A t;rip through time

Monday, January 6, 2020

I drove through Sussex county to get to Scranton this time, avoiding the nutty traffic patterns on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware Watergap.

My last trip east through the gap had me in bumper to bumper traffic all the way from the foot of Route 380, making me wonder what the hell highway people in that state think they are doing by having the principal highway so utterly packed.

What should have taken me two hours to travel home took me three and a half, and I vowed not to repeat this for my holiday trip.

I hadn’t been up route 206 in more than two decades during those years when my ex-wife and daughter lived in Honesdale and it was easier to reach them through Milford than through the gap. Those trips back then happened during the early morning hours when I left from my baking job in Willowbrook though the landscape – except for the abortion of malls just after Newton – looked much the same, old farms and curious roadside businesses, open for this trip, mostly closed in those earlier hours.

Geographically, this was a longer trip – especially because there were traffic lights to contend with, and a few places through towns that slowed traffic from 50 to 25 miles per hour. But there were no bumper to bumper tragedies, no mad-rubbernecking scenes where drivers ached to see the blood shed of someone else’s demise.

My life has always been tied to geography, time periods completely associated with places I’ve been or seen or traveled through, accompanied with a cast of characters for each, as if a stage play. So driving through this part of the planet brings back times I’ve passed through here and people I’ve known, such as Terry Ripmaster – the radical professor I had at William Paterson College, who desperately sought to get back to the earth, trying to relive Woodstock on his own terms, who once lived in a commune in Teaneck, and later, built his own little world not far from the intersection of Route 15 and 206, a dairy farm I visited once or twice before his ultimate departure to Florida – where he briefly engaged in old style radical politics before dementia claimed him.

As I drive, I wonder what fate he has met with since I haven’t heard from him since 2013 when I tried to get a quote from him about the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, and he informed me about his condition, a jazz man who have delved into local history of Jazz as well as built a reputation dealing with the history of Paterson, gone (well, almost) but not forgotten.

Passing through Newton brings me close to my best friend, Pauly, who retired from the library to a trailer, a life long ambition I recall from those days when we were much younger and he dragged me to trailer sales lots on Route 22 in an attempt to find one he could afford, becoming something of a hermit in his old age (another life long ambition) so that I have never seen his trailer and not seen him in years, but heard from Alf, who lives up the road at Digman’s Ferry about the place since Alf paid a visit once, even though the two of them have not been close in decades (and maybe not even then.)

Then passing into Pennsylvania at Milford, I come into Alf’s neck of the woods, then beyond it, to strangely religious names such as Lord’s Valley, and recall how I once traveled this way when my ex-wife and daughter lived in a trailer too remote to reach by regular highways and forcing me to take back roads through a wooded world I remember and actually miss.

At my age, every trip like this hints that it might be my last, and so I take in everything as if I suspect I might not see it again, hoping later that when I do come back, I am more grateful for the opportunity, this being the only life any of us get to live, and recalling the cartoon that had two characters talking, one saying, “You only live once,” and the other saying, “No, you only die once. You live every day.”

It’s a great philosophy.

Democrats turn terrorists into saints

Saturday, January 4, 2020

I’m stunned by the reaction media and Democrats are having about the killing of a terrorist in Iraq.

We have moved beyond reasonable discourse to a whole new plain of insanity, and how right the Rolling Stones were in Sympathy for the Devil in the ability of people to twist logic – horrible people becoming sympathetic characters whose death our celebrities mourn.

I’ve never had much respect for the intelligence level of movie and rock and roll stars. Whatever I had, however, has vanished this week as known performers apologize to Iran for our killing a man who has killed Americans and orchestrated terrorism.

Media and the Democrats hate Trump so much they are willing to defend terrorists who kill Americans, and this is beyond sad.

Most of it has to do with money – and the need for Democrats to get ahold of the national purse strings, even if it means cheating, lying and yes – encouraging terrorism.

It is said that Republicans represent greedy rich people who refuse to part with any of their wealth to help the poor.

The truth is that Democrats – who own not for profits or work for government welfare agencies and such – make their living off providing programs for the poor. In other words, they get their salaries from taxpayers, and it is in their best interest to keep people poor.

Clinton screwed this up when he murdered welfare. Obama did his best to restore welfare by creating Obamacare.

