The Bridge Home…

In the early fifties my father bought a new car every year.  He was doing well in business, building a new house for us, and playing golf, not all that successfully, at the local country club.  The cars were usually Cadillacs.  This was the time when a “Caddy” really was a luxury car, with shiny chrome bumpers, paint that looked a mile deep, and a fragrant genuine leather interior.  I was about six years old, and the back seat was my domain.  Father driving, Mother enjoying the ride, and me, just me, in the back seat.

We were living in New Jersey, in a big old house, waiting for that new house to be finished, and we took lots of car trips.  With gas selling for about twenty-five cents per gallon, this was cost-effective entertainment.  We went to the Jersey Shore where my mother grew up.  We went to visit my grandmother in New York City.  We went to see friends in Clifton, Farmington, and any number of other small industrial towns trying to pass themselves off as suburbs.  We would start out early, make a day of it, and often we would return quite late, the lights of the factories and the oil refineries and the chemical plants giving the landscape, through the smoke and the mist, an undeserved ethereal look.

I don’t think that I ever stayed awake for an entire ride home.  Maybe it was my age, or the lateness of the hour, or maybe it was the gentle, bosomy luxury of the back seat.  No matter what I did to try and stay awake, the softness of the upholstery and the rhythm of the tires beating cadence over the seams in the roadbed would always cause me to drift off into wonderful dreams…dreams of puppies and of holidays and of good things to eat.

There was a small bridge not far from my house, or rather my parents’ house, although I always thought of it as mine.  The bridge was nothing more than a tiny hyphen on the long road home.  It crossed what must once have been a narrow creek, but was now nothing more than a muddy, weedy ditch, punctuated by derelict tires and rusted-out appliances.  It was an old bridge.  The sides were the corroded spiderweb steel of a railway trestle, only in miniature.  The floor of the bridge was made of old, thick, weathered, gray wooden planks, and some of them were loose.

I had the same graphic fears as every child.  I could describe the monsters in my closet in excruciating detail.  I knew with crystal clarity why I must never let a hand or a foot dangle off the bed.  And in my child’s mind, I could see the car, with me in the back seat, plummeting through the loose boards into the ditch.  But that fear was quickly banished by another, stronger feeling.  Those loose boards made a distinctive sound as the car rolled over them, a sound so subtle as to defy accurate description.  My pediatrician once tried to calm me down (prior to a shot, I think) by encouraging me to listen to my own heart through his stethoscope.  That’s as close as I can come to a description of the sound of those loose boards.  I have few early memories as rich and fully realized as my memories of being awakened by those boards, their heartsound telling my now-half-awake self that it was late, and I was tired, and we were nearly home.

And soon, my father’s business burned down, and we moved to Florida, and I went to school, and my father died, and I suddenly became old, and although now I’m too tall to stretch out in the back seat, and although now I do the driving, and although now I always stay awake until the end of the trip, I would give most anything to hear the heartsound of that bridge just once again, reminding me that it is late, and I am tired, and I am nearly home.

What Love Smells Like…

My father spent the last years of his too-short life as an importer. He made a really good living at it. But I think more than the income it provided, my father liked being an importer because it allowed him, along with my mother, and often me, to travel all over the world. We went everywhere together. We crossed the Atlantic twice, first class, on the ocean liner S.S. United States. We marveled at the noise in the Pachinko parlors off the Ginza in Tokyo. We flew on Pan American Flight 002, which went from New York to New York, around the world heading east. A traveler on this flight could get off and get on anywhere along the route, stay as long as he wished, and pick up the next available seat(s) to the next destination. These were wonderful experiences for an inquisitive kid like me. One of our favorite stops was Paris. On several occasions I was able to wander the Louvre, stroll along the Seine, and visit the Eiffel Tower. And of course, Parisian food and Parisian shopping were even more renowned in the those days than they are today.

My parents’ favorite shop in Paris was Sagil. It’s still there, at 242 Rue de Rivoli, in the same block as Angelina, home of the world’s best hot chocolate. My father used to love to take my mother shopping at Sagil, with its designer handbags, luxury accessories, and, best of all, a huge selection of the finest French perfumes. I liked to go with them, because Sagil employed a saleslady that even as a kid I found alluring. Her name was Odile. She was very petite and very beautiful, with porcelain skin and the longest eyelashes I had ever seen. But what really interested me was her hair. If you’ve ever seen the film of Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday to President John Kennedy…well…that was Odile’s hairstyle…except, unlike Marilyn’s hair, Odile’s was pink. The color was exactly that of cotton candy. I had always liked cotton candy. No one in those years had pink hair…except Odile…and I was smitten.

