Real Life at the County Fair

I used to have a picture of my daughter at age three, a green and yellow John Deere cap – much too large for her – tilted precariously on her head. She’s sitting in my lap, and both of us are perched on the seat of a Deere Series 8410 tractor. I have no idea what’s become of it; probably stuffed into a box in some obscure corner of the barn, no doubt, but for some odd reason the image has stuck in my head all these years. I think we were at the New Hampshire State Fair in Hopkinton or one of the county fairs – Hillsborough or Cheshire most likely. I love the fairs; I love them in a way that only someone city born and bred can. In this place, where I’ve lived for the balance of my adult life, there are trees, and flowing water, and fields full of wildflowers in the summer and the hum of bees in the air. I almost always see a horse, or some cows, in the normal course of an average day. I grew up, however, in Jersey City; where all that was left of nature were these little horseshoes of dirt carved neatly out of the sidewalk, spaced about twelve to fifteen feet apart. These were the only clues that once, long ago, there had been a tall, shapely elm or ash in that spot, whose roots had buckled the pavement. They were reminders of a time when (so my mother told me) cities were still green places, not so cut off from the natural world, before the cars, the factories and the diesel exhaust slowly and inexorably choked the life out of them. A time when there was a veritable canopy of trees, arching over from both sides of the street, which stretched all the way down our block and practically every other block in the city.

This is why you’ll most likely see me on opening day up to the County fairgrounds yet again this year, I think. It is an attempt, somehow, to immerse myself fully and completely in this place, to make up just a little for not having been born here. I want to consciously distance myself, if only just a bit (because there is something to the notion that it is possible to take the boy out of the city, but not as easy to take the city out of the boy), from the time I spent growing up with the noise of busses and sirens, with concrete and asphalt and the ghostly footprints of trees long dead. I will gladly spend the day watching the Border Collie herding exhibitions, the oxen, draft horse and tractor pulls, the lawn-tractor races. I will take the time to walk through each and every stall where cows and pigs and sheep and goats are being tended lovingly by diligent 4-H-ers, admiring the hard work and patience it must have taken some eight-year-old to research and set up the poster board presentation, complete with illustrative drawings and photographs, on the different breeds of domestic hogs and how they go from farm to table.

Besides, I am a bona fide tractor junkie. A day at the fair means a walk through row after row of harvesters and hay wagons, balers and brush hogs, tractors as big as a house whose enclosed cabs have air conditioning and AM/FM six-speaker Stereo CD players. I harbor no illusions, mind you. I’d make quite the lousy farmer; in fact, I’m sure that just a week’s worth of work – heck, a day’s worth – at one of the local dairy farms would probably kill me. This has never stopped me, though, from climbing up onto that John Deere equipped with a Model 338 square baler (twine or wire), and imagining for just a moment how different, and how much better, my life would have been if I’d been raised here, in New Hampshire, on a farm. It is why I take my daughter – I want her to see and smell and hear all these things that are at the heart of growing up in the country – so that they may be a part of her, root and branch, wherever she goes, for the rest of her days.

I have a clear memory of one particular visit to the fair, in 1989. I remember it specifically because the three of us – my wife, daughter and I – had just returned home from a vacation to Disney World in Orlando; a trip that I’ll return to a little further on in this narrative. For the moment, it is enough to know that my daughter is five years old, and she and I are picking our way carefully through a field full of livestock trailers, pickup trucks and RV’s. Scattered among them are small groups of two or three people each, sipping coffee in paper cups and finishing off the last few crumbs of a take-out breakfast. Several of them congregate under stained and battered roll-up awnings hanging awkwardly over the side doors of their Winnebagos. The air is full of the sharp smell of manure mixed with the sweet odors of caramel corn, fried dough and cotton candy. As we stand with our backs to the mid-morning sun, on our right in an adjoining field are pavilions full of goats, pigs and cows; and a-ways off to the left there is a fenced-in ring containing five incongruously well-dressed teen-agers of varying heights and genders, all with potentially prize-winning sheep tethered to their sides. The sheep look somehow hopeful (visions of blue ribbons dancing in their heads?), the teens all with concerned faces and furrowed brows. Each serious-looking young man or woman is making a final pass with a large, flat carding brush, or giving a last-minute clip to an errant piece of wool sticking up from an otherwise perfectly flat and impeccably groomed coat.

Fairs are noisy places. There’s an unintelligible babble coming out of a PA system a short distance away, which competes for our attention with the sound of screaming guitars blaring out from over where the carnival rides have been set up. Underneath it all, like the drone of a bagpipe, is the unmistakable dull roar of farm equipment off in the distance, warming up in preparation for the tractor pull. My daughter takes my hand and leads me, following Led Zeppelin’s siren call, towards the bright, noisy midway. I try unsuccessfully to steer her the long way ‘round so that I can get a glimpse of the tractors, but she is determined, holding on to my hand with both of hers, to bring me in a beeline to our ultimate destination. She knows, even at this early age, how easily distracted her father can get. We manage to find our way through the maze of sheds, barns, and exhibition halls (“See The Prizewinning Zucchini!”), avoiding the cow patties and piles of fresh horse manure that dot the pathways, toward the Fried Dough concessions, ring-toss games, wheels of chance and face-painting booths that are lined up on both sides of the carnival midway. The racket of the tractors subsides to a low rumble as we make slow headway up the crowded thoroughfare that leads to this portable Emerald City; loud, whirling and glowing. Each ride is outlined by hundreds of forty-watt bulbs, all lit (except for the few that are broken or burned-out) even though it is almost high noon.