Yet this greedy need to rob the national bank doesn’t explain the insanity Democrats are engaged in, where they side with terrorists against the national interest – promoting this nutty passive-aggressive assumption that we should apologize to terrorists when we stop them from killing us.

This is even beyond the insane notion in paying reparations to African-Americans for slavery.

The events that led up to the killing of the terrorist are simple.

Iran killed an American contractor. The United States sent a missile in response. The Iran terrorist helped orchestrate an attack on the embassy in Iraq, and when the U.S. Marines broke up the attack, the terrorist met with the protestors to plot some new attack – at which point, the United States killed him.

Media and Democrats were hoping the embassy attack would become a repeat of one under Obama in which the ambassador was killed. Trump’s reaction dismayed them and derailed what would have become a key talking point for the Democratic presidential campaign, and something a slanted media could point to in order to exonerate Hillary Clinton and Obama who allowed the ambassador to die during the previous attack.

Trump’s taking out the terrorist has become the talking point instead, allowing media to take the side of the terrorists.

We didn’t get this from media or the Democrats when Obama killed Bin Laden and then dumped the body in the ocean – leaving some serious questions about due process since Bin Laden posed no additional threat, while the terrorist Trump killed did.

Even Democrats who opposed Obama’s paying the Iranians to keep the peace are complaining about Trump – following the Democratic think tank script that might bring about the downfall of the Trump administration.

This only highlights just how far Democrats will go to regain their access to taxpayer money, and to shape a dialogue that makes terrorists into saints.

New Years on Times Square in 1981

January 1, 1981

We’re going to have a new president soon, one of the many changes we can expect in a new year and (depending on who you ask) a new decade.

A lot of people might not yet notice the massive change since many of us are still getting over our hangovers, and this sense of cheer we all subscribe to when one-year ends and the next begins.

A lot of people stroll the still-empty streets of Manhattan trying to sort out fact from fantasy or if lucky enough to have reserved a model room, wake up in time to check out, while pondering whether or not they got lucky the night before – and whether or not it was with someone other than their spouse.

Times Square is a mess, filled with the scraps of 1980, and the bodies of those not lucky enough to survive into the new year – mugged or misplaced, or some other self-inflicted misery too personal for the newspapers to keep a record of.

We all plunge into the new year with high hopes – some actually believing in the new New Deal the new president is proposing, if the world actually survives along enough to see it.

The Iranians are firmly convinced Mr. Reagan is the new George Custard fully intending on waging a war against them the way Custard did the American Indian (with some of us hoping the outcome isn’t as tragic as Custard’s was.)

Then, of course, there are the hostages to consider and whether or not they will arrive back safe before Reagan gets to blow up the world.

All this international intrigue gives me a headache when I have more personal issues to contend with – such as my peeving off my girlfriend last night by refusing to take her see Pauly’s band at the Navel Base, choosing to remain back at her parents home, swinging in the New Year watching the ball drop at Times Square on TV.

Her parents subscribed to some old Polish ritual involving herring and a coin, which seemed to drive her crazy – as if growing up, she’d seen too much of this, while I never saw it before and found it entertaining and sweet – even if my fingers smell of fish even this long afterwards.

She seemed a bit put out by having to share the change of years with her aunt and uncle, though liked seeing her grandmother – as if we all sensed that if we did not take in this moment with these people we might never get to share another with them later.

I always feel such lost moments, even if my girlfriend doesn’t.

She wanted to go out, and be part of that other world that has nothing to do with Polish tradition, sharing the new year with her new friends who just happen to be my oldest and dearest friends, and traditions I know too well, but in her turn, my girlfriend finds intriguing, and that we both might miss later when we realize the opportunity to see the changing of the decade with them might not come again – even when my friends are much younger than her family is.

Perhaps because I’m a decade older than she is, I appreciate older traditions more, and lust less for some new adventure the way she does.

I know she’s angry at me this morning for what she missed last night, her cool silence telling me that I will pay a price for this loss, even though in some ways, she doesn’t yet understand the precious moment she had, and how when time passes on, the band will be forgotten, but not the herring and the coin, or the smell of fish on her fingers, or that last memory of her grandmother who might or might not survive to see a new year or, at best, a new decade.

