: lower black pain.

There is a small park in Queens, New York, on the site of the borough’s last one room schoolhouse. Built in 1879, just five years after citywide compulsory education had been established, the small building held six rows of nine desks, with each row being a different grade level, starting with the youngest. The students were mostly farmer’s kids from the area. There was a blackboard and a US flag and a potbellied stove to keep the kids warm in winter. There was not a bathroom.

Only ten miles away from One Room Schoolhouse Park sits the nation’s largest high school, Brooklyn Tech, serving over six thousand children. I’m not sure how many rooms it has but a lot of them must be bathrooms.

Schools aren’t a collection of rooms, they are a collective of teachers, yet while I remember many teachers fondly, there is one school room that I can’t quite shake the experience of: the gym. If you know me well, or even at all, you’ve already realized that my time in the gym was that of a stranger in a strange land, spindly and not entirely committed to the concept… let’s call it unenthused.

My grade school gym was an indoor basketball court, sunken into a sub-basement with one door for access. There was a small row of built-in bleachers a floor above it that looked down into it like an auction pit at a rodeo.

While a myriad of slight to significant humiliations occurred to us all there, my most memorable involved the gym’s basic design, where the line designating the edge of the play space was less than three feet away from the concrete walls surrounding it.

I won the race. I don’t want to burden you with suspense. Our team won the relay race, and it wasn’t an “in the cards” sort of win; Beth was never the strongest sprinter and the other team had Lester on it… let’s just say he grew up to be an award winning coach, this was in his blood. And putting me as anchor was not a decision, it was the result of the order of selection of the teams, and I’m not wingeing about being picked last, I’d have done it too, it wasn’t a situation where they needed Star Trek facts or magic tricks.

But I ran. I won’t waste time explaining it in a “slow motion you can only hear my heartbeat as we cut between my feet and eyes” kind of way, but I am 45 years from the event and I still remember that particular instance of running. And it wasn’t just the run (not to brag), it was the TURN, the perfect number of harried steps to the opposite line, the touch of the tennis shoe (as we called all athletic footwear back then) that served as both tag and the ideal transfer of velocity and weight in the complete opposite direction to propel me back to the other side of the room.

Kids had gathered on the floor above and were looking down at us. Encouraging shouts reflected from every inch of the entirely non-acoustic space. I didn’t even see my opponent, my focus was the dash to that other red line on the floor, this was my chance, this was All There Was. When I hit the finish line, there were cheers.

For one second. I didn’t stop at the finish line,

I hit the concrete wall with my entire body. It was like falling off a building sideways.

The space became silent. I lay on the floor, that familiar high pitched sine wave sound in my ears, eyes watering. Due to my particular physical architecture, my forehead had taken the most damage.

A teacher asked if I was ok. “What?” I kind of replied.

“Are you going to be ok?” she said slower.

She took a closer look. It must not have been very encouraging.

“Let’s get you to the nurse’s office.”

I wore the egg sized lump on my forehead like an Olympic medal. It was there for three weeks.

That was about as good as it got for me and gyms. Though, to be more specific, my main problem was the locker room.  School is supposed to prepare you for life as an adult, but there are very few work situations that require disrobing, barring those where the job itself is focused on disrobing. I suppose that nurse and doctors put on their scrubs, or beekeepers change into that spacesuit thing, but other than Superman I didn’t have an inspiring example of a reason to take my clothes off outside of my house.

And gym clothes were disappointing. The socks and shorts utilized The World’s Worst Elastic; the web-like white strands seeming to melt before our very eyes each week until every knee sock became a leg warmer. Putting it on was the very opposite of a super-hero suit.

For Lester, it must have felt amazing to shed that light blue short sleeve button down and put on that t-shirt, because he knew deep inside somewhere that this was part of his destiny, his legacy, who he was always going to be. The experience also signaled truths about myself to me, but every one of them was entirely less impressive.

My high school gym was much larger, and had fancy wooden seating that extended from the wall if you turned a key. You had to be careful while it was closing as it was all engineered before they invented “safeguards”.

My experiences there, also somewhat socially awkward, were not athletic, but best summed up by the words “Pep Rally”. Somehow I got tapped to do loads of presentations to the entire school at that strange part before they introduced the teams and the cheerleaders; the warm up acts, an awkwardness compounded by my role in these events as the president of our school’s Latin and French clubs.

For the Latin club, we presented “Tres Porcus Parvus”, a dramatic interpretation of “The Three Little Pigs”. At least I was the narrator, so this event holds a bit of subtle dignity - it went over well with the confused Midwestern parents waiting to cheer for the athletes.

But for one of the French club presentations, I translated “Every Breath You Take” by The Police and performed it on acoustic guitar, and by the time I got to “Je criais ‘bebe s’il vous plait!’ ”  the place went totally wild. The nice part about both these events was that I got to wear my regular clothes.

I spent most of my high school time in our theatre, where, come to think of it, we changed clothes all the time, but those costumes proved much more aspirational since I was never cast in the role of a spindly out of breath kid wearing leg warmers. Perhaps that is a gap in American theatre that’s ripe for a Tony™ award winning play.