We find the source of the music – two speakers that look as if someone borrowed them for the day from their brother-in-law’s stereo system – sitting in front of a large, black tentacled ride called, appropriately enough, the Octopus. At the end of each metal tentacle is an egg-shaped car holding one or more shrieking riders, hanging on for dear life with looks of intermingled joy and terror on their faces. My daughter watches the ride and its occupants for a moment, then tugs lightly on the sleeve of my jacket, indicating with a turn of her head that she wishes to move on. “It’s too loud, Daddy” is the only comment she eventually makes. She guides me towards a group of rides all enclosed with two dozen or so battered panels of free-standing moveable pasture fencing. There’s a makeshift archway over a break in the enclosure, and a brightly colored sign at the top of the arch that says “Kiddie Korner”.

An impatient pull on my arm gets me to move over to the ticket booth perched just to the right of the break in the fence. A woman with big, bleached blond hair, wearing just a bit too much eye shadow, sits in the booth smoking a cigarette. She snaps out a quick “How many?” to me as I push a five dollar bill through the curved slot at the bottom of the Plexiglas window. She takes the five and begins to count out tickets off a large roll. She looks up briefly, and makes eye contact with my child. The woman’s face immediately brightens into a great, broad smile. She asks “What ride are you goin’ on first, sweetie?” My daughter thinks for a moment and replies, “The roller coaster. Or the fire engines. Or the space ships.” The woman and I both laugh. She passes a folded wad of tickets to me through the window and says, as we leave, “You have a good time, hon!” I toss the woman a thank you as my daughter yanks me through the archway. I notice that, with only a few exceptions, these are the same rides I remember from the amusement parks of my own childhood – boats plowing around a small aluminum moat, miniature tanks and jeeps painted a camouflage green, forever circling an enemy position, red fire engines with bells to ring. I stand drenched in nostalgia for the briefest moment, until she makes her choice; she then marches us determinedly past the merry-go-round and the miniature roller coaster over to where the space ships are.

The space ships are just what their name implies – little child-sized rocket ships that look like they may have once been used as miniatures in the old Flash Gordon serials. You know (or maybe you don’t; I’m showing my age here, I think) – the ones with Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon and a wonderful character actor named Charles Middleton as his archenemy, Ming The Merciless. These diminutive Art Deco space cruisers each sit at the end of a long arm attached with hydraulic lifters to a central vertical shaft that spins them in a circle. In each ship there is a control stick that you can push forward or pull back. Pull it back, and your ship rises to what I guess is twelve, maybe fifteen feet above the ground. Push it forward, and the spacecraft floats gently back down. It is this element of control, I think, that my daughter enjoys so much.

While we wait patiently on line with four or five other children for her turn to fly to the outer reaches of the cosmos, I catch a glimpse of the young man who is operating the ride. He is of medium height and very thin, but very muscular, and seems to be no more than 20, or 22 years old at the most. His hair is long and black, a bit greasy, pulled into a loose ponytail; his face thin and somewhat drawn, with a sparse goatee. He is dressed in a black Lynard Skynard tee shirt and tight-fitting jeans. Rolled up in the sleeve of the tee shirt is what I can only assume to be a pack of cigarettes. There are several tattoos on both of his arms, the most prominent of which is a mermaid, topless, with large, round breasts. When the time comes, he flicks a switch and the rockets glide slowly down to earth. He goes around to each ship and carefully unbuckles the safety chain holding each child, watching as the older ones scramble out on their own, or gently lifting the littlest ones out and into the waiting arms of Mom, Dad, Grampy or Grammy. During this whole operation, the young carney has a smile on his face that lights up his eyes and showcases his two missing teeth. My daughter lets go of my hand and runs over to the ship she has picked out. Before I can catch up with her, the young man has already stooped down to pick her up, not saying a word, and places her in the rocket. He draws the safety chain tightly around her waist and clasps it to the eyebolt welded to the inside wall of the ship. She is nothing if not a polite child (we have raised her well), and so she thanks the young man, grinning broadly at him. He replies “You’re welcome, sweetheart, you have fun now”, and moves on to buckle up the next Buck Rogers wannabe.

I stood there and watched her, smiling and laughing while she flew her rocket ship up as high as it could go, shouting all the while “Look at me, Daddy, look at me!” In that moment I was struck, and struck mightily at the time, by the contrast between our day here at the fair and our recent sojourn to Disney World which I mentioned above. On reflection, I suppose the whole business is much too obvious and that additional comment would be (or, at least, should be) superfluous. In each case my child had a wonderful time, and so did my wife and I, for that matter, and perhaps that’s all that needs to be said about it. However, it seems that I am bound and determined to make a comparison here, so I’d best get to it.

Both places exist to entertain and, to a certain degree, instruct you. Both places are, at their base, trying to sell you something. Disney has its enormous media empire and symbiont tchotchkes; why just buy a copy of the movie The Lion King when you can also have a Simba plush toy, or pencil, or cup, or porcelain figurine, or snow globe, or. . . well, you get the point. The county fair exists to sell things too; first and foremost is agricultural life itself, along with farm equipment, vegetable peelers, Ginsu knives, Nelson’s Fudge, miracle oven cleaners and other wonders of the modern world too numerous to mention. And let’s not forget the tastiest food in the universe that is, at the same time, the worst for you by any nutritional criteria you care to name. Despite all this, however, I think it’s safe to say that state and county fairs, wherever you may encounter them, are quite possibly the antithesis of the whole Disney experience. First of all, they sound like a cross between a heavy-metal concert and a monster truck rally, and smell like an Italian street fair held in a dairy barn with a generous shot of eau du Diesel mixed in for good measure. Where the folks at Disney exercise total control to deliver a carefully crafted, slick experience calculated to thrill and delight, giving fun to all and offense to none, with no detail too small to be overlooked and everyone involved on their best behavior, the county fair is, by comparison, an orgy of chaos. There is, for one example, the whole business of manure. Now, something you simply cannot avoid running into at a fair is animal excrement in its many forms, from cow patties to mounds of horse manure to the hundreds of little pellets left behind by goats. In the Magic Kingdom horse poop, largely generated by the draught horses that pull loads of picture-taking tourists in quaint little omnibuses up and down Main Street, seemed to almost, well, magically disappear the moment it was produced.

