Time Slow, Life Rich

We grew up in a US time when horses were still used to deliver milk and baked goods, and collect recyclables (generically called 'rags' back then)... It was a slow time, when summer days were a week long, and to get from Saturday lunch to the starting bars of the first Looney Tunes of the Saturday matinee with 25 cartoons and cowboy double-feature took about 3 days.

There was no tv then, so all we could do in the living room was live. That was mostly at night. During the day, if not at school daydreaming out the windows we were always out playing, up to many miles away, on foot or bicycle, often taking our lunch with us. The radio was in the kitchen, for listening to after dinner or while doing the drudgery of homework while Mom did the ironing.

The only apparatus in the living room was the big clunky iron telephone you had to dial, then wait for the dial to roll clickingly back till you could whirl in the next number but there were only 5 numbers in those days, since there were about 2 billion people in the world and only a tiny portion in Albany. My Brady/McTeague grandfather, an electrician for the phone company, had one of the standing phones with the earpiece on a side hook and the dial at the bottom, like in all the old black-and-white fast-paced newspaper movies. "Get me the desk!" Things began to change palpably when the phone numbers started getting longer. Where I live now my number is 10 digits long, 15 or more if you're calling from another country.

We had no Victrola, as phonographs (itself a neoarchaism now!) were called back then; the only person in the family who had a Victrola was my Robinson/Kelly grandfather, a NYCRR conductor, who had a then merely quaint wind-up Victrola in his basement, with a big morning glory megaphone where the sound came out. Next to the whizzing green felt turntable it had a little metal cupful of playing needles like headless finishing nails that lasted about an hour and were attached to the tone arm by vising them in place with a knurled knob.

The living room in those days was where guests sat and chatted or Dad read the newspaper in the big red easy chair under the standing lamp by the window after dinner. On really rainy days when we had friends over or went to their house, we played in the living room: checkers, cards (War was a favorite), chess, Monopoly, Clue, Go to the Head of the Class... but when the weather was even remotely tolerable (in winter there were no limits) and we didn't have measles or mumps or whooping cough we would never in a million years have stayed inside, we'd be out somewhere exploring, playing, finding stuff to do all day long, even into dark in summer, home only to eat then out again, except for the detested but implacable Saturday night bath.

Each of those days was about a week long. The school year was about a decade in length, but seemed longer. I remember one time at the end of summer vacation realizing it would be 9 months till summer vacation, an impossible duration, as time-distant as the Civil War, which had ended only 80 years before, when great grandma was a teenager. Then at the start of summer vacation, school was almost 3 months away, in the heart an essentially unending length of time, though we knew better.

Comics were a new thing then too, this was only a few years after the first Batman, the only copy in existence now a crumbling million-dollar item. I used to own millions of dollars worth of comics at today's prices, bought them for dimes I got doing odd jobs in the neighborhood, original Donald Ducks, Little Lulu, Mad, Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel and all the many others, read 'em and tossed 'em in a pile, filled my wagon and went trading comics in the neighborhood.

It wasn't a better world in many ways, there was more manifest prejudice, for example, and pollution was the norm-- litter wasn't even a full-blown concept yet (the word 'litterbug' was the winner of a contest to give the phenomenon a name), and though age and nostalgia likely play a big part in my perspective, it seems from here that many of the technoadvances we now enjoy have been achieved at the cost of time's depth and richness. The journey is where the treasures are.

In a Tarzan movie I saw one long-gone Saturday afternoon, Tarzan is shown a movie on a screen set up in the big white hunter’s jungle camp; on the screen Tarzan sees a train rushing at him and panics. "That train in the picture can go from coast to coast in three days," explains the civilized white guy. "What for?" asks Tarzan.

In so many ways, those were the days.

Tall Enough to Tell the Tale

You've got me there, Bob (see previous post); but as I've been saying more and more frequently lately, it seems to be the names that go first. That means I've got a lot of nameless faces floating around in my head these days, but I've learned to cherish the memories, with or without the names. I do remember that face vividly, though, and also remember his parents - and that '50 Chevy - very well.

I also recall spending an afternoon fishing with him from a rowboat out on the still, cold waters of Brant Lake in the Adirondacks. He was a true character, full of piss and vinegar; and unless my mind is telling tall tales on his behalf, I believe he landed what looked to be a pretty good-sized smallmouth bass that day. Of course, I was far more excited about it than he was; perhaps it looked much smaller to him?

I have a much clearer memory, though, of the dart sticking out of the back of my hand at the Delaware Tavern than I do of the legendary "turkey" moment, for understandable reasons. Not only did it dampen my love for the world of darts (a tough blow for one raised in bars), but to this day I have mixed feelings about the memory itself.

