Wake Up Call From Cousin Bill

In response to my last post about the past, someone who should know what they’re talking about wrote an email to me about his memories of our family.

Some of it is very personal, about his recollections of my mother, and his own. They were sisters who died two years apart, and too long ago. My cousin Bill’s missive caught me in a deep-hearted place as he recalled how pleased he has always been that his mom could see her granddaughter before she had passed, and could know that his child had been named for her dear, deceased sister.

He went on in his note to suggest that we only learn from our past, and because we’ve been decent people, we wind up only regretting those things we didn’t do, and not the things we did.

And then this man, who had almost died himself several months ago, but has bounced back, wrote something that knocked me for a loop.

“Your writings, while well done and interesting, are littered with sadness.”

Touché.

And though it may not be my fault, the Sadness Setting has seemed, in my life so far, to be my default.

The mad Italian genius called Ron, my therapist and mentor, might at this point propose a Gestalt experiment:

“What might you feel if you didn’t feel sad?”

The answer is: Angry.

And not a bitter or sour anger, but the kind that breaks the blues and throws off oppression.

For I have always sensed that I was the one in my family to be the repository for all that was unspoken and ungrieved.

What a concept! That families unconsciously transmit messages to their children that, undetected, can burden them a lifetime.

In my family, I’ve been the one who was supposed to suffer and grieve – for those who could or would not do so – the emotional detritus that goes back untold generations. 

Playing as a young child on the living room floor there in Little Neck in the early fifties, as perceptive as any child and as sensitive as they come, surrounded on a Sunday afternoon by old, accented relatives shmoozing about weather and business and the traffic, I could sense the weight of their woes. Sense the truth that stuck in their teeth even as they laughed. Between the lines I absorbed their despair like a vacuum cleaner sucks up dust and dirt. I unwittingly inhaled their sighs, sorrows, and life sentences like toxic fumes. Decades later, after doing some digging, I realized that when my dad’s family matriarch, his grandmother Jenny, had died, there had been no time taken, and no inclination to grieve the loss. Even he, who claimed to have loved her dearly and to have never loved his own mother, was too young to deal with it and never did. Nor, I believe, did his mother or sisters.

And then there was my grandfather’s death, and my maternal grandfather. And the Holocaust. And God knows what else. 

Unfinished family business becomes like so many invisible hand-me- downs, to be worn by the next generation.

And I picked it all up like a radio plucks invisible frequencies out of the air, and I took it all on.

I’ll remember all of you, and everything else. I’ll make you all whole again, I promise.

I took it on, but it never really belonged to me.

It is time for me to throw off this heavy saddle of sorrow. Give back this generational transmission of grief. And claim my true birthright – be that joy or whatever awaits.

I fear I betray something here, but in a way my family betrayed me long ago.

Back when I was about 30, I was in the midst of a relationship crisis, about whether or not to live with a woman named Neema. And I was deeply troubled by it. During that time I had a dream, about being washed ashore, thrown from the sea, exposed and alone. I woke up and realized – that sea was my family. It had carried me through childhood with the unspoken message: Stay true to us, and we’ll always be there for you. I had stayed true by always playing the Designated Mourner, the sentimental one who’d never get over losses, and never let anything go. But they had all scattered anyway, flung by the centrifugal force of modern life across the American heartland, or had died off, or had just forgotten about me. And there I was, at age 30, washed up and stranded on the shore, terribly unprepared for life and how to live it.

Even today, I often feel exposed and alone, like I’m staggering through the desert. And I am sorry, my dear family, but I cannot carry you anymore. You should have dealt with it yourself, all of you! Grandma Ida, you suffered so stoically all your life. Mom, you lost your dad at the same tender age I lost you. I kept your opaque poetry all these years. I read it even today, and I still don’t know what the hell you were talking about. I kept your books because I loved you and needed to keep you alive so I could one day say goodbye to you as a man.

You all should have noticed, shouldn’t have allowed me to take on your years of unshed tears. And now I want a divorce. A break from the family secrets; the invisible sickly and sticky transmissions of pain.

You’ve all become dead weight to me. And I’m too old now to bare the load.

And this hot, salty sadness that’s been such a companion all my years, what do I betray by casting you off? Who are these ghosts I desert? What empty fortress do I abandon? 