Disney’s Main Street, for those of you who might be unfamiliar with the park, is a fascinating introduction to the wonders to come; an idealized re-creation of fin-de-siecle small-town America, an architectural as well as cultural illusion that suggests friendly neighbors waving from their porches, church suppers and socials at the Grange Hall. The irony of all this is delicious, of course, since this back lot simulacrum leaves out or simply ignores all the messy bits that are at the core of small-town life, like manure; bits that are by comparison reflected to a great degree at the fair.

Perhaps, by way of a clearer explanation of what I’m getting at, another illustration is in order. Our first day in Disney World was a fairly typical one. We had arrived at the park around one o’clock in the afternoon, and made our way up through the entrance gates to the head of Main Street. We pass through Cinderella’s Castle into the Magic Kingdom proper, one of the many parks-within-a-park, which unfolds before us like a pop-up picture book. Cheery music emanates from hidden speakers everywhere, just loud enough to be heard over the babble of the crowds, not so obtrusive that it distracts your attention. Everything is clean and bright, scrubbed to within an inch of its life. A small army of men and women are discreetly sweeping sidewalks, emptying trash barrels and tending to the flower beds, trees and shrubs planted in beautiful, eye-catching arrays all along the walkways. Characters and images from the cartoons and movies our daughter loves are all here, incarnated in brightly colored steel, wood and fiberglass, as rides and attractions. She is immediately drawn to the Dumbo ride; a whirling group of miniature elephants that can be raised and lowered at the riders’ whim. We join the end of a tightly compacted line that snakes back and forth through a maze of metal gates. There’s a sign featuring a smiling Mickey Mouse which helpfully informs us that the wait from this point is approximately 25 minutes. All of the other rides we can see from where we’re standing are continuously moving cars or boats carrying two, four, six, eight or even twelve people at a time through It’s A Small World (After All) or Peter Pan’s London. This gives their patrons at least some sense of forward progress. The Dumbo ride, however, must be stopped and its human cargo emptied out and refilled each time. Patience is a virtue, I remind my daughter. We will get there eventually.

I watch the small human dramas playing out in front of us; a child in a stroller clutching a newly-purchased Winnie-The-Pooh, newly-married young couples clutching each other (you can tell they are newlyweds because she is wearing a white headband with mouse ears and a veil; his mouse ears are perched upon a black top hat), an older couple puzzling over a map of the park, wondering aloud about the best route to the Tiki Birds attraction. Several yards away there erupts a loud wail that distracts us from our vigil. A young father, standing smack dab in the middle of the hurrying crowd that glides almost smugly past those of us waiting in line, is holding on to a child of two, or three at the oldest. The little one is making the kind of crying noises any parent would recognize as the sign of a worn-out child, who had obviously had his fun quota for the day and was more than ready for a nap. A bright, well-manicured, clean-shaven young man sporting the uniform of a Disney cast member approaches the poor, harried parent, and in the brightest and cheeriest tone I’ve ever heard come out of a human mouth, says to the child “Hey, don’t you know that there’s no crying allowed in the Magic Kingdom?” It was immediately apparent that the child, tired and irritated though he was, knew full well he was being patronized and his intelligence insulted. It was also clear that the young cast member had absolutely no grasp of the psychology of cranky three-year-olds; either that, or else he had been duped by someone into believing that telling a child he wasn’t allowed to cry would actually make him stop, because he kept repeating this sentence over and over like some mystical Mickey Mouse mantra, which only served to annoy the child into further squirming and screaming. The parent, seeing a bad situation rapidly escalating into something much worse, rips off a barely polite “excuse me” to the young man and hightails it out of there, only just able to hold on to the child who is now wailing like a banshee and actively kicking his father square in the left kidney.

Now don’t get me wrong – I love Disney World. I’m still enough of an eight-year old myself, with a vivid memory of the longing I had as a child to visit Disneyland – fueled, I know now, by Walt’s incessant marketing of the place to my impressionable mind every Sunday evening via his television show – even though I knew full well that my parents could hardly afford a real vacation anywhere, let alone the trip across country to Anaheim. Now that I was an adult with the means to travel, it was great fun to go ride the rides (I once rode the “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride twelve times in a row) and watch the Audio-Animatronic Presidents and buy my daughter that Davy Crockett coonskin cap my folks could never afford to get for me. Where some see the heavy hand of American cultural imperialism, frankly all I see are some damn funny cartoons, many of which border on Art. And even the most unsophisticated visitor to the place understands on some level, I think, that a trip to the World Showcase in Epcot Center is not a substitute for spending a few weeks in Spain, Morocco or Italy. But I suppose, if one had to put a label on it, the county fair has by virtue of its chaos what I guess you’d call character, or perhaps charm or quirkiness or something, which the Disney parks lack. The desire to please everyone by filing down all the rough edges creates an experience that, while entertaining, isn’t quite as exciting or immediate as the kind of experience you get on the midway. It’s the difference, I guess, between spending an evening at a friend’s house where everything is just so, right out of Martha Stewart Living Magazine, every detail thought through and the whole place “design-schemed” to a fare-thee-well, where you are afraid to sit on the furniture lest you knock a pillow out of whack and ruin the whole mise-en-scene; and going to another’s home where the place actually looks lived-in – books and magazines scattered in piles hither and yon, the smell of the last meal cooked in the kitchen still hanging in the air, and a large dog (or two) curled up on the comfortable chair or in the middle of the living room rug. Is one better than the other? What do you mean by better? Is it unreasonable to think that some people might be put off by a young man with a tattoo of a half-naked woman coming into contact with their children? Perhaps not, but I have to say that the tattooed young carney at the fair just might be more likely to ask a small child who was crying what was the matter, and actually listen to the answer.