I listen to the news on TV and realize just how unimportant those events are, except perhaps for the fact that some family member somewhere is aching for the return of hostages the new president promises to get released, and how we pass into a new year with hope for a better future and memories of a pass we should not forget.

And so, I make my annual pilgrimage to New York City to survey the damage and to take stock of what still remains unchanged, and to evaluate – as if in a mirror – how much I’ve changed since the last decade changed.

New Years Day in Times Square

Thursday, January 2, 2020

Street sweepers – many with buckets and brooms – still picked up the detritus from New Years Eve when we arrived at Times Square.

Although chilly, New York City was not unbearably cold, and traffic through the Lincoln Tunnel – so minimal – we passed under the Hudson River in only a few minutes.

The usual rude people – mostly tourists – filled the sidewalks, loaded with baggage they appear to need to travel with everywhere.

Cartoon characters greeted these with hugs and requests for money, photo opportunities that harkened back to the wretched old days when it was still unsafe to walk these streets, days I miss because the illusion of safety did not hide behind a Disney mask, and the robbery often more honest – a simply knife or gun and a demand money. These days, you get ripped off just looking at a cup of coffee or hotdog.

We passed through here numerous times during the transition from the ugly duckling phase to its current knock your eyes out with light phase and saw behind the wizard’s curtain before Disney could hide its sleight of hand.

Change here is inevitable since this is the center of the earth, the place around which the rest of the universe revolves.

And if there is day in the year when you can come here and see unscathed, the first day of a new year is the day to do it, when the world is largely too hung over to express itself in its most obnoxiousness.

We took the tour from the front door of the Port Authority – where The New York Times sign boasts of the greatest deception of all – down the glittering block of 42nd Street to the heart of Times Square, pausing to view the world as it ought to be,  before moving on, taking the bus up town to a neighborhood Sharon grew up in, she acting as my tour guide to point out some of the sights along the way, passing the Hersh building where yellow journalism was invented all the way up to Columbia where the illusion of a free press is taught to impressionable freshman as if truth.

But the little things struck me, the slow intrusion of sky towers into neighborhoods which never saw them before, a promotion to a dark future we will not live to see, the egotist markers of greed that must build up so as to leave their mark on the world, made invisible over time when they all merge into one massive forest of glass – the mayor of New York blames for Climate Change – and so lack distinction.

This week we heard about the windmill that fell when high winds hit it, and made me wonder if a windmill falls in the forest and nobody is there, will anybody hear it?

We are on the downside of empire building, much in the same way ancient civilizations were, showing all the signs of demise after only a few hundred years that the great nations saw after thousands – as our society sheds religious dogma for the illusion of enlightenment, hiding all the same flaws that Times Square hides behind its bright lights.

It is unlikely I will live long enough to see the mass decline that comes at the very end, but will be witness to its prelude, the illusion of social justice, the crusades, the ghost dances that will try to restore what has already been lost.

New York City is symbolic of such changes, progressive hindsight alternating with progress – as the young come up with solutions for age old problems previous generations were clearly too ignorant or selfish and greedy to solve, only to turn into the old people against whom a new generation of young will pass, none of us learning anything from history because we have revised history so much as to lose any possible lesson there – putting up new billboards on Times Square so we are not reminded of what was there in the past, giving new evidence to the Biblical phrase, “This too shall pass.”

Traveling by bus in Manhattan is slow torture – yet also an education, forcing passengers to pay attention to a changing landscape we would miss by the quicker underground alternative, seeing the alternations made since we last passed this way so as to better understand how significantly the world is changing – people talking themselves in 1970s were crazy, but in 2020, they may simply be talking into smart phones (crazy in a different way.)

We got off the bus at 113th Street, strolled through Columbia, then down to St. Johns, walking back down Broadway for about 20 blocks before boarding the bus again, this beginning and ending at Times Square.

In some years, we go to the Village – the real Mecca of my youth – but that’s a more painful journey, because it is so personal, filled with the ghosts of places that have ceased to exist, The Filmore, the Electric Circus, Seize the Day, and the one time poetic coffee shops along Bleeker. But even these memories are the memories of ghosts, the last vestiges of change that I saw when I was young, from the real heyday of the 1920s when that place was hip, or the 1950s folk scene ghost dance that briefly revived it.