In the meantime I have somehow on this journey gathered other,  en-lightening friends:

A woman who has faced death, but has such a bright aura that others on the street or subway often find themselves striking up a conversation with her.  Whose upbeat spunk is a daily defiance in the face of her mortality.

A community of men who are proud to be men at a time when the very idea is held suspect.

And of explorers and cavorters who keep me young.

And I’ve found – how do I say this? – a God or a Force or a Universe that conspires behind my back with the express intent of doing me good.  One that gives me, sooner or later,  everything I want.  You were always there, right over my left shoulder, an Ally waiting to help, until I finally recognized You and started speaking with You daily.

I am so blessed now that I don’t really need these dark and heavy clothes anymore.

Although to be honest I’m not quite sure how to live without them. It may take me a while.

But this anger I feel – it’s useful, as it works against the sadness and breaks it up. I’m not sure it is – at its core – anger at all, but the Force of my life erupting up through all the strata of struggle. For I am tired and will surely die before my time from all this shit if I don’t soon shake it off. 

And one day I will throw off this blog as well. Not that’s it’s a burden. But that it’s more words, more serious struggle, more cerebral hard labor.

As Oscar Wilde put it, “Life is too important to be taken seriously!”

I don’t know where I’m headed now. But I know where I’ve been. And I don’t, as my cousin says, regret any of it.

Thank you, Bill, for helping me break the trance.

And thank you, dear reader, for bearing with me through all of this!

 

Putting The Past In Its Place

Has my past really passed? (Has yours?)

How do I relate to it? Where does it really belong?

All my life I’ve wrestled with these questions.

I recall how as a young boy of five or six I didn’t want to grow up and face the future, or even grow at all. I kept measuring myself by seeing if I could still crawl into the bottom shelf of my little bookcase, and I became increasingly saddened as time went on and I could no longer fit into it. Six years old and I was already nostalgic.

And today, the older I become, the more I find myself communing with my past more regularly. It seamlessly integrates itself into my present day. Like when I daydream, for instance, I’m often hanging out in different parts of my Great Neck boyhood. On Essex Road by the Big Tree (which my brother informs me is no longer there); sitting alone at the creek; sliding down the banister on the stairs at Baker Hill School, or outside on its playground, the highest point on Long Island. Or pitching against the wall in my backyard. But I realized, speaking with Shelley about it last night, that rarely do I daydream about being in my house, where I was stultifyingly protected and restrained, and wherein my mother eventually wilted away to nothing.

And there I go: getting melodramatic. It’s tempting when dealing with my past: if it’s not dramatic, what meaning does it hold? And if my past has little meaning, then, it would seem, so do I.

I’ve always loved that tagline to the ad for that film about a middle class WASP family, “Ordinary People”:

“Everything was in its place. Except the past.”    

But where to put it all? My father would sometimes turn away from old photos. “That’s all in the past”, he’d say dismissing them all with a wave of his hand. And he’d say it not without some disdain, as if the past were a lover who’d betrayed him, or was simply yesterday’s newspaper, good for nothing the next morning. I envy but also reject his ways. There’s such a distracting, heart-wrenching wealth of memory there to be mined, and grappled or danced with. And I (who’ve never so much as discarded a photograph in my life) have always needed to know where to put it all, as if it begs or demands attention and sorting out. (Sometimes I feel haunted, as if there’s something there that wants me to tell their story. Or my whole family’s story. Or my generation’s.)

But the problem is it then it sucks me under. Because I’ve always been so susceptible to nostalgia or sentimentality, which can invalidate the present, or worse, make me betray it, as it whisks me away from it. Memory is to be revered, but nostalgia is really the Golden Calf of memory. It’s a trickster spirit that can tempt you into a futile longing. And I’ve had such a rich life, and one so full of worthy memories, I can fall into that trap, viewing the past through rose-colored eyelids. So I still wrestle with where to put all this stuff.

The problem is how to extract value from the past without it constantly haunting and hobbling me, without getting sucked into its dark seductions. For I know what it feels like to not so much have had a rich past, as to be had by it.

Besides, with so much more sand having fallen to the bottom half of the glass than remains at the top, it’s easy, if you’re anywhere up there in years, to have your mind’s eyes diverted downwards. That’s when coming to peace with your past means coming to a reckoning with what’s been lost.

