Mother Of All Summers

As summers go, the one 67 years ago beats them all, both personally and historically. It was 1945. As a prelude to summer events, Pres. Roosevelt died on an April Thursday afternoon. I heard the news on my way to Hebrew School to learn the mother tongue. Germany surrendered the first week of May. By June Truman was getting up to speed. In July the Allies met in Potsdam. Churchill was voted out of office. Ten days later we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, then on August 9th, on Nagasaki. Japan officially surrendered on September 2.

I didn’t go to Times Square to join the throng on V-J Day but I did publicly weep when FDR died. For my entire life up to that point he was the voice on the radio I associated with God’s, stern yet warm, intoning his commandments. By the end of summer I was no longer a believer but God didn’t care.

I should thank my mother for giving birth to me twelve years earlier with the foresight to plan my coming of-age when the world seemed to be starting over again. This would be my summer of exodus from an Edenic childhood into the larger, uncertain world; my secular Bar Mitzvah a year before my Bar Mitzvah.

Whatever meaning the ritual of initiation had, it was for me, not religious but an entry into the adult world; not a tribal identification but a dim sense of being a grown-up American, coming into consciousness at the end of a war. It felt like a beginning as if I were new, just as everything around me were about to begin.

I remember the returning G.I.s, baseball players back on their teams, new building developments, no more war bonds, air-raid wardens or blackouts. I wondered what newspapers would have to print without those front-page maps of advancing Allied armies.

The end of one chapter began another. Winston and Franklin were replaced by Clement and Harry. Truman was neither fatherly nor the charmer like his predecessor. His cadences were in mid-western no-nonsense clipped tones. I was ready for a harsher voice.

Patriotism, for a child is visceral. I believed in those Four Freedom posters by Norman Rockwell; freedom from fear, from want and freedom of speech and worship. The images were everywhere, in public buildings and classrooms. Movietone news gave us victory after victory. Songs and movies showed us as wholesome, healthy and happy. The world was presented as good or bad and we were the good guys.

Paradoxically, the end of the war signaled the start of a more complex ideological war which split our country into partisan camps. I was politicized early, perhaps too early. Even in my thirteenth year, I felt the change resulting in some frayed friendships, moving me closer to the margin. My family bought The Daily Worker, a newspaper few others read and I echoed that radical voice in my bumbling way. It was a step toward separating me from the pack, for better or worse.

The events of that summer shook the world in ways all of us would come to understand a few years later. The Nazi atrocities scar my sensibilities to this day, too much in my thirteenth year and still beyond my imagining. Like most Americans, I wasn’t fully aware at the time, the Nuclear Age had begun. Global annihilation was to be factored in forevermore.

First Memory

I’m not a beer drinker and can’t tell the difference between Schlitz, Blatz, Pabst, Coors, Miller or Bud. But I also can’t avoid their commercials…which shows what sort of programs I watch. I would never buy Coors because…. but I do subscribe to the philosopher-adman who stated the obvious, We only go around once in life and should therefore (spend our remaining days drinking Schlitz beer) or as he put it….live it with gusto.

One man’s gusto is another’s big yawn. At the moment my attention is turned back to how I got from there to here; the crumbs of my madeleine. I have always associated the recovery of time past as a personal detective story and a comedy. I think of Peter Falk as Colombo-Columbus discovering the new world called Truth or beginnings. There’s just one more thing…

Maybe this comes from seeing too many movies as a kid. The intrepid sleuth snooping, the black sedan trailing him, the goon holding up the lamppost across the street, getting bopped in the alley, everyone a suspect and all of them assembled in the last scene. The detective deduces and detects. He unravels the essential mystery at the core as if now I know why my brother died early, why my father could barely read and my mother trusted no one or... how it is that I stumbled and bumbled and then got so lucky.

Now I am on an expedition in search of my first memory. I am reading a Julian Barnes book that begins, A child wants to see. He was able to walk and could reach up to a door handle. He did this with nothing in mind that could be called a purpose, merely the instinctive tourism of infancy. A door was there to be pushed; he walked in, stopped, and looked.

In my infantile tourism I am at a window about three flights up looking down. A car is on fire, and I hear sirens coming. Across the street there is derrick moving dirt and bricks are being laid. Another apartment house is going up.

I’m not so sure anymore about the car fire because I may be confusing it with my Little Red Fire Engine book. The dirt-mover is certain. It is on Talbot St. in Kew Gardens, and I am between 3 and 4. Why that image while thousands of other sights have been shredded? It was unusual enough to be retained and when I see bricks mortared today it comes back to me. How does this figure in the detective story?

