was, moments like that, led to all these guitars on the music room wall in 2012.  It was a good thing to see.

Instant Mythology

With the recent Penn State media circus, there’s one thing I’ve seen repeatedly put forth by sports writers and columnist that I’m not quite grasping.  It’s this: that we should never view anyone, especially celebrities of any sort, as anything more than human.

While I agree with that wholeheartedly and have reached the same conclusion here every now and then, it strikes me as curious because these people are employed to do just the opposite of that – make someone, especially a celebrity, appear larger than life and infallible.  It’s called instant mythology, and it’s been a bedrock of our pop culture since at least the 1940s, and in existence for all of mankind’s history.

Sports writers do this constantly.  As does anyone writing about musicians, actors, authors, politicians, athletes and any other number of high-visibility people in our society.  Legendary college football coaches, sure, them, too.  No one would care about sports without mythology tied into their histories.  The sports writers will claim now, in their chaste phase of seeing reality clearly thanks to Paterno and Penn State, that they don’t see the world this way and have never engaged in this sort of false-god worship.

Which is utter bullshit.  This is their stock in trade, and they’d be lost without it.  They’d have no job.  Instant mythologies are not built by grand proclamations and writers raving uncontrollably about someone we must now worship.  It’s much more subtle than that.  It often takes years.  In the case of actors and musicians, not so long, as one key performance, or song, or album, can catapult the performer to that exalted level.  And the artists will often respond by maintaining a high level of excellence that cements the legend … which can then be used for decades afterwards, despite declining interest or quality.

But the real myth making happens on a small, daily basis.  Every sports writer now tearing down Paterno, I can assure you, has more than a few positive pieces on him in his canon.  If he’s done this for any length of time, possibly dozens of pieces.  And if you were to read the pieces now, you’d see there was no conscious myth-making going on.  They were simply writing about how special Paterno was, with his emphasis on learning, nearly unheard of in Division I-A football programs.  Or his cantankerous character.  His record of winning.  His longevity.  His storied past, tough Italian street kid from Brooklyn taught by Jesuits, played football at an Ivy League school, came to Penn State with a few dollars in his pocket and a room to sleep in at night while he learned to coach under his mentor, Rip Engle.

Taken in and of themselves, the pieces will be complimentary, expressing a mild, tasteful sort of admiration.  Joe’s taken his shots over the years, without a doubt, but a vast majority of the press that’s been written about him before this incident was overwhelmingly positive.  Again, quietly positive.

What happens is that this acceptable, obviously positive feeling towards him becomes his image, slowly over the course of decades.  It’s not who he is.  It’s who we want him to be, this ideal, and the writers want us to see the same things they do, too.  And so we do.  Before you know it, the myth is created.  And fed.  And fueled over the course of years.  Are we inhumane to do this?  Probably not.  We want examples of human beings “rising above” in some inspirational sense, and it’s pretty easy to point at people living lives like this and imagining that they must possess some higher level of understanding of the world that makes them this way.

But the truth is they don’t: we give it to them.  And what we give them isn’t real.  It’s mythology.  It’s what we want to believe.  It’s ideals we create out of hand-picked qualities of people’s realities, that we then write or talk about.  And not just one person.  Dozens or hundreds will then pick up the torch and write similarly positive takes.  Their consensus feeds the myth.  To the extent, as we’ve seen, that it becomes nearly impossible to imagine the person we’re mythologizing being anything but this shining avatar of the best human beings can be.

If it makes you feel any better, it’s much worse with musicians.  Most of whom wouldn’t cross the proverbial empty street to piss on you if you were on fire.  Most people I’ve come across in the arts are profoundly self-absorbed and keenly aware of their image.  You better believe they nurture it.  As with sports, you have plenty of willing accomplices in the press to build the myth.  Since so much of music is tied in with youth, even better.  Nothing, and I mean nothing, is the base of more mythology than our youths, than the past.  Where we like to believe we were better people, in a better time, in a better place.  But when we sit down to really remember, to recall what our lives were like, the truth often is it was no better or worse than our lives are now.  Just different.  Obviously more simple in ways we probably miss, but there are often good things about our lives now, as we age, that we could have no way of seeing or acknowledging at earlier points in our lives.