Unlike Times Square, nobody there bothered to put lipstick on the pig, and just let the open wounds bleed.

Through each of these trips, I have to keep reminding myself that what I see today will be somebody else’s nostalgic memory tomorrow, and that some other change will change this place into something the people here today won’t like or won’t recognize, longing for what I see as sad as something worth saving.

I think this as the bus passes the place which was once known as The Americana,” where Jerry Lewis once held his telethon, outside of which I once met Soupy Sales, and I realize we keep that New York alive as long as we continued to remember, and sometimes, manage to pass down these memories to others, who remember our remembering them, and sometimes that’s all we can count on in this ever changing world.

Rainy days and Mondays

Monday, December 30, 2019

It’s a rainy day, and Monday, and the last Monday of the last month of the last year of the decade, a scary concept since I once thought making it merely to the year 2000 would be an accomplishment. Now, we are edging into the twenties, marking the centennial of those members of my family that predated my uncles and aunts, yet whom I managed to meet before they passed off this mortal coil.

This idea that we have transitioned into another decade scares me a little, and adds to the blue mood I feel with the cold rain pelting at my window.

The outside cat we call “Tiger Kitty Brother” came into the mudroom to get out of the rain and I sat up with him for a while, feeling chilly, but in that sense I used to get sitting on the front porch of the old house in Clifton when I was out of the rain, but still being touched by it.

We made our way to Asbury Park again this weekend, wasted a lot of time between dinner and when we actually were to see the band, and though the band was good, we were too tired to stay for more than one set – a certain sign of our getting old, as was having to listen to the kids around us – me wondering if I sounded as stupid at that age as they do. One woman and three guys behind us was particularly silly, the three guys all trying to get her, only have her take off with a fourth man.

I guess the three guys were good enough to buy her drinks, but not good enough to go home with.

On Saturday, we had breakfast at Franks, read the story posted about Springsteen, then took our stroll down the board walk, where a footrace has just concluded, before we made our way back to the car. We drove south along Ocean Avenue until it stopped near Belmar, and then drove home.

Everywhere were signs of the old days, changing, rust settling on things that had seemed fresher when I made my way through these streets many years ago. I kept thinking of my family, and how this had been such a big part of their lives, and the century in which they came south when it was still just a location for summer resorts, crabbing in the bays, swimming in the ocean, buying fruit from highway stands that have since ceased to exist.

They are all gone, the family, and I carry these memories around with me as I drive, and memories that aren’t even my memories of a time when things seem much more simple, and how we could still get lost on these highways (lacking GPS to steer us home) and how we really didn’t mind, as long as we came in out of the rain at the end.

 

Recovering from Christmas

December 26, 1980

The hard part is over: the expression and glitter of Christmas, the opening of presents and the mad dash from my mother at my uncle’s place at the seashore to the arms of my girlfriend a stone’s throw away from Giant’s Stadium.

I fell asleep in her arms last night and woke this morning on her parents’ couch.

I’m still unsure whether or not her parents objected; but the sticky part of the holiday is over and all that’s left is recovery.

The whole affair started two days ago with me visiting my girlfriend at her parents’ house, and now I am home again, alone, filling my cold-water flat with steam in order to get warm.

My girlfriend came down with tocolytics and wanted nothing more than to stay in bed, where I found her when I showed up and should have left her, but I didn’t, choosing to help her mother wrap presents while letting my girlfriend rest, and my making a mess of the whole things since I’m no better at wrapping gifts than romance, my girlfriend’s mother eyeing me with some distain while asking just when it was I had to be at work – suggesting maybe I should try and go early and leave her with the chore she knew how to do and clearly I did not, with me glancing out the window as the snow and telling her I wouldn’t be going.

Later, their relations arrived and I went up to hide in my girlfriend’s room, waking her briefly, before she faded back into blissful sleep, with me waiting for her to wake so we could both take the trip up to Towaco to Pauly’s girlfriend’s mother’s house for the first part of our annual Christmas Eve tradition, and then later to make the trip south to my mother’s in Toms River on Christmas Day.

Traveling in the snow scared me; traveling south to meet my mother scared my girlfriend.

