Category: Ruminations

Thoughts, often rambling, on events, past and present, sometimes morphing into fictive narratives meant to continue the theme of those thoughts. For instance, I travel off occasionally to the edge-of-Boston tavern called, The Last Mile. There may, over time, be other escapes.

DIM (SUNSHINE) SUM (FORTUNE)

There is still a faint smudge of soy sauce on it, the tiny strip of paper that bore my fortune, formerly nestled in the shell of one of those barely edible cookies with the cardboard texture. I don’t recall the date I got it, but it would have been some time late in the summer of 1979. I’d finished my meal at Yung & Yees on Church Street in the heart of Harvard Square, after which I cracked open one of those coiled-up wafer that arrives unfailingly with the bill  — an enduring novelty of Chinese eateries.

Ah, The fortune cookie! Mine read: YOU ARE HEADED FOR A LAND OF SUNSHINE.

Well, well.

I’m about to tell you why that little missive from out of Y & Y’s kitchen aligned so coincidentally with one of my life’s major changes. It made for a remarkably poignant moment for this otherwise thoroughly orthodox non-believer in any kind of fortune-telling.

Surely you’ve cracked open a few fortune cookies of your own; been bemused by the content.  Those “fortunes,” for generations now, have been bland aphorism or trite faux-Confucian Words of Wisdom ( i.e. “a labor of love is a labor indeed”). I got one not long ago that was a variation on the philosopher Descartes’s famous nostrum, “cogito, ergo sum.” Reading like a translation from the Chinese, it said, “I think and that is all that I am.”  Who knew the poisonous legacy of Age of Enlightenment would turn up in fortune cookies?

It’s occurred to me that mass producers of fortune cookies took the measure of our litigious, post-religious age of fragile psyches and rampant superstition.  They decided against dispensing even seemingly harmless life forecasts. The better to avoid  lawsuits by troubled souls who take their fortunes far too seriously, e.g., “you will soon find true love and happiness.” The disappointed-in-love might do something truly UNfortunate to themselves or others, God help us.  I’d wager a few palm-readers or mediums have been hauled into court or faced death threats.

Of course, fortune cookies in those Chinese emporia go with the beaded curtains and plastic kitsch. Crack it open, read the fortune, smile, eat the fragments (maybe) and leave the fortune for the busboy.

I forget whether it was lunch or dinner for me that day at Yung & Yee’s. I had things on my mind. I was 32, unattached and holding a Boston University graduate degree in Broadcast Journalism. I was at the end of a memorable, if unremunerative career as a newspaper reporter. I’d been five years in a rent-controlled studio apartment north of The Square and was due for a rent increase. I’d been waiting for word on my effort to secure a television job — it would be my first commercial television job — in Florida. I knew Florida only from postcards, supermarket citrus product and those long-ago bus advertisements inviting us to ‘come on down.’ And, indeed, I’d ‘gone on down’ for the first time the previous May to visit a former Cambridge roommate. I’d been enchanted by the florid, sub-tropical American life among gentle Atlantic breezes along Biscayne Bay, the lively, trendy neighborhoods of Coconut Grove and the colorful Cuba-celebrating streets of Little Havana. A Miami television reporter was not immediately within reach for a beginner in TV news. I’d have to work first in a smaller TV market. So I’d gone looking for work during that short stay and reached out to people at the CBS-affiliate with the whimsical call letters WINK-TV across the state in Fort Myers. I’d been told to stop by for an interview. Accordingly, I rented a little Chevrolet compact, driven west across the wild, watery “river of grass” known as the Everglades and met with an avuncular and endearing retired Pittsburgh sportscaster named Tom Bender (Lord rest his soul). He was then the acting news director at WINK. I’d shown him my video resume reel and gotten a favorable reaction.  He gave me hope of possible employment. So I was waiting for word….

I was still waiting on that summer day in ’79 when I  cracked open my fortune cookie. There it was:  YOU ARE HEADED FOR A LAND OF SUNSHINE.