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Recently, I’ve seen a lot of children wearing Nirvana shirts.

By children, I mean people younger than, say 26 and a half, and by Nirvana, I mean the essential 1990’s American grunge rock band.

The band, if you’re not familiar, is an icon of raw emotion, unfiltered and in most ways we use the word, genius. Words that are poetry mixed with tunes that are musical. You don’t get either of those all the time anymore, but this particular combination was…well, it was an anthem to those who felt lost in a world of More More More, and just wanted to be Enough.

I like the band. A great deal. I was in a band when they came along; no costumes, second hand instruments, clothes from the thrift shop – old jeans and flannel shirts. After they hit it big, Macy’s began selling “distressed” flannel shirts for $45 dollars that matched the 25 cent ones in our local Goodwill store… y’know, for the folks who wanted to cosplay as “authentic”.

But these kids today (ok, fine: “young adults”) were not actually on the planet yet when the band was popular, or even existed, as their lead singer (quite sadly) left the planet in 1994. What does the band mean to them?

And it’s tons of different kids, all races and backgrounds, wearing Nirvana shirts, not The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. Maybe they’ve heard the music, or maybe there was a huge sale at Hot Topic, but those shirts represent a stand for simple individuality which echoes even louder in their infinite forest of social media.

And so many black kids in these shirts. I love that. (There was this great punk rock band, seminal to the genre, born in Detroit, where all the members were black, but they did not crack the hit parade, and nobody’s wearing their t-shirts because their name was Death, which I’m sure is against a school dress code somewhere.)

Nirvana’s music was fused to the events of my young life so completely that when I entered corporate America, I couldn’t bear to listen to them anymore. Every lyric strained my very soul, every power chord tore at my being.

How how how can I go in this building again? Why why why am I part of a broken capitalistic model? You know: your late twenties. I had to swallow so much of who I was everyday (like seawater) that I listened to a lot of Judy Garland on the way to work instead, although her life ended up being pretty punk too. (I would have loved a duet between her and Iggy Pop. Oh, c’mon, think about it, that would be amazing.)

Not for nothin’, but it’s hard to be a human cog. We’re not really built for that, no matter how ergonomic the chairs or the keyboards, it doesn’t feel right. For 12 to 16 to 20 years we go to a place everyday where we learn things and then prove that we either understand or at least remember what was taught. And in between that, we chat with our neighbors, have a little bite to eat, and go to recess.

Now it’s backward. People go to a place everyday where they don't learn anything but they get free coffee, and for a break they go outside to get more coffee or (if they’re kicking it old school) top it off with a little nicotine. Then it’s back inside to let all that jitter juice and tarry resin work medical black magic on their insides. No recess.

That’s actually a lyric by Nirvana, but, digression.

The logic of recess was always that kids need a bit of time during their routine to romp about and reduce their stress, to let out all the bad air and take in some good air, to calm down. So here we are now, filled with caffeine, and (not for nothin’ but) most of us are more stressed than when we were seven.

Honestly, recess as a kid was its own kind of stressful. In the classroom, no one was allowed to hit you in the face with a red latex ball, but on the playground they were instructed to do so, and praised upon impact.

Yet, I am convinced that, as adults, we still need recess. I’m also convinced the reasons we don’t have it anymore are purely legal, as the red ball thing would most certainly lead directly to a courtroom situation at this point.

I’ve tried to add healthy movement to my day, fill the rings on my watch by walking briskly to Whole Foods to get more corn flakes, but it doesn’t compare to a good game of kickball. At least we could go outside once a day and play on a swing, or a slide, or a jungle gym. When’s the last time you said “whee!” during a work day? That’s all recess is, y’know, a bit of joy within routine, a scheduled rebellion.

Hmn. Maybe I’ll walk the other direction today, down to the comic book store, my grey tie and black button-down hiding the Queens of the Stone Age t-shirt underneath.

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First day of the school year here in Brooklyn. Lunch has been packed, the pencils sharpened, a brand new Keeper has been Trapped. I know I’m not the one going, but it’s exciting nonetheless, anticipating new homework and classes and conversations and memories being made, like when Potatohead made that ridiculous face that we all found hysterical at lunch.  Ah, Potatohead.

I was not a fan of homework as a child. I am not a fan of homework today either. I did enjoy “word problems”, challenges that put me in the role of a young investigator seeking answers in clever mysteries, like “two trains leaving opposite towns at the same time”. But I’ve always really loved learning practical knowledge; things I could use, building blocks I could make something out of.

My sources of knowledge were limited, but I really do believe that it used to be easier to learn stuff. I know that sounds naive, given that we carry the knowledge of all ages in our pockets, but that often feels like drinking from a firehose: everything I’ve managed to know I learned individually, one fact at a time, and most everything was related to something else I was interested in. I was an investigator, collecting clues.

• listen to an album by a favorite artist, • notice the amazing guitar player, • go to the record store to figure out what other albums they’ve played on • discover a new artist

I can discover an artist on my phone, but for the most part they are spoon fed to me, pushed in my face like 3D pancakes. I used to actually hunt for knowledge, a human search engine with 3 TV networks, maybe five radio stations, a handful of magazines and a couple of giant reference books with credits for music and film. No internet, but lots of conversations with people about art and history and science, books and food and travel. I built a mosaic of passion and experience that felt more personally curated than logarithmic.