The Big Bad Wolf ate the Little Pigs in their straw house and the one built with sticks but huffed and puffed and could not blow down the brick one. Fear and safety. Must be a dangerous world out there. Animals, untamed. Irrational forces. Mother’s milk.

Guilt. Something went wrong. I wonder what I did or didn’t. I was a poor eater. I violated the clean plate policy. Serious stuff. People were starving in China….because of me. I wasn’t listening. Didn’t wear galoshes. That third sweater. Went out unprotected. No wonder I got the measles, mumps, whooping cough even scarlet fever. What about polio? Don’t go swimming. And head lice? Don’t lean back on the movie chair. Don’t. Don’t. How will I ever remember all these don’ts?

The don’ts get embedded. I fight for my Do’s. The derrick moves the dirt. I climb the hill, gradually find my gusto. Case closed………but not so fast. I wouldn’t do that if I were you.

The Past As Present

Is there anyone by their 79th year not carrying a selective history with them in their invisible trunk? The past is the one thing we own not subject to bubbles or market volatility though past glories do have a way of spontaneously inflating. Some of my best memories might even be true……but I doubt it. Most are composites of photos, wishes and the actual with embellishments and key omissions.

If you doubt the presence of the past just look up at the night sky with long-dead stars flaming. Or listen to the canned laugh track of giggles and guffaws recorded sixty years ago of folks belly-laughing their way to life everlasting; as if we need a poke in the ribs to tell us something funny just happened. In that preserve of uproarious laughter, I think of Aunt Agatha tuning in to I Love Lucy re-runs listening for uncle Abner’s hee-haw in the mix.

More appropriate today might be canned-weeping when the far-right spokespersons of the Un-enlightment, who know less than nothing, open their mouths. I can imagine the gravesites of our founders in upheaval. What would statesmen like John Jay say or Henry Clay or even Whirl-away? Nay!

Modern technology seems to have brought us new claims on immortality. The dear-departed husband of a friend lives in her answering machine; a more reasonable memorial than cryogenics, I suppose.

I wonder if the weight of past years has a counterpart in the pull toward the future felt by a pregnant woman?; something I will never know. That unknown future and this hefty past both have a place in the vibrant now, that elusive present which slips through our grasp on its way to oblivion unless we can halt the butterfly as it flutters by.

And then we have the not-quite-here but not-quite-gone, like Dolly Parton who opened her ample mouth before 20,000 at the Hollywood Bowl and out came her voice from 25 years ago. After all she didn’t want to disappoint the gathered with her weary pipes. Nothing to fret over; merely the past having its way with us.

As a society we don’t do well with aging or maybe it has more to do with change. I remember how painful it was hearing Frank Sinatra when he lost it or watching Orson Welles double his weight when he was already larger than life at age 22.

My guess is that our generation of septuagenarians and octogenarians is having the hardest time in human history, staying current. In the eyes of pop culture we’ve long since been regarded as yesterday’s news. Maybe there is an art to aging; solving the equation between jettisoning old baggage and taking on some of the new fangled. Making room not only for new gadgetry but more importantly a willingness to catch the Zeitgeist; to not resist the accelerated pace and a readiness to greet unfamiliar forms. Eternal verities may be there in unrecognizable dress.

Memory, That Blurry Lens

Memory is the unreliable narrator, a fiction sleuthing for the truth. So much so that many vivid scenes from my past may have happened to me or my brother or not-at-all except in my fecund imagination. I have visited them so often I can’t tell the difference or where the facts, by extension, become fantasy. What purpose is served in the retelling if they aren’t actual? Because the fabrications have grown into my mythos, my reality, my truth.

Therefore before I leave my visitation to that distant period I need to confess my life as a near-felon. Let me set the crime scene.

I have spoken about the candy store we called Pops. The owner was an old man (to my eyes) with a graying mustache, probably in his early 50s. My friends and I collected bottles from here and there and brought them to him for deposit, two cents for soda, three cents for milk bottles. This was big money for us. Eleven cents got us into the movies. Otherwise we’d have to risk sneaking in from the side alley.

The backs of Pops candy store and my apartment building faced each other. Our rear yard looked out onto his storage area. Pop kept the empties there in a shed. The rickety structure looked like somebody put it together on their lunch hour. The walls and roof were mostly chicken wire. You might say I cased the joint. An apple tree in the grassed area of our apartment house looped over those gleaming empties which looked to me like Fort Knox.

