Remember, O man, that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.
Each Ash Wednesday during my eight years at St. Leo the Great School, we were marched up the center aisle of church, class by class, a single file of boys alongside a single file of girls, to be reminded of our mortality.
For the first four or five years, we knelt on the red velvet cushion at the Communion altar rail; after Vatican II dictated the rail’s removal, we inched forward in that same center aisle in those same single-file lines.
It was years before I realized the black schmutz that was being absolutely mashed into my forehead with that scary prayer was supposed to be in the shape of a cross, not merely the pastor’s thumbprint, and that the blessed ashes came from the burning of the previous year’s palms, not what we emptied out of the pencil sharpener.
It was years before I understood why we were being reminded that life is short:
We have only so much time to do good, to care for each other and to care for all of Creation as a sign of God’s Spirit within us. So get cracking!
It was even longer before I fully understood that this prayer leaves out the best part:
Through his painful crucifixion and glorious Resurrection, Jesus conquered sin and death and made a home for us in Heaven.
When to dust our mortal bodies return, to our loving Almighty Creator our immortal souls return.
May this Lent offer us all 40 days of quiet times and thin places to meet our loving God.
You’re a poet, and you don’t know it, but your feet sure show it: They’re long fellows and they smell like the dickens!
The assignments at St. Leo the Great School could be challenging, and by that I mean they often challenged us to get out of our comfort zones. They challenged us to think outside the box. They challenged us to try something new.
A little over 45 years ago, I stood in the living room of my college advisor, a beautifully wild man with wild hair and a creative spirit that had lit a fire in me and under me.
I was helping him pack.
He had not been granted tenure, and his contract was up, so he and his young family were heading out to his wife’s family home to work on their next steps.
It was, I recall him saying, the first time in 32 years that he would not be going back to school on Labor Day.
The all-night Pathmark had an ambiance and a community all its own.
Well, maybe “community” is stretching it. At 2 a.m., the Pathmark had an assortment of fellow travelers who only slightly acknowledged each other’s presence as they scooped up everything from the cliché bread and milk to a full week’s — or full fortnight’s — load of groceries.
Those folks — often, myself included — qualified as visitors, or as casual members of the aforementioned community. The permanent “residents” — shelf stockers, Michelle the cashier who did other stuff but I’m not sure what, truck unloaders — to them, Pathmark in the wee hours was their temple.
People who work at night, or whose jobs start at zero dark thirty or end at bar-closing time, might as well be elves, considering how they’re often viewed. What they do seems to happen magically, reliably, predictably. Often quite creatively. Just as often, not. And that’s OK. It’s all necessary.
Think about who those folks are. We’ve met the Pathmark natives; the visitors included women in surgical scrubs, men and women ostensibly in the custodial field, the occasional peace office or first responder, new parents (usually dads) lost in the baby food aisle, fashionably dressed commuter-type people, and past-deadline journalists.
Every one of them — every one of us — are doing something at night so the rest of the world can function during the day.
Though it’s been years since I worked the evening or night shift steadily, I still come alive after the sun goes down. It’s odd, considering I have … well, not exactly a fear of the dark, but a low, unconscious dread of what may lurk in the uncertainty that darkness engenders.
I find I’m most creative and most productive under artificial light, the gloom barely an arm’s length away. Other people draw more deeply into their own selves as any given day winds down, which offers me the solitude I need to concentrate most fully.
I love people, but, oh, that Cone of Silence!
I think again of the night crew at the late, lamented Pathmark.
I was in the store more than once when Michelle announced lunch break (hey, it’s lunch when it’s in the middle of your day, regardless of what hours you consider to be your day). But unlike the chatty, energetic midday meals shared by coworkers I came to see in my 9-to-5 days, the night guys scattered, ate quietly, and with their body language threw a DMZ around themselves.
Which made me review the others in the store. Most of them, and especially the regulars, had portable DMZs around themselves. Not antisocial, but asocial.
Because this was their time, whether by choice in the first place or by making the best of the situation.
Some social scientists say that we need alone time in amounts that correspond directly with how deeply, how intensely we absorb the world around us, and especially how deeply we connect with other people, how much of their crosses we help them carry.
That may well explain it: This disconnection, enabled by a night schedule, can help people be better spouses, parents, friends, children of the Almighty. I prefer to believe this, and not that those people are cranky sourpusses.
Of course, with the store long gone, I’ll never know for sure.
As we grew up, and as the family grew in number, dinnertime at Bedside Manor I on Riverbrook Avenue was a semi-sacred ritual. The dining room — literally an extension of the kitchen floor — was home of the massive Fedders window A/C unit, the one Dad had a 220-volt outlet installed for. The only other electro-cooler in the house belonged to Bill and Julie; the rest of us either got our fill of chill at the evening meal, or pretended the attic fan actually got some air moving.