Ok, that made it sound kind of cool. It definitely wasn’t. I was a middle school kid that watched what I’m going to call an entirely disproportionate amount of PBS. That’s where Monty Python was, and Doctor Who, and the most wonderful show I had ever seen, a series of historical lectures (told you it wasn’t cool) called “Connections”. Helmed by the jauntily British James Burke, the show demonstrated cause and effect throughout human history, a series of if/then statements connecting, say, the invention of the plow directly to the jet engine. It was like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon if Kevin Bacon had six degrees from Oxford.

That’s what I thought learning was, because my other two influences were my mom (who believes there is always something to learn anywhere) and the World Book encyclopedias. Between the three of these, I found everything interesting. I still do, kinda, and the most wonderful coincidences happen. A quick example:

As mine was a bold youth during the reign of Michael J Fox, I enthusiastically saw everything he was in. The other day a movie of his popped in my head called “Light of Day”, where he was a punk rocker whose sister was played by Joan Jett. I did not remember it as a classic, but I kept humming the theme song for some reason, so I looked up the movie in The New World Book = Wikipedia. It was indeed not revered as a classic either in its time or any time after. It is NOT available on iTunes, and its current rental price has been reduced from 99 to 72 cents on Amazon Prime.

But I learned that original star of the film was supposed to be Bruce Springsteen, and whaddya know? He wrote that theme song I couldn’t get out of my head. Oh, and the original title of the movie? “Born in the USA”, which Bruce took with him as a little souvenir and put to a much better use.

What was really surprising is the screenwriter’s credits.  The very next film he wrote was one of my all time favorites, The Last Temptation of Christ, and his two previous scripts?

Raging Bull, and Taxi Driver.

I learned all that in a 2 minute break from doing dishes. See? Learning is fun.

Awkwardly, I collected what I’ve learned in paper form, so we now have loads of books that explain how-to do things, like how-to repair anything, or how-to read secret codes and ciphers, or how-to make a movie on a used car budget. Cookbooks and biographies and maps and The New England Journal of Medicine… we never really leave school. But it is wonderful to get a few unnecessary pens and new notebook once a year. To be perfectly honest, it was always getting a new lunchbox that defined the season for me. I guess that’d be silly now… unless they make an “Oppenheimer” one.

Oh, who am I kidding: I’d get “Barbie”.

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I find no state of being quite as deeply insulting as insomnia.

Because it isn’t just about being awake; it’s about the knowing the state I’ll be in the following day. I know exactly what 3PM is going to look like when I’m up at 3AM, which is immediately stressful, bringing a tide of adrenaline that self-perpetuates the situation. Oh sure, I might drag myself into work, but by 11:30 I’ll be struggling, and by 2PM consciousness falls and the world drifts into a haze of low noise and deep inner struggle.

It’s not like I’ve come here dishonestly: the world’s very often a madhouse, lacking logic or structure: and the most challenging part is the breakneck speed I must employ in order to stay on top of everything, which doesn’t give anyone ample time to really soak it all in, so of course everything comes bubbling to the surface after I’ve had a bit of sleep.

Only at 3:30 in the morning can I properly contemplate the subtleties of inequity, brutalities of narcissism, and Crocs. I don’t think they’re shoes. I do find comfort in the fact that no matter how crazy The World is, MY world is a little bit better, if for no other reason than that it’s smaller than the entire world, so it wins, comparatively, by scale.

I’ve developed a few tricks to get to sleep; they aren’t great, but after a few hours or so they each seem to work.

Sometimes I practice the alphabet in American Sign Language, left and right hands at the same time. I give myself challenging phrases and try to fingerspell them. I keep forgetting how to sign “x”, “f”, and “p”, but there’s not really a great phrase with all those letters in it anyway, since nobody faxes anymore.

Corn flakes are good - not the frosted kind (too much sugar). I’ve had some success with reading, but it’s hard finding a book interesting enough to get into but not so intriguing that you can’t quite put it down. And it’s difficult to be productive or accomplish anything that requires a clear head, like writing or music scoring, because at least that part of my brain is absolutely asleep.

I try to stay away from my phone and computer, but then I discovered ASMR: if you haven’t heard of it, it’s little online films that maximize the intimacy of the medium by mimicking eye to eye contact while employing soft, nearly whispered dialogue in roleplaying situations that are supposed to be, on the whole, relaxing. They cut your hair or give you a vision exam or demonstrate the many sounds they can create on a nearly impossible range of interesting objects purchased at a nearby Target. 

In my opinion, in all the internet there is one person really good at it; her most effective strategy is a very convincing imitation of genuine empathy:

“You look so tired!” she’ll say, brow slightly furrowed in worry.“You work too hard. You deserve a vacation!” The warmth of my enthusiastic agreement lulls me right back to sleep.