Our culture would feel empty without these myths.  For the most parts, we love these myths, provided they don’t backfire on us, in which case all hell breaks loose, and we must go to great lengths to destroy the myth, not just to punish the person for letting us down, but to show everyone else that we’ve distanced ourselves from the myth, and are good, real, little people, just like you, who never fall for shit like this, no, not us.  We’re better than that myth we created.

I just read a long piece in The New Yorker on Bruce Springsteen … and this is a shining example of myth making, as is nearly everything written about him.  (If you think it isn’t, that we’re finally getting insight to the “real Bruce,” ask yourself why touchy subjects like this and this aren’t discussed.)  While I love Bruce’s music, have for decades, and suspect I’d like him just fine if we met, I can’t stand articles like this.  Because it’s clear to me that Springsteen believes wholeheartedly in the myth of himself, the one created by fans and critics over the years, and when he speaks in these stories, he always speaks in this character, even if he’s being honest.  He’s like an actor who played a role that was so striking and impressive, so representative of the best he had to offer, that he never learned how to break character, or wanted to, and decided to be that character for the rest of his life.

This guy really does think he’s some berserk hybrid of Superman and John Steinbeck.  He’s a millionaire many times over.  He has what looks like a pretty good life for himself: multiple homes in exclusive areas, a wife who understands him based on who he was before all this happened, kids who appear pretty well adjusted, a job he loves, that has granted his family generations of wealth and fortune, endearing him to millions of fans over the course of decades, creative outlets that suit his every need, the unbelievable proposition that what he set out to do as a pimple-faced kid, this thing he loved more than life itself, rock and roll, has granted him everything he ever wanted, and then some.

And he suffers from depression!  Why is that.  Could be because he’s so obsessed with this asinine, overly serious image of being everything to everyone, that it now feels like a prison, that it’s not really him, and he suspects if he was really himself, wrote about the confusion he feels over being a working-class kid set adrift in a world of wealth and affluence he couldn’t have possibly imagined when living in a surfboard factory in Asbury Park, that no one would care.  That people want the myth he’s created far more than they want him.

Or maybe he’s just genuinely depressed, chemically imbalanced, genetically acquired from his troubled father, and this could have happened whether he was this successful or not.  Who knows.  I’d say who cares, but obviously, a lot of people care.  Most mythologies aren’t as carefully crafted and nurtured as Springsteen’s is; they just happen.  And when they happen, it only makes sense for the person being mythologized to ride the wave.  Why not?  It beats obscurity or treading water.  Ride the wave, until it stops.  And we’re finding it never stops anymore, unless, as we’ve seen with Paterno, a situation presents itself that drops the person back down to earth and reminds us that he’s only human, prone to error, and possibly prone to doing whatever it takes to keep the myth alive.

I’m all for bringing it back down to you and your own life.  Don’t mythologize anyone.  Forget about rock stars or football coaches.  I mean even within your life.  Don’t mythologize your parents, or kids who died when you were young, or old girlfriends, or yourself, for that matter.  Accept people for who they are.  Accept yourself.  Understand that you’re going to fuck up, terribly some times, and provide for it, make sure the act of fucking up isn’t some cataclysmic event that drops you in your tracks and renders you incapable of moving forward.  You’re going to do plenty of things wrong and right in your life.  Everyone you know will do the same.  Keep as many people as you can in your life, but don’t hesitate to lose people who only drag you down or mean you harm.  Be reasonably honest with yourself and everyone you know.

But this is all bullshit!  Not in and of itself … those are some pretty good ideas.  But I’m not kidding myself: life is easier with myths.  Be they personal or cultural.  They guide us at times, like guardian angels we want to exist.  My life is filled with mythical rock stars, movie stars and writers, too.  The occasional athlete.  Various other people who do something extraordinary in their lives, that even if it was the only good thing they’ve ever done, that thing strikes us all to the core of our humanity and makes us want to be better in some sense.  That’s what myths are for, the good they serve.  The trick is to instinctively grasp there’s a difference between the myths we’re presented with, and the real people behind the myths.  Sounds easy?  To judge from what I’ve read about Paterno over the past few weeks, it isn’t.

