Harrumph!

Back to key childhood town today via the NYT opinion piece, I recalled Danville, VA. Tess Taylor, likely the age of my eldest son, wrote on how early Civil Rights protests hit even her white, establishment granddad.

In the very segregated setting only three miles above North Carolina, I went to elementary and junior high. Separate black/white schools were the norm. Even Greyhound was the white bus line versus the black Trailways. Some accommodations were not quite blended. I think of the Rialto movie theater, which kind of accommodated black folk, so long as they sat in the balcony. In fact, when I was eight, a friend thought he was tricking me by sending me upstairs with my bag of popcorn. When I noticed that the white people were downstairs and I was among rows of exclusively black people, I wasn’t bothered and watched the double feature (always at least a double and the Rialto had the Westerns and other action flicks). Later I wondered whether anyone in the balcony resented a white kid in their seats. If so, they didn’t let me know. After the movies, my classmate met me and looked chagrined. I think maybe he tasted his own racism and found his joke unfunny.

Taylor’s piece is on her grandfather’s modestly foolish upbraiding of a racist judge for coming heavy on black protesters for integration. It gives nice background on Danville as well as the perceived praise of her relative.

I’ve written on Danville here before. I lived there longer than anywhere until I moved to Manhattan after college and those were formative years.

Fortunately, my mother was not a racist and we were not infected by the malevolent disorder. She ran the Red Cross chapter, where black folk as well as white volunteered and received such services as blood, transportation, first-aid and home nursing training and such. Black folk were as welcome in our lives as whites. There were a few Jews, including the physician who rented to us, although I don’t recall knowing or even seeing Asians. It was a two-colored world.

We moved to a far more rural Chester — middle of the same state, but not at all a city, before going to Plainfield, NJ for high school. PHS was half black. Plus my classes were a quarter to half Jewish students. I took the bus to Manhattan every chance I got. I experienced intense culture shock, almost entirely in a good way. I did hear and see Yankee de facto segregation and overt racism though, as I did and do during my decades in Boston. The first time I heard anyone openly using the N word was in my first few days in New Jersey. The separation of races in old Danville seems to have minimized open disdain, plus likely the veneer of civility in the South.

Pic note: The building was my public library and had been the site of the last capital of the Confederacy. Danville came with extra baggage.

On a far more prosaic level, I can draw light lines to other cultural transitions. I think of common tools, such as computers. I went from a manual typewriter to an electric one, on to when being a computer user meant bringing your task, like data analysis to a programmer who types out punchcards and handed them to you to pile into a huge computer for calculation, I went on to batch processing in a shared environment and to paper tape mainframes before dedicated (and very expensive) word processors before workstations and then personal computers.

The improvements in integration and race relations have not been as linear or incessant. Yet integration advances, even in places like Boston, although there’s still a lot of happen. To return to the weak tool analogy, much as occurred in my lifetime and my towns. I think of my wife’s late grandmother, who grew up from the era before electricity and automobiles. Like Mable Thames, I have seen and benefited from much. Keep it coming.

• Leave a comment... (0)

As a boomer, I grew up with the excesses of the amusingly epithet-ascribed greatest generation. Those carried along by the tides and storms of WWII indulged themselves from the moment they declared victory. We kiddies got to share in their leavings.

As a group, my parents’ generation rewarded themselves non-stop. Sure, that meant too much booze and a level of adultery not known since the most profligate of ancient periods. To this day, they feel and think they deserve every indulgence.

With that comes the irony of calling my generation and the next several The Me Generation, The Entitlement Generation and other denigrations. We who studied history, sociology and similar soft sciences know those slurs were first applied to the WWII and Korean “police action” sorts.

Regardless, the mythology was and remains powerful. All hail, summa cum laude, the Greatest Generation!

One small piece trace of that legacy is salads.

Yes, boomers grew up with the formerly deprived slathering dressings on. Sure, it was the Greatests’ parents and grandparents who had to make the family work and survive during the Great Depression and WWII. Sure, it was the WWII folk who walked into battle (or were the men and women behind the desks and safe in the defense plants) who risked bullets or paper cuts after their elders had shepherded them through the national economic horrors.

Having landed firmly after V-E and V-J Days, the WWII crew knew it was party time. Among the obvious delights were the self-indulgence of food.

We boomers recalled the weekly visitations of the women’s service mags — McCall’s, Ladies Home Journal, Redbook and others. In most middle-class, white families that really meant one big thing. As surely as the WWI generation grabbed their Reader’s Digest monthly to find out what disease they had to fear this time, the competitive housewives made sure they were up on the latest recipes.