All year long, but especially in the warmer months, we crowded around the elliptical table with all three extension leafs jammed in, sitting in mostly matched chairs (but not all), elbow to elbow, scoping out the mixing bowls and pots and pans (why wash serving dishes as well as cooking pots), and hoping the nice ear of corn was still there when we got to grab.
Dad spent as much time as needed with each patient, which led to a crowded waiting room that lived up to its name, and which also led to irregular times for dinner. We always ate together; at least, that was the case until high school evening activities superseded the sacred supper.
Having Richard at the table with us was a treat because (a) he came pre-loaded with after-school activities (student council, basketball) and (b) he did a great job of translating and otherwise diplomatically shuttling between us kids and our parents.
He also was a font of quirky trivia.
One evening, when the air outside was easily 100 and the Fedders was huffing and puffing but far from blowing the house down, dinner became like a picnic.
Ants.
Fat black ones.
Fat black ones moseying across the dinner table, one of them on the back of my left hand.
I finger-flicked it with my right hand to somewhere in the living room and headed to the downstairs half-bath to wash my hands.
“You don’t have to,” Richard pointed out.
“Why not? Ants are dirty. They’re in the dirt all day.”
“Dirt isn’t dirty,” The Seventh Boy explained, detailing silicates and organics and dust and probably — memory fails me here — probably a few words about the billion-year-old carbon Joni Mitchell and CSN immortalized.
At this point, having mentioned those artists, I invoke the spirit of Arlo Guthrie to say that’s not really what this story’s about.
This story is about white knuckles, which shine through any amount of dirt, dirty or not.
In the early 1970s, as it had throughout the decade before, our driveway hosted a Ford Country Squire wagon, never more than 2½ years old, and some Volkswagen product.
Ford and Veedub. Veedub and Ford.
For a short while, Richard broke the string with a bit of swing.
A Dodge Dart Swinger, to be precise.
This metallic green coupe — not lime, not khaki — with a darker green vinyl roof, was all straight lines and rectangles and simplicity itself, and it was all his.
The Dart, with its slant-six engine and Torqueflite transmission and torsion bars and leaf springs, was cherished by engineers for its engineering and by economy-minded people for its economy.
Style mavens? Puh-leeze!
Did I mention, though, that it was all his? Muy importante.
The Day of the Ant with the Non-Dirty Dirt (we never did find it post-flick), as the evening was starting to soften into twilight, but not fully, Riverbrook was quiet; all the dads were home and their cars were in their driveways.
“You want to drive around the block?” Richard asked.
Every emotion known to humanity plus a few I invented on the spot flooded the 15-year-old me.
Richard started the Swinger, backed it out of the driveway into the wide-wide 90-degree curve of Riverbrook where our house sat, dropped it into Park, popped open the driver’s door and slid across the vinyl bench.
I climbed in, pleased that I didn’t have to adjust the seat or the mirrors, looked around, stepped on the brake and shifted to D. The Dodge idled forward.
I nudged the steering wheel slightly to the right so that we weren’t taking our half of the road out of the middle, then overcompensated, overcompensated again, and finally got the aim correct.
Mind you, I hadn’t touched the gas pedal yet.
“You can accelerate a little more,” Richard said, and my gentle (I thought) tap on the gas made the car jump. “OK, good, that’s enough for us to get going,” he said.
We eased down to the next 90-degree, and I braked. The original intent was to slow down, but my heart was revving more RPMs than the slant six, so instead of heading right, then another right, then another right and down the hill into our driveway — once around the block, remember? — I handed the wheel back.
Well, actually, Richard gently and lovingly pried my hands from the wheel. If there hadn’t been finger grips on it before this drive, I definitely squeezed them into the hard plastic.
Smiling, without a comment, Richard resumed the driver’s role and brought us home.
I remember the empathy — his knowing that any teen in Jersey wanted to drive so bad he could taste it like pork roll. His sympathy — not compounding my unexpected fear of wrecking his car or otherwise misusing a ton of Detroit iron. His calm — instructing without barking.
It may not have been much of a driving lesson, but it was an extraordinary lesson in life.
Back in college (waaay back), a friend had a poster tacked to her desk’s bulletin board, sort of encapsulating the typical student attitude.
When I works, I works hard.
When I sits, I sits loose.
When I thinks, I falls asleep.
Yup.
We could joke about it then, because we were doing all three at the same time, each of us at our dorm desks or in the Boyd Lee Spahr basement after hours or in some lounge somewhere.