So Long, Joe III

One more time, Joe Paterno is center stage after this week’s release of the Freeh Report and the renewed shitstorm put forth by the temporary moralists of the world.  Well, “temporary” isn’t the right word.  Rogue moralists would be better: opinion columnists and commentators in general who see themselves as the floating vanguard of morality, able to parachute in on any moral quandary at a moment’s notice and point out to all of us what the easy, black-and-white answer is to the given situation.

Thank God we live in a world where these selfless heroes are here to protect us from, well, I guess our own personal values and judgment systems.  We’re not smart enough to read that report on our own, study the overall situation carefully, weave it into the dozens of articles we’ve already read over the months on the topic and draw our own conclusions.

As you could imagine, I read that report and feel awful.  Clearly, Joe knew something had happened with Sandusky and a kid in the coaches’ locker-room shower in 1998.  That’s one thing – at the very least a warning sign of a situation that, while not illegal and extremely hard if not impossible to enforce in a court of law, was surely so far out of bounds and disturbing that it should have warranted Sandusky being booted from Penn State for eternity.  (If you’re not aware, Sandusky showered with and bear-hugged a boy while both were naked in the shower.)  Then in 2001, Joe was directly informed of a clear sexual assault in the same showers by Sandusky, and the net effect, whatever else happened, was that nothing substantial happened to this monster.  This second known incident, with some knowledge of the first, should have been a declaration of war and complete disclosure that something terrible had occurred.  Joe should have resigned right then and offered up an affidavit as to exactly what he knew.

I have to face the fact that Joe made terrible errors in judgment at that time, most likely to preserve his legacy, and think about it.  If it wasn’t for Sandusky fooling around with a kid on a wrestling mat in a central Pennsylvania high school in 2010, and that story leading to the unraveling of this past 2001 incident, none of this would have come to light.  They, meaning Joe and his administrative supervisors, would have quietly buried this thing, as was clearly intended, whether that was Joe’s call alone, or a group effort more likely.  For all the power Joe is posthumously granted by so many people, if he really had that sort of power, he would have buried the 2001 incident immediately by not reporting it to his supervisor, which he did.  What influence he exerted after reporting the incident, I don’t know.  None of us really do at this point.

They clearly didn’t understand the scope of this thing, how damaging it would end up being.  I’m guessing Joe’s life was an endless series of major issues and concerns as a Division I-A college football coach, and those two incidents, at the time and in the context of the dozens of other issues he surely dealt with routinely, seemed like side issues that concerned his program tangentially, but not directly.  He paid dearly for his arrogance and the blinders he applied to his life, which didn’t allow him to fully gauge what was going out outside his program and family.

The whole thing smacks of that smothering university inertia, the belief that their system is superior to any outside force, that they can handle any situation on campus internally far better than the outside world.  I’ve seen that mindset in effect a few times in my life, as noted, it’s another world unto itself, with its own set of rules, many of which have little to do with reality.  Throw in a highly-successful football program run by a legendary coach for decades, and you have a perfect storm of cloistered unreality for those involved to make grave errors.  They clearly had no clue how awful this thing was going to be when or if it ever came to light.

Joe’s legacy?  His family wants us to believe he’s the same person he always was, and I can’t fault them for that.  This report is another piece of the puzzle, and I’d rather not make any grand pronouncements about his character or legacy after this recent addition.  This will be an unfolding story for a long time to come, and this media furor, as we’ve seen, will die down as the vultures find another carcass to pick at.  I wouldn’t say it’s a good thing that his legacy is severely tainted, but it surely makes him a lot more human, and when you get a person living on that level of fame, the mistakes are that much larger and intensified.

While it doesn’t trouble me as much, I’ve pointed it out in the past how aggravating it’s been to see how the media and internet handle a situation like this.  The faux outrage from people who don’t care about anything.  The proud declarations of personal integrity, bravery and fortitude from writers who put themselves above the situation and see themselves as having an all-knowing view of what is going on.  That strange herd mentality that encourages everyone to band together and have uniform opinion on an issue, or otherwise be branded as some sort of nut or pariah whose vision is clouded.