Letter to My Daughter (or; My Life in the Theatre)

Hey Kiddo:  So I go into work for the matinee today (Sunday), and as I'm getting dressed I hear Lin (our ASM) announce the following:


"Uh, actors? Can you listen up for a minute? Just so you know, if you need to use the bathroom, you shouldn't use the stall on the left hand side as you walk in, because there's a dead rat in the toilet. OK? Adam (the BCA facilities manager) will be here in a few minutes to fish it out. Thanks!"

You should pass this on to all your friends who are in the acting program at Tisch; they should have at least some small idea of what they'll be in for when they get out into the real world.

I love you!

Daddy

PS: Thankfully, the rat was gone by the time I had to go to the bathroom myself, but just to be on the safe side I'm not going to drink or eat for at least two hours before a show.

Sing Out, Louise! (More Letters to My Daughter)

Hi Kiddo:  OK, so as of yesterday, when my copy of the new revival cast recording starring Patti LuPone came in the mail, I now own 7 separate recordings of Gypsy (8, if you count as a separate recording the re-issue of the Merman Original Cast recording with all the extra stuff on it) on CD alone, not to mention at least 3 LP’s (two of the Merman O.C. recording and one of the Angela Lansbury revival).


I have no idea why I’m not gay.

Maybe its because I don’t own either the movie soundtrack (with Rosalind Russell – an atrocity from start to finish) or a copy of the movie itself (see my previous mention of atrocity); I do, however own both a copy of the video and the CD to the TV version with Bette Midler (I count the CD of her version as part of my eight, as well as the CD burn of my live recording of the whole show with Merman).

It is a strange world I live in, my dear.


I love you with all my heart.


Daddy

More Letters to My Daughter

Hey Kiddo: Came across a “Mr. Rogers Sing-Along” on YouTube; the following is (verbatim) one of the comments that was posted on this video:

I don't like being a grownup :< Can I be a kid and watch Mr Rogers again?

I know how this guy feels. . .

I love you with all my heart.

Daddy

Never work with small children and dogs. . .

For more years than I'd care to count I have spent the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas trussed up in chains and hauling strongboxes, locks and ledger-books in my ghostly wake as that well-known Dickensian spectre Jacob Marley in one or another production of the perennial holiday warhorse, A Christmas Carol.

I always loved playing Marley for the sheer theatricality of it all  --  I have entered stage to the cacaphonous wails of the souls of the damned, surrounded by clouds of liquid nitrogen smoke; in another production I rose up out of the floor, lit from below in the oranges and reds of the very fires of Hell, accompanied by a blast from the dry-ice fog machine and a deafening peal of bells.  This last particular entrance was far enough downstage that I could witness, for a brief moment, the effect Jacob's apparition was having on those unlucky souls seated in the front row of the theatre.  It amused me no end to see people practically jump out of their seats night after night; in fact, I was disappointed if I didn't cause at least one patron to let out an involuntary yelp.  On one particular night I saw two small boys, seated on either side of a woman whom I can only assume was their mother, who upon my arrival simultaneously buried their faces in her lap and started screaming.  I was wired and my voice was amplified and digitally altered --- but I swear those two poor young boys were louder than I was.

Common to most productions of A Christmas Carol are the hoardes of small children who fill out the ranks of the cast, taking on the obvious roles like Tiny Tim (and other members of the Crachit clan), Little Fan and, my favorite, the Turkey Boy.  Depending on the size (and budget) of the particular production, these children also serve as London urchins, street carolers and assorted hangers-on that are used to flesh out such scenes as Fezziwig's Ball or the half-dozen or so musical numbers that producers invariably introduce into the story to liven things up.  The state of the performing arts being what it is in this country, the addition of so many children to the mix is usually done with both eyes firmly fixed on the box office.  The reality is that each child in the cast will generate massive revenue: tickets sold to parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors.  One theatre had the brilliant idea of having three separate, rotating casts of kids; this was ostensibly done to accommodate the youngsters' busy schedules -- what with sports, ballet, music lessons, school -- it was reasoned that each group of kids would then only have to rehearse a few days each week and  perform in 3 or 4  instead of a full 8 shows per week.  A logistical nightmare for the production staff, to be sure, but a bonanza for the bottom line.  Instead of, oh, say, a total of 15 children in the cast rehearsing and performing all the time, you would now have 45 kids total, each of whom (as detailed above) would potentially generate sales of 8, 10, even 20 tickets each to family, friends and neighbors.