                                    “Because the past/ Is just a goodbye” – CS&N

And what’s been lost, of course, is your youth; opportunities; perhaps friendships that have faded, or lives that have ended. Not to mention, if you’re over 50, the bulk of your life. 

So here’s one place I really get ensnarled – or entranced: Having personal, compelling memories triggered by scenes depicted in print or on a screen about the 1960′s. (To be clear, my own definition of the 60’s is that period of American history which began November 22, 1963 in Dallas, and ended May 4, 1970 in Kent, Ohio). It’s one thing that so much of who we are now as a people was spawned from what transpired then. That so much happened in those few short years that we’re still busy sorting it all out half a century later. But consider this: the “glory days” from age 17 to 22 are often ones best, and are certainly ones most hormonally exuberant. So imagine not only coming of age during the late sixties – and blossoming while the world was erupting – but of  actually having that world erupt around you largely because of how you were blossoming! To have been essential to such a historical moment is a kind of heady experience that you wouldn’t soon forget. 

So yeah I can get lost back there.

Moreover, those who know me well know what a pack rat I am and have always been. With our recent move, I’ve had the opportunity to sort through every object in my possession, and throwing much away. But I’m glad I kept all those notebooks reaching back 35 years. And my entire CD collection (I hear The Traveling Wilburys are worth a pretty penny). And all my record albums (Velvet Underground! T Rex! Firesign Theatre! Pet Sounds! After the Goldrush! Tea For the Tillerman! Brothers and Sisters! Sam and Dave! ….somebody, stop me!) .

 

 

 

BTW, did you catch Jagger the other night on SNL? The man’s still got it!

And yes, all my 45s as well. (Washington Square; Don’t Worry, Baby; Mecca! Blue Velvet! You wanted me to throw this stuff out?!)

And all the books that have guided and defined me (Another Roadside Attraction; Gestalt Therapy Verbatim; Lenny Bruce; Ram Dass; Revolution For The Hell of It; Iron John; The Road Less Traveled).

And there’s much that still awaits for me to extract meaning, or just pure pleasure from. Not only the music and books and movies I loved (it’s really a different book or film when you read or watch it 40 years later), but also all those I missed! All that great classic American culture from the 50’s and 40’s and 30’s I was deaf and blind to when I was growing up, or had defined myself against. So I’ve been playing catch up with Astair and Kelly and Edward Everett Horton and Monroe…not to mention Benny and Caesar…or Louis Jordan, Cole Porter, Glenn Miller. Why I could spend the rest of my life luxuriating in our cultural cornucopia!

So while I may envy my father for his way of simplifying his life by rejecting the past, it’s not my way.

But how to make good use of the past without it owning me? Let me get back to you on that one…in about twenty years from now – when I’ll be nostalgic not about the sixties, but about being back in my sixties.

Strange Bedfellows

The President’s decision to speak out in favor of gay marriage some six months before the election is an act of almost brazen bravery.

Let’s face it, no matter your politics, you’re probably either a little (or greatly) disappointed with Obama, furious at him, or just sadly resigned, or all three. But with the economy still in the tank and a war going badly, and the opposition solidifying around a handsome and wealthy opponent, taking a stand certain to further fire up that opposition shows backbone and character in my book.

Gay marriage is the last civil rights campaign of our time. As Mayor Bloomberg put it a few days ago, “Each and every generation has removed some barrier to full participation in the American dream…Exclusion and equality are mortal enemies – and in America, every time they have met in battle, equality has ultimately triumphed.”

Thirty years from now, we’ll be looking back at “Defense of Marriage” legislation like we now regard White Citizen’s Councils and George Wallace. “Marriage should be between one man and one woman” will go the way of “Segregation Forever”. And the idea of marrying someone of the wrong gender will go the way of the idea of marrying someone of the wrong religion or the wrong race.

The blatancy of the bullshit becomes clear when you just stop and consider this: If one really wanted to “defend marriage” against those who would defile it, one wouldn’t bother with the few in the homosexual minority who want in, but the 50% of people who marry who want out. If one were so concerned about “preserving what God intended” then please tell me how a person can “defile” marriage more than by breaking the wedding vows one took in His name and suing his or her spouse for divorce? (Mea culpa here).

