When I recently read the obituary of songwriter Paul Leka, it was accurate, in a sense, to say that I felt pretty steamed.
What, that name doesn’t ring a bell? It wouldn’t have for me, either, except that the full New York Times headline read “Paul Leka, a Songwriter of ‘Na Na Hey Hey,’ Dies at 68.”
If that song title isn’t familiar to you, chances are you haven’t been inside a sports stadium in a very long time.
The full name of the tune is “Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye).” It was a number-one hit on the pop charts in 1969 despite—or probably because of—its repetitious banality. Fully half of its four-minute running time consists solely of the title words being chanted over and over, to an equally droning musical accompaniment. It’s sort of like the even-longer “na-na-na-na” ending of “Hey Jude,” except without those great Paul McCartney screams, the imprimatur of The Beatles, or—most importantly—the memorable lyrics preceding it. Whereas “Hey Jude” famously and inspirationally urges John Lennon’s then-young son Julian, and by extension all of us, to “take a sad song and make it better," “Na Na Hey Hey” in its initial two minutes is just a guy’s plea for the girl he likes to dump her boyfriend.
“Na Na Hey Hey” is a stupid song, but one that nevertheless appealed to my musical sensibilities when I was 11 years old. Not because of its boy-girl dynamics, as I wouldn’t yet date for another, oh, never mind how many years, but thanks to that oddly mesmerizing if seemingly endless chorus. I bought the single and pretty much wore it out over the course of the next few months.
But then I was done with it. And so was the rest of the world, until 1977, when—according to Leka’s obit—the organist for the Chicago White Sox employed the chorus as a taunt whenever the opposing team’s players struck out or when one of its pitchers was removed. Crowds who previously might have shouted “Sit down!” or “Sox rule!” at the departing opponent found it infinitely more satisfying to elongate their derision by singing “Na na na na/Na na na na/Hey hey hey/Goodbye!”
Somehow, some way, the chant went viral, in an age long before the Internet and social-networking tools existed to facilitate such contagion. As a result, over the course of the past three decades the ending chant of “Na Na Hey Hey” has become a staple at athletic venues around the world—because taunting the opposition knows no specific sport or nationality.
So, while presumably few people outside of his own family and a smattering of fellow songwriters and musicians of a certain age recognized Paul Leka’s name when it recently joined all the others on St Peter’s eternal registry, the song title “Na Na Hey Hey” resonated with many readers. As had been the case with me. But here’s the thing. I’m dead certain (no pun intended) that very few people reading Leka’s obit—even individuals like me who once had owned the 45 of “Na Na Hey Hey”—knew that the recording artist to which the single was credited was a group called Steam.
See, this is the kind of thing I tend to remember, while so many things that it would be infinitely more useful to recall—names of professional contacts, my online passwords, whether a dear friend is recovering from cancer or lost a kidney or what—are sacrificed. I no sooner had seen the headline associating the late Paul Leka with “Na Na Hey Hey” than I thought, “Ah, yes, the song that became a stadium phenomenon, performed by that one-hit wonder, Steam." But then, no more than a few seconds later, I asked myself, “Why the hell do I remember that?”
I mean, sure, I owned the single. But the name of the band was written in tiny type on the label, and it isn’t as if I’ve set eyes on that name in probably 40 years. It also isn’t as if I’d periodically been reminded, over the decades, that Steam was “the band behind the monster hit ‘Na Na Hey Hey’" when the combo swung through town for a widely promoted gig at the state fair or a nightclub devoted to revival acts. In fact, what I learned in Leka’s obituary was that there wasn’t, and never had been, a real band named Steam. Leka and his friend Gary DeCarlo, who co-wrote “Na Na Hey Hey,” recorded the song together and made up the name Steam on the spot, perhaps because their musical partnership was as ephemeral as the stuff arising from a still-hot cup of coffee. There would be no Steam follow-up hits, tours or merchandise. Steam would not live on at all, except as one more pebble of pointless trivia taking up precious space in the rock pile of my brain.
It’s confounding. It’s annoying. I take no pleasure in the motley conglomeration of discrete, rhyme-or-reason-less facts and figures that seems to add up to a disproportionate percentage of my collective memory.
It isn’t even as if I’m a kind of idiot savant who may forget the date of a key interview or the name of a close friend’s son, but who at least could kick ass in a sports trivia contest by rattling off the names of every player on the roster of the “Murderers Row” 1927 Yankees, or could impress film buffs by recalling who won all the major Oscars in 1987 or 2003. When I wrote the word “discrete” just now, I meant it. Even my accumulation of arguably or patently pointless knowledge is completely scattershot. I remember things like Steam, and the fact that President James Garfield was assassinated in 1881, and the pairing of character actors Herb Edelman and Bob “Gilligan” Denver in a short-lived sitcom called The Good Guys in the late 1960s. (I also remember that the show’s bouncy theme song began “We’re the good guys, who never let a friend down/Friends forever, ask anyone in this town.”)
But, can I even recite in order the names of all the American presidents of the last half of the 19th century, for whatever that may be worth? Is my familiarity with TV theme songs anywhere near encyclopedic enough to get me into the final rounds of some obscure competition on the Game Show Network?
No, and no.
Much has been written, I realize, about the neuroscience of how and why the human brain remembers what it does, forgets what it forgets, and might go about retrieving what it can retrieve. As much as I’d like to be glib and tell you I just keep forgetting to check out that array of potentially insightful resources, the fact is, last year I bought myself one of those works.