It doesn’t seem to really matter what I do; time isn’t finicky – it eats whatever I feed it for 90 minutes or so and then leaves me about half an hour to snooze before the cats wake me up for their breakfast (which I find particularly unsympathetic, as they literally sleep all the time).

What works best for me is just thinking. I usually pick a word and begin free associating. This week the word was infrastructure.

I started with bridges; there are some around here so unstable that entirely new structures have been built around them just to keep them standing. Then I drifted through the Key Utilities (gas, water, power, internet, phone) and all the Essential Services (housing, sanitation, education, transportation) and then commerce… all the little plastic pieces you would need if Catan was an actual place.

If I was on a farm, I’d have to provide all that for myself. A well for water, solar panels for power. I’d have to build a house and buy a truck – a big one, for hauling… I’ve never really hauled before…I’d probably need to learn how to haul…on the commercials it’s always logs…so I’ll guess I’ll need an ax or a chainsaw or something –

– if infrastructure represents the building blocks, the basics, then what constitutes our personal infrastructure? (Beyond food and water and, y’know, sleep.)

I think we truly need empathy; we have to care. And we need passion and courage, because we have to want something, and we have to be brave enough to try new things. Empathy stands against despair, passion stares down apathy, and courage conquers ego. That would be a good base to build on.

Yawn.

Ok, cats, I’ll feed you. Good grief. look at the time. It’s actually a little chilly.

Yawn.

Thanks, Summer. See you next year. I’ll be sure to tell winter you said hi.

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Somewhere in Peru, an aged schoolbus with no working windows (all permanently open or closed) roughly winds its way along a jungle road, picking up villagers on their way to or from the market. Loaded with baggage and animals and children and laughter, it is a loud, bumpy, and uncomfortable ride, yet so much a part of the community that every passenger experiences a warm familiarity.

So last week, I could have squeezed my way onto that subway train, surrounded on all sides, hands full of grocery bags, deeply “engaging my core” to keep my face from pressing up against the window: instead, I chose to wait 10 minutes for the next train, because I just couldn’t do it. The doors opened at the station and there was about a foot of space left in the car. I did not experience a warm familiarity, although it was 92 degrees and I suppose standing shoulder-to-shoulder is as familiar as strangers get.

But I just… couldn’t.

I believe that I am middle-aged now.

It’s not my back or my knees, it’s my perspective. The glass isn’t half empty or full as much as now it’s dirty and I’m gonna have to wash it by hand because it’ll break if I put it the dishwasher and I don’t have one of those sponge/stick things to properly clean it so I’m gonna have fold a regular sponge in half lengthwise and kinda dial it around aggressively and then shake it like a bartender to rinse it out.

I don’t always wear matching socks anymore because I wear Doc Marten boots so who’s gonna ever see ‘em? and my daughter stopped wearing matching socks years ago and look how happy she is.

And I just can’t with the rushing and worrying about everything, and I have acquiesced to the fact that my waist is below my tummy now, and not straight across it.

On E-Bay I’d be listed as “used, but in good condition”.

That’s middle age, right?

I’ve been watching a lot of those home renovation shows on tv. Those shows are fascinating, celebrations of tools, skills, and imagination. My favorites are the ones where they just move some things around, take down a wall or two, and voila, new space.

I think it’s cheating when they do a full demolition and just rebuild a new house there… that's not renovation as much as architecture. It seems like cheating, the DEMO route, because you’re just destroying old and making new, not improving on what’s there already. If you take it all down to the studs and build something different, it’s not as impressive when the people who live there come back and say “I don’t even recognize it! It doesn’t even look like the same house!”

Because it isn’t. Sure, the house can have “good bones” but we’re more than our bones.

Ok, well, yes, I see it as a metaphor. I do, yes.

We all have good bones. And we can renovate ourselves without replacing ourselves. The Earth has good bones: there’s a lot to work with, some really great features, impressive details, a natural flow: seeds are planted, flowers spring up, then Jack Frost brings his demolition crew to blank out everything. But we don’t get All New Trees every spring. The planet builds upon itself, expanding the growth of the years before, thriving less on re-invention than evolution.

Age doesn’t “demo” youth, it feeds into it, deepening its roots: youth gets stronger and smarter with every passing day, able to weather the winters and cherish the summers. And then, when we no longer require any more discouraging hot and crowded commutes, we can toss out all that urgency we really never needed and make room for the pop hits of 1973 in those 10 minutes we have on the platform until the next train arrives at the station.

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I’ve been stationed in many a cubicle in my work life: beige, grey, light green (I think that was my favorite), each a definitive non-statement of industrial design, constructed from canvas and oddly non-magnetic steel, semi-surrounding us like parentheses.

It’s the evolution of sitting at one’s desk in a classroom. The desk was never really yours, you just sat there. But often one found the names of past inhabitants written or (even more boldly) carved into the wooden desktop, concave letters embellished with the ink of many a ballpoint pen, decades of students drowsily following the original lines, deepening them, while listening to others “read aloud from the book”.

Wooden schooldesks represented a historically significant yet unauthorized sculptural legacy, ruined by the development of space age mar-proof materials which resisted even the permanent marker, soulless surfaces where the pointy end of a compass could never produce a truly satisfying result, impressions too shallow to leave one’s metaphorical mark. Plus, schools eventually reclassified the compass as a weapon rather than an essential educational tool. There lies tradition.

