Surf's Up

The month of September is at my doorstep, but the summer is still trying to suck every last drop of life blood out of us, like a crazed vampire who doesn't know when to stop draining its victim.  Almost imperceptibly, the great wheel of the seasons is turning with tantalizing slowness, and the sun continues its languid, snail-like journey towards the south part of the sky.  I leave my weekly aerobics class at approximately the same time, 6:50pm, and I can tell it's getting a tiny little bit darker each time.  Used to be I would walk out of the gym into the bright sunlight of an early evening, but now the sun is hovering just above the western horizon, sinking a little more each day.  The equinox is about three weeks away, and before long I will exit the gym to a sky devoid of sunlight..

I so love autumn because it has always been a time of reflection and contemplation, a time to consider what has been done so far this year, and plan for the long cold winter nights.  Everything seems richer and more colorful; the air will soon carry a touch of chilliness in the morning, and there will be a fragrance that speaks of the harvest and coming-of-age, of promises fulfilled and lessons learned.  The nighttime sky, always an indication of things to come, shows the Scorpion slinking low across the south toward the faintly glowing western horizon, and gallant, regal Pegasus, the celestial flying horse, making a powerful leap into the eastern sky, taking its rightful place of honor in the starry firmament.

In the coming months, the Scorpion will disappear in the west just as Orion the Hunter throws his leg up over the eastern mountains and hoists himself sideways into the sky, his faithful dog beside him and Lepus the celestial rabbit underneath him.  The Scorpion and Orion are locked in a death pursuit, each chasing the other but never catching up.  Scorpion wants to sting Orion with its glittering tail, and Orion wants to kill Scorpion with his club.  They've been doing this for billions of years and will probably continue for billions more. Such is their fate, both of them hopelessly joined in titanic struggle that will never be resolved.  Orion will rise higher in the southern sky until around the winter solstice, when Orion will take his rightful place as Lord of the Sky, glistening in the cold, deep winter night, Master of Heaven and Earth, surveying his kingdom.  The Rabbit will still be underneath him, right above Columba the Dove.  And very late at night, right around the winter solstice, you will spot the star Canopus, the harbinger of spring, skimming barely above the southern deserts and wildly twinkling like an over-caffeinated, multicolored strobe light.

I have been listening to a lot of music from the 1960s recently.  XM satellite radio in my vehicle, along with the music channels on DirecTV, serves up an endless stream of great tunes from that amazing decade.  Some of the music still sounds incredibly fresh and new, as if recorded just last week.  The music and the vocal harmonies of a lot of the groups were startlingly complex and intricate.  Looking back over four decades, I have a new appreciation for the achievements of bands like The Mamas and The Papas, Spanky and Our Gang and the glorious "Jersey Boy" pop of the Four Seasons.  Even shallow contrivances like The Cowsills, a musical family whose members ranged from youngsters barely out of the toddler stage to the surprising youthful and hip (for the 60s) mother, recorded an amazing song called "The Rain The Park and Other Things."  The Cowsills were a manufactured pop group, a precursor to the ubiquitous "boy bands" of the 80s and 90s, and their short-lived success degenerated into a series of acrimonious lawsuits which ended up tearing the family apart.  Besides the reign of brash, revolutionary groups like The Beatles and the Jefferson Airplane, the 60s also saw the dawning of the singer-songwriter era with geniuses like Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell, whose brilliance would continue into the new millennium. 

Sure, there was a lot of crap music from that era, something that is inescapable no matter which decade you examine.  The "bubblegum" music craze was particularly obnoxious, and unabashedly phony studio groups like "The Archies" and "The 1910 Fruitgum Company" sold millions of annoying records.  Reflecting the cultural war at the time, a lot of people snapped up faux-patriotic potboilers like "The Ballad of the Green Berets" by SSgt. Barry Sadler (1966) - and on the other end - whiny, overwrought polemics like "Eve of Destruction" by Barry McGuire (1965).  But all that was counterbalanced by Motown, the early Beatles, and the whole San Francisco psychedelic era, and those are the musical genres with real creativity, and real staying power.