The presence of  a large number of children in a theatre environment presents its own host of problems, of course;  but in one way, I guess you could say that being cast in a play in the professional theatre is a highly educational and enriching experience.  For example, it can expose these children to a vast and very colorful new set of vocabulary words, many of which I can almost guarantee will not be seen anytime soon on the usual standardized tests.  But I digress.

The story I actually set out to tell here involves the family of one of the children in a company of Christmas Carol I was in some years ago.  One evening, about half-way through the run of the show, I arrived early as usual to the theatre, since the elaborate make-up I was doing for the role took about an hour to apply.  As I came down the stairs into the lobby, I noticed one of our young charges (I believe she played one of the Crachit children; we'll call her Janie), in the company of an attractive woman and a much younger child.  The woman spotted me and immediately came over with her hand extended.  She introduced herself as Janie's mom and we exchanged a few pleasantries.  She then proceeded to explain to me that the whole family, including Dad and another, older sibling,  had come to see the show on opening night, sitting right in the front row.  They had all (with one exception) enjoyed Jacob Marley's ghost immensely, and it was pretty obvious as to which family member wasn't next in line as president of my fan club.  Janie's younger sister (we'll call her Suzie), stood behind her sister and mother, with both arms clasped tightly around one of her mother's legs.  Janie's mom went on to explain that Suzie had been so frightened by Marley's ghost that she suffered nightmares; this in turn had traumatized her so much that now she absolutely refused to sleep in her own bed but had insisted on spending every night since in-between her parents, awake in fearful vigil awaiting the re-appearance of the spectral Marley.

It was clear from the haggard look on Mom's face that this situation had reached critical mass in the last several days; there was also a desperate tone in her voice that she could barely keep under control. Neither did it escape my thinking that, implied but not stated, the ongoing lack of something other than sleep was also a factor here.  She asked if I wouldn't mind speaking to little Suzie to reassure her that it was all just make-believe.  So, in my best Dad voice, I knelt down by Suzie and introduced myself.  "Hi", I said, "I'm Michael!  I work with your sister in the play.  Your Mommy tells me that you came to see us."  Not a word from little Suzie, who kept her head buried in the crook of her mother's knee.  "Your Mommy says that you thought that Jacob Marley was really scary.  I'm so glad!  He's supposed to be scary so that he'll make Mr. Scrooge see that he's been a very bad man."  Still not so much as a peep; however, I did notice that she was finally beginning to actually look at me.  "You know, I have a daughter too; when she was really little, just like you, I used to take her here to the theatre with me all the time so she could see me put on my scary make-up and know that it was always really just Daddy, so that she wouldn't be afraid."   Still nothing.  "If you come and see the show again, maybe I can show you how I put the make-up and the costume on so you can see that it's just me and not a real ghost, OK?"

All through this, Suzie and Janie's mom looked hopeful; Suzie was looking right at me now and not trying to hide.  Despite not saying a word, she certainly seemed reassured and her mother thanked me profusely for taking the time to try and undo the damage I had inadvertantly done.  They all walked off and I continued on to my dressing room.  It was the way Suzie stared at me, as we parted, that made me understand, finally, that nothing had really changed.  No, I wasn't fooling her, not one bit.  While I was rambling on, trying my best to be sweet, charming and (above all) non-threatening,  little Suzie had an unmistakable look on her face.  It wasn't fear, but neither was it relief or reassurance.  It was, instead, the look of a child who was simply waiting.  Waiting for my forehead to split open and the shrieking, howling, green-faced monster wrapped in chains  -- the creature she knew in her heart of hearts was lurking inside of me, biding its time -- to burst forth from its smiling human guise and carry her off to Hell. 

For all I know, Suzie is still sleeping with her parents.

A Memory of My Father

It is an old photo, worn and a bit stained, missing a chunk here and there, as if it had spent much too much time in a plastic sleeve in the dark recesses of an overloaded wallet. Which, in fact, it had, until I decided to pry it out and digitize it, in an attempt to save it before it was lost to me for good. Framed neatly in the center of the picture are a small boy and a tall man, standing by a fence near some body of water; there seems to be a large bird in the background as well. It’s hard to know for certain, but I think that we’re somewhere at the Jersey shore, on a pier or jetty. The little guy is me, at what I’m guessing is age 4 (which would make this 1957); the big guy is my dad, who in ‘57 would have been 45 years old, a decent bit younger than I am now. The shore was a favorite day-hop getaway for my folks, even in winter. You can tell it’s winter by the outfits; in addition to his coat my dad is wearing his gloves, and I’m wrapped up head to toe in a suit I still remember – a wool cap with earflaps, wool coat, gloves, wool pants and leather leggings (something which, as I look back on it, must have resembled the leather putees that soldiers in World War I wore). I think I looked pretty spiffy, if I must say so myself. I certainly was warm, if maybe a tad itchy. It could be Atlantic City, since I recall that even in the off-season there were some things on the Boardwalk that stayed open; a few souvenir shops, some restaurants,the penny arcades.


Those pre-electronic age arcades had lots of things to amuse a four-year-old. There were the mechanical baseball, hockey and football games, real clanking, clunking pinball, shooting galleries, wheel-of-fortune style games of chance, and one of those booths that, for a few quarters, allowed you to make a short recording of your voice on a 45 RPM disc. My father and I made one of those recordings, perhaps the very day this photograph was taken. I do remember being bunched up in the tiny booth with him; he was hugging me tight so that he could both maximize the limited amount of space available to us, and, at the same time, hoist me up close to the microphone, as my mother looked on from outside. He asks me to talk all about space and rocket ships, a favorite subject of mine at the time. He also encourages me to sing a song, which I do, although by then it becomes clear that the novelty of this recording session is wearing off and I’m getting eager to move on to something else.