Days later, word came: I’d been hired by WINK on Florida’s west coast, aka, A LAND OF SUNSHINE. My commercial TV career began there in stark humidity and some sunshine. It was the culmination of a drive south pulling a Uhaul trailer with my non-air conditioned ’75 Dodge Dart. I was stalled briefly at a motel in Savannah by Hurricane David, a relatively minor storm that gave me a chance to ponder the coming changes in my life. My first day on the job at WINK was September 10, 1979. Florida was a bit of culture shock. I’d half-expected that.

Much has transpired in my life, many reversals of fortune and some blessings — best among them, a son — since that first time in The Land of Sunshine. I’d work there again — twice at WTSP-TV in Tampa/St. Petersburg. Tampa Bay’s 10, as they are known.

And now, in semi-retirement, here’s the unsettling and mysterious and surprising part: I’m back to Florida — for the third time, lock, stock and barrel — for financial and other personal or ultimately, and frankly, uncertain reasons, having surrendered a beautiful townhouse in Lancaster, MA that I miss terribly, along with life in Central Mass where I was in fairly easy reach of my old Boston and vicinity stomping grounds for wakes (sadly) and for impromptu reunions with childhood friends from Dorchester.  Not that there aren’t many Boston natives and old friends here in Florida. Some days it seems the State House golden dome is right above the palm trees. But there were all those new friends from the past two decades in Clinton and Lancaster, MA, and the guys on early Saturday mornings at Lou’s Diner…. And I’m living, at the moment, in a mobile home in central, hot, swarming Pinellas County. The mobile home is — pink.

No, I’m not at all sure what I’m doing here this time. I suppose it’s a long story, as if this story isn’t already long enough. Ultimately, I think I’ll be back in the cold and sleet and high prices and fraught  New England politics  — for a final chapter. For now, I’m back in the standardized, sun-baked, palm tree – accented land of six-lane traffic. Oh, yes, there’s far more here than that, and much that is wonderful and beautiful, most especially including old friends and colleagues  from my old Florida days. And the Gulf beaches.

But some wild restlessness, some outsized fear of dwindling funds probably drove me here this time. What retiree hasn’t been battered about by such fears? That’s part of it, anyway.  As I said, it’s all rather uncertain. Sheer — fearful unrest. And homesickness, so recently after leaving home.

Home is where the garbage is, said the rat. Along with baggage, we acquire a lot of garbage in our lives.

But I spared that little old strip of paper — that fortune —  the fate of Yung & Yee’s garbage pale.  It’s yellowing under plastic, reminding me that what’s truly elusive in this life is that true Land of Sunshine. I’m still looking….

 

A SEPTEMBER SONG

This September day — September 23 — will always be a sad day of remembrance for my family. But before I get to the reason for that, some thoughts about the meaning of any September day….

Near the end of my career — it’s appropriate, given my subject matter here, that it would come near the end — I did a piece about the month of September, its resonances, it’s moods, its bittersweet positioning in our lives as a bridge between seasons. (Now, if you just chanced into this site like an early autumn leaf twirling down randomly in someone’s yard, I should tell  you that I was a television reporter in my working life. The “piece” I refer to was a “story” or, in TV new parlance, a “package”. And while it is rare that a news reporter is allowed a fill up a big patch of valuable time with a “package” full of personal ruminations, I was so indulged by my managers, for which I remain grateful.)

For one thing, September has obviously seeped into multiple songwriters’ subconscious, because, as  you may have noticed, there have been so many songs written about this month — more, it sometimes seems, than April, May or June whose crocuses and rosebuds have long supported the themes of re-birth, young love and the seasonal charm of Paris. (True, in T.S. Eliot’s “waste land” April is the cruelest month, but that lives on as a jolting and nicely executed act of poetic inversion.)

People sing of Autumn in New York and Autumn in Vermont, when the leaves are gold and beautiful. But in September, while the leaves begin to turn, summer breezes and summer temperatures seem to prolong, confuse and taunt us with a lingering sense of the vacation season just past — even as the flowers whither, the summer clothes and beach chairs get put away and the jackets come out for the first chilly days —  and darkness comes earlier and earlier.