It’s called Moonwalking with Einstein, is subtitled “The Art and Science of Remembering Anything,” and was a bestseller in 2010 for author Joshua Foer. You might have seen him on talk shows, discussing how a year of “memory training” transformed him from being a guy of average retention to winner of the US Memory Championship. I’m looking at the book flap right now, and it says that Foer “draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of memory, and venerable tricks of the mentalist’s trade to transform our understanding of human remembering.” If that sounds potentially dry, the back cover features a glowing endorsement by one of my favorite nonfiction writers, the hilariously accessible science author Mary Roach.
Of course, I have not, to date, read Moonwalking with Einstein. In fact, I had to fish it out of a box in our basement when my chagrin over this Steam business brought it to my mind. I have no trouble, however, remembering why I bought it and then didn’t read it. Per the book flap, “Foer’s experience shows that the memory championships are less a test of memory than of perseverance and creativity.” It was the “perseverance” thing that had pushed the book to the back of my reading list. I’d ultimately decided that, while I’d love to have a better memory and all that, I didn’t much want to work at it. I might rather read books that didn’t give me homework assignments.
In the wake of this Steam Incident, however, I’ve changed my mind about reading Moonwalking with Einstein. I figure maybe I can at least pick up a few tips—minimally effortful ways to train my unruly and un-sharp mind just a little better, with the effect of maybe remembering a few more substantive things than I might otherwise retain. And perhaps not even at the expense of my Steams and other pieces of useless minutiae, because author and National Public Radio commentator Stephan Fatsis writes in his back-jacket endorsement that “Joshua Foer proves what few of us are willing to get our heads around: there’s more room in our brains than we ever imagined.”
What Fatsis means, I gather, is not that our brains are partially empty (although I sometimes feel the jury’s out in my case), but that there’s always space for more to be retained. I’ve long despaired over my poor hold on new information, so the possibility of losing less of it intrigues me greatly. On the other hand, though, my reading retention is abysmal, which poses a huge catch-22 in trying to draw lasting lessons from Foer’s research and narrative.
What I’ve decided is, Moonwalking with Einstein is going to be the next book I’ll read. Maybe it’ll hook me and convince me to make a real effort to improve my memory. But then, I imagine it’s the kind of thing where even minimal exercise is better than none at all, and presumably I can coax the self-discipline to do the equivalent of a few sit-ups or toe-touchers. At worst, the book stands to be a painless read. I mean, my girl Mary Roach—author of the fantastic Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers—touts Foer’s book as filled with “humanity, humor and originality.” How much of a slog can it be?
So, I’ll start Moonwalking with Einstein soon. I mean it. I owe this to myself and to all the people in my life for whom my lapses of memory have adverse consequences, be they small or substantial. And frankly, I don’t want to feel quite so annoyed the next time, in a single 24-hour period, I miss an office meeting whose date I forgot and find myself singing the entire "Ballad of Jed Clampett"—including the part that accompanied The Beverly Hillbillies’ closing credits.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Steve and Me
When Steve Jobs died of cancer a couple of weeks ago at 56, he was eulogized worldwide as something of a secular God—the electronic genius whose inventions and vision did much to shape the world in which we live today.
I felt some sadness that he’d died so young, but otherwise was a complete bystander to the global canonization. While you can’t spell either my first or last name without an “i,” there are no “i” products in our house—nary an iMac, iPhone, iPod or iPhone to be found. Not because I favor competing labels, but because I’m pretty much a Luddite. Yes, I know the ship of change has long since sailed, and that I must come to grips with the inevitable death of everything from newspapers and radio to mystery and intrigue (since every question now can be instantaneously answered by a Google search and any entrancingly mystical figure from one’s past can be made mundane and contemporary on Facebook). I know those things, but I don’t have to like them. And I don’t. (Except when I do. Like when I use a search engine to decipher in an instant some long-vexing song lyric, or to find out who that guy was in that movie. I don’t claim to be consistent.)
So, anyway, let’s just say there’s a lot about the world Steve Jobs helped create that I don’t like. For that reason, while others mourned his passing with much the same passion that I imagine earlier generations felt at the deaths of such historical game-changers as Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, I regarded it with the shrug one might direct at Pandora’s box long after all the chaos within it had escaped.
I suppose the one thing Jobs’ disciples and I always had in common was seeing him much more as a symbol than a man. To the faithful, he represented the happy interconnectedness of today and the possibility of a future in which no gratification whatsoever will be delayed. To me, he embodied the end of the heretofore familiar and the certainty of ever-escalating levels of noise.
But then, in this morning’s print Washington Post (ironically enough), I read an article about Steve Jobs, the newly published biography that the very private i-con of the Internet Age had authorized, and for which he’d granted author Walter Isaacson more than 40 interviews. According to the book, Jobs had handpicked Isaacson, whose biographical subjects have included Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, because he wanted his children to know why he “wasn’t always there for them” and “to know why, and to understand what, I did.” (Jobs is survived by four children. And yes, I Googled that.)
Today’s article brimmed with facts I hadn’t known about Jobs—not that I’d known much of anything. It humanized him and made him relatable to me. I discovered, for instance, that folk singer Joan Baez had been among his pre-marriage lovers, and that a college friend of Jobs thinks the major draw was her previous relationship with Bob Dylan, who Jobs revered. I found out that Jobs had been adopted, that he'd both praised and treated shabbily his adoptive parents, and that angst over his birth origins had fueled a vague but lifelong spiritual quest that had manifested itself in a pilgrimage to India, extreme diets and even primal-scream therapy.
