Fools’ (plural) Overture

August 1982

The Smith men, in Utah in August 1985, following the loss of the youngest Smith male.

Heads up. Here comes a whole lot of navel gazin’. Hey, it’s cheaper to puke on this here blog than it is to pay a therapist to get this shit out…

I’ve chronicled the challenges I faced following my mother’s passing in October 2012. Mom’s passing was a blow, but the real challenges came three weeks later, when my father broke his hip the night hurricane Sandy broke the metro New York City area. I’ve chronicled here, too, the challenges of the months that followed, caring for my father and doing things no child should have to do for his parent. And finally, I chronicled my exasperated escape, when my father’s stubborn nature and disrespect led me to move back to San Diego — pretty much as far away from Plum Island as you can get and still be in the continental United States — in September 2013.

What I haven’t chronicled (in addition to the times since that move) are the pangs and emotions that have wracked me ever since. No, I’m not Catholic and even if I was, I did my part for the cause. I felt wholly justified in departing, and I don’t know a soul — not even my father’s friends — who would begrudge me my leaving.

So why is it that when I hear from my sister this evening — my father won’t talk to me anymore — that my father, after falling and hurting himself, and spending some time in Newburyport’s Anna Jaques Hospital, is now in one of the notoriously bad rehab facilities, that I feel a sudden obligation to jump on a plane and go back to New England to rectify the situation?

My sister’s call came as I was nearing my apartment this evening. I called her back a few minutes later, after I’d walked inside, and she gave me the details. And that urge to head east came over me like some guy whose buddy took a bayonet for him back during the war.

The irony is that if I did fly back, my father wouldn’t agree to anything that would get him out of the crappy home and back into his house. He’s become so stubborn that he turned down food items he normally loves that my brother got him at Christmas, just because HE hadn’t suggested them first. Seriously. So suggest arranging an in-home nurse because it will get him? No. Suggest rearranging the house to accommodate less stairs and simpler living? No way. Don’t even bother suggesting a nicer, more home-like rehab facility such as those he was in in 2012 — those are right out.

I’d reconciled that realization, that his stubborn nature makes my abandoning the life and career I’m building here in San Diego a pointless gesture, over the course of a drive up the coast following the phone call with my sister. I stopped in for some tacos at a joint in Carlsbad and was driving home, content if somewhat saddened, when a song I haven’t heard in years came on the radio.

It was Supertramp’s song, “Fool’s Overture.” It’s a long, disjointed (but beautiful, great, haunting) piece about Winston Churchill and the resilience of the British people during the darkest days of World War II. It chronicles the shabby treatment the Brits gave Churchill, their savior, following the war, and makes clear that country’s debt to such a great leader.

It must be the fact the song references the war that made it hit me so hard on the ride home this evening. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t believe my father ever came home from World War II. He had a career, raised not one, but two, families, and has had a great, long life. But he’s still in the Ardennes; I believe that firmly. He’s one of a generation that we — not just Americans, but the entire world — owe an incalculable debt to. And me, too; I owe him. I still believe I’ve more than paid that debt back, but the anxiety of wondering if I have, and the sadness of watching, however remotely, an ancient man watch things wind down is unbearable.

The fool in Supertramp’s song is Churchill, those who cast him aside, Neville Chamberlain and all Brits who’ve come since 1940. Same goes for my family: we’re all fools. As Prince in “Romeo and Juliet” points out: all are punished.

Navel Gazing, Personal, , , ,

Dateline: Matamoras, PA

Conn Welcome

The welcome from the state of Connecticut is a bit blurry at 75mph.

Yes, Matamoras, Pennsylvania. I put a few hours under my wheels just to make the next couple of days’ drive more manageable. I’m in a Hampton Inns hotel just off I-84 here in the northeast corner of the Keystone State. Oh yeah, baby! Matamoras! (It DOES appear on Google Maps.)

The drive was surprisingly easy for the Friday evening of Labor Day weekend. Traffic was very light even in some of the usual nightmare area such as the Mass Pike and Waterbury, Conn. I hope I didn’t use up all my good luck already and will find myself buried in traffic the rest of the way, but I guess we’ll see. I’ll get through Chicagoland tomorrow evening and then it should be smooth sailing for a long ways.

As for where I’m “sailing” to, since many have asked: I am going to be the director of digital media at KGTV, the ABC affiliate in San Diego and part of the Scripps media company. I’m excited for a number of reasons, not least of which is that I’m getting back into the game after a long, hard slog over the past year-plus. More importantly, though, it’s a good opportunity to get back into the digital world at a media company, where content is the core product. That’s where I belong and I’m psyched to play in the frenetic online space once again. Scripps is a good company and I’ve heard great things about the people at KGTV, so I’m looking forward to contributing to the team.

