Month: September 2018

Bruncle, part two

The oldest sibling in a family where the first four boys were born close together gets no authority via birth order. Prophet in his home village and all that.

Add to the mix the unique distinctiveness of each of what eventually became the six of us, and there’s little chance that Son No. 1 could rule, or even supervise.

But add someone who splits the difference, age-wise, between yourself and your parents, and you have an ally.

Uncle Richard was the 180-opposite of the old saw about grandparents and children being so fond of each other because they have a common set of enemies. Richard got parental guidance from the same Bill and Julie that we did, but he seemed to absorb the sharper edges of the discipline and kept us on the straight and narrow without the cat-o-nine-tails my dad always swore he had in the garage.

Mostly, Richard’s gift was alternative activities.  We explored some of the simplest sites throughout Monmouth County, rain, shine or snow; long before “Sesame Street,” he sneaked learning into the fun.

He also had a sense that families should have traditions, even if they had to be manufactured. When he moved to the Shore from the steel mill town Dad had totally disavowed, Richard’s life hit a reset.

Our split-level development house was continually under construction. The downstairs rec room — a mini-hangar, really — at first was carved into two pieces to give Richard a place of his own. Then that wall came down and the fireplace went in; adios, picture windows. And this being the early and mid-1960s, the ceiling needed faux beams.

All of this inspired RAZ the playwright, director and producer. Who needs a barn? We’d start a tradition with a Thanksgiving pageant, and this was the perfect place for it.

From the beams, he hung bedsheets with thumbtacks. We had a stage.

He condensed the whole Plymouth story into a Ken Burns-ian script. A fire in the hearth added atmosphere.

Cardboard Pilgrim hats, white turtlenecks, black pants on the actors. As narrator, I got to wear my gold V-neck sweater with the black mock-turtle dickie sewn in. Quite snazzy.

Before we ate Thanksgiving dinner, we performed for Mom and Dad. I forget if there were others in the audience; maybe a younger brother not ready for prime time. A small crowd, regardless. Somewhere in the vast archives of family heirlooms, there’s a Super-8 reel of One Night Only on Riverbrook.

To this day, I can see our playwright-director’s beaming face: love, pride, accomplishment.

I don’t think we ever had a holiday play again, but that pre-dinner extravaganza was the foundation of many traditions my brothers and I did come to share, and which we’ve adapted and continued in our own families.

… to be continued

Moon dances

Fairy tales are filled with nocturnal characters. A goodly chunk of them are servants or guardians of some sort: They shine shoes and fill them with chocolates. They craft ball gowns for orphaned princesses. That sort of thing.

The real world at night, it has servants and guardians, too.

Police, other first responders, watchmen and -women have to take a more cynical attitude because (a) there are fewer of them and (b) malevolent forces hide in the dark.

Not everyone on the street at night is a threat, but night people have their quirks. Some start that way; some evolve.

Though I’m mildly nyctophobic, I worked on night shifts for almost three decades. I’m a news editor and designer; at night is when my work got done. I chose the profession. The schedule chose me.

Before online banking or convenience banking, I chafed at the 10-to-3 bankers hours that were the norm. Stores, businesses, professionals open 9 to 5 or 8 to 4? Yeah, I was no fan of those, either. 

But the all-night Pathmark supermarket? That was a blessing.

RIP, Pathmark.

At 2 a.m. back then, you saw workers stocking the shelves with items the ad circular had promised 18 hours before but the store failed to display on time. This crew had a tight-knit camaraderie, and yet as individuals they presented as lone wolves.

Quirky.

Customers mostly grabbed the stray product or two they’d need for the kids’ breakfasts in four hours, or pre-sliced cold cuts for their own lunches, to be eaten around 9 p.m. Fellow night-shifters. You could tell the schedule had chosen them, as it did me.

The PJs people … young parents grabbing diapers or milk, older folks buying light bulbs.

Then there were the hard-core vampires.

Oh, these were not goth-looking folks, usually; more often than not they were in surgical scrubs or other uniforms. Tired, a bit worn and dirty, and clearly living their days upside-down.

These folks, you see, had full shopping carts, with a week or more’s worth of everything from apples to zinc supplements.

These folks … I’ve always admired them. Some clearly are working multiple jobs for the betterment of their families. Some are working a schedule opposite a partner so there’s an adult around the house always. 

It’s not a fairy tale for them, but they make it as close to a happily ever after for their families as they can.

Sine sinews

It’s been said there are two kinds of people in America, those who shower before going to work and those who shower afterward.

Though the sentiment could be considered classist, it reminds us of the dignity of work, all work, when it’s done with pride and honesty.