The book, according to the article, on balance lauds Jobs, who nevertheless had no editorial control. But Isaacson also concedes that his subject often was a bully and a jerk. He “largely abandoned” his first child for the first 10 years of her life. He cheated Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak during one of their first business ventures. He had a mean streak even close friends couldn’t understand or reconcile.
The secular deity also spent years studying Zen Buddhism, and is quoted by Isaacson in the book as having said, “I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God. For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.”
It’s not like I felt, after reading all that, that Steve Jobs and I were soul mates who never met. I still neither know nor care much about his life’s work, and I probably won’t buy the biography because the i-stuff figures to loom large in the narrative. Spoiler alert: I never bedded Joan Baez. I never had kids with whom to have problematic relationships. I never had to wrestle with my own adoption. (Although every time I compare my parents’ beliefs and worldviews with my own, I wonder how we possibly can be blood.)
Still, I like knowing these things about Steve Jobs. It isn’t as if I ever thought he was an automaton, or that he didn’t put is pants on one leg at a time just like me (unless he’d perhaps programmed a robot to perform that task). But neither had I imagined that he and I had such big and small things in common as theological skepticism, struggles with civility and a soft spot for 1960s folk singers. If I’d ever taken the time to give Steve Jobs’ personal life and beliefs a single thought before reading that article—and I hadn’t—I guess I’d have assumed he’d died a never-married or divorced childless atheist, who’d found only his work sustaining and only the promise of perpetual technological advancement spiritually satisfying. If he’d listened to music at all, I’d have assumed he was into electronica created not by musicians in a studio but by some masterful melder of computer-generated sound. (A subsequent Web search revealed that Jobs in fact had been a huge fan of the Beatles. You think maybe "Apple" should’ve been my clue?)
Which isn’t to say that Jobs’ work wasn't the driving force in his life. But, like everyone else on the planet, he was much more complex and multifaceted than his CV would indicate. Well, duh! Except that, until today, I hadn’t really internalized what was an intellectual given.
There's this, too: Nothing humanizes any giant like death—whether that outsized figure is a visionary like Steve Jobs, or the late madman megalomanic Moammar Gaddafi, or King of Pop/Peter Pan/space alien Michael Jackson. The Big Sleep truly is the great equalizer. We're all ashes and dust, destined to return to same.
So, where is Steve Jobs now? If he lives on in any sense other than our collective memories, given what he told Walter Isaacson, he’s half-surprised to find himself there. Wherever “there” is. He may or may not still be wearing that black turtleneck with the black jeans, or sporting those ubiquitous wire-rim glasses. Maybe he’s been reincarnated as another person, or a dog or a horse. Perhaps he’s part of an energy field currently zipping across the universe. Who the hell knows? He didn’t. I don’t.
That, and all the other things that made him human, have changed how I look at Steve Jobs. Now I need to similarly reassess my attitude toward the fruits of his work and his societal legacy. Because I know I must, sooner or later, come to terms with that world. It’s not going anywhere. And it won’t be the death of me.
Something will be the death of me. Perhaps it’ll be the Big C, in which case my man Steve and I will have shared something pretty major. But whatever ends up snuffing me, it almost surely won’t be the i-Anything. And I do objectively know that all those devices he created have their uses. I understand, for instance, that you can download pretty much the entire Bob Dylan and Joan Baez catalogs on one of Jobs' portable music-player gadgets.
I felt some sadness that he’d died so young, but otherwise was a complete bystander to the global canonization. While you can’t spell either my first or last name without an “i,” there are no “i” products in our house—nary an iMac, iPhone, iPod or iPhone to be found. Not because I favor competing labels, but because I’m pretty much a Luddite. Yes, I know the ship of change has long since sailed, and that I must come to grips with the inevitable death of everything from newspapers and radio to mystery and intrigue (since every question now can be instantaneously answered by a Google search and any entrancingly mystical figure from one’s past can be made mundane and contemporary on Facebook). I know those things, but I don’t have to like them. And I don’t. (Except when I do. Like when I use a search engine to decipher in an instant some long-vexing song lyric, or to find out who that guy was in that movie. I don’t claim to be consistent.)
So, anyway, let’s just say there’s a lot about the world Steve Jobs helped create that I don’t like. For that reason, while others mourned his passing with much the same passion that I imagine earlier generations felt at the deaths of such historical game-changers as Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, I regarded it with the shrug one might direct at Pandora’s box long after all the chaos within it had escaped.
I suppose the one thing Jobs’ disciples and I always had in common was seeing him much more as a symbol than a man. To the faithful, he represented the happy interconnectedness of today and the possibility of a future in which no gratification whatsoever will be delayed. To me, he embodied the end of the heretofore familiar and the certainty of ever-escalating levels of noise.
But then, in this morning’s print Washington Post (ironically enough), I read an article about Steve Jobs, the newly published biography that the very private i-con of the Internet Age had authorized, and for which he’d granted author Walter Isaacson more than 40 interviews. According to the book, Jobs had handpicked Isaacson, whose biographical subjects have included Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, because he wanted his children to know why he “wasn’t always there for them” and “to know why, and to understand what, I did.” (Jobs is survived by four children. And yes, I Googled that.)
Today’s article brimmed with facts I hadn’t known about Jobs—not that I’d known much of anything. It humanized him and made him relatable to me. I discovered, for instance, that folk singer Joan Baez had been among his pre-marriage lovers, and that a college friend of Jobs thinks the major draw was her previous relationship with Bob Dylan, who Jobs revered. I found out that Jobs had been adopted, that he'd both praised and treated shabbily his adoptive parents, and that angst over his birth origins had fueled a vague but lifelong spiritual quest that had manifested itself in a pilgrimage to India, extreme diets and even primal-scream therapy.