For students, thinking was work, work we could be proud of, work that even now we look back on and wish we had done more of, or done differently, or done at all. For students, thinking was going to lead to action, and many, many of my contemporaries did indeed turn those thoughts away from Morpheus and instead toward Hermes or Ares.
Since then, Morpheus seems to be in favor again.
It’s difficult to listen to what passes for political-economic discourse these days and not sigh, let alone despair.
We’ve descended into sixth grade, where eggheads are mocked and the notions of academic achievement and intellectual work are belittled in favor of manual labor.
This is not a model for success in the 21st century. It certainly wasn’t in the latter half of the 20th.
To be clear: There is extraordinary dignity in manual labor, done by folks who bathe after their day’s assignment, and not beforehand.
There is a great sense of achievement in having something physical to show for eight hours or more of sweat and aching muscles.
But those opportunities are disappearing, disappearing fast. And they’re vanishing quicker than they can be replaced by something equivalent — unlikely — or something that requires retraining. One of those “when I thinks, I falls asleep” opportunities.
We do everyone a disservice when economic policies (see how I avoided mentioning “trade war” or “tariff” here) focus on manufacturing or manual labor and diss intellectual efforts.
Agent Gibbs may be building yet another boat in his basement, but he always dopes out a plan when he is chasing a murderer or terrorist. And, besides, there are plans for that boat, too, even if they’re up in his gray matter.
Skilled craftspeople can fashion a deck or a desk or a dock with a carpenter’s square and a tape measure, but that’s because they’ve worked with enough sets of diagrams and schematics that they can infer a new set for the current circumstances.
In short, there’s always a plan.
That plan qualifies as intellectual property. On paper, on a hard drive, in the human mind, that plan came from thoughts and calculations and formulas, and lives on as thoughts and calculations and formulas that can be duplicated and extrapolated and improved upon.
Thoughts and calculations and formulas that came from intellectual pursuits first, and actions second. Think, then act.
I don’t care if X, Y or Z is manufactured in America as much as I care whether or not it was conceived here, designed here, if the manufacturing process was fashioned here. That’s the value in this equation.
When I hear how these so-called trade policies are supposedly designed to bring jobs back, I scoff, because if more of these items are again made here, they’ll be made by machines. Assembled by automatons. Riveted and ratcheted by robots.
And that’s only if Americans design the processes, the automation to achieve this. Because no American in Wisconsin — native, native-born or immigrant — is going to work for the same pittance that Foxconn pays in Taiwan. And if Foxconn does indeed do any manufacturing here, they’ll want extreme efficiency.
The solution must be a greater reliance on the kind of intellectual growth that teaches critical thinking, not how to pass standardized tests.
Here’s another example:
Amazon is asking its workers to quit and start their own delivery services, to get work from Amazon. That’s in part because Amazon is rolling out machines that can pack delivery boxes 12 times faster than humans. There’s no arguing with efficiency.
It takes savvy to run your own business, and even one seemingly as simple as a delivery service has levels of complexity that call for brains.
The Luddites failed 200 years ago. They will fail even more spectacularly now, because these weaving machines are infused with artificial intelligence over and above their artificial brawn.
To love our workers, to deliver jobs, jobs, jobs, we must teach, teach, teach and teach some more.
It’s been as long as a presidential term, or a stint in local government. It’s been longer than what we call four years of college, longer than the time we owned any of our Country Squire station wagons in the 1960s and ’70s.
Dad died in the early-early hours of Feb. 11, 2015. He was 85⅔. He had been sick, really sick, though none of us knew it until nearly the end.
His illness was not the only unknown.
As we came to realize that Dad’s time was almost at hand, my brothers and sisters-in-law and Andrea and I recalled things about Dad — things we did, things we said, character quirks. It became obvious quite quickly, quite startlingly, that each of us seemed to know someone a bit different from the person the others knew.
Each of us had a different story to tell, and some of us were hearing them for the first time.
To be clear: This was no multiple-personality situation, not in a clinical sense. Dad was many things to many people. Many, many, many people. He gave of himself generously, and could mingle with titans of industry (his favorite) as easily as he did with row-house ladies who reminded him of the residents of the steel-mill town he left behind in 1947.
It just was a shock to learn things about our father on his deathbed. Finding out that some things we recalled as funny or cute had a slightly darker edge … but which always led to redemption, resurrection, renewal, lessons learned.
Just. Finding. Out.
Beyond unexpected.
In my four years in college, longer ago than I prefer to note, I did learn a lot, terrible GPA notwithstanding.