Was it I or my brother or neither of us who climbed that tree with an eye on a section of loose wire large enough for a hand to slip through to the mine of gold bullion? Maybe it was biblical, being an apple tree, that providence intervened and I/he fell to the ground with a broken ankle. Huck Finn would have succeeded, I’m sure. Maybe we just weren’t cut out for malicious mischief. And if we’d swiped a few bottles and walked them back in the front door, Pop would probably have spotted them anyway. He could look at a bottle and know if it was his or the A&P’s.

Innocence isn’t lost so much as misplaced. It kept coming and going those pre-pubescent years. The front of my apartment building on Forest Lane faced a private school. It was for rich kids from the real Forest Hills with its restrictive covenants, not for pretenders like me. But it had this grassed area so green and so vacant, ringed by a fifteen-foot chain link fence. Such a playing field should not, by any law of justice, stay un-trodden. We would scale that fence regularly and were regularly shooed off by a custodian or the school principal who passed us walking down the hill for his morning paper. One or twice he called the police.

One day my friend, Johnny Kassabian, and I went over that fence. He slipped coming down and a knife he was carrying went into his arm. Why the knife? Certainly not as a weapon. His purpose had something to do with a project for the Boy Scouts but whatever we were up to escapes me with the emergency of stopping the blood and getting out of there for treatment. It turned out to be a lesson in tying a tourniquet and a large dose of remorse for trespassing.

The knife severed a nerve in his upper arm and Johnny lost use of two fingers. I remember looking up his condition in an anatomy book at the time. It had a name which I’ve never forgotten, Palmar fascia aponeurotic expansion of the palmaris brevis. This string of glossolalia had a ring to it. He managed, somehow, to compensate for his loss and was a fine draftsman and engineer.

I had four close male friends during those years from age ten to twenty. One is still close, one died early and the other two have long since disappeared from my life. I can still hear their voices, except for one. If you’re out there Johnny Kassabian, please contact me. Did I lead you into temptation going over the walls of Eden? Say I wasn’t so.

Still Coming Of Age

We watched a coming-of-age movie last night I would recommend in spite of a few too many movie-familiar turns and improbable detours. It also has a political subtext which seemed to me as plausible as any other for JFK conspiracy believers. The film is An American Affair.

My response to coming-of-age books or screen versions is often a surprise to me. If the events seem too close to mine I feel robbed. If they seem too other I might feel shut out. It may not be the story at all but my receptivity at the time. It's one of those mysteries I'm happy to leave unsolved.

This one set me off thinking about the few memories that still cling to my bones since those formative years. What happened to all the rest? Could I even bear it? Imagine the wondrous moments seeing/hearing/apprehending for the first time. How we meet the natural world and have it colored by the fear or welcome of a parent’s voice. Imagine if we could recover that early aha when Dick saw Jane run on and off the page.

I think of the complex behaviors devised to protect us from the shame of stumbling and bumbling. Conformity pulls us toward anonymity. Being the last one standing in a spelling bee was almost as bad as being the first one to sit. The risk of being oneself, even glimpsing that shadowed person is continually being played out. Coming-of-age is the still-happening age of becoming.

Coming is just a part of coming-of-age. My experience was not so much an earthquake as a series of small seismic events. I was a slow starter out of the gate, but by age 21 found myself married, moved from N.Y. to L.A. and a pharmacist.

In other blogs I’ve written about my first job and other entrees into the adult world such as the emotions shared with grown-ups the day President Roosevelt died and a ten-day bicycle trip around New England at 16 with friend. Each of these was a beginning journey from home to which I would never fully return. Having matured perhaps too fast, my late teen years would make a fairly dull movie. It’s taken me a lifetime to claim my youth.

Some of us may have lit and explored all the rooms in our mansion early on. I suspect most of us are not yet fully at home in the attic or basement. Where's that flashlight? Ain't it fun?

Actually, no, not always. More than likely we live with our myth, the small fictions that seem to serve us well enough. We tidy up the canvas with omissions, erasures and vivid remembrances that never quite happened. That we grew up at all seems a drama enough; if not a conspiracy of time and place, at least a series of contingencies that have taken us this far. Glories and defeats, like scraped knees, are scarred over with Band Aids worn emblematically.

We have to make do with whatever still clings. Yet there is so much flesh we cannot reach wrapped around that etched bone. It’s as if we hear a faint lyric but not the music that went with it. Or is it a symphonic wave still resounding and the words that have vanished?

There is still soft clay to be sculptured. As long as we can see and hear. the tape is running, the camera is loaded. The shapes and sounds are us walking into a moment we will never forget.

Life As Theater

I wondered, early on, what I was doing in my dysfunctional family which bore no resemblance to radio households or Andy Hardy films. My mother yelled her lines and my father swallowed his. Her mouth seemed to grow in inverse proportion to her height while he hushed the clamor. As a theater piece we would have bombed in New Haven.