Also central to the 60s sound were the Beach Boys, whose music and sophisticated vocal arrangements are still universally regarded as the best of the best.  Brian Wilson's perfectly crafted masterpieces such as "Good Vibrations," "Wouldn't It Be Nice," and the shimmering, transcendent "Surf's Up" are unforgettable.  The Boys, along with lesser lights such as Jan and Dean, created the entire California youth scene, an eternal playground full of fast cars, surfing and beautiful girls in bikinis frolicking on a golden beach in an endless summer (recently given a garish, playfully hallucinogenic update by Katy Perry in her "California Gurls" video).  As someone just entering their teenage years, I was completely captivated by this perfect vision of a happy, carefree world drenched in lemon-yellow sunlight where you didn't have to work, and the biggest problem you had to worry about was catching the perfect wave.  Growing up as I did in a gritty steel-mill town near Pittsburgh, life could get oppressively dull and dreary.  The nearest body of water was the dirty Allegheny river which absent-mindedly meandered nearby, definitely not conducive to surfing.  The "beach" (derisively called the "Polish Riviera") consisted of a tiny strip of land on the other side of the river made up of smooth, round river rock, which was incredibly uncomfortable to walk or lay on.  Wintertime could be long, harsh and very depressing, often not seeing the sun for two weeks at a time, the trees devoid of green leaves, and the world locked in a frigid grip of icy, frozen ground and heavy, leaden skies.  But gods help me, that was my home, and I loved it.  Truth be told, sometimes I miss those incredibly dismal, cheerless winter days.

When conditions outside become difficult or unpleasant, either emotionally or because of the weather, the natural urge is to turn inward for solace.  Whether it's 10 or 110 degrees outside, it's the same thing, two sides of the same coin.  Memories are important stepping-stones back to a world with which you are intimately familiar, and that can be a very comforting thing.  It's endlessly fascinating to me how a song or a piece of music can evoke such rich, detailed memories of who you were and what you were doing when you first heard it.  I can remember all the words to songs I have not heard in 40 years, yet I can't remember what I did last week.  Funny how such seemingly trivial things make such an enormous impression on you.  Memories are funny, precious and remarkable milestones on the journey of your life.

A Lifetime of Memories

Father's Day always brings me around to think of my own father. I miss him a lot, he was a good man and we had a good relationship up to the very day he passed away. Mother's Day is always such a big deal and we hear about it for weeks in advance, but Father's Day is somewhat low-key and almost overlooked, almost like these men who worked so hard to provide us with everything we needed.

My dad was born on April 2nd, 1915, in the early days of World War I. He was born at home, not in a hospital, and lived in that same home until he enlisted in the Army and was sent to serve in Italy, where he was shot in the right thigh in combat with the Germans. He returned to live in that some house after the war and only moved out when he got married, and he and his brother Albert bought the duplex house right across the street. I've lived in probably seven different towns and cities in my life, but my father never left the street on which he was born.

He never talked much about his time in the Army fighting World War II, but one day he did open up to me and told me many stories about being in the Army and the camaraderie he had with his fellow soldiers. I was completely fascinated when I heard these stories because it caused me to look at my father in a totally different light, as an individual person with wants and needs and experiences outside of the context of our family. I always knew him as "Dad" but now I saw a whole different side of him, and it was amazing and enlightening.

My father married my mother in 1946, when he was 31 years old. My older brother was born three years later in 1949, and I came along two and a half years after that, in 1952. Dad was three months away from his 37th birthday when I was born. That was pretty late in life to have children, even by today's standards, and I can't help but wonder how drastically it changed his life. I wonder if he had any regrets about that. He never mentioned any, of course, but I can't help but think that he might have had a second thought or two. Especially when he found out that his two sons were going to be complete, polar opposites.

I will admit to being somewhat of a difficult child. People who know me usually end up gasping with apoplectic disbelief (although some of them say "gagging" is closer to the truth) when I say that, but I readily admit it. From the very start I had absolutely no interest in sports of any kind, and still don't to this day. I was a loner who preferred solitude, reading as many books as I could. My brother was a joiner who was never without a large entourage of friends, engaged in some sporting activity. I was a non-conformist, stubbornly independent, and I didn't care who didn't approve. My brother was a total conformist who found his greatest comfort in sharing a group identity. We were at each others' throats regularly, and the only interactions we had were meals shared around the dinner table; otherwise, we essentially lived in separate worlds and had nothing to do with each other.