That was a simpler version of today’s foodie snobbery. Now it’s obscure ingredients and must-have food prep gear. Back in the 50s and 60s, it was being sure you were the first, or at least not the last, to serve the pop dishes.

Dreadful they were, but adequate in nutrition, if short on sapidity and devoid of presentation value. It meant, by God!, another tuna noodle casserole variation. It was those dreadful, salt-filled, mouth drying burgers baked in foil with cream of mushroom (always Campbell’s) and dried onion soup mix (always Lipton’s). Accompanying the leaden entrée was some cloyingly sweet mess with colors that do not naturally occur, think an orange Jell-O mold with pineapple junks and mini-marshmallows.

Then both at home and particularly in restaurants, the iceberg lettuce salads were totally dominated by four or five times too much sugary, fatty dressing. A typical dinner table at home or out included two, three or more bottles of gum-thickened, sugar filled mayonnaise disguised as condiment. The very antithesis of light, savory vinaigrette, those clots of extremism marked the WWII generation as surely as did the second and third pre-dinner cocktail.

I thought of those days a decade or more later when working one of my summer college jobs at Cain’s Foods (now Cains and in Ayer not Cambridge). We made and packaged salad dressings, mayo, pickles and horseradish. The famous chips magically happened elsewhere.

Among our short runs on the assembly line were gallons of salad dressings, ketchup and mayonnaise for restaurants. Sure, they carried the Cain’s label like the grocery quarts, but they were different. The old hands (all deaf from the clinking of bottles on the line) said the stuff the chefs got was simply better. The production shifted to condiments that used better materials, richer oils and more fully flavored ingredients. Your perception that the tabletop stuff when you ate out was better was accurate.

One effect of the women’s service mag tyranny was that most of us boomers had little idea what vegetables on their own tasted like. To this day, many of us suffocate salads.If a teaspoon of dressing is good, a quarter cup must be much better. You know…getting your money’s worth…

To no effort of my own, I had the benefit of summering with my maternal grandfather, who grew phenomenal amounts and varieties of vegetables. He  neither accepted nor permitted overpowering his veggies with fats and sugars. If we had asparagus, he’d go down his 150-foot rows with his stainless-steel knife and cut just enough for dinner. We’d eat them minutes later, maybe with a bit of lemon, a dusting of butter and a little salt.

Yet, at friends’ and relatives’, we’d be in the over-consumption mode.  The four bottles of clot-thick bottled dressings fairly screamed to swamp the salad makings. Kids as well as adults lathered it over and on.

In contrast, tossing a salad with say a little white-wine vinegar and a small squeeze of Dijon mustard or perhaps a splash of balsamic with a small portion of olive oil or maybe a scant teaspoon of mayo with some black pepper is all you need…and much, much better tasting. In fact, lightly dressed salads actually let you taste the ingredients, including remarkably enough the veggies.

We don’t have to praise the WWII generation. Lord knows, they’ve done plenty of self-mythology themselves. What the boomers and their kids are learning though is that we don’t have to replicate their food silliness. Too much is not better. It’s just too much.

• Leave a comment... (1)

I’m a notorious TV disdainer. That’s odd for a boomer who grew up, enjoyed and benefited mightily from the box. I’ve aged to much rather do a cryptic puzzle, read a book or use the net.

I’m the least TV-centric in the family. Yet, I do like a few series that the family watches — Treme, Downton Abbey, and Mad Men. It’s the latter that had me reminiscing and projecting.

I’m a child who followed the WWII generation, not one of them. I did work with and know those guys (almost all men) and their younger siblings/nephews in the 1970s New York City.

I worked trade and business magazines in the 3-martini-lunch era. In fact, one publisher always ordered the same drink, “A triple Bombay martini, hold the olives and hold the vermouth.” It was all three martinis in one, very engineering efficient and thus appropriate for a construction mag.

Drunken afternoons were less of a shock to me as the dissolute lives of those magic creatures the space salesmen. The very term space salesman seems mythological if not metaphysical. Selling space…ooooo. The mundanity of actually pitching ads for print media does not rise to the phrase.

I knew a lot of these guys, men whose work brought in my salary. They often shocked me with the likes of their casual comparisons of sexual conquests of women customers, sales reps, waitresses and even friends’ wives.

However, I also got a few life lessons that have rooted.