Therefore, the songwriter’s mood at the onset of this month, inescapably, might be somber. In my “piece”, speaking of pieces, I rolled in pieces of the familiar September songs — “September in the Rain”, “September Morn”, “September of my Years” as my photographer gathered shots of me wandering  meditatively through Boston Common in a trench coat. I hoped for him, on that September day, it would be a happy diversion from a videographer’s usual round of car wrecks, train wrecks, politicians, criminals, criminal politicians, political train wrecks…etc.. The daily junk of every season. I believe he enjoyed the break — especially when I got a bunch of children from Boston Children’s Theater dancing to Earth,Wind & Fire’s “September”, a bouncy bit of musical funk I’ve always liked — conveying, as it does a less lachrymose spirit for the first month of autumn.

The most famous of the September songs is “September Song”.  Kurt Weill wrote it and a wonderful Berklee College of Music professor named Jimmy ( who’s last name I will insert here whenever I locate or remember it) sat at the piano and explored the mood-adjusting chord shifts for me, from hope to sadness. The lyrics follow those shifts:

But it’s a long, long while
From May to December
And the days grow short
When you reach September

The lyrics takes us forward. We pause, as does the melody. We look back, we look around….

And the days turn to gold
As they grow few
September, November…

Pause. Memories, both harsh and tender, rush in.

And so do they rush in for my extended family on this day of September grief:

That’s because my sister Anne died of pancreatic cancer three years ago, September 23, 2016.  I got the phone call  as I sat waiting in a lawyer’s lobby — waiting to sign papers to buy the townhouse where I sit writing now. It was a September moment — sorrow, not unexpected, at the precise moment I’d found a plateau safe from a torrent of tormented circumstances….

My life had been unsettled for several months following my end-of-2015 retirement. Thanksgiving weekend, 2015, having bid my 17-year workplace goodbye, I’d driven nervously through nights of rain to Florida where the prospect of some sustaining work for extra money awaited me — or so I thought. Extra cash would be necessary, I thought, to make retirement possible. But I sold a mobile home there and drove back when those prospects didn’t pan out. I stayed three months at my friend Diane’s cousin’s house west of Boston, where there was another prospect for free-lance journalism or broadcast work. In Massachusetts, I assumed I’d absolutely have to work to make ends meet. Ultimately I wound up driving back to Florida — to Diane’s son’s little white beach house in the Florida Panhandle. This unexpected retreat became necessary when it was plain we were staying longer in someone else’s house than etiquette and two rambunctious dogs would allow, and when it was also plain work wouldn’t be coming my way any time soon in my home state.

What followed, briefly, was a period of peace and refuge facing the Gulf of Mexico among migrating Monarch butterflies — until a hurricane temporarily forced an evacuation inland to Greater Atlanta and the home of one of Diane’s other sons.  When the storm passed, we returned to the beach house, relieved to find it still  standing, though the waterfront road was completely gone.

All this while Diane was skillfully working to secure a beautiful townhouse back in Massachusetts, one town over from where I’d lived before retirement. Ultimately, that led to yet another drive north — and that moment sitting in the lawyer’s office, waiting to close on this, my current home — at least for a few more days.

I recall, after that September 23, 2016 closing, walking out into downtown Worcester, Mass. The September day was a mild day of muted sunlight. The air was absolutely still. No breeze, no city noises. It was peaceful. My sister, after a brief but intense illness, had died quietly among her husband and children — back down in Florida. She, too, was at peace. My return to Florida had allowed me to visit her one last time. I last heard her voice over the phone while sitting outside a little store in the Panhandle. She was serene, resigned. She would have been 78  that December….

As they grow few
September, November…

Now, once again, I’m moving. Don’t ask why. Finances, yes. Sitting surrounded by half-filled boxes, preparing for the movers on Thursday,  I am wondering, has a September restlessness nested permanently in my soul? Why am again uprooting myself? Why am I leaving this beautiful place? I’ll pray about that, just as I prayed before making this decision — a decision to return to Florida where the Septembers are intensely humid in my memory ( l lived and worked there a full ten years in my career). But while I was able to do free-lance work here, that work has completely dried up. I was lucky to this point. In Florida, I think I can get by with little or no extra work. I’ll see….