If life can be seen as a three act play I don’t mind that the curtain has gone up on the last act. But I’d hate to think of leaving the stage with the world not looking much better than it did with the opening lines. After all, I told them what to do but did they listen? No.

Suckled as I was on FDR, studio films and the good war I had every reason to believe that the trajectory was onward and upward. Evil was doomed, success was meritorious, the meek would get their inheritance and science was giving us better things through chemistry. And then I grew up.

Years later a photo turned up of my mother as a young woman on a tennis court like an elongated, athletic version of herself, rushing the net letting her forehand speak for her. Also uncovered, was a document, dated when I was minus three, of my father arrested for violating Prohibition, as a pharmacist. I’m proud that he dared cross the line and glad also that he was inept at it. I suddenly saw my mother with grace and my father with gumption. I’d had it all wrong. My first act was their second.

And now my third act is my daughters’ second. On a macro level I despair that their generation can fix our mis-steps. We seem to have devolved into a corporate universe. Greed has been redefined as a virtue. Deceit multiplied and amplified passes for truth.

With armies of mercenaries the next war might break out between British Petroleum and Exxon or maybe Toyota will invade General Motors. Multinationals with treasuries in Geneva and the Caymans reign over governments. Elected officials move laterally as lobbyists and C.E.Os take office as senators and governors.

Is it just my jaundiced eye that witnesses xenophobic and religious walls continuing to divide people. I see no sign that the heated rhetoric of orthodoxy is their last gasp? Nor do I have a vision of universality gaining any ground.

Our president is caretaker of an immense complex of corporations whose reach far exceeds any sovereign nation. Their culture is their own. Their sophisticated practices baffle any outside regulator and the risks they take ransom the planet.

Tell me that Democracy hasn’t been subverted into Oligarchy; that out-sourced jobs and off-shore money hasn’t consigned millions of workers into a marginal existence while the abstraction of government itself receives their wrath.

As a bit player in this historical drama I look back and wonder how this downward spiral occurred under my nose. Before I’m booed off the stage I can only hope the play will be re-written before Broadway, that mankind gets a glimpse of a happier denouement.

Maybe I have it all wrong in the same way I misjudged my parents. That the organism is self-correcting with even more grace and vigor than I recognize in my cynical haze.

Holding My Breath

In a previous incarnation I remember how we could smell Igor coming from six caves away. Caesar didn't have a lot of friends till he got his toga out of the dry cleaners. And I must tell you that Ivan the Terrible earned that name a month before his annual bath.

Ah, but now we live in a virtually deodorized society except for the new car smell and "medical" marijuana. It's as if we have opened the windows and all the warm and fuzzy fumes went with the wind along with the stenches and stinks.

Fortunately room sprays can’t erase what has been imprinted within. To the extent we are walking computers many gigabytes of memory must be lodged in our nose. One deep breath and I'm ten years old back in Gishkin's candy store, the air thick with his cigar smoke and bubble gum.

Think of Staples, Big Five and the magazine section of Borders compressed into a large closet of a place jammed with baseball mitts, football needles, roller skates and skate keys, colored chalk, hockey pucks and model airplane kits along with that hallucinogenic glue. There was a section of school supplies including three-hole notebooks and such relics as reinforcements and ink eradicator.

Did these objects emit some strange odor? I say, Yes, just as the comic books and newspapers thrown from the truck left a vapor trail which found room for pipe tobacco and the ever-present egg-cream famous for containing neither egg nor cream.

My second inhalation brings me to my father's drug store with its mingling of three incongruous scents and an overhead fan to triturate the mix like a mortar and pestle. First was the twelve-seat soda fountain with accompanying sandwich board. So we had tuna fish and egg salad wafting over to the Evening In Paris perfume. Into this add the breath of crude drugs such as Cocilana syrup, wild cherry extract, smelling salts and acacia from the glue bottle.

Tincture of benzoin and oil of eucalyptus last whiffed in the vaporizer, spirit of camphor and Cheracol are now gone or fallen into disrepute. Several of these may be unknown today but were staples back then. Some were pungent, some near rancid or sulfurous; they all cling to my nostrils.

This is the arcane fragrance I associate with my father. He brought it home with himself every night. Arpege and Aqua Velva are still with us and even marshmallow frappes but many of the botanicals have vanished and that special confluence of drug store air has been gone for over half a century.

I doubt we will ever smell it again. Those of us over sixty have it warehoused in our olfactory where it never grows stale. It's safe there and easily retrieved. But how can we pass this on to our children? It’s part of the trade-off called progress.