The new “desktop” of the computer screen, while infinitely customizable, holds no legacy. It is the very definition of ephemeral, leaving no mark whatsoever, in fact disappearing entirely while you’re still sitting there if not engaged with.

I’ve never left my name on a cubicle. Underneath the rolling drawer unit at my current job I found a lipstick that looked expensive, but my co-workers quickly reclassified it as mid-level at best. It was not a name,  just some light evidence that a previous resident of my current space had experienced the loss an easily replaceable cosmetic.

Although I have inhabited many a cubicle, I feel extremely lucky that I have never been farther than the flight distance of a hastily folded paper airplane from a window.

I was once offered a job that paid nearly ten percent more than the one I had, but it was in the basement of a twenty story building. Oh, they interviewed me (and told me the part about the salary) on the eighteenth floor, high above the hoi polloi; then we took the nice elevator (with the wood paneling) down to the first floor, went through a large set of metal doors at the end of a long hallway, transferred to a service elevator with blankets on the walls, and went down FOUR FLOORS.

The room we entered was vast, ceiling almost two stories high, but I could still feel the weight of the entire building above us as the air conditioning audibly struggled to pump enough oxygen into the space to support a free range pen of professional graphic artists. One of them had printed out a photo of a window and placed it on the wall beside them. I did not take the job, and have since considered window access part of every pay package.

The modern interpretation of ergonomics (or the science of understanding humans within a system) seemed more clearly rooted in economics when the cubicle was abandoned by many larger corporations in favor of the Open Layout. Here six, eight, or ten people shared a single long table, like in a dining hall at a summer camp. The pitch was: with no walls at all, employees will be granted the freedom to better communicate and bond. The reality was: you could fit 1/3 more people in a room that way, saving millions in rent.

I was deep in corporate America when this wave hit, and remember being told that each employee would get 32 to 36 inches of space, not on each side, but in total. No room for phones anymore – they’d have to use their own. Plus (special bonus) when an employee was out for any reason, another employee could use the same space. This office space design logic was obviously based on that of the “food court”, money saving trends which dissolved once we all had to stay six feet apart from one another.

While I’ve had offices, they can be isolating. I liked to use them best as meeting centers for my department, both for official business and random celebration. But thousands of hours were spent alone, hidden away, awash in light toil, where one might appreciate the unintentional sigh of a nearby co-worker awash in their own.

Thus experience has led me to appreciate the cubicle as both a literal and figurative middle ground between open and closed workspaces, a non-permanent home away from home, seemingly designed by the fourth little pig, the one between the sticks one and the brick one: the prefab pig who loved walls but didn’t really want to get mortar all over his hooves and got eaten by the wolf since he was only surrounded on three sides.

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My junior high daughter has started doing math for fun, so I guess that summer is coming to a close. Not quite the swallows coming home to Capistrano, but it does indicate that it’s probably time to wrap it up and get ready for the rest of the year.

Summer has been what it always is in the core of the northern hemisphere; dependably warm and lush, tree-wise. It’s strange to think that it’s snowing in Argentina: it’s 37 degrees in Ushuaia right now.

(I did look that up. Ushuaia. I don’t have the southernmost cities of every continent sitting in my mind’s back pocket.)

The crunch of Autumn leaves, the peal of Winter’s bells, and the tweeting of the birds in Springtime have no parallel in summer. Ok, maybe crickets, but they really get going at the end of summer, into the fall, and it’s hard to hear them in the city sometimes.

But I do love the crickets. Apparently those are mating calls, so the whole thing probably sounds like a crowded singles bar from a cricket perspective, but that’s one of the kindnesses of there not being a Babel Fish in my ear (as of yet).

Summer’s not over quite yet. There’s a couple of “dog days” on the way, the heat where my DNA reconsiders its prehistoric choice to leave the protection of the cool deep caves. For those of you already surviving blazing heat, the season may have been a bit too thematic, and you’re waiting for the night you can sleep in the specific silence that happens when the AC isn’t going full blast.

By definition, seasons come and go, that’s the strategy of them, a character arc, plans that evolve into memories, perennial traditions like old friends. Around here, we have just arrived at our annual festival of the summer fruits, which is 49% about eating them, and 51% about singing this song:

“Summer = summer fruits: it wouldn’t be summer without ‘em!”

The peach. The blueberry. The sensational nectarine. Fruits literally ripe with aroma and flavor, best enjoyed alone (reportedly), yet always so deeply appreciated atop two scoopfuls of vanilla ice cream. Or on a hearty morning bowl of corn flakes. Mmn.

Of course, now we can get peaches in December. Plums in January. Blueberries in March. Where is the anticipation of the season? That delicious last bite for the year, followed by the “I can’t wait until we can have this again!”? The sweet and delicate patience that buffets you through pumpkin spice and peppermint, past snap peas and ramps, back to the sun-drenched sweetness of cherries and berries?