It's not like my dad didn't try to get me interested in what were considered more "normal" childhood activities during the 50s and 60s. Every three months or so he would drag me outside and force me to play "catch" with him, tossing a baseball back and forth. I thought this was the most outrageous, ridiculous and painful torture imaginable and I dreaded it every time it came up. To me it was the dumbest and most pointless activity possible, and I always felt like I was being punished for something I couldn't remember doing. I made it clear I was not having the tiniest amount of fun and gradually he just gave up on the "catch" thing. He tried to interest me in golf and get my uncles to take me out fishing, but nothing worked. I would not have any sports in my life, at all, and still don't.

Very early on in life I came to realize that the vast majority of adults with whom I had to deal were complete idiots. This made me exhibit a rather obvious contempt and resistance to their attempts to control me and tell me what to do, and it led me to do a lot of mouthing off and talking back. I'm sure it caused my father no end of frustration and embarrassment when he heard that I talked back to a nun in Catholic school or told my aunt off in her job as clerk at the local drug store. But he also knew that that was just my nature, who I was, and rarely made me feel bad about being different.

I grew up in a blue-collar family in a blue-collar town. My hometown was a small place, around 2000 people, and you could not get lost there even if you wanted to. Everyone knew who you were and who your parents were. It was a pretty idyllic existence, and I have many, many fond memories of beautiful spring days bursting with flowers and gentle rain, endless, sun-drenched summer days, the majestic beauty of the fall foliage, and icy, snow-covered, crystalline winter days. We had most of what we needed, but few luxuries. My father's work at the steel mill was steady and provided for us. After twenty-five years at the mill my father was eligible for their extended vacation benefit, which gave him 13 consecutive weeks paid vacation every 5 years. Sometimes we would take a family vacation, which usually meant going to Conneaut Lake park in Ohio for a couple of days, or to Presque Isle on Lake Erie in the north. It wasn't a week at the beach or in Europe, but it was fun and memorable just the same.

Tragedy and misfortune did befall us, as it does all families. My older brother was killed in a car accident on the evening of my parents' twenty-first wedding anniversary. I don't remember a lot about it, as time fades memory and my own brain has blocked a lot of it out, but what I do remember was a nightmare of epic proportions. He had been diagnosed with leukemia some months before that, and it was a double blow to my parents. My mother never came to terms with losing her firstborn and it haunted her for the rest of her life. After his death she had what was called back then a "nervous breakdown" and spent time in a psychiatric hospital. They subjected her to ECT (electroconvulsive therapy), also called "shock treatments," in which her brain was subjected to blasts of electricity in hopes of "rebooting" it back to a normal state of being. She also took what she called "nerve pills," probably various anti-depressants, for decades afterward. My father had to deal with all this horrendous stuff as well as take care of me and the house and do his job, and I honestly don't know how he handled it all. He protected and shielded me from a lot of it, and had to cope with it alone. I realized this in time and still marvel at his strength through what surely had to be the darkest times of his life.

Dad and I locked horns often during the late 60s, as the cultural revolution swept the nation and I joined the hippie contingent in our town. I went to college and more disagreements and divisiveness followed. But I never lost my love and respect for him, and I'm sure he never stopped loving and caring for me, no matter what. As I went out in the world and they grew older, my father and I grew closer, realizing how much we had been through and how much we really had in common. He was plagued with a case of gout in his ankle, and I remember him hobbling around the house and I would tease him for having the "rich man's disease," as gout was called. I remember joining them on vacation in Las Vegas, which they thought was the most glamorous and exciting place on earth, and we had lots and lots of good time. While I never regarded my father as an equal, I began to think of him as somewhat of a peer and a very good friend, and it only served to enhance our relationship on deeper, unexpected levels. We would talk often on the phone, and I really miss not being able to call him up and chat with him.

My father died on January 1st, 2001, of congestive heart failure. It snowed in Pennsylvania the day of his funeral, but it wasn't a gray, dismal kind of snow. Innumerable huge white snowflakes drifted down from a bright sky, spinning and pirouetting as they fell. It was a unique and special day, a fitting farewell for a unique person. My dad has always been a rock, a compass in my life, and a beacon of love and understanding. He taught me, by example, of what it truly means to be a man. Just as I said goodbye to him on a bright, shining day, I look forward to seeing him again, on another bright, shining day.