I certainly recall the best space salesman I knew at Construction Equipment magazine. I’m comfortable using his name, Larry Huckle. He was one of the wholesome guys. He was also the company’s best salesman year upon year. That was particularly odd as he had Texas and the Southwest, virtually devoid of equipment manufacturers. He skunked the other reps time after time.

He and I were at a bar at the mag’s sales meeting in Boca Raton one time. As a former newspaper reporter, I just had to ask him how he did it. I had grilled the other editors and they claimed not to know. Larry was candid and had no fear of giving up his secret. He said, “I know one thing the other guys don’t. When you’ve made your sale, shut up.”

Sure enough, later on sales calls with various ad guys, I’d see them goof up a sure deal again and again by talking about themselves, making inane talk about the customer or otherwise souring a deal in the bag.

I found as a single guy that Larry’s advice was as good for someone seeking companionship as well. That’s another sale.

Likewise, I came to appreciate a silly rejoinder from another space salesman. He’d inveritably come back to the rhetorical, “How ya doing?” with “Any day I’m not pushing up daisies is a good day.”

That certainly falls in the class of painfully obvious. Yet, the longer I live, the more emotional, intellectually and physical troubles that visit me, the more meaningful and sensible that seems. It’s certainly better than the meaningless, “Fine.” And it inspires introspection.

A third space salesman had another iterative response when anyone did the drama-queen whine about a birthday. To one who complained about marking another year older, he’d always say, “Consider the alternative.” Sure enough, death would remove any joy or even observance of a birthday.

Space salesmen, as well as engineers and other stereotypical literal sorts can pluck all the feathers from our social conventions. After all, they have jobs to do that yield to metrics. To those other of us who like to think that everything is fungible, malleable, such brutal realism can only be good.

• Leave a comment... (0)

For the life of me, I can’t remember the Christmas tune the white church played in our house. It had music-box works and I enjoyed winding it up, returning it to the cotton “snow” lawn, and grokking the season.

My mother, Wanda, loved Christmas and did it up right. She’s dead, but we have retained much of her joy and rituals.  I’m very sure my sister dumped the oldest fixings and does not decorate as intricately. Here, we almost do.

Perhaps like the proverb of dubious provenance, there are no atheists in foxholes,  pleasure in and even obsession with this holiday season may not be limited to Christians. Indeed for me, I was raised as a Christian and was a devoted one when young. I got better. Yet, I generally go to a Christmas eve service, often the old-fashioned New England one, with the fillip of the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus performing, at the Arlington Street Church. There’s nothing like an apse filled with bald or gray chubby or saggy men in dinner jackets with beautiful voices singing God’s glory to scream, “He is born!”

Wanda though picked up from her father Bill, my Granddad. His often grumpy wife Mable, Baba per my sister’s dubbing as the privilege of the first grandchild (she similarly named the paternal version Bubu) was not such a Christmas aficionado.  Granddad started with the two three-story blue spruce on the front mini-lawn. He festooned them with strands of those gigantic colored bulbs we boomers knew.

Then he and I could get in Charlie Long’s pickup with him — the kind where you had to use a hammer to change in and out of 4-wheel drive by pounding the hub. We’d thump over the fields and across the shallow South Branch of the Potomac to get to his land that had evergreens. I’d pick the tree I liked, as by far the junior man-let in the group and we’d saw it down. They always let me make the last few cuts that caused the TIMBER moment.

Mable never cared for this treasure. It was work to trim, although she was not involved except for huddling, directing and scolding. It always meant she had to haul out the vacuum daily to inhale the needles. It was more trouble to undress, plus shedding seemingly half its tags on the trip out the front door before trash day. Harrumph, indeed.

Wanda was in Bill’s mode and then some. Most personally obviously, she bought presents, not only many, but exactly what people wanted or would have asked for had they been as perceptive as she. Very much unlike those who wrote checks, gave gift cards, or approximated age-appropriate gifts, Wanda looked to the soul (and lifestyle) of each recipient. She made sure you got what would delight you. Your delight was hers.

Yes, the outside of her house was lit and tarted up with red, green, yellow and white. Inside tough, it as a monument to Christmas traditions. Bookshelves (of which she had many, many and table tops were layered with chorister candles (never burnt, God forbid), creches, scenes of shepherds with angels, ice skaters, lighted model villages and on and on and on.

I loved it all.

We decorate here, replete with a substantial creche molded and painted by my late mother-in-law. My wife does the Martha Stewart deeds of garlands, lights and more. I and one or more of our sons sets out the luminarias. We get a to-the-ceiling evergreen butchered for our pleasure. We as a family and often with a daughter-in-law real or to be, rig it up with three decades of ornaments, chili lights, a porcelain angel topper, icicles and candy canes.