But bullies don’t take on big fights, of course – like going after the tens of millions of American men and women who’ve split up. They pick on the little guy…and pretend it’s a big guy.

And you know what? In time, and with the way things are going, gay people may turn out to be the last, best hope of marriage. That’s because homosexuality simply makes a lot of sense, especially in an age when men and women barely understand (or know how to get along with) each other.

Just the fact that so many women today no longer really need men to protect or provide for them destroys the traditional foundation that has justified the union for millennia. And when we guys don’t feel needed or necessary, our self-esteem droops and we go looking for someone else to stroke it. Which of course is what often precedes a breakup.

But (most) men understand other men, and (most) women, women. Like Seinfeld said in that episode about those who “share the same equipment”.  

If you really think men and women are generally suited for each other, try this experiment the next time you have mixed company in your living room: Ask them, if they’re old enough, what theye each thought of a TV show from over half a century ago called “The Honeymooners”. I’ll bet you bucks to bagels you’ll get the following response:

The women will say something like, “Ach! What a miserable show! Ralph Kramden played this piggish overbearing ass who in every show is seen shaking his fist in his petite wife’s face, trying to intimidate her by threatening to send her “to the moon!” How could you watch it?!

The men will say something like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. It was a pretty funny show! Every episode shows Ralph failing to intimidate Alice when she challenges yet another one of his harebrained schemes. While he’s bellowing, she’s standing there smirking and rolling her eyes, daring him to let loose. Each show invariably ends with Ralph saying, ‘Me and my BIG mouth!’  and eating crow. It was always clear who was the smartest one in the room and who really ran the household!” 

 

 

The only logical conclusion is that the men and the women were seeing two completely different Honeymooners. Which is similar to many a marriage, after the honeymoon, when the man and the woman often end up leading two completely different lives.

So just as in politics, heterosexual marriage often makes for strange bedfellows.

Perhaps we hapless hets no longer have any business getting together except maybe to have sex and procreate. Because in terms of scholastic achievement, employable skills, and intellectual and emotional development, women are pulling so far ahead of men these days it’s ridiculous. And at the rate marriage in America is going, in another 30 years we’ll probably see a lot fewer kids with their mothers still – if they have ever been –  married to their fathers, and a lot more kids with two mommies or two daddies who are still happily married to each other.

And I’m crazy about my own wife, but we’re unusually compatible. And we probably would have never really appreciated each other so much had it not been for prolonged ordeals the first time around with unions that brought out the worst in all four of us. The fact that I didn’t actually murder my first wife many times over has got to be testament to my amazing saint-like restraint.  

Moreover, three of the strongest and longest lasting marriages I currently know of (and how many do you know of?) are between men and women who haven’t had sex with each other in a decade. So what’s my point here? Simply that men and women are in deep trouble these days, and I think we know it. And those who rail against gay marriage are diverting attention from the fact by hurling stones from their glass houses.

The One Way Mirror

I’ve been writing this weekly blog for over two years now. Slowly, it’s changed my life. For the better and a little for the worse.

It’s been important for me to be writing and sharing my thoughts on everything from my occupation to Occupy. The commitment to Waking At Midnight makes me think as well as feel. (“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.” – Gustave Flaubert)  And whittling a 1300 word piece down to its 900 word essence after four drafts at 4:30 in the morning can be a clarifying experience.

This also has become a neat ** way of keeping in contact with my friends by letting them know what’s going on with, and within, me. And therein lies the downside: People don’t miss me, as in, seeing me face to face. It’s like, Hey I read your blog, I know all about you!

This results in email exchanges that often go something like this:

Charley to friend: Let’s get together, the (2) (4) of us. Here are some dates I’m/we’re available.

Friend to Charley: Cool! I’ll let ya know!

And that’s the last I hear.

So I have some wonderful, local friends I haven’t seen in years. And I can’t say I blame them. If they read my blog regularly, they probably know more about me than I do.

People get to see me through this one way mirror. So while they may not be missing me, I miss them.

Which is yet another example of technology being a double-edged electron. It brings us together and distances us at the same time. Sort of like what a city does to us.