It seems that initially the crowd of revelers greeted my childish mistake - foolishly reaching for darts on the board while someone sober enough to stand but too drunk to see, was about to launch his shoulder-fired missile - with a roar of laughter. Time and the blessed imagination of the Irish, however, have given me a better ending.

As I stood there staring at my impaled hand - Christ-like, virtually nailed to the board - I calmly reached up and drew out the offending projectile, jammed it into the bullseye, and walked slowly back to my seat, droplets of blood tracing my footsteps to the table.

The silence in the room was palpable; but its vacuum was suddenly replaced by a deafening roar of cheering, clapping and the stamping of feet, quickly erasing any vestiges of shame left in my heart. Clutching my bloodied hand with the other, and lifting my head to the onlooking crowd, I whispered hoarsely, 'Don't worry, my friends; it's only a flesh wound.'

How do you remember it? Did I leave anything out?

Author's note, added the following day: I was lying in bed last night, about to drift off to dreamland, when suddenly the ceiling above my bed opened up to reveal a vast midnight sky filled to overflowing with glittering stars. From deep within a bank of silvery clouds came a voice, saying "Bobby! Bobby! Bobby Van Buren!" Then I fell into a deep and restful sleep until the room was once again full of sunlight. Morpheus always seems to do his best work in that twilight zone between wakefulness and the semicoma of deep sleep.

Dartboard

Hey Mick, got a question for ya--

Remember Chark and Lilian Van Buren, who lived across the street from us and VFW Post 6776, had a then supercool salmon and gray Chevy (1950? another question) and their son X one night hit a turkey on the dartboard at THE dartboardly perfect moment and the house went wild (not the time you got a dart in your hand, I think; kindly elaborate on the dart-in-hand memory and its fringes)-- But my question is: what was the name of the son?

(He had one of the first motorbicycles in Albany that I know of, he explained it to me in front of Einstein's Pharmacy - early 1940s)

Superheroes

We know how it is, we elder superheroes.

We know because we remember. That's what it's all about, in the end: remembering.

We remember how it was-- sure, we used to move at the speed of light, but we didn't let it go to our heads too much, that was the key: we learned how to handle the gift.

And a great gift it was, to Shazam our way out of any situation, or fly whenever we wanted, just like Captain Marvel or Superman with only a magic cape stolen from the bathroom tied around our neck as we whizzed down the street on foot or bike, looking back to see the supergarment flowing out behind us as we flew through the surrendering air, some of us even tried it out of a second floor or higher window but hyperreality has its limits, even for superheroes with x-ray eyes.

Anyway we didn't fear tall buildings, we could walk fencetops, we could leap broad chasms at a single bound if we had our Keds on and yeah, we used to fly from branch to branch of high trees as good as Tarzan with a slingshot in our pocket and even if we fell we got up and carried on toward our date with destiny, maybe with a cast on, but time travel was easy then, we were superheroes - born that way, like all kids are in their own fashion - invulnerable of course, we boys in my case, no matter how fast we were flying, except against mumps, measles, girls and other forms of kryptonite.

We all remember the dashing and heroic era, our time of swords and capes, six guns and pen knives, slingshots and peashooters, all the need there was in the world of then that required our presence and our attention: the woods and the waters, the dark, the haunted and high places, the things that could explode, the creatures in distress needing rescue in that world where we could run down the stairs like water and cartwheel at will and roll down hills like logs and jump higher, skate faster than anybody, then later in those early years stay out all night and swing from chandeliers on our way to world-saving in between dates with ladies in distress who caused cartwheels in our hearts...

We had our shot when it was our turn, we did our duty when it counted, we saved the world all by ourselves, did our bit to get to now and now it's time to rest, to remember, advise the new superheroes how to handle their gift, tell them of the do's and don'ts we've learned by heart, tell our tales of the intrepid, sit back, have a sip, dig up some more treasure, try to eat an apple...

We can still fly, by the way. Hand me that towel...

leaving a room

room one:

It was not that I was a bad child, but it was clear early on that I seemed to have a gift for mischief. Consider, for instance, the quiet summer morning in 1944, a day when my father was probably busy taking out machine gun positions in the forests of Germany, while my mother was attempting to hold down the front lines at home. I had just been sent to bed for disturbing the peace. We all had to pitch in and do our part.

Only two and still in diapers, I had been incarcerated for over-reacting to an injustice perpetrated on me by my older brother: he had thrown my stuffed monkey off the front porch. Outraged that insult had been added to injury, I chose this moment to escape from my crib and climb out the bedroom window to rescue my little comrade, still lying, broken, on the sidewalk below.

Hanging only by my fingertips, I seemed to have no fear I'd come tumbling down, apparently lacking a grip on the gravity of the situation. Once out the window, I couldn't quite figure out how to get down; but I wasn't about to let that stop me: rock-a-bye baby be damned, I was going to retrieve that monkey.