We do Christmas. It seems genetic now.

• Leave a comment... (0)

Yesterday was big doing in these parts. #3 son and his GF graduated from Boston Latin Academy. Her family has one more young’un but that completes our cycle here.

These things changed. I picked up his yearbook a few days ago and before that they had gone to their prom. Each was the same and different from my HS years. For the yearbook, all the pix of kids and staff were in color, and more important, the students got to put their own message beside their image. There was no more CV style, comma-delimited list of sports, clubs and other activities, which set us obsessive sorts apart from those just clinging to the log flowing in the educational river. Both better looking pix and free commentary are good.

The prom though had no theme. With disdain, Isaac explained how old fashioned themed proms were, that they were more sophisticated today. That may be accurate too. Lord knows, I went to several junior and several senior proms in my years. Their Hawaiian or outer space or other decorations were generally pretty tacky, even though those involved spent terrific time and money flogging the motif and its artifacts.

Yesterday, we might have been able to cram everyone, kids and parents, into BLA’s auditorium, but the Matthew’s Arena at Northeastern was more spacious, allowed for flow of grads getting their three seconds across the stage, and provided the sense of transition that fit.

It was a jolly time for students, perhaps too jolly with the smuggled in beach balls distracting from the addresses and making the patrolling teachers look like rasorial birds scrambling, but for the toys instead of worms. After six years of attention, I think the kids were allowed what passes for rowdiness in one of Boston’s exam schools. Having been in numerous other of the city’s high schools, I am always struck by the relative focus and calmness of the teens in the likes of BLA and BLS.

I brought a notepad, expecting some wisdom in the numerous addresses. Only one was worthy, but the others were harmless enough. Both the salutatory and valedictory addresses were LITE. The young women thanked parents (with the valedictorian claiming she had successfully hidden her keynote status from her Albanian immigrant parents up to the moment she walked on stage), praised the school and teachers, and waxed nostalgic with a few mini-vignettes of shared experiences. There was no enlightenment offered.

The salute to the graduates, a.k.a. the mandatory remarks of Headmaster Emilia Pastor, was harmless but atavistic. I’ve been in meetings with her and always found her dreadfully serious. I don’t know about the science high, but BLA and BLS’ headmasters have always seemed to wear their position like chainmail, heavy and demanding deference. In hers, she gave advice on how to thrive in the six years of BLA, only every student on the arena floor had come out the end of the HS machine.

She was more amusing rising from her seat repeatedly to introduce others or start her address. Her skirt was a little above the knee and she offered no cheap thrills to the hundreds of black gowned folk before her. She was acrobatic rising by pressing her knees together, splaying her feet and somehow managing to spring modestly upright. She was attention getting in the way a baby giraffe is rising on his hooves.

Understandably most parents and other relatives were there for their precious one. Those with large claques walked the stage to deafening squeals and applause. Before the presentation of diplomas, quite a few in the audience had no use for the addresses. They shouted to each other and into their cellphones instead. I may have been the only loony trying to hear the words.

It’s a pity they missed what I considered the highlight (short of my son getting his diploma, of course). State Rep.Carlos Henriquez, BLA ’94, spoke in the middle. His was the non-trivial set of remarks. He spoke wistfully of never marching across the stage and his envy of those who were about to. Seems he struggled with a required match course, failing a couple of times, before completing it in summer school.

So he was a dragon at heart as were those about to hit the stage, but without that few seconds of shared glory.

He noted that he continued to accomplish in life in ways he feels that redeem his slow start. In fact, he said one redemption was being the legislator who represented the district where BLA is. Perhaps more so was his candid inspiration to the grads-to-be. He was not afraid to use himself as an example of the struggle and success. They heard the call to go out the next day and start becoming leaders, but then the brief respite came that “Tomorrow you can sleep all day. Then the next day you become leaders.”

• Leave a comment... (1)

I put a post earring in my left lobe this morning. It’s a silver, smiling sun, symbolic of our youngest graduating high school today.

Big, fat, hairy detail as Garfield thinks. Well, to the incapacitated, it’s noteworthy.

Healing from broken ribs and clavicle, these small and normal tasks are remarkable. Moving the left hand to the lobe and manipulating the earring back onto the post was moderately painful. Of course, in context, completing the wee task was still a minor accomplishment.

And there it is…for those inconvenienced or worse by accident or disease, the wee range from impossible to requiring effort to delighting with the relative ease of completion.