In June 1973, 45 years ago, I was a high school graduate for barely 12 hours when I grabbed a short-handle square-point shovel and waded into a pile of hot asphalt dumped at the end of a driveway that had to be repaired before Itaska Drive in Oceanport, NJ, could be repaved.

New jeans and workboots from Sears, a white T-shirt. Not quite a ditchdigger’s ditchdigger, but I wanted to look and feel like a real man on this summer job.

I danced around in the blacktop, doing more damage with my feet than making any progress with the shovel. In a matter of minutes, my jeans were nearly off my sweaty backside and my Tee was transparent, soaked through.

The foreman grabbed my belt and yanked me away from the driveway. I barked at him, “What’s the matter with you, man? I’m working my ass off here.”

He looked at me, shook his head, and said, “You may be workin’, but you ain’t producin’. Until you produce, you’re off my crew.”

When my first payday came around, he made me turn around, put my hand behind me, and back up to my check — a sign that, in his mind, I hadn’t earned it.

I vowed that would never happen again. Not on the road crew; not on any job.

It wasn’t easy to get past that, not at first. I was 5-11 and 125 pounds. The laborers called me “Muscles” because I had none. These were guys who routinely carried a cast-iron manhole ring under one arm and the manhole cover under the other.

No way I’d ever achieve that, even if it had been a goal.

But producin’. That was a different consideration.

Hard labor demands that you turn off your brain. Dig. Scrape dirt off curbs. Smash concrete with a jackhammer. Slice old asphalt with a cutter. No time for what-ifs or what-I’d-rather-be-doings. Thinking gets you hurt or, worse yet, injures somebody else.

Turning off my brain, though, was harder than hauling concrete.

Producin’. Hmm. How about helping with the daily report? The materials tickets? These guys were summa cum laude from the College of Hard Work and Harder Knocks, so the college kid was perfect for paperwork they detested, including the orders for coffee and buttered rolls.

I soon found the sweet spot between work and work, and after a while Ol’ Muscles actually had some.

Producin’ is everything. It takes hard work and the right skills, used to their fullest. It requires identifying what you’re good at, best at, and throwing your entire self into it. (No “percent” clichés here.)

I spent five summers, four winters and one autumn on that foreman’s crew. For nearly three-quarters of my life, what he taught me has guided my career.

Bruncle, part one

Innumerable articles have detailed the effect of birth order on persons’ trajectories and personalities, and in most, firstborns and middles seem to get the most attention.

As a firstborn, and as a “Jr.,” I have some skin in the game.

Often, firstborns are their parents’ experiment, the product of this chapter of Benjamin Spock or that episode of Fred Rogers. Either many mistakes are made or none, and if more children come along, the parents adapt, tighten up, loosen up.

Sons and daughters designated Junior or II or Chip or Deuce can be expected to follow in parental footsteps, especially if a parent is notable and/or if the child shows many of the same innate talents and skills as the parent. A double- or triple-whammy.

But what if the firstborn gets an older brother?

When asked about our family, Dad always answered, “I have six sons but seven boys” (later, eight, then nine, as other young men came under his tutelage).

His brother, Richard, 14 years younger than Dad to the day, came to live with us in 1960, to finish high school, college, grad school … and to drive my brothers and me to the Asbury Park boardwalk and Palace Amusements in a VW Beetle.

He’s the only person I’ve ever seen successfully grab the brass ring — often — on a carousel. Metaphor? Prognostication? Perhaps.

Creative, loving and hard-working, our brother-uncle changed the birth-order dynamic slightly yet dramatically. 

… to be continued

All that glitters

Why are precious metals precious?

What makes platinum, gold, silver, copper and gemstones valuable?

Darned if I know.

The four big shiny things are marvelous conductors of electricity, in descending order; perhaps in millennia long ago they made their wearers tingle or something. And these days they make our hand-held technology tick, though glass fibers — from relatively common sand — are replacing ductile metal strands in communications.

I don’t buy the rarity argument, either. Komodo dragons are rare in New Jersey, but I wouldn’t emulate the gold-panning Forty-Niners and leave my home in a hunt for them.

Shiny rocks.

I wear two pieces of jewelry, both of them signs of a relationship with my beloved and with the Creator who brought her into my life. A simple wedding band and a pendant with the head of Christ under the crown of thorns. My smartwatch doesn’t count as jewelry; it’s a tool (albeit with more apps than I’ll ever use).

Please know, this is not a criticism of folks who wear jewelry. I don’t object to it (as I said, I have some).

I just don’t understand the gold etc. thing. Never have; doubt I ever will.

So every time I hear a radio ad for a gold IRA or see a TV commercial for precious metals, I think about investing in hammers and nails. In vaccines to cure Ebola and river blindness.