Fortunately for me, though, my mother had grown suspicious when the bedroom suddenly grew silent, and after discovering the empty crib she spied my tiny fingers digging into the second-story windowsill and reeled me in. It would prove to be the beginning of a lifelong pattern.

room two:

I must have been staring at that page for a good ten minutes. It was as blank as my mind, except for name, date, subject, school, up there at the top. Nothing else to add. Or subtract. Or multiply. An algebra test may work for others, but it sure didn't work for me. I walked up and handed the empty page to Sister Ann Marie, walked out into the hallways of Cardinal McCloskey High, and who do I bump into but the Principal, Father Turner, on his way to mail some letters.

"What are you doing out here, son? Class just started ten minutes ago."

"Well, Father, I finished my algebra test early."

"Come with me," he said. "I'm going out to mail some letters." Father Turner, a man given to few words, was utterly silent as we walked all the way down the hill to the mailbox. We then walked back up the hill in the deepening silence, and as we approached the school steps, he turned to me and said, "Go empty your locker, and don't come back again.", an eerie echo of Jesus' words to the adulterous woman, "Go, and sin no more.", except for the complete absence of Christ's love. It would be my last day as a Roman Catholic.

room three:

Bag in hand, all earthly possessions but my Gretsch drums and Zildjian cymbals inside, I kiss my mother goodbye and, in what would prove to be my final (and least convincing) James Dean walk, head down the filthy housing project hallway to the stairs. Just before descending into the inferno, I turn to see my mother crying in the doorway, now reduced to a sagging silhouette.

Both boys now in the Air Force, off to God knows where. It was a near-fatal blow for her, I knew; all the men in her life were now gone. No one left at home now but my thirteen-year old sister, Suzi, and her. I was leaving on a silver plane.

Hormones on the Range

Today, I shall briefly address that deep and timeless puzzle of life that involves growing up as a young boy (in my case during the 1940s-50s), going to a favorite movie theater on a Saturday afternoon at any time of year and there having to sit through the disgusting sight of my favorite hard-ridin', hard drinkin', quick-drawin' cowboy hero slowly but surely getting roped in despite his matching pair of pearl-handled six-guns, being all smarmy and shucksy and even sometimes kissing a grownup girl to the yucks and boos and retchings of the nearly all male prepubescent Saturday double-feature audience, who either averted their eyes or showered the screen with a hail of popcorn, Raisinets, Milk Duds, Necco Wafers, Junior Mints, Jujubes, Juicy Fruits, Good and Plenties, Mason Dots, Mary Janes, Black Crows and whatever other anti-smarm ammo they had at hand. Weren't these movies made for guys? Like us? What the heck did girls have to do with it anyway? Why did they always have to make movies with long, icky scenes like this in them, where the hero's heroism just melts away before our disappointed eyes? Didn't the moviemakers know what life was really like?

Nothing in that young and intensely male universe was more deeply disturbing, worrisome and revolting than seeing Tom Mix or Gene Autry or Lash Larue or Whip Wilson or Hopalong Cassidy (Roy Rogers too, but he was already married, so it was too late anyway; he had Trigger though, and at least he never kissed his wife) getting all weak-kneed around a perfumy-curly girl who couldn't fast draw to save her life, or even throw a baseball right!

What was going on here, what was all this romance stuff, why were our heroes doing this, we used to wonder en masse in those velvet seats in the boo-filled darkness, not yet having even an inkling of the vast herd of longhorns that was about to stampede through our bodies and minds, leaving our boyhoods back there somewhere in the dust of the heroic wild west; no knowledge that you too, cowboy - ace pitcher, fast-ridin' Delaware Avenue gunslinger that you were – would soon be getting all smarmy and weak-kneed yourself, stammering like a lovesick cowboy in front of the girl of your dreams of the moment...

From the present promontory of my life, though, even as a once-upon-a-time hero and gunslinger I simply can't remember what it felt like to be so hormonally innocent, revolted at the sight of a kiss...

And to think we all expected to go on like that forever...

Fearful Sweetness

Jesus, it suddenly hit me, they were all down there in that basement, just after the war and the survivors were home, the spring of '46. Even now I can hear the yakkety-yak, the striking darts, the cackle and gab, smell the beer, deviled eggs and cement dust, perfume, cologne, fresh clothing, cigarettes and cigars, the grownups with their drink-smoke breath leaning down to me now and then to tell me how I've grown, even as I look at the photo 60 years later. That was back in the days when the generations drank together, and all the guys and their wives, relatives and friends rented this place, this joint's basement, where one afternoon they drank beer and shot darts, danced and got drunk and took photos like this for the kids to look at one far-away day as grownups, when the war and all the personal destruction that followed had long been spun out into the rusted gossamer that is history, me here today with only little-kid memories of all these people, who look a lot younger than they did then, the women quite girlish now that I'm well past their captured age; the elder, once-ancient folks in the photo are only as old as me now, and with beers in their hands they're standing there around the folding chairs, on one of which sits my mother not much older than my daughter is today, and with a look of such now-obvious anxiety on Mom's face - it's taken me this much life to see it - she must have sensed even then, surrounded only by Dad's friends and relatives, how alone she was and was going to be, how without allies in that group of jovial-looking characters, and though she never told me such a thing I must have sensed it in her all along, known it without knowing, as children do, for what I remember most strongly about that afternoon - like the short-lived attempt at familyhood that followed - was the mood that filled it, of fearful sweetness, of an unnamed goldenness going away, a mood like dust motes in a sunbeam on a paper-thin afternoon, and it cuts me with the edge of half a century that despite all the fears and all the joys in the photo, not one person in it is now living, to tell me more about what I feel...