The book, according to the article, on balance lauds Jobs, who nevertheless had no editorial control. But Isaacson also concedes that his subject often was a bully and a jerk. He “largely abandoned” his first child for the first 10 years of her life. He cheated Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak during one of their first business ventures. He had a mean streak even close friends couldn’t understand or reconcile.
The secular deity also spent years studying Zen Buddhism, and is quoted by Isaacson in the book as having said, “I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God. For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.”
It’s not like I felt, after reading all that, that Steve Jobs and I were soul mates who never met. I still neither know nor care much about his life’s work, and I probably won’t buy the biography because the i-stuff figures to loom large in the narrative. Spoiler alert: I never bedded Joan Baez. I never had kids with whom to have problematic relationships. I never had to wrestle with my own adoption. (Although every time I compare my parents’ beliefs and worldviews with my own, I wonder how we possibly can be blood.)
Still, I like knowing these things about Steve Jobs. It isn’t as if I ever thought he was an automaton, or that he didn’t put is pants on one leg at a time just like me (unless he’d perhaps programmed a robot to perform that task). But neither had I imagined that he and I had such big and small things in common as theological skepticism, struggles with civility and a soft spot for 1960s folk singers. If I’d ever taken the time to give Steve Jobs’ personal life and beliefs a single thought before reading that article—and I hadn’t—I guess I’d have assumed he’d died a never-married or divorced childless atheist, who’d found only his work sustaining and only the promise of perpetual technological advancement spiritually satisfying. If he’d listened to music at all, I’d have assumed he was into electronica created not by musicians in a studio but by some masterful melder of computer-generated sound. (A subsequent Web search revealed that Jobs in fact had been a huge fan of the Beatles. You think maybe "Apple" should’ve been my clue?)
Which isn’t to say that Jobs’ work wasn't the driving force in his life. But, like everyone else on the planet, he was much more complex and multifaceted than his CV would indicate. Well, duh! Except that, until today, I hadn’t really internalized what was an intellectual given.
There's this, too: Nothing humanizes any giant like death—whether that outsized figure is a visionary like Steve Jobs, or the late madman megalomanic Moammar Gaddafi, or King of Pop/Peter Pan/space alien Michael Jackson. The Big Sleep truly is the great equalizer. We're all ashes and dust, destined to return to same.
So, where is Steve Jobs now? If he lives on in any sense other than our collective memories, given what he told Walter Isaacson, he’s half-surprised to find himself there. Wherever “there” is. He may or may not still be wearing that black turtleneck with the black jeans, or sporting those ubiquitous wire-rim glasses. Maybe he’s been reincarnated as another person, or a dog or a horse. Perhaps he’s part of an energy field currently zipping across the universe. Who the hell knows? He didn’t. I don’t.
That, and all the other things that made him human, have changed how I look at Steve Jobs. Now I need to similarly reassess my attitude toward the fruits of his work and his societal legacy. Because I know I must, sooner or later, come to terms with that world. It’s not going anywhere. And it won’t be the death of me.
Something will be the death of me. Perhaps it’ll be the Big C, in which case my man Steve and I will have shared something pretty major. But whatever ends up snuffing me, it almost surely won’t be the i-Anything. And I do objectively know that all those devices he created have their uses. I understand, for instance, that you can download pretty much the entire Bob Dylan and Joan Baez catalogs on one of Jobs' portable music-player gadgets.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Gut Reaction
The following paragraphs are excerpted from a front page story of the Washington Post’s Web page this afternoon:
The jerky cell phone videos that surfaced Friday showed Gaddafi, his face and shoulder drenched in blood, being pushed and shoved by revolutionaries.
“Get him out of the pipe!” yelled one, apparently referring to the drainage culvert where he was discovered Thursday. “God is greatest!” several revolutionaries yelled, firing their rifles.
Another video shows a dazed Gaddafi pulled roughly onto the hood of a truck and being punched and slapped. A third showed him begging revolutionaries, “Have pity, don’t hit me!” The videos were shown on the Arabic television channel al-Arabiya.
I hardly know where to start. But these are my visceral thoughts:
I’ve never felt firmer in my stance against an-eye-for-an-eye Old Testament justice. Which, however you want to dress it up, is the core of the death penalty in this country.
While I know intellectually that religion can be a force for good, once again I find myself thinking the key to world peace would be universal adoption of the Golden Rule and abandonment of all other faith-based nonsense.
I’ll readily cop to being a technophobe who’s in many ways the 21st-century equivalent of The Kinks’ 1960s Village Green Preservation Society, but, is it really progress that anybody, anywhere, now can and do take pictures of anything—including lynch mobs virtually whistling while they work?
Sure, you can argue that compassion comes easy to someone like me—a middle-class American who’s never known a Libyan, let alone one who was brutalized by Moammar Gaddafi, that country’s deposed and now quite dead dictator. But I have to say, I feel more than a little sympathy for that battered corpse.
I‘ll not belabor any of this, because I always feel more comfortable—inside and outside this blog—making light of myself, rather than suggesting I have anything profound to say, or that I’m an expert on anything.
Who am I to argue, for instance, that the death penalty is any less defensible than are its sad alternatives within our criminal “justice” system?
Where do I get off condemning religious faith, which propels people of all creeds toward good works, and not merely toward rivalries, hatreds and wars?