But I know this. I know I’ll be back among old television colleagues and Florida friends and relatives who’ve relocated there — and that finally, I’ll be able to visit my sister’s grave in Sarasota. And visit with my still-grieving brother-in-law.

And these few golden days
I’d spend with you
These golden days I’d spend with you

And that, for now, is my particular September Song.

 

ON BEING OURSELVES

Best be yourself, imperial, plain, and true. — Robert Browning.

Really? Robert Browning, whom I admire, would likely have rued the day he helped spawn the current age of the Imperial Self.

Leaving aside the poet for the moment, I stand at this hour on the conjoined shoulders of two delightful contemporary writers, Heather Wilhelm and Derek Thompson, neither of whom are particularly well-known. Heather, in this case, was writing recently in The National Review, Derek in The Atlantic. Each in their turn set out to skewer the “Be Yourself” culture being propagated on coffee mugs, t-shirts and bumper stickers.

Let me, at the outset, ask this question: would any of us have encouraged Jeffrey Epstein to “be himself”? It appears, in the end, even Jeffrey was glad to take leave of himself.  Or, touching lightly on theology here, it seems Jeffrey, alone in his jail cell, feared the consequences of actions committed by the “Jeffrey” he had become which, I submit, was very different from the Jeffrey God intended him to be. And my Baltimore Catechism tells me there’s ultimately no escaping the consequence of bad deeds freely done by ourselves, be it our good self or our bad self. Of course, divine mercy may work differently than the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. But in the sweet by-and-by, I suspect no lawyer can help the perversely self-ish.

You might be a determinist or some rigid iteration of Calvinist and believe we are doomed by a capricious deity to be either wretched or blessed “selves”. I can see the Army drill sergeant standing over the recalcitrant basic training trainee he – or she — is about to send to the stockade for conduct unbecoming a soldier. “Our slogan, trainee, is ‘be all that you can be”, whereupon the trainee answers, “this is all I can be, sergeant, take it or leave it.”

Heather Wilhelm was moved to her meditation on the culture of “self” (that’s the name of a magazine, too, right?) by the “dictum-spouting screen” at her New Age dentist’s office, “relentlessly instructing me to be myself, no matter what.” Why? Well, as best Heather can figure out, because “everyone else is doing it, too.” Who’d have thought Emerson’s 19th Century celebration of self-reliance would devolve into the modern plague of Groupthink?

Derek Thompson, meanwhile, writing on The Atlantic’s website, was examining the cultural implications of online dating in which “anybody who feels obligated to select the ingredients of a perfect life from an infinite menu of options may feel lost in the infinitude.” (I’d be tempted to begin my online dating appeal by quoting that Emily Dickenson poem: “I’m nobody, who are you? Are you nobody, too?”)

“Gone are the days,” writes Thompson, “when young generations inherited religions and occupations and life paths from their parents as if they were unalterable strands of DNA.”

Well, I hope they’re not gone, even though, in our relativistic culture, we are apparently all free to invent our own “truths”  and our own “selves.” Herein, of course, lies the big problem. Was Jeff Epstein following his own truth? Just being himself? DNA: Do Not Ask.

Ms. Wilhelm, meanwhile, has helpfully catalogued some “be yourself” exhortations from the lips, blogs and tweets of our pop culture favorites. Lady Gaga, for instance, tells us, “don’t you ever let a soul in the world tell you that you can’t be exactly who you are.”  Or Taylor Swift: “If they don’t like you being yourself, be yourself even more.” (As they used to say of the mechanical rabbit at the Wonderland dog track, “there goes Swiftie…”)

Oscar Wilde’s dictum is Heather’s favorite. Mine, too: “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.” She also likes the t-shirt that says, “Always be yourself. Unless you’re a jerk. Then, be someone else.”

I’ll buy that.