In the last four years, though, what I’ve learned is that I knew just a few facets of this not-fully-polished diamond, and that’s all I ever will know. And I’ve learned that I’m not alone in having a parent shrouded in mystery.
I also learned that other people had fathers and mothers whose lives were open books, family albums in the flesh, and of them I’m jealous.
I’m savvy enough to understand why Dad pulled on his cloak of invisibility, even when it led to his under-communicating with my brothers and me. Understanding helps dull the sting, a little.
Because he had given so much of himself to so many people for nearly half a century, and because he feared — or at least suspected — that his people would want just a little more, Dad essentially dropped off the face of the Earth when he retired to Florida. He huddled with his core friends, played golf and cooked, traveled internationally with a sand wedge in hand, and when golf slipped out of his life, he slid into a chair in front of a huge flat-screen TV.
“This! Is! Jeopardy!”
His retreat from the wider world pulled him back from us, and in that retreat, as his memory faded and dementia took his edge, his secrets were sealed in the vault that eventually would become his tomb.
It’s been four years since the night we sat in chairs around his bed, hearing him tug for each breath, pressing ourselves to stay awake while he transitioned into his final rest. Our memories are the ones fading now.
I’ll never know everything about him that I want to; I won’t even know what I don’t know. But I do know that I can’t and won’t be as much a cipher to my family when it’s my time.
First, check your guest list: How many will be brunching with you today? The calculations start with one (you) and go up to 12 semi-hungry folks, six mostly hungry people, or four would-be lumberjacks. Then, check your fridge: You do have a dozen eggs, right?
Next, clear a space on the counter, or, if you’re Felix Unger, on a large flat cutting board.
Grab a loaf of bread. Round-top is better if you have a round frying pan; otherwise, sandwich will do just fine. Place one slice of bread flat on the counter (or the cutting board; sheesh) and start jabbing at its center with your index fingers until you’ve flattened a circular area about 1½ inches in diameter. Gently pull that squished piece away from the rest of the slice, leaving a nice hole.
A lumberjack gets three of these. Other guests, two or one. Poke away until you have enough slices to accommodate their appetites, one egg per slice.
Heat up some cooking oil in a large frying pan. Add the bread only when the oil is hot enough to make a drop of water dance. Otherwise, the bread will soak up the oil, which will cause a host of problems. Let the bread sizzle for about 30 seconds.
Now, with extreme care, crack one egg per slice and center the yolk into the hole (aha!), letting the white spread over the rest of the bread. Try to get all of them cooking as quickly as possible so they can be turned together.
As soon as the white is opaque, flip the concoction with a spatula, being careful not to break the yolk. Or breaking it, if that’s your preference.
Keep an eye on the eggs; you’ll know when they reach your preferred doneness.
Salt and pepper to taste.
Of course, Uncle Richard occasionally added ketchup. That’s OK; this is his recipe/procedure, and his contribution to the culinary education of his nephews.
As soon as any of us hit 10 or so, Mom would let us do some basic cooking, as long as she or Richard were supervising. Egginnabread — it has dozens of names and hundreds of variations, but this is how we made it and what we called it — egginnabread was the first foodstuff that challenged us to know about oil temperatures, cracking eggs, flipping foods. The index finger thing added flourish that I use to this day. For silliness, I usually add sound effects to each jab, boops or explosions to brighten the morning.
Richard taught us the secret of pancakes — the popped bubbles that call out “Flip the flapjacks.” And the real magic — fry up some bacon first, leave the grease in the pan, crumble a couple of the well-done pieces back into the grease, and ladle in the batter.
He taught us cookin’ with love.
I later tweaked a recipe he taught me, as a defense against a proselytizing babysitter.
Mine was bluer than this….
Creamed chipped beef on buttered toast. SOS, to Greatest Generation members and their kin. Entree and dessert in one, to this Baby Boomer.
I recently had learned that food coloring adds no flavor. Who knew? If it was blue, it had to taste disgusting, right? Nope. Same as always; just blue.
Three or four drops of cyan into that white floury goop, and EP left me alone all night. No stern warnings from the Book of Revelation.
I’ve spent the last few days reading farewell columns written by superb journalists — close friends and acquaintances, personally and professionally — as they accept retirement offers from our former employer, a media giant. Many of the retirements came earlier than my friends or I expected, and some of us are rewiring more than retiring.
I continue to insist that, for now, the only retirement I’m considering involves Michelin or Goodyear treads.
The farewell columns share a common theme: It’s been a great career, and here are some of the highlights.
Journalists have a lot of amazing memories, because we’ve been there.