I recall nearly 30 years ago, I broke my right wrist in a fall on roller skates. I like to think of that as a noble sacrifice instead of clumsiness. Our young firstborn had fallen right in front of me. Having no out, I could have plowed into him or taken a tumble. An amusing aspect is that two resident docs from Mass General were running along the Esplanade beside us and heard the crack. They said they were so happy after treating so many broken bones to see and hear it actually happen. Whee.

The doc who set the cast on the wrist asked the obvious question — are you right handed? Well, I was, or so I thought.

As it turns out, I apparently had been ambidextrous all along. I just had accepted the training I’d had at school and home. I’ve heard from other boomers that they too were told righthandedness is the norm, ergo you are righthanded. Yet, with a bad wrist break and a hand immobilized for a month or so, I had a single choice, be helpless or see what I could do.

My writing with the left hand was not quite as good, but plenty legible. After never having had the muscle memory, I found it refined quickly. I learned that I had no problem with other tasks — shaving, cooking, dressing myself and on and on. I found as the cast came off too, that I could use both hands as needed separately, such as stirring a pot and a frying pan with different motions simultaneously. I just had never tried.

It makes me wonder how many of us are really ambi unaware.

The harder part was doing two-handed tasked with just one. The extreme example was tying shoelaces. The docs told me it was impossible ad that I had to go with slip-on or Velcro closure shoes. That was a direct challenge, which I accepted. It is tough, but not at all undoable. It too falls in that class of the normal made impossible then mastered.

I recall too many years before that in my volunteer work at VA hospitals, being with vets who relearned basic tasks. They tended to have a sly, infectious joy at re-adding each task to their repertoire.

I relate.

• Leave a comment... (0)

Magazines, websites and I hear even the T and V drown in drug ads. Most of those intend to convince Boomers they’ll sicken and die if they don’t accept the capsule, tablet or pill that treats symptoms they didn’t know they had. Vanity, fear of mortality, peer pressure…who knows what makes these is-the-purple-pill-right-for-you attack work.

On the other hand, in my tiny universe of one, in the past four years, I’ve found an effective diet regimen — opiates.

Probably like other blogs that write on common physical issues, this one gets a fair number of hits related to various aspects of my broken legs. That makes perfect sense, both in seeing how someone else dealt with your condition and in filling in the huge gaps that docs often leave. I look at the info sheets the ER provided me for my broken clavicle and ribs, thinking these are as bad as a Microsoft Office Help system. There’s not enough useful there, and no effort to address common and likely problems.

In that context, I’ll note that I had been losing weight and fat, using a self-customized low-carb/moderate protein and fat nutrition plan. Then coming up on 11 days ago, my big boom threw me to the pavement from my road bike at speed at 20-some MPH, with those fractures, cracks and such. Being unable to exercise in the slightest, I have feared what had been my weekly weigh-in. I still record all I eat, but only two days have had the slightest exercise, and that’s been just over a mile walk up and down this hill. While the amble was slow, halting, painful and demanding, it’s far, far from my normal daily fitness attacks.

Mirabile dictu! After not weighing for the past two Mondays, I dared today, knowing I just had to record the damage and push ahead. By the scale, I was down nearly 10 pounds. I suspect I had been holding some water, as I was at a plateau and that some of that recent drop was soggy tissue giving it up. Nevertheless, to a banged up old guy,not gaining would have been plenty of good tidings.

On the way to the weigh-in, I was on oxycodone, an opiate. Likewise, following my leg surgery and much, much worse pain levels, I had hydromorphone, a synthetic morphine replacing the actual opiate given me in the hospital. In both post-trauma situations:

• I was not hungry when I had the drug in my system
• There was real, substantial weight loss
• My typical nervous response did not turn to food
• I was (almost surely irrationally) terrified

I have known drug addicts in many situations. During my college and professional years working newspapers, I would meet them both on the job and socially. I have never known a plump one. However, I am at a disadvantage (for which I am grateful) in not coming from a family with drug addiction in it.

Still, I fear opiates and other highly addictive drugs. I think at various times in my life, I would have been healthier and more productive if I drank less of an evening. More to the point, I smoked for a decade from my late teens. I was truly addicted to cigarettes and nicotine. Kicking was no fun and took several tries. It was the idea that we’d create a baby that inspired the victory. So, I know I can exhibit addictive behavior.