How can I credibly argue that the digital revolution is, in wide balance, perhaps less empowering than it is impoverishing?
Why waste sympathy on a sorry excuse for a human being who hardly lavished it upon his own people?
I don’t frankly know how to answer any of that.
All I know is that I've a sour feeling in the pit of my stomach—as once again, as routine as sun and rain, violent retribution is celebrated and shared.
The jerky cell phone videos that surfaced Friday showed Gaddafi, his face and shoulder drenched in blood, being pushed and shoved by revolutionaries.
“Get him out of the pipe!” yelled one, apparently referring to the drainage culvert where he was discovered Thursday. “God is greatest!” several revolutionaries yelled, firing their rifles.
Another video shows a dazed Gaddafi pulled roughly onto the hood of a truck and being punched and slapped. A third showed him begging revolutionaries, “Have pity, don’t hit me!” The videos were shown on the Arabic television channel al-Arabiya.
I hardly know where to start. But these are my visceral thoughts:
I’ve never felt firmer in my stance against an-eye-for-an-eye Old Testament justice. Which, however you want to dress it up, is the core of the death penalty in this country.
While I know intellectually that religion can be a force for good, once again I find myself thinking the key to world peace would be universal adoption of the Golden Rule and abandonment of all other faith-based nonsense.
I’ll readily cop to being a technophobe who’s in many ways the 21st-century equivalent of The Kinks’ 1960s Village Green Preservation Society, but, is it really progress that anybody, anywhere, now can and do take pictures of anything—including lynch mobs virtually whistling while they work?
Sure, you can argue that compassion comes easy to someone like me—a middle-class American who’s never known a Libyan, let alone one who was brutalized by Moammar Gaddafi, that country’s deposed and now quite dead dictator. But I have to say, I feel more than a little sympathy for that battered corpse.
I‘ll not belabor any of this, because I always feel more comfortable—inside and outside this blog—making light of myself, rather than suggesting I have anything profound to say, or that I’m an expert on anything.
Who am I to argue, for instance, that the death penalty is any less defensible than are its sad alternatives within our criminal “justice” system?
Where do I get off condemning religious faith, which propels people of all creeds toward good works, and not merely toward rivalries, hatreds and wars?
How can I credibly argue that the digital revolution is, in wide balance, perhaps less empowering than it is impoverishing?
Why waste sympathy on a sorry excuse for a human being who hardly lavished it upon his own people?
I don’t frankly know how to answer any of that.
All I know is that I've a sour feeling in the pit of my stomach—as once again, as routine as sun and rain, violent retribution is celebrated and shared.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Ride of a Lifetime
Last Wednesday was my mom’s 80th birthday, so this past weekend Lynn and I drove down to Greensboro from Bethesda, and my brother Ken and sister-in-law Cindy traveled from Roanoke for a family celebration. This featured dinner at a nice restaurant, desserts from a fabulous local bakery, a champagne toast, and gifts that included a stay at the stately Hotel Roanoke and a handsomely packaged reproduction of the entire New York Times of October 5, 1931, the date of my mother’s birth in that city.
It was clear, however, that my mom’s favorite gift was one she’d received the day before her birthday: a ride in a red sports car. She’d mentioned every now and then for years that this was something she’d someday like to do. Not to put the pedal to the metal herself, or even to get behind the wheel at all, but simply to be in the passenger seat of a sleek crimson convertible as it sped on down the road. For a woman whose life has been the absolute antithesis, in daredevil terms, of that guy I recently saw on 60 Minutes who scales sheer cliffs barehanded and sans safety equipment, this seemed the ultimate adrenaline rush.
To make a long story short, I made it happen. Given the name of a foreign-car dealership in Greensboro by a friend who lives there, I lucked into contacting a salesman who’d graduated from my high school a year after I did, with whom I’d probably even shared a school bus. That bond, plus the fact that he’d thrilled his own elderly mother with a ride on his Harley-Davidson just years before her death, meant he was only too happy to help make my mom’s dream come true. My dad delivered her to the dealership at a pre-arranged time, and the salesman took her for an exhilarating spin in a turbo-charged Porsche that had carried a $174,000 price tag when it was new three years ago. It had been owned by some Raleigh millionaire who’d traded it in for a new Ferrari.
Everything about this gift—for which I wasn’t charged a dime—worked out perfectly. My dad cannily planned the event for the day before my mom’s birthday so she could have the pleasure of telling the story to everyone she saw on her big day. Which she did, by his account and her own, and which she still was doing when we saw her over the weekend. No friend or even casual acquaintance was spared the story of how she had zipped along on NC 68 at speeds of up to 70 mph on a 45-mph road, of how an impressed trucker had looked down from his lofty rig at the spectacle of the Old Lady and the Porsche and given his horn a hearty toot, or of how she’d left her hairnet in her purse and simply let the wind blow through her tresses. (Given my mother’s impenetrable perm, this amounted to something considerably less than letting her freak flag fly, as it were, But trust me, for her to have gone hairnet-less was, in its own context, as much a statement of abandon as is that free climber’s distain for ropes and harnesses.)
The sports car ride actually was the perfect gift for my dad, too, in that he’d never before planted his ass in the seat of a vehicle worth more than twice what he’d paid for his current home in 1972. The words “one hundred and seventy-four thousand” were something of a mantra the entire weekend for my tightfisted father—in much the same way, I imagine, he might have chanted the words “filet mignon” during his Depression-era childhood had he ever lucked into such a meal.