Most theme parks above 1-70 Highway are not open all year - snow and roller coasters don’t go together. Beaches close as well, even though most are technically parks and public land (guards at the ready yet some ne’er do wells attempt an autumn picnic). Here in New York, ice cream shops will turn to soup huts, and dollar store pool noodles will be replaced with sleds. Summer moves along, everywhere, except the produce section of the grocery store.

On television, Summer Replacement Series were supposed to be temporary, you knew that going in, they were experimental and a bit cheeky because they knew that in eight weeks you’d be watching Matlock again in this time slot. My Summer Replacement Series has allowed me a break from heavier topics, issues, and ruminations – I hope it didn’t seem too frivolous, as I’ve enjoyed it very much, and I’ll be finishing the summer in a similar tone. But I may keep a bit of this Sonny and Cher variety show vibe, like a vial of sand from a well groomed beach vacation. Or actually, more like a Dixie cup full of little seashells.

We have to retain a little bit of summer all year round. But just a little.

There is a chain of Christmas stores that is open all year long, not just the three months before the holiday and the month or so after when everyone is looking on a “good deal” for next year’s decorations. Nope, they are open in June. Some stock flags for the 4th of July and jack-o-lanterns in October, but the purists remain, noël three-six-five, anticipating the tourist desperately longing for that August nutcracker.

But unlike calendar based holidays, seasons are always happening. We can keep a little bit of the summer because it’s always summer somewhere on the planet… the mystery of the hemispheres. I realized yesterday that every single Winter Olympics has been held in “winter” in the Northern hemisphere. That’s so hemispherist. We could hold them in August if we went to Ushuaia. Or La Paz. That’s in Bolivia. I looked that up too.

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languid: exhibiting a natural disinclination to physical exertion; leisurely; unhurried

Under a giant beach umbrella in a sturdy beach chairsits a woman wearing a wide brimmed hat and sunglasseswho sips something very coldthrough a colorful strawfrom a very tall glasswhich she sets downlightlyon the little white table beside herso that she may continue to

read a book,

languidly.

I’ve read booksI’ve been on a beachand I’ve even worn a pretty big hatbut as of yet have not hit the tremendous trifectaof this image.

It is ubiquitous, aspirational,and utterly, utterly fictional.Absolutely.

(two utterlys and an absolutely)

It has haunted me for a great deal of my adult life as an iconic renderingof a perfectsummer vacation.

There is no doubt that the book she’s enjoying is a“summer read”,one of those novels specifically designedto be carted about in an oversized canvas bag;lighthearted faremeant to lure one gently awayfrom the frenetic reality of realityto share the adventures and mis-adventuresof delightful charactersplagued with relationships,and circumstances.

Summer reading is meant to be read outdoors,pages designed to be illuminated by the light of the sun,(not directly, but saucily bounced off of groomed sand).It is a dream that they’re selling,A formula. A recipewhere all you need to add is time

to read.

But they don’t sell you the time. They only sell you the book.

And there it sits, on your table, waitingfor the time to read it. Outdoors, at that.

The book costs, maybe, $15 dollars.But that experienceOf the woman on the chairis a premium onebecause she is never sitting close to anyone elseshe doesn’t have a phone outno kids within earshot(certainly not her ownor her bag would have beenladen with other people’s things instead ofher shawl, sunscreen and keys(and, of course, the book))and she’s never on her first drink

sometimes there’s a young person wearingcrisp white clothingbringing those drinks to herso that she doesn’t even have tolift her eyesfrom the page.

So it’s $15, plus all that. Which adds up.Plus, the time.

I’m watching peopleOn my way to workOn the subwayFar from the rays of the sun

Each of themDeserves a relaxing stretchOf eight to eleven hoursWithout mayhem or consequence

But insteadThey are hereEyes down

Gripping a railOr packed in the seatsElbows close to their sides

Holding their “summer read”pastel cover awash with florescent lightNo breezeNo drinksAn experience incredibly affordableBut not quite alignedWith the genreof the bookAs any fantasy within itIs overshadowed by

the image of that womanon a beachin a chairwith her quietand her space

and her timeto read

languidly. Next stop: Fulton Street.

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It was after church, right after church, so I didn't even get to take my tie off. The basement was finished and furnished, but it was still a basement, without windows, and my suit felt hot; polyester not breathing, and I was eleven, and church had already been 3 hours long, and then we all said we'd come to Miss McClaine's house after to see her slide show.

She'd laid out nuts and dried apricots along with jell-o salad. It wasn't as heresyish as it sounds because she'd been to Egypt, that's what the slide show was about; so it’s Thematic Snackery. Somebody made a joke about eating a camel that made everybody avoid the meatballs, but the jell-o went pretty quickly. There were marshmallows.

We sat in the front row, my Mom and my Grandmother and Grandfather and I. I had a little paper plate filled with dried fruit. My mother filled a little plate with almonds. I liked dried fruit, even though it was hard to chew, but I only took the appropriate amount at first; then, when nobody else wanted any (this was in the era before dried fruit had really hit the states, save the mighty raisin or noble prune), I went back before the lights turned off and really stocked up. We were missing dinner for this.