I still have that old recording, sitting on a shelf with the Beatles, the Stones, Herman’s Hermits and all the other 45’s I had as a kid. It is hard for me to listen to it now; not only because the disc itself is difficult to play on my modern stereo turntable, and almost unintelligible as well, but also because there is too much of me on it, and not enough of my dad. It is the only thing I have that has his voice on it, a voice I haven’t heard in almost fifty years. Nowadays we are awash in home audio-video; most kids born in the last 20 years will be able, with a bit of editing, to assemble an entire documentary multi-episode mini-series of their early lives, running only about 3 hours shorter than the real thing. Most of these video kids will have hours upon hours of Mom and Dad on tape and DVD as well, beginning with the wedding video and progressing through the gruesome details of their own birth and beyond, until it may well be that it gets to the point where no one will notice that their parents are actually dead until they get around to viewing the footage shot at the funeral.

I’ve never liked the home video camera; ours is one of the few families that doesn’t own one. Its presence always felt so intrusive to me, especially at formal occasions like weddings, First Communions or graduations, since almost everyone present (including, in some cases, the direct participants) are standing up or roaming about, straying into aisles and up onto platforms, thrusting their cameras out like so many ill-mannered papparazzi. Nobody is actually paying attention in any meaningful way to what’s going on; it is as if the reality of the event will be defined solely by its existance on some sort of electronic media, and not really experienced by those who were there until they sit down in front of the television, hours later, and finally watch what went on. Anything and everything is grist for the video mill: soccer games or afternoons lounging in the backyard pool, school plays or a Frisbee toss with the dog, trips to Washington DC to see the sights or to grandma’s house for Sunday supper; it all gets put on tape or disc for posterity. The ubiquity and sheer quantity of this unending documentary footage will have the effect of ultimately diminishing the genuinely special moments in our lives; any true significance lost in the morass of the blow-by-blow banality of it all.

Photographs, though, are different. Since they freeze selective moments in time, and are not simply transcriptions of an event the way a video can be, they serve almost as a mnemonic; a clue or a hint that opens up a whole host of memory and associations. “Every picture tells a story”; so goes the old phrase, and the older the photograph the more of the story we know, especially how parts of it inevitably end, while others go on and form the basis of yet another narrative. I know all too well how this one comes out. If this is 1957, as I think it is, then the 45 year-old-man in the photograph, my father, will live for only another five years. My mother took very few photographs after he was gone; I have some of my confirmation, taken by an aunt and uncle, but none of birthdays, or proms, or graduations. Perhaps it was best that my mother in her grief gave up on the taking of pictures; they would have only re-inforced his absence at these turning points in my life. Those few pictures I do have, especially of him, are triggers for a host of images and memories; fragile, imperfect, unsure of the details. At some point during one winter day in 1957 my mother stopped for a brief moment to take a snapshot of her “boys,” before the three of us went on to do the things we always did when we went to the shore in winter: walk on the Boardwalk, eat lunch in a restaurant, spend a few coins in the penny arcade, buy a box of saltwater taffy, stop in a booth to make a record of the four-year old me pontificating about the future of space travel and singing a verse of “Camptown Races”. This picture, and that old, barely comprehesible recording, is all I have; but it is enough. Memory is flawed; there are things I’m not sure about, details that are fuzzy. In a way that I can’t even begin to explain, though, it is enough. Perhaps it is precisely because the memory lacks the detail a video would have, I get to re-create and recast that day again and again in my mind, each re-imagining allowing for the serendipitous recall of a hitherto long-forgotten moment, or smell, or sound, or feeling, each adding another layer to the story. A man and a boy; a father and his son, a cold winter’s day at the shore that will end with a ride home in our 1950 Plymouth DeLuxe, the boy tucked between his mom and dad on the front seat, eased slowly into sleep by the steady rumble of the tires on the pavement, the static-y lullaby of Perry Como on the AM radio, and their hushed conversation. As I said, I don’t really know, for absolute certain, if this photograph was taken the same day I made that recording, but it comforts me to think that it might have happened that way. All this, from one cracked and faded image. All this, from memory.

The Best Day of My Life

I’m getting older. I don’t quite know how this has happened. Lest you think, however, that I’m just another whiny, graying baby-boomer, I have to make it clear at the outset that I don’t mind getting older; in fact I rather like the accumulated wisdom and experience that the years have conferred upon me. But let’s face reality -- at my age birthdays are freighted with weight and significance, a certain gravitas; the damp hand of the Grim Reaper coming closer and closer, that sort of thing. By comparison, you don’t see some twelve-year-old getting all depressed on his birthday, thinking about how he’ll never see eight again. But despite a sort of detached, intellectual appreciation of my chronological age I don’t feel old, and so I’m convinced that the guy with the gray hair – slightly balding – and the on-the-verge-of-craggy face that stares back at me in the mirror each night as I brush and floss, is some sort of sick joke optical illusion perpetrated on me by my wife and daughter for their own perverse amusement. I realize this doesn’t reflect well on my family (if you’ll pardon the pun), but I can think of no other explanation since the guy – no, the kid – inside me still feels, well, like a kid. Because of this, there is a part of me that still expects my birthday to be, somehow, the way it was when I was a boy. Special. Set apart. A day to be anticipated, savored. A day when the mundane is replaced, if only for a while, by the astonishing.