Swing Low, Sweet Pontiac

In the fall of 1963, I was a young airman stationed at Griffiss Air Force Base in upstate New York. I had recently returned from a tour of duty just outside Istanbul, Turkey and the Rome/Utica area just didn't have quite enough magnetic pull to keep me in town on weekends. I often hitchhiked the Thruway to Albany, not just because it was my home town, but because it was a place that had a hell of a lot more going on.

On one of those Friday afternoons I was standing roadside with a buddy of mine, a fellow airman, for what seemed to be a very long time. In hitchhiking, as in everything else, there are good days and there are bad days. Things were not going well on this one, and we were growing discouraged. Finally, though, this fairly ordinary-looking Pontiac sedan pulled over and we grabbed our bags and took off down the road and jumped in; me up front riding shotgun, Pete climbing into the back seat.

After rolling along in silence for a while someone finally broke the ice, and then all three of us began rambling on about everything under the sun. Being guys, we eventually stumbled upon the subject of baseball. Our driver mentioned in passing that he used to play the game himself, a remark that went unnoticed for awhile, and we continued to rattle on and on about facts, figures, heroes, etc. Besides, we had all played baseball in the past, hadn't we?

Then, for some reason, it occurred to me to ask exactly what he meant when he said he used to play baseball. Well, he said, I started out playing in high school, then went on to play in the minor leagues. Wow, we said in unison, did you ever make it to the majors? Yeah, I was in the majors for a while. Holy cow! This was getting interesting. Real interesting.

The Thruway can seem like one long endless ribbon of road when you have no one to talk to, but on this one particular autumn evening, I was completely unaware of the outside world. It was just getting dark, and before continuing his story, he slowly reached down to turn the lights on. His face, now illuminated by the dashboard, revealed the unmistakable signs of mischief: an impish little grin at the corners of his mouth and a twinkle in his eye.

I thought he was going to string us along for a while, just for laughs, then admit he was joking. It would have been a pretty damn good laugh, too, because he had us - hook, line and sinker. OK, OK, spill the beans; who'd you play for? The New York Giants, he said quietly. The New York freaking Giants? Are you kidding me? You played for the Giants? You mean the farm team? No, I was in the majors for a few years. Really? What's your name? Robert. Robert Thomson.

Hmm, that didn't ring any bells with either of us, and for a few seconds there we were all suspended in this agonizing silence; and then, all of a sudden, it hit us! You couldn't... possibly... be... Bobby Thomson? Yep, that's what they used to call me.

Holy Jumpin' Jesus! Bobby Thomson! The man who hit the most famous home run in the entire history of the universe; the home run so famous they called it 'the shot heard round the world.' We were stunned. Speechless. To this day I don't remember very clearly what happened after that; I recall the two of us going nuts and jabbering a mile a minute for a while, then settling down to listen, enraptured, to all the details of that day, from the man who had lived them; how he had no memory of running the bases, how he threw up as soon as he reached the locker room, and on and on into the night. We were in the hallowed presence of the biggest Giant in the world.

It was one of the great rides of my life, despite the fact that he had broken my heart when that ball soared over the fence in the last out of the last inning of the final playoff game for the 1951 National League pennant. Though he had delivered a crushing blow to every fan of the long-suffering Brooklyn Dodgers that year, there was no way around the fact that it was a moment of high national drama, a lightning bolt across the American sky, a crowning moment in baseball history. When it happened, I broke down and cried. I was 9-years old.

But on this particular night, I relived it with him, I rejoiced with him. Why? Because the Dodgers, the team I had earned several bloody noses defending as a youth, had finally paid me back for my undying loyalty just a few years earlier by moving the team to Los Angeles, California. The final indignation came when Ebbets Field was torn down and that hallowed ground was covered with high-rise apartment buildings.

Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that I would one day be riding shotgun for the very man who had hit that pitch. But here I was, not only riding alongside him, but cheering for him, celebrating with him. It was all very clear to me; I had finally been avenged. Go, Bobby, go, Bobby, Go!