My mother loved perfume, as did most women of that era, and my father loved buying it for her. The perfumes smelled good, but more than that, the perfumes reminded them of their trips together, and the perfumes reminded my mother of my father. I can remember them choosing the various scents…some scents which were not even exported to the United States. My mother had four favorites…”Oh La La”, “Mitsouko”, “Shocking” and the one she liked best of all, “Mistigri.” My mother and my father had happy times shopping at Sagil. When my father died, he had only been in the import business for about ten years. The trips ended, the business was sold, and my life and my mother’s life continued, albeit incomplete without my father. And my mother continued to apply small amounts of those perfumes each day, not because she was going out, but, as she explained to me, they reminded her of my father. She never so much as looked at another man.

After a while, the perfumes were used up. My mother took the empty bottles and put them in her dresser drawers, so that the faint scent remaining in the bottles would infuse her clothes. Even that eventually stopped working. Nearly forty years had gone by. One day I saw her remove the “Mistigri” bottle from the drawer and put her nose to it. She commented (with some sadness) that it no longer had the fragrance, but I noticed that she put it back in the drawer anyway. This clearly was not about the scent. It was about my father, their travels, and their love for one another. My mother (who was by then in her late eighties) had a birthday coming up, and I had a plan.

By this time I was a regular user of ebay, the online auction site. I had sold hundreds of items, and found that I could buy things on ebay that I could not find anywhere else. I began to search ebay for those very same perfumes, and, much to my surprise, I was able to find them…brand new, sealed bottles, in their original boxes…perfumes that hadn’t been produced in decades, and some of them had never even been sold in the United States. But there they were…and I bought them. You might think that these were rare items and therefore were very costly, but to my great surprise, they cost me less than they had cost my father forty years earlier. And so…they began to arrive. An “Oh La La” gift set from the early sixties, with its bottles and sprays all of classic mid-century design. A small bottle of “Shocking” by Schiaparelli, with its famous “shocking pink” label. A beautiful round bottle of “Mitsouko”…a fine crystal flask in miniature, with its ground glass stopper and its golden cord. The birthday was drawing near, but still, no “Mistigri”, my mother’s very favorite, and the one that, more than any other, reminded her of my father.

With about two weeks to go, I finally found a listing for “Mistigri”, in, of all places, St. Augustine, right here in my home state of Florida. It was hard to believe the listing. The seller stated that the bottle contained an unheard of 1 1/2 ounces of perfume…not cologne…not toilet water…perfume. The seller claimed that the bottle was sealed, in its original satin-lined wooden box, which was in turn encased in its own original paper outer box. This didn’t seem possible, considering that “Mistigri” hadn’t been produced since 1968. I didn’t care how much it would cost…I had to have it…so I bid a lot of money. Fortunately, no one else wanted it very much. I won the auction for about the price of a good quality dress shirt…much less than my high bid. It arrived just as advertised…it was perfect. I had all four of the perfumes I wanted to find, with about a week to spare.

In my family, we’ve never been much on special occasion gifting. My wife and I have given up on it all together. But this was different. This wasn’t about gifts…this wasn’t about “stuff.” This was about traveling though time. I wanted to give my now-elderly mother the gift of her past, the gift of a better time, the gift of a few more happy memories of my father. When she unwrapped the package and realized what it contained, her eyes lit up like they hadn’t in many years. And so it was…she was back in Paris, and young, and healthy, and back at Sagil with my father, if only in her mind, and if only for a little while.

Neuro-scientists tell us that of all of the senses, smell is the one that persists longest in memory.

My mother didn’t live long enough to use up those perfumes. She loved them, and in her last years she loved telling the story of how she got them. After she died, I gave away most of her things, as she wanted me to do. But I still have those partially used perfumes. They’re stashed away in the back of a closet. They remind me, as they did my mother, of the past, of a better time, of my father. And now that she’s no longer here…they remind me of her. When I’m gone, I hope that my wife will sell them on ebay. Even though they’re now slightly used, someone will be as excited to find them as I was, and someone will be as happy to receive them as my mother was. I can’t possibly be the only one with a story like this to tell…and a loving quest like this to complete.

On the Death of the Hobby…

I am now officially an Old Fart. I know this to be true because I find myself referring longingly to “The Good Old Days.” This is not a welcome development in my life, but it is very real, and I must confront it, even though I cannot embrace it.