For both pain drugs, I disdained the doctors and nurses, nurses in particular, who chanted, “Stay ahead of the pain!” They actively encourage what looks like drug abuse to me. At least, they’d have you take the script dosage and stay drugged up all day and night. The idea is that you heal better. The reality is that you would bug them less if you were out of it.

I recalled how they pushed antacids and laxatives and such in hospital. I had no symptom indicating any of the several allegedly preventative drugs and adamantly, repeatedly refused multiple nurses and docs. Likewise, I demanded the minimal morphine dosage over their objections.

Post-hospital and recently post-ER, I weaned myself from the opiates quickly, preferring a higher level of pain to a possible dependency. That’s not for everyone. I know many who get emotionally wrapped up in pain issues and who take analgesics daily and more for any cause. Coffee is a drug for me, as is a drink. Thank you very much.

Alas, the current opiate was to help me sleep at night and manage during the day. Turns out, that wasn’t true in my case. The first full day after the bike wreck, I went with three of the scripted four pink pills. During the day, taking one made me almost pass out and become a dozing drooler. Not cool. At night, one at bedtime kicked in at a half hour, give or take, but only provided two or so hours of rest before the agony of scapula and ribs, that is their related muscles and nerves, had me teary and too, too awake. The cycle repeated if I waited the six hours from the previous pill and dosed again.

I discovered I was better off grimacing and groaning my way into a seated position on a living room couch. That minimized pressure on the torso and chest, allowing more exhausted sleep than the drugs did.

With all the upper body damage, breathing was very painful, coughing almost unbearable, climbing our many stairs (four stories with the basement where my computers are) was very bad down and much worse up. I have reasons to think of pain relief.

I confess on those first few nights of agony, I could understand how junkies and the pain-fleers would double or triple on the dose. I felt the urge. Yet, I went from two pills a day to one to none.

When I can drive again, I’ll swing by the pharmacy where my wife got the pink pills and drop the container off for disposal, as I did with the hydromophone. I’m not quite sure why I am so wary of addictive prescription drugs, but there are many worse compulsions and areas of paranoia.

So to those stuck in acute pain cycles, I advise a bit of self-science. Step back, Newton like, and observe. Do behavior and as in my current case, posture offer relief drugs don’t? Is being shoved into stupor awful to you? Can you manage your pain with fewer doses than the bottle calls for?

I think of a former minister who was on the other end. She said she hated pain and give her anything and everything necessary to take it away. She and I differ.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, pain, drugs, oxycodone

• Leave a comment... (2)

Heading to what turned out to be a large theater filled with gray hairs and baldies, we stopped nearby the Loews Boston Common for a nosh and drink. Before For the Love of the Music, we headed to Temple Place, a Boston home to the proverbial watering holes.

We’d never been to 49 Social, which had a couple of pluses. First, it was just opening for drinks/dinner and not crowded. Also, it looked comfortable and well designed.

We didn’t have time to try of their long list of $28 wines. Instead from a very pleasant bartender, we got drinks and the charcuterie plate. Chat. Eat. Sip. Chat. Sip.

All was well until it wasn’t. Blue strobe lights and eardrum stabbing siren waves queered the mood.

The bar keep emerged from the basement kitchen saying a pipe had burst and she was soaked. At least she was all in black.

We had to head out with the help. Turns out that only the fire department can turn off such alarms.

Sure enough, in maybe six or seven minutes a truck arrived. Then in another five or so, a ladder truck pulled in. The boys had their toys.

Even before they parked, the Sponge Bob Square Pants plush in the truck window was obvious (pic via my wife’s phone).

Sensibly, the firefighters climbed down and brought their hooks and axes, their gas masks and helmets, their heavy slickers and on and on. I thought of the one time we called them many years ago in JP for a creosote fire in our chimney. It was a quick whoosh, a fat tongue of flame up the top, and anticlimax. The fire was long out before the two trucks came from half a mile away. Several of our other boys in blue were terrifically disappointed. They brought in big axes and kept feeling the walls, obviously hoping for the slightest excuse to break through the plaster and brick. Surely, it had been a boring day and we offered no real excitement. They left looking unfulfilled.

Here too at the 49, the first crew waved off the second one. Nonetheless, a couple of the ladder guys just had to go down the stairs. Axes abounded….you never know, eh?

While waiting for them, we had nice, if abstemious, chatter with the bartender and waiter (no drinks allowed outside). We learned that the owner was Lebanese and that two evenings a week offered Middle-Eastern food, music and belly dancing there. The place has been open not quite a year. The owner appeared as we waited for the fire department. He was calm, as befitting the event,  which happened with plenty of time to rejigger the kitchen before the dinner and party crowds. He said there’d be no tab for us and apologized for the inconvenience. He didn’t exhibit the worst of Boston restaurant attitude, the opposite.