Lights down, slide projector on, and that super familiar "Shatook-ik!. Clak!" sound began.

Splo MacClaine, our host, stood to the left (her right, my left) of the screen. She even had some music for the background. It was what my Grandmother called “foreign music”. My Grandmother called lots of stuff ‘foreign’. Ms. MacClaine told stories about the heat and the sand and of course, the pyramids. And sphinxes. Or is it ‘sphinx’ in the plural? There were camels and men wearing long robes and music-that-was-foreign and sand (again).

On the way back home in my Grandfather’s car, my Grandmother said, “Well, that was nice. Now we don’t have to go there.”

“Grandma, “ I said, “she told us that she hoped this might inspire us all to go.”

“Well, that’s ridiculous. Why would we go now? She just showed it to us. I’ve seen everything now. Now we don’t have to go.”

This bothered me. You can tell, right? I mean, the whole 44 year retention of incident thing probably tipped you off. It’s just that I hadn’t been anywhere yet, and I was unconvinced that going places was just seeing things. You could do that with a ViewMaster (Oh look! Now I don’t have to go to the Grand Canyon! (click-ik) or Oz (click-ik) or the Moon!). To truly experience a place you have to use all your senses. True, Ms. MacClaine used sight, sound, taste, and even smell in her post-worship TEDx talk. Oh, she wore a “traditional dress” too, so I guess she got touch in there.

Still, that basement was not Egypt.

I’m sure you must have thought about the chance that maybe my Grandmother was just upset that Ms. MacClaine had gone there FIRST, that this story was hers to tell and why do you go somewhere if you can’t come back and tell everybody? But my Grandmother never took a lot of pictures when she went anywhere, and she did have to travel with my Grandfather. There were a couple of airport souvenirs with “Hawaii” or “San Francisco” on them in their house somewhere; I believe the Hawaii one had a little volcano diorama, and they did have one of those spring loaded hula dancer figures (but they never put it in their car).

I think it was less jealousy than water. Grandma liked water. She and Grandpa enjoyed fishing; in lakes, off dams, and especially in the ocean. A little girl born and raised as landlocked as they come, but any boat my grandmother hit the deck of? She was Captain. I once saw Grandma light a full charcoal barbecue grill and cook twelve hot dogs on a pontoon boat no larger than a good sized area rug.

Egypt didn’t have enough water. Now Venice, she’d have LOVED Venice. Except it was in Europe, and she didn’t really enjoy the idea of Europe all that much. Foreign stuff.

We weren’t really a “vacation” family as much as “people who took trips” occasionally. Trips are like vacations with a thing to do added. We went on a trip to look after my pregnant aunt. You could take a trip to the mall to pick up something. Business trips always made sense to me later on because of course there was business, that was the point of a trip, getting something done, and maybe experiencing something the way there. Or back.

And “vacation” never really involved going anywhere, it was defined as the temporary pause of the otherwise necessary. We didn’t “go on vacation”; vacation was just the time circled on the calendar where there was no school or work; at my house it was always a time of contemplation and relaxation… no, I’m sorry, I must have fallen asleep there for a minute - at my house, it was ALWAYS time for accomplishing tasks you didn’t have time to do while you were working or at school. So there really wasn’t much of an opportunity to leave the house for an extended period when there was so much to do, right? Maybe we’ll take a trip to the store and get a Dairy Queen dipped cone on the way back.

“Traveling” was, to be brutally honest, what rich people did. No agenda, nothing to get done, no reason to be there except to… enjoy yourself. Yeeesh.

I would watch “Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom”” on TV and try to imagine what cascading miracles of circumstance might lead me to ever see a real water buffalo. The most feasible scenario is that I might add a major in Zoology with a Radio, Television and Film minor and then join the crew of “Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom””. Then every episode would be a trip that I was taking for work, and oh, look, there’s a water buffalo…cool. But the very idea (and let’s be honest I have a pretty good imaginatory thing going on) that I would just wake up one day and say to myself, “I want to see a water buffalo!” and then spend money to do so seemed pretty impossible.

But that’s what traveling was, aimless adventure, best accomplished by circuses, sideshows, and basketball players though I really never understood how that works.

Zoë is the one to plan all the trips, and they are trips, there are things to learn everywhere she’s taken me… it’s only when I try to amble that she becomes cross and bit boneless… “Do you need to go to another record store/comic book store/magic store/toy store?”

“Well, the records/comics/magic tricks/toys here are different.”

“How, are they different?”

And here, I take my gentle stand against my Grandmother’s opinion in that car. I stand tall, in these international places of business, spending my trip allowance on a set of light-up juggling balls or a disappearing flower arrangement or a bouzouki, and I know why exactly I’m drawn to these objects… the subtle difference in size of playing cards in Italy, the unique smell of that particular Moroccan candle… they’re foreign. In fact, it’s the opposite; I’m the foreign one… all those objects are right where they’re supposed to be, they’re at home, I am paying with foreign money and saying “thank you” in a foreign language (or at least accent in the UK). And I like it.