It’s fucking disgusting.  Granted, nowhere near as disgusting as what happened in this god-awful scenario.  But it’s disgusting.  It’s not morality, although we’re presented with it as such.  If you’re wondering how Jews were slaughtered in concentration camps by the millions in the 1930s and 40s, it was like this: group consensus shaped to give the illusion of easy answers.  If you don’t see the same sort of diseased group-think in the way our media operates, the way it mass manufactures opinion as fact and slanted reporting as knowledge, then you’re not paying attention.  I don’t think there is any great unseen hand guiding the media on this Penn State story – it’s simply people who run the media, the editors in high positions and such – knowing what type of story sells newspapers and ad space, and accordingly, taking stories like this and amplifying them a few thousand times louder and larger than they need to be, in easy-to-understand broadstrokes, so we can all rest easy knowing that real good and evil exist in the world, and the evil is being vanquished.

As if the world is ever going to be that easy.  I have my own buttons that get pushed, too.  I recently saw a clip on youtube of an elderly woman who was a school-bus monitor being abused mercilessly by the kids on the bus, in ways that made me feel like attacking those kids physically.  It’s a natural reaction to feel some sense of outrage.  I try not to expose myself to these sort of videos (which are legion on youtube, people acting crudely), because I know, all they’re going to do is wind me up needlessly over a situation that I have no control over.

Evil exists in the world, on a nonstop, 24-7 basis, whether we’re exposed to it or not, whether we choose to care about it or not.  This is why the Penn State story isn’t blowing my doors off morally and causing me to don my Superman’s cape to take down Paterno and the university, so mankind can feel that much more safe, thanks to my noble efforts.  You better believe the story upsets me.  As an alumni, deeply.  It’s a bad situation that has caused me to re-appraise a man I once viewed as a minor father figure of sorts.  It’s caused all of us to do that, in one way or another, whether we’ll admit that to anyone else or not.

But seeing as my pajamas no longer have feet, I think I can handle this.  I can live on with Joe Paterno’s legacy, knowing he dropped the ball terribly towards the end of his tenure.  He did a phenomenal amount of good in his life, tempered with this regrettable lapse in judgment and morality in 2001 and thereafter.  Ask me 10 years from now about this, and I’m sure I’ll have a different answer.  Maybe better.  Maybe worse.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned about this story, it’s that I’m not willing to offer final pronouncement, that the story keeps unfolding, and may do so for years to come.  It took a very bad turn for the worse this past week, but again, come back in a decade and let’s talk then.  The people having temporary moral shit-fits over this will be long gone, mind you, still having moral shit-fits, but about other stuff they only care about temporarily.  And only the people who cared about the man in some sense will have an honest opinion about him.

I’m not worried about legacies, not even my own.  Legacy implies that you’re dead, and here’s what people remember about you after you gone.  Most of us will be forgotten.  Famous writers, artists and musicians from centuries ago … most are forgotten.  Only small handfuls of people study their work in some cases.  And we’re talking some of the most influential people of their time.  Every-day people, like me writing this or you reading this?  Time passes, and in decades or centuries, we will be forgotten.  That’s how it works.  Whether you were a villain or a saint, famous or nobody, you will be forgotten.  I don’t mean that as an insult: I mean it as a fact of life.  Or more accurately, death.  Very few people span generations, decades and then centuries, in terms of being remembered.  And I suspect they are then remembered in highly inaccurate ways that fit some easy-to-grasp story we must be told about the good or evil this person did in his time.

Your only legacy should be how you live your life from one day to the next.  That’s what Joe seemed to lose track of somewhere along the way.  This thing he built over the course of his adult life became more than it was ever meant to be.  He was meant to coach a college football team.  You get that sense seeing interviews of him in the old days, in the 60s and 70s, this animated, sharp-as-a-knife, no-BS guy in his 30s and 40s having the time of his life, shaping his teams from one year to the next.  But in the 80s, after the two national championships, this thing got heavier.  And heavier in the 90s as coaching records were now in view to be chased.  In the 00s, this cumbersome weight, must coach until that dying day (which he nearly did), can’t retire and take it easy, must be this benevolent entity that people understand and look up to so easily, because it’s all they understand about him, and all he understands about himself and his relationship to the outside world.