To put it another way, imagine being able to enter a fantastic 3-D depiction of a forest (probably only a few years from now), and having it diminish your desire or felt need to go and enter a real one. Would you have been brought closer to nature, or further away?

In the past, to connect with someone you had to pick up the telephone and dial their number (mommy, why do they call it ‘dial’?) Or go and actually see them face to face.  Yeah I know about Skype and Face Time. But I mean, in the flesh. And while some of you respond to my posts, which is always satisfying, it’s of course not the same.

There may also be a more insidious impact the blog is having on me: I write about a topic and get as deep and well- thought-out as I can between midnight and dawn on a Tuesday morning. Sometimes, this isn’t very deep at all. And so I wonder if this is fulfilling a need that also keeps that book further away – the one I still feel is in me somewhere. Perhaps if I didn’t feed my writing jones on a weekly basis, I would feel compelled to write something deeper and more substantial. 

Anyway, I’m mostly happy with this blog, and, although it adds to my too-long list of weekly to-dos, I still love writing it and connecting with you in this way.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

** Neat: An old Oliver North word meaning: expedient. (Mommy, who’s Oliver North?)

 

Busy Signals

 The death this past week of FM jock Pete Fornatale brought back memories and some thoughts about the indelible invisible mark radio left on me and a lot of other boomers as well.

Looking back over it now from the interneted view up here in 2012, it’s clear to me that radio was really the pre-net. Before websites and social media, we kids connected via radio. Instead of electrons we had airwaves. Oh we had television too, but that was, at the time, still aimed mostly at adults and, more important, it was visible and above-ground. But this other place was a world of sound that was literally out of sight, as most transmissions took place in the dark, after bedtime, and under the pillow. This was facilitated by an ancient wireless mobile device called the transistor radio.

There I nightly would tune into a secret world parents were either oblivious to or ignored; an underground society, connecting us like so many spokes to a hub with tens of thousands listening with me across the city to the same shows, and with tens of millions listening with us across the nation to the same songs.

Here in New York, a prime example of this secret society was to be found not in a DJ but on non-rock WOR in the personage of one Jean Shepherd,

who would later be better known for writing A Christmas Story, and for hosting Channel 13’s “Jean Shepherd’s America”. But for 45 marvelous minutes every weekday night from 1956 to 1971, Shep, as we guys would call him, would spin tragi-comic tales that revealed the deeper embarrassments and foibles of growing up. We’d invariably all be talking about the previous night’s show while walking to school together the following morning.  

But to me and most of us, rock was radio’s raison d’etre. New York had three stations for us white kids: WMCA, WABC, and WINS. I kind of rooted for MCA and “The Good Guys” as they were, at a measly 5,000 watts, clearly the underdog. ABC was pure corporate white bread. But WINS always attracted the best jocks, starting with Alan Freed in the fifties who was the first to actually call it “Rock ‘n’ Roll” and culminating in the creative narcissistic genius of Murray “The K” Kaufman, who for a time would achieve rock star status in this town.

But my favorite was the mysterious Mad Daddy, who came on right after Murray (which was too late for most of us) and who spoke only and always in rhyme, anticipating rap. How demented his brilliance was we’d soon find out.

But before this, I somehow deciphered, although he tried to project a pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain image, that if I listened late into the show, as his sentences would trail off, he’d sound for a syllable suspiciously like Pete Myers, another DJ I’d caught once just up the dial at non-rock WNEW, where he’d play Sinatra and the like. 

Myers would kill himself a few months later, but he was one of the best we ever had.

Now like I said, I had a soft spot for WMCA, partly because their night time DJ Gary Stevens was creatively wacko, but mostly because of the busy signals. 

Like most stations, they’d run the “be the 12^th caller when you hear “She Loves You’” and you’ll win….” type of nightly contest. But soon, teenagers all over Long Island and Brooklyn would discover a strange secret: the world’s first dating site. The phone lines, you see, would get overloaded every night, and all of us at once would get busy signals, and it would be like Hey! (BEEP!) You! (BEEP!) What’s (BEEP!) your (BEEP!) name? (BEEP!) Mine’s (BEEP!) Herbie (BEEP!) Hershkovits (BEEP!)…for hours at a time.