Maybe that’s how my grandmother felt on the ocean; a woman from the Great Plains, adrift on the waves, far from the shore, a foreigner, somehow at home, and the sand dunes of Africa just didn’t do it for her. Or maybe she was hungry after church and the jell-o salad just wasn’t cutting it. I believe we all got barbecue sandwiches on the way home from that event.

Officially, that made it a trip.

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My wife is from California. As a little girl she saw The Wizard of Oz, where, as you might remember, the plot is driven by a tornado’s direct effect on an impossibly sturdy wooden cabin. Zoë didn’t like that much, and decided that she’d never like to visit there, that was crazy, clouds attacking people was not the kind of thing that was supposed to happen, that was really bad.

I am from Kansas, and as there are many more films and television shows about the edges of our landmass than the middle, I saw a great deal of California based entertainment. I saw “Earthquake”, a movie about an earthquake, filmed in a technology they called “Sensurround”, an early version of multitrack audio where the sub bass was separated and the speaker POINTED INTO THE FLOOR of the theatre to make a kind of rumbly rumbly feel. In Brooklyn some people seem to have this installed in their cars now. It was nearly deafening. One could barely make out what Charleston Heston was shouting.

In any case I decided, much along the same lines as Zoe did, that California wasn’t right, the ground attacking people was not the kind of thing that was supposed to happen, that was really bad, I shouldn’t ever go there.

I did, of course, and I was in an earthquake, which didn’t ruin California for me because the true appeal of the Golden State for any midwesterner lies firmly in the mysteriously shifting topography of The Beach.

BEACH.

Land, meeting water, with NO LAND VISIBLY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF IT. Wow.

The beach was a perfect place to dance, according to the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello week of after-school movies on local tv. You could have a cookout, or hang out, or lay out in the sun for hours. I didn’t understand how the sun worked on fairer skin, past the dubious science presented on the Coppertone commercials (which was Jodie Foster’s first job, if you didn’t know…she was 3: she was the little girl with the dog on the bottle). Anyhoo, on TV, beaches were a magical place where folks fell in love.

I eventually went to a beach, of course. I did not fall in love there.

My coastal friends said that the beach was like a midwestern park, but in the park there is shade, from trees. I had thought there might be palm trees on the beach, like on Gilligan’s Island, but that was a different kind of beach. Most parks also have suspicious yet existent restrooms, which were lacking, along with their sketchy water fountains. And the sun was super fun, up until the moment I discovered that it was the one having the cookout: I, was on the menu.

I liked playing with sand, even burying myself in it, but that was ruined by a tv commercial for a horror movie called “Blood Beach”. The commercials were, quite famously, better than the movie: a no-budgeter about the invasion of a hungry creature beneath the sand - an idea later cribbed by George Lucas for The Empire Strikes Back, when the bad guys tried to feed the good guys to a big toothy sinkhole in the desert.

Even before that, there was JAWS. But the funny thing is that movie wasn’t even set in California, it was Martha’s Vineyard. The nerve. The true horror was the drop in property values. As iconic as that original film (and poster) was, it was the by-line to its sequel a few years later that struck home for me:

“Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.”

My mother thought that was hilarious. “When was that supposed to be? Safe in the water! Who even thinks that?”  she scoffed, mocking the newspaper ad from the kitchen table of our landlocked apartment.

Yet beyond both experience and cautionary tale exists my true beach-based obsession.  The nexus of extreme sport and high art: surfing.

They called skateboarding “sidewalk surfing”, but I knew that I wasn’t shooting the curl or hanging ten as my wheels ground over the pavement, teeth rattling, legs vibrating at a frequency high enough to produce sound.

Surfing was smooth. Effortless, yet a display of mastery over both gravity and bravery. There was a reason that the James Bond theme sounded like surf guitar; roundhouse cutbacking into a tube ride and ending safe and sound on land, board beneath your arm, one hand casually pushing your hair from your eyes (which was, incredibly, still dry), surfers were earthbound astronauts, navigating the rhythm of the planet itself.

I have not been surfing. Maybe it’s that thing about never meeting your heroes, but also I haven’t lived long enough in places where there was great surfing, and haven’t ever been on that style of vacation where you snorkel and pay with beads and have time to learn things like that.

Instead, I watch The Endless Summer, a movie about surfers literally following summer around the globe, enjoying worldwide waves for a year. There’s also Step Into Liquid, and Riding Giants, and this summer I think we’ll add Blue Crush.

Oh of course I’ve seen Point Break, but that’s more of a crime cupcake with surf frosting. And I can’t forget Frankie and Annette: ooo, here’s a little something, if anyone ever asks you, “What’s the connection between Boris Karloff and Stevie Wonder?” tell them they were both in the movie “Bikini Beach”. (On second thought, if somebody ever asks you that specific question, you should probably just quietly walk away.)

The freedom of the beach is, for me, the majesty of the waves, and though I’ve never been on a surfboard I’m in awe of the spirit of surfing; navigating the unknown and ever changing with grit, balance and focus. I can’t accomplish that in the water, but every now and then, after a long day of work, I get in the empty elevator, take my hair out of its band, and push it back from my eyes with one hand, imagining Dick Dale guitar riffs as I’m taking the subway home.

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