Oh, sure, your friends and family try to make a big fuss over the milestones like fifty and sixty. There are plenty of “over-the-hill” jokes and snide references to the state of your sex life, but for the rest of them, the reality is that people are busy, wives have important jobs and kids aren't kids anymore, but adults with real jobs and lives of their own, and so a grownup’s birthday can come and go in an anticlimactic blur of one or two cards and some chocolate cake. Presents become an issue as well, the further you sink into middle-aged material comfort. I suppose this says something profound about the ultimate inadequacy of a materialist lifestyle; however, I think it has even more to do with how we perceive the world as adults as opposed to our view of it as children. Adults are a tough audience. Our lives are in many ways (sad a commentary as this is) defined by the stuff we accumulate, and after a while simply getting more “stuff”, no matter how “special” or expensive it is, just doesn’t do anything for us any more. It gets to be a lot like the arms race; all about bigger, better, faster, but not always truly wanted or needed. When you’re a kid, though, it seems that there’s little or no effort required in taking one ordinary day out of three hundred sixty-five other ordinary days and transforming it into something wonderful.

All of which leads me, by an admittedly circuitous route, to one birthday in particular: May 12, 1964, the day I turned eleven and the year of the opening of the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York. In late April of that year (it may well have been the week the Fair opened, in fact) I had my first taste of the Fair in the company of my fellow Cub Scouts (Pack 43, Den 1, Saint Aedan’s Parish, Jersey City) on a chilled, windy Sunday morning. We stopped first at the Vatican Pavilion to fulfill our Sunday Mass obligation, where I eagerly volunteered to serve as an Altar Boy (I was that kind of kid; always with the hand up in class. I’m surprised I wasn’t murdered by my peers at an early age). Not for the Pope, I hasten to point out; just for some poor parish priest from Long Island somewhere whose turn it was to say Mass there that day. It was still pretty cool, though.

We emerged an hour or so later, after Mass and a quick trip on a moving walkway past Michelangelo’s “Pieta”, beautifully lit and housed behind three inches of bulletproof glass. By now it was eleven AM or so, and the Fairgrounds were packed. I mean jammed. I mean waiting-for-an-hour-and-a-half-just-to-take-the-five-minute-ride-in-the-Johnson’s-Wax-Pavilion crowded. Most of our time was spent slowly threading our way through the crowds, like trying to wade upstream in a river of overcooked Cream of Wheat. We slogged on from exhibit to exhibit, looking for a line where the wait was only ten minutes less than forever. Grateful as I was just to be there, the day somehow lacked that certain sense of carefree fun I’d always assumed outings of this nature were supposed to have. So, jammed cheek-by-jowl with the rest of humanity who had come to gawk at corporate America’s vision of the clean, well-lit, and brightly waxed (but, surprisingly enough, fairly computer-free: who knew?) world of the future, I was pushed along by the rising tide of bodies until I found myself at the entrance gate again. We had gone into five pavilions (none of the interesting ones, mind you) and ridden on one ride. So much for my day at the Fair.

The next day I was back in class, up to my eyeballs in fifth-grade math, geography and science. A return trip to the Fair simply wasn’t on my radar. However, my mother, whom I never would have pegged as the adventurous type, began to concoct an elaborate scheme for a revisit almost immediately after that first ill-fated trip. She arranged to get a day off from work and then cleared her plans with the Sisters of St. Dominic who were my teachers. When I awoke the morning of my eleventh birthday, I assumed I’d be walking the six blocks to school as usual. Instead, to my utter surprise and endless delight, we ate a hurried breakfast, caught a bus to the waterfront in Jersey City, and boarded the special World’s Fair Ferry which shuttled passengers from a wharf near the Colgate factory (home of what was, at the time, the largest clock in the world) across the mouth of the Hudson River, then up the East River, to Queens, and docked right at the fairgrounds.

When we got there, it was as if we had been given the keys to Palisades Amusement Park after the place closed. Objectively, there had to be several thousand people at the Fair that day, but you hardly noticed them. Everything I wanted to see, every ride I wanted to ride, every hands-on exhibit that had been twelve or twenty or fifty people deep the Sunday of my first visit, was empty. No waiting. We ambled from building to building, going through the exhibit or on the ride twice and even three times, just because we could. I’ve had a lot of time to think, in the intervening years, about why this particular day is so special to me. I have always said to my family that it was without a doubt the best day of my life. Even the great milestones like graduation, marriage and the births of children don’t compare, since each one of those events were Important, with plenty of time to plan and therefore plenty of time to worry and fret over them. I suppose if someone had just whisked me to the church one day on a whim, where there was a full blown wedding ready to happen, it would have been a lot more, well, fun than it was. This day at the Fair was special for a lot of reasons: it was totally unexpected, and so out of character for my mother to have done such a thing as taken me out of school just so we could enjoy ourselves for a day. I realize now that it certainly must have been quite a sacrifice for her; my father had died two years earlier and money was tight. The total for the day, including transportation, passes to the fair and lunch, had to have equaled the day’s wage she was missing, probably more. More than anything though, was the sheer serendipity of it all. It was my birthday and every one of my friends were in class, but here I was at the World’s Fair! And best of all, it was as if my mother and I had the place all to ourselves.