As the sirens and lights stopped and the crews left, we went back in to get our stuff and head to the flick. Of course, I at least left a healthy tip and also took away a good vibe. We’ll be back for a longer session and a meal.

• Leave a comment... (0)

We can wait too long. That should surprise none of us.

This week in New York, I got that lesson, in the mortal version, yet again. Going to, going to, intentions, intentions…yet when I actually called and tried to visit an old chum from our previous lives, he was dead.

Tomorrow will be the fifth anniversary of Reginald Charles Obrecht’s death. I won’t be talking to Reggie, unless it’s like a Bluetooth fool ranting solo.

A woman with whom, as we Southerners are wont to say, I kept company for several years and I lived a few floors above Reggie, his son, and second wife on East Ninth Street on the Lower East Side.

I was on the iPad trying to figure out why his long-time phone number was “NOT IN SERVICE” when I found only vestiges of his musical life. When I returned to Boston and hit up the Social Security Death Index, I got confirmation. Then I was a bit disappointed seeing no Obrecht obit. It seems like the Times or somebody should have been aware that a lesser figure in early rock and R&B died.

Setting aside for the moment his delightful personality and wonderful stories, consider that he gave us boomers earworms and love songs. He wrote, arranged, and played the music for the likes of The Coasters, The Bobettes, LaVern Baker, and Ruth Brown. His Reggie Obrecht Band was on many of the late fifties tunes. He sometimes got credits too under a stage name, Reggie Chase.

Purple Cow

He had his Gelett Burgess mixed blessing as well. While that art critic/author/editor was overshadowed by his throwaway poem The Purple Cow, Reggie had Mr. Lee, sung by The Bobettes. Unlike most of the rock and doo-wop songs of the era, this did not get everyone and his uncle throwing his name on to get possible revenue. Reggie had to take full blame for what he acknowledged was a really stupid song. Yet, we sang and hummed its stupid lyrics. I bet he continued to get residuals from it to the end.

Reg was young then and made what was for him a fair amount of money. He was in on the early days of Atlantic Records. Like most recording groups, bands, composers and such, he got screwed out of much of the revenue in a dirty business. Yet, he squirreled away enough cash to suit himself.

The way he told it, he fixated on chess. He grew up a poor black kid and chess was both intellectual and classy enough to please his new self. He devoted several years to becoming a good player. He spent a lot of time with Grandmaster Nicolas Rossolimo at the latter’s Greenwich Village chess studio. He says he memorized the requisite 2,000 games to be able to win most of the time.

When I met Reggie, he had married again. His first had become a junkie and produced their son Marcus, who was non-functioning autistic. She went away and died young. His second wife was Marjorie Saunders, adopted daughter of the long-time head of the Colgate-Rochester School of Divinity.

Reg said the Rev. Dr. Wilbour Saunders was none too pleased that his only daughter had taken up with a black many of uncertain prospects. Reg was never above laughing at himself and spoke of the first weekend the three of them spent at the regal homestead in Rochester. Like any period sitcom, there was another black person, the maid who clearly disdained Reg and Marcus. Reg was so concerned that Marcus would disgrace them with primitive eating, he sat beside him constantly ready to correct and help. When the servants brought roasted half chickens, Reg was in a near panic. Marcus meanwhile was mirroring the others around him and doing just fine. In his distraction, it was Reg, who knocked him bird into his lap.

Marj was a public-school teacher and a sort of precocious New Ager. Those became relevant as she turned to Marcus. She refused to believe he had to be institutionalized as all doctors and teachers pronounced. She put him (and them) the Feingold Diet (no artificial anything) and a regimen of vitamins, minerals, whole grains and such as barley stew with bones of a chicken or two boiled until they dissolved in it.

All those seemed to work. Marcus was a giant at 12 and had disconcerting self-absorbed traits like climbing on my shoulders and sitting when I sat. He was not what we call normal, but Marj made a huge improvement. He was at the point of low-functioning normal by the time he came of age and left.

Eventually, Marj and Reg separated and I think divorced. I heard she headed off to Denmark to teach English, but that was decades ago.

Last Chat

Reg called me years ago, perhaps six years. He sounded pretty good and we had our usual long, light chat. He called for a reason though. That woman who had been with me on East Ninth had lent him $50 many years before. He said he had heart trouble and wanted to repay her, just in case.