Of course, I came out of Operation Red Sports Car smelling like something of a genetically engineered Super Rose—the devoted son who had taken a mother’s passing wish and turned it into a dream gloriously realized. In baseball terms, if my mom hadn’t dared hope for more than a clean single, I’d nevertheless drawn a bead on the ball and socked it completely out of the park.
So it was that I got back home yesterday feeling pretty smug. Delighted for my mom, to be sure, but more than a bit taken with my own success in taking an open-ended desire and transforming it into something my mother surely will remember for the rest of her life. Last night, when we picked up our dog Bean at the home of our friends Joanne and Eric Scott, Lynn prompted me to recount the story. I modestly filled them in on the details. They beamed at the image of my octogenarian mom basking in the pleasures of the open road, and in the knowledge that her youngest son had turned out so outstandingly.
I continued riding that high all the way into this morning, when Lynn suddenly jogged my perhaps willfully spotty memory about What Really Happened.
Didn’t I remember that conversation back in August, Lynn queried, when she’d asked my visiting mother what she wanted for her 80th birthday? Didn’t I recall how my mom had jokingly referenced that oft-mentioned sports car ride, clearly not thinking it ever would come to pass? Didn’t I recollect how she (Lynn) subsequently said we needed to make that happen?
Lynn no sooner had completed the questions than I sensed my Super Rose wilting and its divine fragrance dissipating. Just two minutes earlier, my mental sequence of the events leading up to The Car Ride had begun with my having brilliantly brainstormed to Lynn that our friend Kenneth in Greensboro, a well-connected local attorney, might be able to recommend a car dealership to target. But now, in an instant, I realized that the impetus for my decision to e-mail Kenneth in the first place had been Lynn’s identification of the Perfect 80th Birthday Gift.
“It’s fine,” Lynn assured me. “I don’t need credit. But it was my idea.”
Every piece of that, I immediately understood, was absolutely true.
It honestly is fine for a mother to think that her son came up, completely on his own, with a wonderfully thoughtful way to make her 80th birthday extra special.
Lynn doesn’t require credit. If she did, she could’ve demanded and received it any number of times over course the weekend, on each occasion a new person heard instead the tale of The Car Ride and the Amazing Son.
The ride was her idea, as Lynn reminded me. In the code of marital scorekeeping, she had deemed it important to keep me honest. I totally get that, as I tend to do the same thing.
So, yes, it was Lynn’s conception. I executed it, with an assist from Kenneth in suggesting the dealership, and with monstrously huge thanks to one Reade Fulton, now my favorite car salesman in the world, who soon will be receiving a generous gift card from me.
My mom literally enjoyed the ride of a lifetime. My dad savored her excitement and his own brush with affluence. I loved playing a key role in making my mom so happy. And Lynn got the satisfaction of being quietly virtuous throughout. As returns on investment go, this one was turbo-charged.
It was clear, however, that my mom’s favorite gift was one she’d received the day before her birthday: a ride in a red sports car. She’d mentioned every now and then for years that this was something she’d someday like to do. Not to put the pedal to the metal herself, or even to get behind the wheel at all, but simply to be in the passenger seat of a sleek crimson convertible as it sped on down the road. For a woman whose life has been the absolute antithesis, in daredevil terms, of that guy I recently saw on 60 Minutes who scales sheer cliffs barehanded and sans safety equipment, this seemed the ultimate adrenaline rush.
To make a long story short, I made it happen. Given the name of a foreign-car dealership in Greensboro by a friend who lives there, I lucked into contacting a salesman who’d graduated from my high school a year after I did, with whom I’d probably even shared a school bus. That bond, plus the fact that he’d thrilled his own elderly mother with a ride on his Harley-Davidson just years before her death, meant he was only too happy to help make my mom’s dream come true. My dad delivered her to the dealership at a pre-arranged time, and the salesman took her for an exhilarating spin in a turbo-charged Porsche that had carried a $174,000 price tag when it was new three years ago. It had been owned by some Raleigh millionaire who’d traded it in for a new Ferrari.
Everything about this gift—for which I wasn’t charged a dime—worked out perfectly. My dad cannily planned the event for the day before my mom’s birthday so she could have the pleasure of telling the story to everyone she saw on her big day. Which she did, by his account and her own, and which she still was doing when we saw her over the weekend. No friend or even casual acquaintance was spared the story of how she had zipped along on NC 68 at speeds of up to 70 mph on a 45-mph road, of how an impressed trucker had looked down from his lofty rig at the spectacle of the Old Lady and the Porsche and given his horn a hearty toot, or of how she’d left her hairnet in her purse and simply let the wind blow through her tresses. (Given my mother’s impenetrable perm, this amounted to something considerably less than letting her freak flag fly, as it were, But trust me, for her to have gone hairnet-less was, in its own context, as much a statement of abandon as is that free climber’s distain for ropes and harnesses.)
The sports car ride actually was the perfect gift for my dad, too, in that he’d never before planted his ass in the seat of a vehicle worth more than twice what he’d paid for his current home in 1972. The words “one hundred and seventy-four thousand” were something of a mantra the entire weekend for my tightfisted father—in much the same way, I imagine, he might have chanted the words “filet mignon” during his Depression-era childhood had he ever lucked into such a meal.
Of course, I came out of Operation Red Sports Car smelling like something of a genetically engineered Super Rose—the devoted son who had taken a mother’s passing wish and turned it into a dream gloriously realized. In baseball terms, if my mom hadn’t dared hope for more than a clean single, I’d nevertheless drawn a bead on the ball and socked it completely out of the park.