Htfd Sunset

But a short while later, Connecticut gave us drivers a pretty sunset.

The fact that it’s in San Diego is just icing on the cake. Many friends have said that it’s great that I’m going back to a place that I love. Well, I like San Diego…and I like New England and Alaska and Montana and…a whole lot of places. I was getting a little choked up as I was driving out of San Diego in the summer of 2010, and a voice in my head responded, “What the hell?! You’ve been bitching about SoCal since you got here.” And I realized: I’ve loved every place I’ve lived and I’ve hated every place I’ve lived. It’s not the place, dummy, it’s me. I pack my own bags; I’m responsible for how I respond to a given location.

So while I’m sad to be leaving my homeland in New England, I’m happy to be heading back to a place where I have so many friends and there’s so much that fits my lifestyle. And there’s also a job I’m excited about and eager to get to. A couple hundred miles down, a couple thousand more to go.

Personal, Travel,

My One Vanity

The glory days: August 1982

And so, on the eve of my 25th college reunion, I make this confession: I’m not too bothered by the whole aging process (which is a good thing since there’s not much one can do about it). I don’t mind that I’m not as fit as I once was. I’m not bothered that I once could party like a rock star and still wake up for an early morning class/ski/surf, but now it just takes a couple of drinks to make me feel like I got hit by a train. And it doesn’t really bother me that all the lovelies that parade before my media-saturated eyes are young enough to be my daughters.

But there is one fact of aging that I struggle with. One fact that stares me in the face each and every day and reminds me that time is marching on and we are, in fact, born to die, as Billy Shakespeare pointed out: my thinning hair.

I got a haircut yesterday and as I waited my turn, a young mother was trying to get her two-and-a-half-year-old son into the chair. He was having none of it and this kid was an unholy terror. He screamed. He clawed. He headbutted — yes, headbutted — his mother. All to avoid getting his mop top trimmed a bit. The mom finally gave up and followed as her kid ran out the barber shop door. I didn’t strike out at anyone, but know that on the inside I was screaming just as loudly as that little kid as I got into the chair, but for a different reason. In my case, it was because there wasn’t much hair left to cut.

Still full but getting darker:
At college in 1984-85

When I was younger, I would shake my head in the shower after shampooing and it wasn’t until my hair was long enough to make loud slaps on the front of my face that I knew it was time for a haircut. Now, if there’s even the slightest waver as I shake my head, I head for the barber.

Hair thins. It happens, I get it. Hell, many of my friends are way more folically challenged than I am. But what gets my goat is that I had a righteous mop of curly blond locks when I was a kid. My hair went darker — it’s now more of a light brown than a blond — in my 20s and began disappearing (from the top and back first) in my 30s. It was in my mid-40s when I was sitting on a bench in my sister’s foyer, bent over tying my shoes, that my seven-year-old niece strode over and with her index finger poked me on the scalp saying, “Uncle Luke! You’re losing your hair!” I’ve never been closer to parricide (who knew that was the word for “killing a close relative”?!). That’s when I knew I was on the downslide.

In recent years, whenever I would whine as loudly as that little kid in the barber shop about my thinning hair, my mother would remind me that I was taller than most people — and pretty much all women — so no one could tell how thin my hair was really getting. That didn’t seem to deter my diminutive niece, though, dammit!

And now: June 2013. It’s all
downhill from here.

My older brother is 10.5 years older than me and still has a full head of curly blond hair. My father is 42 years older than me and though he’s always worn his hair in a thin buzz-cut, his hair remains thick as the bristles on a brush. Me, I’m hearing from friends that I should consider treatments like rogaine or some such silliness. Maybe I’m just being stubborn, but that’s not my style. I’m going through and out of this life the way I came in: using the tools I was born with.

Some female friends have even suggested that when (not if) the time comes, I should consider shaving my hair off and going bald, that bald men are HOT. Besides the psychological trauma of seeing myself bald, I’m concerned about the damage, both physical and psychological, I’d do to other people who witnessed my gigantic melon (hat size 7-3/4… no fooling) glistening in the sun.

I guess, to coin a cliche I abhor, that it is what it is. My hair is going and I’m going with it. Eventually. That fact is the one and only thing that reminds me I will shuffle off this mortal coil someday. My thinning hair is my one vanity, the one unalterable fact that makes my knees buckle and makes me growl at mirrors and barbers, much like the little boy I still feel myself in every other way to be.

Personal, Uncategorized, ,