Political conventions and town councils. Super Bowls and high school gridiron rivalries. Broadway and the Broad Street Players. Rolling Stones and forgettable tones.
There’s not a one of us who’d have traded a moment of it, and there’s not a one of us who’s not a bit smug (and yet a bit sheepish, too) about the experiences we’ve had that many “regular folks” haven’t, and likely won’t.
I’ve had dozens upon dozens of seats on the aisle at plays and concerts. I’ve dined with celebrities, seen movies’ world premieres, ridden Kingda Ka eight times before paying customers got their first whoosh.
Sweet.
So, of course, when we look back, journalists have a lot to reminisce about, a lot to wish we weren’t leaving behind.
We got to meet Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder and Gene Hackman. Mighty Max, Clarence and Bruuuuce. Bernie and Cory.
We got free meals, Hilton points and air miles on the company dime, conventions and conferences we needed passports to attend.
Really sweet.
But please remember — and this is important — we did it for you. We were your eyes and ears and noses and sometimes your scorched cheeks, covering accidents and fires and robberies and trials and political events where your tax dollars were being allocated.
We celebrated your births and engagements and weddings. We cheered your Halloweens and New Years. We helped bury your dead.
We met with grieving parents to learn about their children’s lives, cut short. We tried to make sense of terrible diseases afflicting old and young.
You didn’t have to be there, because we were.
There are fewer of us now, continuing a spiral of attrition that some folks simply, glibly call the death of newspapers. But there are fewer of us in magazines and TV and radio as well. Fewer eyes and ears and noses and cheeks to represent your interests. Fewer of us to kick over the rocks that snakes and cockroaches hide under. Fewer of us to shine a light into dark corners, to use that antiseptic sunlight on your behalf.
Every one of those beautiful, bittersweet farewell columns signifies loss. Loss of the best career I or any of us could have imagined for ourselves, yes. But loss, mostly, for those who still need the news, even if they don’t realize how much they do.
The Ford dump truck was long past retirement, as probably was the shotgun passenger.
The July sun was searing the young man and the grizzled laborer through a hole in the truck’s cab’s roof, first punched there by misloaded rocks or asphalt and then widened by rust.
We’d finished a job that morning on the southern end of Monmouth County and we were expected at another site, about 20 miles away, after lunch.
We’d grabbed lunch at a local gin mill; for me, it was the $1.25 forgettable special and a short whatever was on tap and cheap, and for my partner du jour it was a shot with three tall ones as chasers. Obviously, not a sandwich or blue plate guy.
As soon as he’d tossed back draft No. 3, I hustled him into the truck and fired it up, using our size to muscle into back-to-work traffic.
“Hey, I didn’t get my full half-hour,” he growled, to which I replied, “We gotta get to Oceanport.”
“We’re on the clock, kid.”
I agreed with the assertion, not realizing at the time we actually were poles apart.
“We’re on the clock, kid.” To him, it meant slow down, we’re getting paid while we crawl up Route 36, the boss should be happy we’re taking his money, the boss should be happy we deign to punch his time clock.
“We’re on the clock, kid.” To me, it meant we’re getting paid for what we produce, that otherwise we’re taking the boss’s money with nothing to show for it.
I’ve not had to punch a clock or fill out a time sheet for all but four non-contiguous years of my career; I’ve been “exempt” in nearly all my roles as a journalist. The task’s size and complexity — and deadline; always a deadline! — dictated the clock.
Maybe it was my upbringing. Dad stayed at his office until every patient had been cared for.
Maybe it’s my temperament. I want to see the finished product, the completed task, which made news a perfect career: There’s always something to see and touch at deadline, whether it’s a complete newspaper or a digital post.
It’s probably why I don’t start certain projects I know will need multiple sessions to finish. I don’t always like to do but I thoroughly enjoy having done.
And I concede the anti-capitalists’ point that anything I produce belongs to the company, but I still get a sense of accomplishment. That’s mine.
We’re on the clock? Perhaps, but I don’t watch it.
Well, maybe “community” is stretching it. At 2 a.m., the Pathmark had an assortment of fellow travelers who only slightly acknowledged each other’s presence as they scooped up everything from the cliché bread and milk to a full week’s — or full fortnight’s — load of groceries.
I think again of the night crew at the late, lamented Pathmark.
A Dodge Dart Swinger, to be precise.
To be clear: There is extraordinary dignity in manual labor, done by folks who bathe after their day’s assignment, and not beforehand.
But those opportunities are disappearing, disappearing fast. And they’re vanishing quicker than they can be replaced by something equivalent — unlikely — or something that requires retraining. One of those “when I thinks, I falls asleep” opportunities.