At that moment, on that day, in that place which promised a glimpse into the “World of Tomorrow” (just as its predecessor had done in 1939), I had the once-in-a-lifetime privilege of being so totally immersed in being eleven years old, with all that implies; while at the same time seeing clearly (or so I thought at the time) how wonderful my adult life was going to be, shiny and filled with promise. I thought the AT&T Videophone was the coolest thing imaginable. I was fascinated by an almost room-sized contraption full of whirring tape reels and blinking lights that the folks at the IBM exhibit called an electronic computer, a fascinating gizmo that would have interesting (but limited) uses in science. I wanted so badly to drive one of those magnetically-controlled cars through GM’s City of Tomorrow, which, I still claim after all these years, was the neatest ride there. Because at the time I still believed I would grow up to become an astronomer, I easily pictured myself living in one of those domed colonies on the Moon or Mars. Everything I saw that day was a quick glance into one small bit of the infinite variety of futures I could imagine for myself.

But this day, this amazing day, this day unlike any other for the sheer surprise and wonder of it all, came to an end. We rode back to Jersey City on the ferry and the bus, and the next morning my mother went back to cooking lunch for three hundred hungry high school boys while I returned to my fifth grade classroom, full of stories to tell and with the hope of being the envy of all my classmates, if only for a few hours. The next day passed, and the next, and before I knew it I was graduating high school and then college; there was marriage and children (and the death of a child); and my mother had long gone to be reunited with my father, the man she loved and had missed so much. Other birthdays came and went, but it was never the same.

All this time later, I readily confess that I still harbor a full-blown disappointment that despite what I saw that day the “world of tomorrow”, my here and now, has no colonies on the moon and Mars, no atomic engines the size of typewriter cases, and even the videophone has had tough sledding. This shouldn’t be surprising though, since the one bit of wisdom (or insight) I’ve gained in my middle age is the knowledge that the future is something that sneaks up on you out of left field somewhere. Humankind’s vision wasn’t far-reaching enough, in 1964, to hold things like the Internet, and personal computers, and five dollar wrist watches with more power on one little chip inside them than in all the computers in all the Apollo space capsules. My own vision at eleven wasn’t broad enough to encompass all the day-to-day miracles I encounter now: a loving wife, a beautiful child on the brink of her own wondrous adventures in life, good neighbors, good friends.

But the fact remains, plain and simple, that when Spring is in the air and my birthday comes rolling around yet again, something is missing. While I wouldn’t trade my life or my family for anything, the part of me that is still eleven (that will always be eleven, no matter how old the face in the mirror grows) is waiting for something. I’m not exactly sure what it is that I expect, or hope for. Maybe I’m just hoping that this birthday will be it – that special, wonderful, day when I will feel eleven again and each moment is full of wide-eyed anticipation of what’s around the corner or in the next pavilion at the Fair. Or perhaps I’m simply waiting for one, just one, of those astonishing marvels of the future I saw spread across Flushing Meadows all those years ago to come true. Whatever it might be, the one thing I’m certain of is that it is this anticipation and hope that keeps me young; it is what reminds me that my life’s journey is far from over. It is what keeps me going, every day. Oh, and one more thing – thank you, Mama. I love you.

"Mama D." ca. 1964

Orphans In The Storm

While I was singularly blessed with two parents who loved me beyond all reckoning, neither of them lived long enough.  My father died only four days after my ninth birthday.  My mother, at least, was able to see me graduate high school and college (and grad school, for that matter), and be there for my marriage and the birth of our first child.  She died soon after; I swear to you that she held on long enough to hold her granddaughter in her arms, and then figured she was free to go in peace.  I miss them both to this day.  The next two posts are stories about these two remarkable people.

Letters to My Daughter, Part 1 (of many)

Dear Kiddo: One night, while I was still a boy, I dreamt a dream of you. I was fourteen or fifteen at the time, and I certainly wasn’t in love, or anything that passed for love. It wasn't at all the thoughts of girlfriends or romance, or even the impulses of just-burgeoning adolescence, that caused me, asleep in my childhood bed, to be graced with a "vision" (because that's the only word I can think of to describe what this was) of someone whom I knew to be, without having to be told, my own daughter. In the dream I saw myself, as if in a movie, asleep on the sofa in my parlor. A small girl, with dark eyes and long dark hair in pigtails, a toy clasped in her hand, ran into the room, came up to the napping figure and threw her arms around him, and whispered in his ear. “Wake up! Wake up and play with me!” That was all there was; almost as if it was at her bidding, I awoke from the dream to the familiar darkness of my own room. I remember lying there, for a considerable while, awake and puzzled as to what it might mean. The dream neither frightened nor upset me; it just left me with a feeling I can only describe as an odd mix of contentment and wonder. I drifted back to sleep, and went off the school the next day, and thought no more of it for a very long time.


I had for several years known (or thought I did) that I wished to enter religious life, and to that end I entered the seminary only a few years later.  I had always figured I'd be spending my days as the beloved (and somewhat eccentric) Father Michael, dispensing sound counsel to all who came to me, delivering Sunday sermons full of trenchant theological insight and peppered with my trademark self-deprecating dry humor.  Well, like the old saying goes, we make plans and God laughs.  As you and Mommy well know, I did not stay, and at the time there were reasons, good reasons, for that choice, none of which had to do with being in love or wanting to marry. Perhaps, all those years before, I should have interpreted the dream as a sign; it seems to me that, if there is anything to the notion of an immortal soul, then it is quite possible that our souls are in existence long before it is time for them to incarnate. All I know is something that I have told you over and again from practically the day you were born and I first held you in my arms: the life I had chosen for myself was not the life I was meant to live; I was meant to be your father. So you came to me one night in a dream, when I was still just a child myself, to tell me that you were waiting for me. I carried that with me for many years afterward, not really understanding what it might mean or even thinking about it consciously, until the day you were born and I saw you for the first time, again, and with a rush realized that I had always known it was you.

I love you, Kiddo.

Daddy