I had figured to see him again. When I got to the City, I intended to call him and get together.

Spending four days in Manhattan this week, I did call him. Anywho and other online directories list his number and address as the last time we spoke. Only this time, when I called that offensive tone was followed with “THAT NUMBER IS NOT IN SERVICE.”

I found out why and shouldn’t have been surprised. He did warn me he had a heart ailment. Yet, I deluded myself as we all are likely to do. On occasion, I’d see that he was still listed and think he was perking along. Only he wasn’t.

Draw your own inferences. I’ve been pretty good about tending to parents, friends and other relatives. I can’t say I did not come to peace with anyone I loved. Still, Reg is a good soul. I do regret not making the extra effort to visit him a few more times.

• Leave a comment... (0)

Wasn’t it the Brits who muttered their wait to sports fairness standards? How did we Americans become so team-parity obsessed?

As a boomer, I grew up with a few great teams in various sports drubbing the feebs. It really did work. It really did fit American history and ideals. Yankees, Celtics, Cowboys, Lakers, Canadians, Packers and a small set of sports bullies were the top. It was as Willy S’s Cassius had it:

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus; and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.

Instead, along the path of sports entertainment, the oligopolies and monopolies permitted by law as well as custom could not have that in the mundo world of advertising and broadcasting contracts. With millions to hundreds of millions of dollars looking for pockets, parity became the watchword. With artificial and intrusive aid, the very worst teams in a league were supposed to be pretty damned close to the very best.  That resulted from business decisions, what would maximize the advertising and broadcasting cash flow. To hell with excitement and ideals!

Unlike the American cultural norms boomers heard from their WWII parents, survival of the fittest became everybody has a chance to be the winner. We saw that creeping pseudo-equality, feel-good artifices starting for us in the 1980s. Our first son went to the hippy-dippy Beacon Hill Nursery School and then played Little League on the Hill against other downtown teams. He was a member of the league championship team. What that really meant is that they always had at least one superior pitcher. That was by far the single victory margin…game, after game, after game. By the time second and third sons were playing soccer, the parity factor was in total control.

It was not at all like real life of business or even a decent college. There, brutal unfairness was the norm. Boss’ child? Fellow alumnus? Sorority sister? Trivial controlled the real.

In the 90s and beyond, on school and kid-sports levels, it mirrored the professional athletic world. With no intent to disparage the developmentally disabled, we can note that the aptest comparison is special Olympics. Everyone’s a winner. Everyone’s a medalist. We, as my eldest parroted his nursery school mates, have the same.

It was more elaborate and rigid in professional sports. Artificial mechanisms like salary caps, luxury taxes, and most heavy handed, player drafts that gave the teams with the worst records first pick of the college and high-school grads are now the norm. There was no attempt to disguise the aim. Even the poorest teams in the smallest markets were supposed to have what is euphemistically called a level playing field.

Back to the thrilling days of post-WWII America (for me) and earlier for my parents and grandparents’ generations, the best teams really did seem like dynasties. Lesser teams and their fans rejoiced if they beat one of the big kids. On those rare years when the traditional champions were not in the playoffs, there was Cinderella magic on the radio, TV, in the newspapers and surely in public conversation. There was that American set of ideasl of aspiration, of bettering oneself, of coming from low to climb high.You know,  success through work and talent.

Now the best are severely punished. How dare they show up the petty men?

Maybe it was in part because I moved ever few years as a child. I would glom onto winning teams. Then I was a fan. My mother’s family came from the Eastern panhandle of West Virginia, with no professional sports, but close enough to D.C., Baltimore and with a stretch, Pittsburgh. Instead of those cities’ teams, I had the freedom of the nomad in picking my heroes, my champions. As a young’un, I’d stand up to my uncles, great-uncles and such with their fandom of the Orioles, Pirates, Senators, and Steelers and such. I’d recite the glories and stats of the Yankees, of Y.A. Tittle’s Giants and such. I was a sports slut, one who loved winners.

Those picnic debates no longer work. Not only are my great-uncles dead, but plastic parity humbles the mighty. It also robs the athletes and fans of both dreams and pride. Like the Japanese cliché that the nail that stands up will be pounded down, the parity police either did not know or lost the ideals of American culture, literature, theater, movies and television. We were a nation whose people won in the end despite shortcomings, being outnumbered, and without expectations of victory. Any American could succeed with determination, some luck, and relentless optimism.

We lost that and are poorer for it. We have the same.

• Leave a comment... (1)