And when he got into that supposedly safe haven of legend, that’s where he lost his way, although I never would have pictured it playing out on the level it has.  But it has, and we’re left to move forward without him, taking all the good and bad things we’ve picked up from him along the way, and using them however we choose.  I’m not even sure if that’s the right take.  Maybe he was so homed in his program that he wasn’t even thinking about his legacy … he just didn’t care about anything or anyone else outside his program.  In either event, he paid for it, as did the victims of this monster.

I just can’t wrap it all up in a neat little package that makes you feel better about yourself.  Or me better about myself.  Or any of us better about the world in general.  It’s not my job.  It’s not anybody’s job, despite the valiant efforts of so many out there who see themselves this way.  It’s my job here to let you know how someone who has an emotional investment feels, a lifelong Penn State fan, who gets blind-sided by this awful situation that presents shadowy opposites to the images of integrity and action we’d been taught to hold true.  We expect this shit in our every-day lives, in our work places, where we see microcosms of this sort of abusive, secluded power routinely, where we accept it with deep reservations, grumble about it, put up with this shit, but somehow expect people like Paterno and his program to be above it all … when the reality was he was just as susceptible to radical errors in judgment and anywhere from mild to blatant disregard towards humanity in others.  It happened here.  Boy, did it happen here.

And I wish he was still around, so someone who could reach him could confront him like this and just speak openly, to get his take on all this now, to allow him the opportunity to drop all pretense and honestly appraise the situation.  But he’s gone.  We’ll learn more as time goes on, for the rest of our days, about this, about ourselves, about how we pick up and move on when life gets strange and ugly like this.  I’m far too close to this to give you a simple answer.  And I know too much about the world, about the darkness in it, and the darkness in myself, in all of us, to offer any sense of closure or finality with some damning conclusion.  If it works that way for you, have at it, my take on the world is no more or less valid than yours.  It surely works that way for Sandusky and me, no question about it.  Paterno and me, that’s going to take much longer to figure out, if I ever do.

Used Cars

Well, we just had our big 30^th high-school reunion this past weekend.  It was a blast, as usual, a strange and wild night that left me feeling exhausted the following day.  And the thought occurred to me: at this point in our lives, we’re all used cars.  Got road miles.  You can find some devious way to roll back the odometer, but there will still be telltale signs of how far we’ve traveled, in our eyes, how we see the world.  The good thing about used cars is, no matter how hard you kick our asses, we keep on running.

Being a used car is a good thing.  Valuable beyond its dollars, it gets from Point A to Point B many times over, probably to work, places one has to go to get things done.  Road miles.  No frills.  Probably still has a cassette deck and manual windows.  Just gets it done.  That’s us.  Or maybe that’s just me.  I can’t speak for everyone!  But that’s how I feel now, and I’d call it one of those small victories you don’t realize until someone points it out to you, or you look in the mirror and realize things are all right, despite all the dumb, embarrassing, weird shit you’ve done or gone through over the years.

That’s why I go to these things, that sense of recognition I won’t find in the city, that sense of being from somewhere, and somewhere that I’ve learned to appreciate.  I may live in New York City.  But I’m from this small town in Pennsylvania, and there’s no denying it, I’m always going to be from there.  That thought terrified me in my 20s.  Now it guides me, the same way the World Trade Center did when it was around, coming out of a subway station downtown, trying to figure out which way to go, and I’d look up, see the towers, ah, that’s south, now I know where I’m at.  It wasn’t lost on me coming back this time that the “Freedom Tower” (or whatever they’re calling it) is at full height now, gleaming in the sun from my bus window as we rounded that New Jersey curve into the Lincoln Tunnel, and I’m now going to be able to use that building the same way, which made me feel good.