Garrick saved me from the trip in the snow by picking me up at my girlfriend’s house, waiving back at her as she waved from her door up the long set of stairs from the street with me merely having to pay the price of listening to Pauly in the front seat predicting ill tidings for the upcoming year.

My girlfriend’s sickness allowed her to escape the trip south to see my mother, leaving me to make the trip there and back along, returning to her late Christmas Day exhausted, falling asleep in her arms and waking on the couch under the scrutiny of her parents.

With my girlfriend still not recovered, I wanted to stay with her today – but had already told Uncle Harry that I would drive up to Greenwood Lake to visit him, knowing that he was ill as well.

“Someone has to visit him,” I told his brother Ed down in Toms River, “and since I’m the closest geographically that someone has to be me.”

Harry like many in our family has been ill for a long time and Christmas time did little to help him mend.

Harry and Christmas were old drinking buddies and I over the years was the hapless bartender condemned to listen to their tales of woe.

My girlfriend’s illness robbed us of what may be our last and only Christmas together since this time next year she will likely be off in some remote place at graduate school.

The whole two days made me realize that we are constantly saying goodbye to each other, each time feeling as if it will be the last time, and that we might never see each other again.

Now, I sit in my own place on my own bed aching for warmth that may never come, from a stove that is not adequate to heat this sieve of an apartment, and from a love I know already is only temporary.

A Christmas Tradition

December 26, 1985

We celebrated a traditional Christmas – traditional for us, if not the world, just like in the old days, a fellow might say, me, Hank, Pauly and Garrick, all in the same place at the same time, singing old dogs, drinking until we were drunk, smoking dope the way we did each Christmas Eve as long as we could remember, feeling the age old pain lonely men feel this time of year.

Only Hank seemed reasonably content, having met a new romantic interest last fall. The other three of the Four Musketeers ached with the same old pangs that drew us together in the past, bringing us to Frank and Dawn again for our reunion.

Although the location changed over the last decade, the mood never did, nor the atmosphere – and even when one or more could not stay the whole night, we all made our appearance if only as a gesture of the past, to maintain a tradition we are reluctant to surrender for fear we might not have it when we need it again in the future – when suddenly four years ago, it stopped.

One year, I recall, coming through a thick fog. One year I even deserted my girlfriend to be with this motley crew, deserting them a week later on New Years to be with her.

One year I met Frank’s mother, an elderly woman who startled the crap out of me when passing the joint, she asked for a hit.

This year felt as if nothing had changed, time preserving this night in eternity for us to linger in and recall, except that we all looked older if not acting it, and Frank’s daughter springing from childhood into young womanhood.

Thinking back over the last four years since our last gathering I realize how lost I felt, and hearing the old songs and feeling the old high dragged me back in time to a point where no matter how miserable I was on any other day of any other year, I found peace on Christmas Eve with these people.

Early on Christmas Eve Day I’d felt lost, without tradition after hearing other people talk about theirs, and then attending the event with the others and hearing Hank belt out songs we’d sung since 1971 or so, and having Pauly dominate the room with his satiric humor, I felt as if I’d come home again – We all go home for Christmas don’t we?

Hank had a more self-deprecating humor, mocking his past life and failed accomplishments, while Garrick still pined over that one lost romance from that one time when he lived inside a DH Laurence novel with a woman as acute as any of its characters.

Garrick makes up for his loneliness by going from place to place, seeing a host of people who populate the landscape of his life, but never really manages to escape the fundamental pain he feels – we all feel – this time of year, waiting as we all wait for some woman to jump into his life with both boots on.

I think I hurt him a little when I mumbled something about my interest Hank’s cousin, Mary Kay, a woman Garrick is apparently interested in as well. But waiting for Garrick to act is like waiting for the advance of a glazier. He flirts with commitment, but never commits.

I remember a string of Christmases past in which he occupied himself with a woman from Clifton, coming ever-so-close to getting her to bed, only to wait just long enough for her to eventually introduce him to her future husband. I remember when I was just like Garrick and so we can take comfort in each other’s misery, and the perverse contest of how long each of us could last without a woman’s attention.

Now as always, Garrick operates alone, and sometimes I feel sorry for him, when I am really feeling sorry for myself since – in breaking up with Anne – I’m right back to where he is, one more sad tradition that has nothing to do with Christmas.