So it was that I got back home yesterday feeling pretty smug. Delighted for my mom, to be sure, but more than a bit taken with my own success in taking an open-ended desire and transforming it into something my mother surely will remember for the rest of her life. Last night, when we picked up our dog Bean at the home of our friends Joanne and Eric Scott, Lynn prompted me to recount the story. I modestly filled them in on the details. They beamed at the image of my octogenarian mom basking in the pleasures of the open road, and in the knowledge that her youngest son had turned out so outstandingly.
I continued riding that high all the way into this morning, when Lynn suddenly jogged my perhaps willfully spotty memory about What Really Happened.
Didn’t I remember that conversation back in August, Lynn queried, when she’d asked my visiting mother what she wanted for her 80th birthday? Didn’t I recall how my mom had jokingly referenced that oft-mentioned sports car ride, clearly not thinking it ever would come to pass? Didn’t I recollect how she (Lynn) subsequently said we needed to make that happen?
Lynn no sooner had completed the questions than I sensed my Super Rose wilting and its divine fragrance dissipating. Just two minutes earlier, my mental sequence of the events leading up to The Car Ride had begun with my having brilliantly brainstormed to Lynn that our friend Kenneth in Greensboro, a well-connected local attorney, might be able to recommend a car dealership to target. But now, in an instant, I realized that the impetus for my decision to e-mail Kenneth in the first place had been Lynn’s identification of the Perfect 80th Birthday Gift.
“It’s fine,” Lynn assured me. “I don’t need credit. But it was my idea.”
Every piece of that, I immediately understood, was absolutely true.
It honestly is fine for a mother to think that her son came up, completely on his own, with a wonderfully thoughtful way to make her 80th birthday extra special.
Lynn doesn’t require credit. If she did, she could’ve demanded and received it any number of times over course the weekend, on each occasion a new person heard instead the tale of The Car Ride and the Amazing Son.
The ride was her idea, as Lynn reminded me. In the code of marital scorekeeping, she had deemed it important to keep me honest. I totally get that, as I tend to do the same thing.
So, yes, it was Lynn’s conception. I executed it, with an assist from Kenneth in suggesting the dealership, and with monstrously huge thanks to one Reade Fulton, now my favorite car salesman in the world, who soon will be receiving a generous gift card from me.
My mom literally enjoyed the ride of a lifetime. My dad savored her excitement and his own brush with affluence. I loved playing a key role in making my mom so happy. And Lynn got the satisfaction of being quietly virtuous throughout. As returns on investment go, this one was turbo-charged.
Saturday, October 1, 2011
162 and Out
October has started off cold and rainy. That feels about right.
Back on April 8, in a post titled “The Boys of Bummer,” I’d chronicled the annual torture of being a rabid (as in “sick” even more than “devoted”) fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Toward the end of that piece, I’d noted, “I am not fooled by their record at this writing of 4 wins versus 3 losses. There is every reason to believe the club again will reach season’s end with far more losses than wins.” Of course, I needn’t have been Nostradamus to have made that prediction. I needed only a grasp of history, given the fact that the Bucs’ previous winning season concluded the same autumn Bill Clinton first was elected president of the United States.
The 2011 season of the Pittsburgh Pirates ended this past Wednesday night with a 7-3 loss in Milwaukee to the playoffs-bound Milwaukee Brewers. The Pirates closed out the campaign with 72 wins and 90 losses. The positive spin is that it represented a 15-win improvement on the club’s abysmal (even by its own sad standards) 2010 record, and was good for fourth place in the six-team National League Central Division rather than their standard spot in the cellar. But that spin overlooks the fact that the team was enthrallingly and improbably competitive for more than half the season, and stood proudly at 53-47 in late July, before wresting the word “freefallin’” away from Tom Petty and making it their own.
Did I write “improbably” competitive? Given that the club entered the 2011 season with more or less the same personnel who’d lost 105 games the previous year, I hadn’t exactly been hopeful at the outset that the string of losing seasons at last would end. But—and I won’t bore non-baseball fans with a lot of details here—the pitching far exceeded expectations for days, weeks, then months, while the hitting and defense proved sufficient to vault the Pirates above the .500 break-even mark and even keep them there for a while. Neither I nor most other Pirate partisans took it seriously when the team claimed first place for a day or two in July for the first time in forever. But we, or I at least, foolishly began to hope that a winning record over the course of the entire 162 games might be attainable.
But then the pitching collapsed, the hitting got even worse, and the defense turned offensive. It’s not easy, frankly, to be six games over .500 with only 62 games left to play and still finish 18 under. But damn if my boys didn’t do it. Management’s post-mortem for the past few days has been that the early success proved that the basic talent is there, while the buzz-killing plummet largely was due to inexperience. Sure, the team maybe could use a few more good players in 2012, this bill of goods reads, but now that our young pitchers have thrown those extra innings once, and now that our young hitters know better how to pace themselves physically and mentally over the course of a six-month season, look out for us next year!
The problem with such cheerleading is that the team has no credibility when it comes either to forking over dough or evaluating talent. Pirates fans have heard all this stuff from the Front Office many times before. Yes, the Jekyll-Hyde splits of so many players’ first- and second-half statistics this year does suggest there is much good to be found amongst the evil, as it were. But then, the club’s record on maximizing its players’ potential is far from stellar. This is evidenced by the fact that the major leagues are littered with good-to-great ex-Pirates who stumbled and floundered until they prospered under the mentoring and nurturing of other organizations.