I don’t think I had too many embarrassing moments this time around.  We botched the photo ID badge of one of the people attending, as she had the same name as another classmate.  I felt so bad when she walked in, and I could tell by the look on her face, she already knew.  (Sorry, SFJ, if you read this!)  And in that early part of the reunion when only a handful of people were there, man, the song “Black Sabbath” by Black Sabbath came blasting over the speakers.  Just listen to it.  It was my idea to include a healthy dose of metal in the mix … but probably not a good idea to include a song that sounded like what Satan might play if you’re unlucky enough to meet him at the gates of Hell one day.  From that point forward, I don’t think anyone even noticed the music, as people were talking so loudly and excitedly with each other that it drowned out the music, and that was fine by me.  Can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a bar or club where the volume of the music made it impossible for me to hear a person less than a foot away screaming into my ear. 

As with all these reunions, I felt guilty and stuck-up the next day, too, because I didn’t make time to talk to everyone.  Sometimes because I didn’t know what to say, or we just never connected back then and felt weird about approaching each other, or simply never met physically in the crowd.  I know how these things work – you start talking to somebody, anybody, and there’s just about always something worthwhile and interesting that’s going to flow out of that conversation.  It can’t help but happen with anyone who’s lived this long.  But I had a terrible night sleeping afterwards, with the dozens of conversations I did have rolling around in my head, not to mention it was hot as hell that night and bad sleeping weather.  At least I wasn’t hung over.  A group of folks had tried to talk me into the after-party, but I’m not kidding, I’m too old for this shit!  Hanging out from 6:00 until 11:00 had me feeling wiped out.  I’ve spent more than a few Saturdays and Sundays in my life, all day, performing mental road repair after a hard night out.  Been a long time since I cooled my fevered brow on the smooth porcelain of a toilet bowl rim, after putting my face where it should never go, and hopefully a long time before I do so again!

But overall, a great time.  What struck me this time was having unexpectedly deep conversations with people about their kids, many of whom are at or near college age.  (Meaning these folks had them in their 20s … a lot of people my age at work started in their 30s and have kids still in grade school … and then there are weirdoes like me with no kids.)  One really stuck out for me.  I was taking a leak in the men’s room when J walked in, called out my name and said, “You and me, buddy, we’re going to have a beer when we get back out there.”

The correct response to that is “O.K., man” and so we did.  J then explained to me that his daughter had just graduated in what had to be the top 1% of her class and was on her way to a fairly prestigious local college.  It made him feel a little befuddled … because here he was, working these outrageous hours in a local factory, his wife working just as hard, too, and their kid, somehow, had become a borderline genius for whom it made perfect sense to go to college.  Befuddled, maybe, but obviously proud, too, that he had laid the groundwork for this to happen, worked his ass off, saved, tried to give her everything she wound need to face the world.

And it made think about my late father, who was in the same boat J is now.  I wasn’t as smart as his kid in high school, but smart enough.  Expected to go to college.  So I did.  And had a great time while I was there.  Really spread my wings in a lot of senses, got some kind of bearing as a writer, a taste of what I could do, an introduction to a whole bunch of people who “got me” on some wavelength that didn’t always happen back home.  Got good grades, too, although I’m not sure what all that means now.  It was more the experience of being there and feeling another level in my life that seemed crucial at the time and made me feel like I could go into the world and try anything (which I did, after a few stumbles).

But I never forgot Dad, and bless him for getting me work inthe factory those two summers, as it set me up financially for most of my college career.  I can only imagine how he felt the day he watched his youngest kid graduating from college.  He had tried college fresh out of the armed forces in the 1950’s, but didn’t care for it, and eventually fell into the factory work, on which he raised a family and left Mom a pension she still lives on today.

Whenever I’d come back from New York in the late 80s and for the rest of his days, he loved to drive up to Hazleton and pick me up from the bus station, just so we could talk and relax together on the way back home.  That’s where I really got to know Dad, as a fellow man, as someone I could speak with on some type of equal ground, and oddly enough, find that we got along even better like this.  But the one thing that always stuck in my craw was when he’d say something like, “Bill, go for the money.  I’m so glad you’re doing something in your life that allows you to make some real money.  That’s all I ever wanted for you, not to end up like me.”