When I was a young man (see what I mean…) it seemed that most people had hobbies. A hobby, for those of you who have never had one, or known anyone who has had one (there it goes again…) is something you do consistently and frequently, focusing on a particular area of interest or endeavor, that gives you some degree of emotional satisfaction. It must be distinct from your occupation. Working overtime and like a dog is NOT a hobby. It must be distinct from your family. Figuring out ways to protect your children from themselves is NOT a hobby. And it must be distinct from your love life. Memo to Tiger Woods: What you have been up to is NOT a hobby.

Many years ago EVERYONE, or so it seemed, had a hobby…but when was the last time that you met a Coin Collector or a Model Plane Builder or a Water Color Artist who was under fifty-five years of age? One of the main passages of childhood used to be the selection, after much trial and error, of a hobby…one that would persist into adulthood, and one that the now-adult would unsuccessfully attempt to pass along to his or her children, only to be rebuffed by a flurry of extreme disinterest that represented one the the child’s first, but by no means last, incidences of healthy (although it didn’t seem so at the time) rebellion.

When you go through Granddad’s things after he passes on, you’ll probably find that old book with the few stamps in it, still hanging around from the time many decades ago that Granddad’s father tried to “get him interested” in stamp collecting to “keep him out of trouble.” It didn’t work. The only thing Granddad wanted to do was hang out with his axle-grease-stained friends (“those no good bums who will never amount to anything” as they were referred to by Granddad’s father when Granddad was a kid) and tinker with that old Model A Ford (this is what Granddad’s father referred to as “trouble”)…and he kept tinkering with old Fords throughout his life…didn’t sell ‘em, didn’t race ‘em, just got a kick out of putting them back together and making them run well and look good. This is how hobbies developed, and, like genetic traits, often skipped a generation or two. That spotless “Model A” that Granddad used to proudly drive in the Memorial Day Parade each year was the result, like most hobbies, of equal parts skill, interest, and rebellion. He sure looked handsome and happy driving it, didn’t he? That’s what a hobby used to be, and that’s what a hobby used to do for a person.

When I was a kid (oops…there it goes again) I tried stamps, coins, model trains, and more. They all bored the hell out of me. I was pretty good at sports, but not all that interested in them. Then, for my ninth birthday, a friend of my father’s went to Sears and bought me a present…a Silvertone brand guitar. I loved it…and learned to play it pretty well…well enough to sound good to myself and later on to impress the girls at the occasional party. I still play a bit today, using a Gibson J-series…that old Silvertone is no doubt long gone, probably used as kindling. Hobby One.

About that same time we moved to a house on the water. On his way home from work one day my father, who had never fished before, stopped by the Reef Bait and Tackle store and bought two “entry level” rod and reel sets, and some frozen shrimp. That weekend, we started to fish together from the small dock behind our house. I fished from that same dock well into adulthood, and even though that dock has been replaced by a new one, I continued to fish there until recently…thinking of my father every time I wet a hook. Hobby Two.

One year my wife and I decided to put in a rose garden as a birthday gift for my late mother. My wife really enjoyed doing it, and through some odd combination of evolution and osmosis, we BOTH became interested in gardening. Hobby Three.

My wife read about an organization whose members knit and/or crochet baby blankets for donation to needy and homeless families. She could neither knit nor crochet, but she painstakingly taught herself to do both, and produced a series of wonderful, complex, colorful, beautiful blankets, all of which she donated through this organization. She still knits and crochets, and gives away everything that she creates. Hobby Four.

And what about today? What passes as a hobby for a young person in the 21st century? Is someone with eight thousand songs in their iPod a music collector? Not really. Is selling the contents of your garage on ebay a hobby? Probably not. Does anyone still elect to play a musical instrument for fun and for fun alone? Not that often.

It seems to me that everyone today knows everything, or, using the computer, knows HOW to know everything. But most (younger) folks don’t know how to DO anything. How many twenty-somethings can repair a toilet?…roast a turkey?…rewire a lamp?…well, you get the idea. Maybe that’s what hobbies are really good for. They are a training ground. They show us that knowing how to actually do something or being really interested in something is satisfying in and of itself…not for profit…not because you have to…just because. And when, devoid of any practical application, you find your knowledge or your interests satisfying, then the acquisition of more knowledge and more interests becomes one of life’s goals. I miss hobbies. I think we’re all diminished as they fall more and more out of fashion.