Well, maybe some copper. As in pipes to bring clean water everywhere it’s needed.

No energy crisis

I don’t believe in auras.

(In general, I also don’t believe in starting a post or homily with “I,” but sometimes it’s necessary.)

I know many people are convinced they can see glowing fields of energy around people — all people, usually — and that the auras change color or intensity or both according to the aura’d person’s mood or other factor.

I’m sure my dubious fashion choices would clash with an aura if I had one.

I do believe in people’s energy. It often manifests as inexplicable attractiveness, but it’s far more than that.

Certain people can walk into a room and there’s a Super Trouper-level spotlight surrounding them. In the theater or in show biz, we call it It.

The It Girl. The It Boy. My Lawd, they’ve got It.

You know It. I don’t think It can be measured by a PKE meter or a Geiger counter or anything remotely quantitative, but you definitely can tell when somebody has It and somebody else really has IT.

You can nurture It to its fullest, but It has to be planted early in a person’s life, even at birth. Maybe her It started as raw intelligence; perhaps he was born with a bio-mathematically perfect Denzel face.

Sometimes people come close to fully realizing their It, but fall short, and there’s an incompleteness about them. Their energy is a little off. Maybe that’s what the aura-seers perceive.

The best It People have developed to the max, and then share, humbly, their gifts. Many are leaders; few are bosses. And, yes, they draw a crowd. If the It People are fully actualized, that crowd turns into a group hug.

Share and share alike

It’s no secret, far from an elephant in the room, even, that people are more divided than ever.

Whether you attribute the situation to tribalism or a more caustic “ism,” the gaps between us are real, often deep, frequently wide.

Too deep, too wide to cross? That’s a matter of choice. As, of course, is everything when you’re a person who lives and not merely exists, who actively progresses and not passively goes for a ride.

The first choice is to acknowledge that the notion of shared experience is an incredibly flawed one. You can’t experience my life any more than I can be a Blackfoot or a Zulu or a woman.

We can choose to listen and empathize, not as someone else’s hero or savior or scapegoat, but as a fellow traveler.

I want to know who you are, what you’ve experienced through all your senses and through all your emotions and thoughts. Your experiences really can’t be shared, even if we were at the same event side by side, because our previous experiences will shape how we react, internalize, commit to memory.

Your memories, and your interpretation of how your experiences shaped who you are … those, perhaps, you will choose to share with me, so I may know you a bit better.

I hope to accomplish this with humility.

Love’s Labours

First and foremost, thank you for weekends, whenever they arrive, Sabbath or otherwise. Thank you for coffee and lunch breaks. For OSHA.

Thank you for this holiday.

Working people’s contributions aside, there’s a bigger significance to this weekend. This is back-to-school season, or as retailers have been saying since July 4, BTS.

Having somebody in school means packing lunches or slipping the lunch money into a pouch where asshole bullies can’t find it. Checking homework, first over the student’s shoulder and next via Google or our professorial friends who know we’re mangy at math. Disabling the snooze button, because the schoolbus maintains a tight schedule. Filling shopping carts at Target and Staples, in person or online.

Thank you, FedEx and UPS.

We don’t have anybody in school anymore, PhD candidate notwithstanding. Still, the rhythm of the seasons is guided not by the angle of the sun but by the bell or buzzer or tone for the first class of the day on the first day of the school year. 

As former students, we all feel that tug. We’re conditioned from pre-K into the workaday world to shift gears on Labor Day.

Beaches close. So do carousels and Skee-Ball. Pizza doesn’t taste as good.

Politicians shift into eighth gear for Silly Season.

Of course it’s manufactured. Of course it’s Pavlovian or Skinnerian. The air really isn’t hissing out of the balloon (not with a near-heat wave kicking in).

That doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Because it sure feels real.

P.S. I don’t love you

OK, that’s a deceptive teaser headline.

It’s not Pumpkin Spice coffee — sorry, not a latte guy — that I dislike. It’s the timing.

Go out to a farm in the Garden State and look for pumpkins. They ain’t ready yet. The zucchini are still winning the battle of agricultural manifest destiny. The tomatoes still own the title of most colorful, with sunflowers and zinnias close behind. The corn is as high as … well, R&H fans know the rest.

I’ll swill P.S. in October, when the third drawer in my dresser reopens and I retrieve my sweaters. I’ll take it intravenously, as I do any sort of coffee (except hazelnut).

Yes, the aroma tempts me now. The hype grabs my attention.

But not as much as 90-degree days with cut-it-with-a-machete humidity. And as long as those show up in the 10-day forecast, P.S. I don’t love you. 

P.S. — as in postscript — Hot Coffee. Iced Tea.  There are rules.