Well, I got bad news for Dad … I’ve ended up a lot like him.  Which is good news for me, because I’ve always known he was a good man, and whatever quiet senses of resolve and personal responsibility he carried through life, I’ve aspired to carry, too.  We’re worlds apart in some ways, but most of them very surface.  I turned into him, for better and worse.  My mom, too.  I can see so much of how I am in her.  More and more each day, which comforts me, because that will be how they live on.  And I always wanted to tell Dad, “You know, this life you envision for me, you have no idea what I’m dealing with.  Nasty pricks.  Ruthless people.  The kind you wouldn’t want to be stuck in an elevator with for five minutes, much less spend eight hours a day working with for years on end.  This ‘upper crust’ life you picture yourself missing out on is packed with headaches, greed, insecurity and dishonesty in ways that would make you cringe and run straight back to the factory you know so well.  My life ain’t as great as you think it is.”

But I know he didn’t want to hear that.  He wanted the illusion that any sort of white-collar work was far beyond his blue-collar work in terms of personal happiness and fulfillment.  In some ways it is, in others it’s far from it.  Everyone’s life has problems, and you better believe, people with more money often have more problems.  I don’t even have that much, been hanging on to this way of life by my fingertips for a long time now, and I can see, the people who are successful in some easily identifiable way often have mountains of personal and financial issues that I would find crushing and oppressive beyond belief.  Generally speaking, the more you make, the more you want, and it never stops.

So … I often look back to Dad’s way of life and romanticize it as being far more simple and honest.  But I’m not kidding myself these days.  I’ve written many times before: sane, healthy and solvent.  You got those three things, the world can say anything it wants about you, but it can’t tell you jackshit.  And I think that’s what I’d tell Dad now if I could.  That’s what he lived by, that’s what he taught me (by example … I know he wasn’t even aware of it), that’s how I try to live, too.

All this came bubbling up inside as I spoke with J.  And I guess the main thing I wanted to get across to him was the simple act of recognizing he was sacrificing so his kid could live a better life was about the best he could do for himself, and that his kid could pass along if she wanted.  The act of sacrifice, parental sacrifice in particular, is a beautiful thing that speaks volumes about a person’s character, and something I saw in J’s character, immediately, could see it in his eyes when he spoke about her, and I knew that was how Dad talked about me when he was bragging to the guys in the factory about me and the Dean’s List at college.  And how they looked when they got to  know me those summers and felt some kind of personal stake in my beating ass out of the world they knew so well.

The truth is a kid who’s raised working class, goes out into the world and gets into ways of life that aren’t working-class, sort of finds himself playing it by ear, making it up as he goes along, hoping he’s doing it right, but not really sure if he is.  Hell, I’m still not sure!  But I know I’m living the life I want to, mistakes, missed opportunities and all.  Punching a clock in many senses, just like Dad did, but I’ve also learned just answering the alarm clock, getting your ass out of bed … may not seem like much, but that sense of routine keeps all of us going, no matter how good or bad we feel about it.  It’s work.  I learned over the course of 9/11 in New York, when my world felt empty and shattered, when that sense of routine was blown away for close to a week, I was yearning to get myself back in the office.  We’re conditioned to think the routine is embarrassingly dull and unimaginative … but try living life without it, especially for a reason like that.

There were moments like that all night.  Where I was simply talking to somebody about their kids, or work, or crazy shit we’ve done … and this door quietly opened in my mind or heart to see these other things that come out when you talk about simple things with people who knew you before you were all grown-up and putting on such a brave face.

And that’s why I go to reunions, in a nutshell.  Sure, there’s the flirting, fun, crazy stories, drunken revelry and occasional screwed-up memory that comes flashing back after a few beers and leaves you wondering “where in the hell did that come from.”  But most of it is this strange sort of time travel, where you recognize you’re in the here and now, but someone says something that takes you back to another place in your own life, maybe theirs, too, and makes you see some good things about yourself, the people who brought you along in the world and the person you’re talking to in that given moment.  So it’s not all beer guts, gray hair and gossip.  Well, sure it is.  But this is what you find when you stop paying attention to those things and start to absorb things that really matter, when you learn how to listen, to other people and yourself.