Getting back to what I’d written in April, I’d expressed hope that, come what may, I might this year lighten up considerably about the Pirates—not let their fortunes so profoundly affect my moods, or so lessen my enjoyment of live baseball at Nationals Park, or on so many nights bedevil Lynn with my OCD stratagems for influencing athletic contests taking place hundreds or thousands of miles away. I made a little bit of progress on those fronts, although of course it was easier when the wins still flowed. Even during the dark months of August and September, though, my attempts to be philosophical were fitfully successful. I obsessed a little less and shrugged a little more. I saw several games through to their completion at Nationals Park even after the out-of-town scoreboard recorded a Pirates loss. I was better at enjoying the successes of my hometown team in DC, which by many measures had an outstanding year, and whose future is bright.
If the Pirates’ future looks less luminous—and it does—there’s still some good news. They’ve now experienced some real success on which to build. Their headier moments in 2011 brought fans to the ballpark and captured the city’s imagination, which might encourage management to spend more money to make more money. A few of the current players look like the real deal, and laws of probability suggest that one or two of the team’s recent high draft picks (fruits of their ineptitude) just might pan out.
None of which makes today—a day on which, once again, playoff baseball will be played by other, better teams—any less cold and rainy. But it, and my incremental emotional progress this year, stand to make next April’s inevitable renewal of optimism feel a little less naïve, and a little more maturely measured.
Back on April 8, in a post titled “The Boys of Bummer,” I’d chronicled the annual torture of being a rabid (as in “sick” even more than “devoted”) fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Toward the end of that piece, I’d noted, “I am not fooled by their record at this writing of 4 wins versus 3 losses. There is every reason to believe the club again will reach season’s end with far more losses than wins.” Of course, I needn’t have been Nostradamus to have made that prediction. I needed only a grasp of history, given the fact that the Bucs’ previous winning season concluded the same autumn Bill Clinton first was elected president of the United States.
The 2011 season of the Pittsburgh Pirates ended this past Wednesday night with a 7-3 loss in Milwaukee to the playoffs-bound Milwaukee Brewers. The Pirates closed out the campaign with 72 wins and 90 losses. The positive spin is that it represented a 15-win improvement on the club’s abysmal (even by its own sad standards) 2010 record, and was good for fourth place in the six-team National League Central Division rather than their standard spot in the cellar. But that spin overlooks the fact that the team was enthrallingly and improbably competitive for more than half the season, and stood proudly at 53-47 in late July, before wresting the word “freefallin’” away from Tom Petty and making it their own.
Did I write “improbably” competitive? Given that the club entered the 2011 season with more or less the same personnel who’d lost 105 games the previous year, I hadn’t exactly been hopeful at the outset that the string of losing seasons at last would end. But—and I won’t bore non-baseball fans with a lot of details here—the pitching far exceeded expectations for days, weeks, then months, while the hitting and defense proved sufficient to vault the Pirates above the .500 break-even mark and even keep them there for a while. Neither I nor most other Pirate partisans took it seriously when the team claimed first place for a day or two in July for the first time in forever. But we, or I at least, foolishly began to hope that a winning record over the course of the entire 162 games might be attainable.
But then the pitching collapsed, the hitting got even worse, and the defense turned offensive. It’s not easy, frankly, to be six games over .500 with only 62 games left to play and still finish 18 under. But damn if my boys didn’t do it. Management’s post-mortem for the past few days has been that the early success proved that the basic talent is there, while the buzz-killing plummet largely was due to inexperience. Sure, the team maybe could use a few more good players in 2012, this bill of goods reads, but now that our young pitchers have thrown those extra innings once, and now that our young hitters know better how to pace themselves physically and mentally over the course of a six-month season, look out for us next year!
The problem with such cheerleading is that the team has no credibility when it comes either to forking over dough or evaluating talent. Pirates fans have heard all this stuff from the Front Office many times before. Yes, the Jekyll-Hyde splits of so many players’ first- and second-half statistics this year does suggest there is much good to be found amongst the evil, as it were. But then, the club’s record on maximizing its players’ potential is far from stellar. This is evidenced by the fact that the major leagues are littered with good-to-great ex-Pirates who stumbled and floundered until they prospered under the mentoring and nurturing of other organizations.
Getting back to what I’d written in April, I’d expressed hope that, come what may, I might this year lighten up considerably about the Pirates—not let their fortunes so profoundly affect my moods, or so lessen my enjoyment of live baseball at Nationals Park, or on so many nights bedevil Lynn with my OCD stratagems for influencing athletic contests taking place hundreds or thousands of miles away. I made a little bit of progress on those fronts, although of course it was easier when the wins still flowed. Even during the dark months of August and September, though, my attempts to be philosophical were fitfully successful. I obsessed a little less and shrugged a little more. I saw several games through to their completion at Nationals Park even after the out-of-town scoreboard recorded a Pirates loss. I was better at enjoying the successes of my hometown team in DC, which by many measures had an outstanding year, and whose future is bright.
If the Pirates’ future looks less luminous—and it does—there’s still some good news. They’ve now experienced some real success on which to build. Their headier moments in 2011 brought fans to the ballpark and captured the city’s imagination, which might encourage management to spend more money to make more money. A few of the current players look like the real deal, and laws of probability suggest that one or two of the team’s recent high draft picks (fruits of their ineptitude) just might pan out.
None of which makes today—a day on which, once again, playoff baseball will be played by other, better teams—any less cold and rainy. But it, and my incremental emotional progress this year, stand to make next April’s inevitable renewal of optimism feel a little less naïve, and a little more maturely measured.
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