Ridiculous as it now looks, it was then like discovering a surreptitious underworld, and I met new friends (and went on not a few dates) from there during my pimples-and-braces phase.

But my most vivid and life-giving memories of New York radio were the early days of FM. Just as the United States military found out the true meaning of “unintended consequences” with their invention of the internet, so did the FCC, when in 1965 they ruled that the AM stations that owned FM outlets had to begin developing original programming for them. Grudgingly, the well-established radio execs allowed their orphan stations to do whatever they wanted. No one was listening anyway, right? But within months, it became clear, they had been sitting on a gold mine all those years. (Imagine: rock ‘n’ roll actually sounds better without static!) (Makes me wonder what might be an equivalent hidden gold mine today.) Soon jocks were jumping over each other to leave AM when they realized the future of radio was on the FM side. 

In New York, a hip, black DJ named Roscoe (“Wanna take a mind excursion?”) helped pioneer the free form radio format, first on WOR-FM, and would soon be followed by Johnathan Schwartz; Vin Scelsa (a true master); and Pete Fornatale, the man who passed away just this last week. Pete was not only a jock but also a rock historian (his expertise was sixties rock and folk and folk rock). I met him once when I visited WNEW-FM back in the ‘80s when I was trying to fashion myself as a talk show host. I parked my cab late one night and went up to the station to drop off my resume. And there was Pete, with his friendly voice, spinning his own records. At the time, you could walk right in and talk your way into the sound booth, and that’s what I did. 

For a brief, anarchic time, FM would become the unregulated home of the golden age of rock, just as both of them would merge with and feed the counter culture. So an entire medium would be literally broadcasting the sound of revolution daily to every high school and college kid in America. And then many of us would be taking it to the streets.

Radio never sounded so good. Nor did rock ‘n’ roll. And neither, for a time, did we.

A Wink From The Sky

Sometimes a birthday can set you hovering above, and looking over, your life. And sometimes I want to be released or cleansed of something from the past that still blots the expanse of scenery.

I took last Friday off to celebrate the start of my 64th year, and spent it in my favorite spot by the lake in Prospect Park. While there, I went a bit deeper than I had expected.

This is about my mother dying when I was still a kid of fifteen. I was very close to this smart and scared and beautiful woman, and we never got to say goodbye. She knew she was suffering, and slowly disappearing, and, according to what happened with many women at the time, was never informed as to why. The Big C was a big secret. And this is a long story…for another day.

The point is, just at the time that I was starting to feel my adolescent oats, and beginning a healthy rebellion from her over-protective apron strings, she was yanked from me. Months before she died, my father had enrolled me as a co-conspirator in what we kept from her. So suddenly I could no longer be real with my mom about anything.

And last Friday, for an extended moment, the sky overcast with a hundred shades of gray, and the swans swimming and the ducks ducking, there appeared there above the lake a break in the clouds, revealing a brief relief of sky.  And the soft cottony tufts appeared to me like my mother’s fair cheeks, and somehow I actually felt her presence. 

Her image came to me vividly and suddenly I could see so clearly what my father had fallen in love with so long ago – the soft beauty, the rigorous smarts, the vulnerable, fragile grownup child.

And before her, I stood still sad with all we didn’t get to say to each other, and how I would never get to regard her as an adult, as a man. And how I never got to tell her all I carried so heavily inside.

And so speak I did…

Mom, there was so much that was left unsaid between us. And some of that, I must say, was how mad you made me at times. Oh God, did you ever piss me off!  And how I never got a chance to find the courage as a man to tell you all this as an equal and to your face.

But beneath that, and more important, is how exceedingly grateful I am to you for all you gave me – not the least of which was the gift of life! But also how you gave me Judaism and tried to civilize this rambunctious child, and instill in me a love of learning and consideration for others. And taught me how to care for myself as if my well being truly mattered.

And how eternally sad I am that I never got the chance to thank you for all you gave me, and say it right from my heart.

Mom, I’d like to think that right here, by this lake, and beneath this sky, on this solitary day out of time, you might, in some way, hear me now, and here, receive my thanks, because I could not possibly feel it any deeper, and right now you could not possibly feel any closer.  And to think this now is a true relief.

Right before I turned to go, I had one final image of her. She appeared before me as young and beautiful as I’d ever known her to be, and, giving me a knowing grin and a wink, she gestured with her thumb to an image of Shelley. It was as if to say, You got a good one there, kid! I’m happy for you!

It was a blessing I had never had the chance to receive from her.

I walked out of the park on Friday much lighter than when I had arrived.

 

What I Would Have Missed

In two days I’ll be 63.  Each time March and April come around, I realize the year-clock on my mind-wall is about to tick up to a new number, and I try to feel my way into it. The number 63 doesn’t rattle me too much. It’s still safely ensconced in the lower sixties. I could claim to be a young old man.

I’ll be working on Thursday, but will be taking the next day off to celebrate. And celebrate I will! Did you know I was born on Patriot’s Day and the anniversary of both the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and Bicycle Day?

Taking stock, the changes I notice are that I’m slowing down, but also calming down. I seem to be getting more content, the fire in my belly mellowing like glowing logs in a hearth. I’m a little more tired. A little more apt to want to stay home with Shelley on a Saturday night. To savor the tastes, sounds, feel, looks and aromas all around me here on my plateau.

And more apt to recall the climb, and enjoy the view.

And part of the view is to survey some of the paths not taken on the way up here. I like the concept of parallel lives – that in some alternate (or parallel) universe, there’s a Charley living a different life that’s due to different choices he made along the way.

So I wonder what would have happened if I had actually followed through with my friends and had left New York to start that coffee house in Sonoma in ’76.

Or had stayed at the executive recruiting firm and had built up that 401K.

Or had the foresight to ask my father for a down payment on a house in Park Slope in ’78?

Or had managed to withstand the loneliness of a breakup a little longer, and had not lunged out of longing, and on the rebound, for the woman who was to become my first wife.

Or if she and I had accepted that baby that had come up for adoption.

But up here on my current plateau, I look back from those parallel paths to what I would have missed had I taken them.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, they say, and my parents, who grew up in the Big Apple, had a son who decided to live there.  And there I bloomed where I have planted myself, and have lived a life that was not built on accumulating money and what it could buy. Which meant that I left that recruiting firm, and didn’t adopt that kid, and instead decided this time around would be primarily for my own benefit and for what I could give to others. Which meant I could take the financially imprudent choice of jumping career ships at age 40, and go back to school to learn to be a therapist. And as I’ve said before, from the moment I decided to do that, all the shit I’d been through in my life to that point was suddenly transformed into fertilizer for the benefit of my future patients. I got to do work that truly meant something to me, because working just for the money had left me with the gnawing, hollow feeling that I was wasting my life. This was a path forged earlier by being raised in an upper class suburban town called Great Neck, where I got to see first hand what money could not buy. This freed me from growing up with the slavish devotion to its pursuit. As Billy Joel would later put it,

“Working too hard can give you a heart attack, ack, ack, ack;
                    You oughtta know by now.

Who needs a house out in Hackensack?

                    Is that all you get for your money?”

 Instead, I made choices that left me financially insecure but therefore having to stay on my toes, always looking for new ways to reinvent myself.

And as a result of all these choices, I have less money than I would have had, but more to show for it.

And having stayed in one town for so long, I got to know a life of having friendships that have lasted 25 and 35 years and more. And of getting to see a city through its worst time, and now into one of its best. There’s been so much to learn here at NYCU, I may never graduate. 

And that first marriage? Well, I had to go through it to learn lessons that were unavoidable, and that then left me painfully single once again and learning so much about how to go through a divorce and traverse the dating wilderness that I started a workshop called Breaking Up Without Breaking Down, and began teaching wilderness skills in a course called The RelationShop. Which landed me on TV, coverage in the Times, and a full-page feature spread in Newsday, where they proclaimed me The Love Doctor. 

Which all culminated in a second tying of the knot that has felt like a reward for all the work I’ve done on myself.

Yes – what I would have missed!

So I certainly did it my way, as Frank would say. For better and for worse.

And from here I can see a clearing up ahead. Either a long and slow decline, or a fertile void I can grow and create something new and exciting in.  Or both. 

But I’ve done so much with my life already, that if I were forced to exit the stage now, though I’d be greatly saddened, the show would not feel to me like a tragedy. And that alone is as good a commentary as any on the choices I have made.