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.

The Good Humor Man…

Not one summer passes me by without thoughts of the Good Humor Man and his ice cream truck. There are still a few independent operators driving around in badly converted minivans selling awful, brightly colored and artificially flavored off-brand concoctions that look MUCH better than they taste. I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about the ice cream trucks of my childhood…the sparkling pure white open-cab Good Humor truck with the immaculately uniformed driver…the Good Humor Man. That was how I REALLY knew that it was summer. The trucks were not mechanically refrigerated in those days. They were basically rolling ice boxes, with several small doors (so as not to let out too much of the cold) opening into carefully stocked compartments chilled to below freezing with chunks of dry ice. I can vividly remember the burst of frigid air on my small, uplifted too-warm face as the man in white would open one of the doors to retrieve my treat.

We were living in the northeast, so the Good Humor Man only appeared in warmer months, like bathing suits and robins. I always wondered what they did (the Good Humor Men, not the robins, and certainly not the bathing suits) the rest of the year. Perhaps in the winter when all the lawns were brown they delivered heating oil, or coal, or perhaps they just climbed into their trucks and hibernated atop the dry ice chunks until spring. I never knew. All I knew for sure was that when the first Good Humor Man appeared, like the first robin, it was officially spring, and school was almost done, and my summer vacation was about to begin. It was nice to have indicators like the Good Humor Man…harbingers to help mark the way through the year and through the years to come.

My family never knew when the Good Humor Man would show up. Sometimes we would hear the tinkle of the music from the truck while we were out in the yard in the early evening. Sometimes we would see a truck while out for a drive, and my father would make a show of “chasing him down.” It was fun, the products were really good, and more than anything, it was summer with my mother and my father, and this was as much a part of it as the warm tall green grass or the fireworks on the Fourth of July. My father always had the Toasted Almond Bar, my mother, the Strawberry Shortcake Bar, and for some reason, I never wanted the ice cream…I always had the Lime Ice Pop. And so there we were, the three of us, eating our frozen treats and getting sticky and laughing. And nothing would ever change…ever. At least in the mind of the little boy with the Lime Ice Pop.

And so we moved to south Florida, where we have only two seasons, the warm one and the hot one. And the grass is always green. For a while we would still see the Good Humor Man, but since it was summer almost all year ’round, some of the excitement was gone. There was a newsstand in our new neighborhood where my father would go every evening after dinner to buy the early edition of the morning paper. They sold Popsicles there as well, and I could have one whenever I wanted. For a while I wanted one every evening, and then less often, and eventually, not at all. And the tinkling music from the ice cream truck, when one did drive through the neighborhood…it didn’t sound quite the same after a while. And then I stopped hearing it altogether. And then I stopped missing hearing it.

I’m an old man now, and once in a while I buy what today passes for a Lime Ice Pop. They call them “Frozen Juice Bars” to appeal to the health-conscious, but just like the old days, they are sugar and water and coloring and a bit of lime flavoring. They’re not bad, but they’re not the same. I’d like to think that it’s because they don’t make ‘em like they used to, but deep down inside I know that it’s because I’ve grown up, and my parents are gone and the only Good Humor truck I’ve seen in decades was at an antique car show, where I spent much too long looking at it. The truck had been meticulously restored, but it was empty, a butterfly pinned in a frame, as beautiful as ever, but as lifeless as a tomb. And as I looked at that truck, I realized what I had learned from the Good Humor Man. When you’re a kid, have every Lime Ice Pop that you can. And savor each one. Because just like the Lime Ice Pop, childhood itself, as sweet and tasty as it may be, melts away so very quickly, and when winter arrives, as it inevitably does, the Good Humor Man doesn’t come around any more.

Think Locally…

Alice Waters is the owner and chef at just one of the many fine restaurants that I can’t afford, Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, California. After many years of dining out, I’ve learned that I can not afford to eat at ANY restaurant with “Chez” in the name. Anyway, Chef Waters is well known as a proponent of the use of local products in her restaurant. Reading about her got me to thinking how far we’ve moved away from the idea that local products, local businesses and local services are good for us and good for our communities and good for our nation.

We need to support local businesses (if we can still find them) with unique local products (if there still are any such things) and local viewpoints. If we don’t do something, everything will be the same no matter where we go. Take Chili’s for example. Now I have no objection to Chili’s. They serve pretty good ribs, and they have a terrific warm chocolate dessert that I’m sure has killed more people than texting while driving has. And those people died happy (the diners, not the drivers). But wherever you go, from sea to shining sea, when you eat at Chili’s, the food will be exactly the same. It will look the same, it will taste the same, and it will be served to you by the same server with the same Chinese symbol tattooed on the upper arm, which the server was told (by the tattoo artist) means “Serenity” but in reality is the Chinese symbol meaning “Brake Fluid.”

A short while back I was in Philadelphia for the first time in many years. Decades ago I used to visit my late aunt there…the one that everyone else in the family referred to, only half-jokingly, as “Crazy Trudy.” Whenever I would visit, she would take me to lunch at Wanamaker’s Department Store. The store was huge, with a wonderful central gallery that went from the first floor all the way to the top, and a luxurious restaurant overlooking the gallery. The food, served on fine china by liveried waiters, was really good, the live organ music was a nice touch, and best of all, it was THE famous Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia…it was special…one-of-a-kind. It had been there since the 1876 Centennial, and it had it’s own character, it’s own personality, it’s own products. It was as “Philadelphia” as the Liberty Bell. It’s a Macy’s now. It carries the same products as every other Macy’s, has the same displays as every other Macy’s, and it’s as “local” as a McDonald’s.

Speaking of which…we’ve got a town here in south Florida (SoFla to those locals who are concerned with the ever-rising cost of printer cartridges) named Davie. It’s a suburb of Ft. Lauderdale. Davie fancies itself a “Western” community, even though driving east for just fifteen minutes will cause your car to fill with Atlantic Ocean water. It has some horses, an annual rodeo in its very own little rodeo arena, and three “Western Wear” stores, inexplicably selling “Cowboy” clothes (Stetson hats, flashy boots made from the skins of every conceivable animal, belt buckles the size of manhole covers) to nearly every Jewish attorney in the Ft. Lauderdale metropolitan area (“Happy Passover, Pardner…”). The Davie McDonald’s used to have wallpaper with a horseshoe motif, and, hanging on the wall, a medium-sized glass “shadow box” frame with labeled samples of various types of antique barbed wire. I thought that it was pretty interesting. It wasn’t much, but it differentiated this McDonald’s from others. Several years ago, they refurbished this McDonald’s (and changed the oil in the fryer for the last time) and lo and behold, the horseshoe wallpaper and the barbed wire display mysteriously disappeared. Too local, I guess. I know that it’s silly, but that was when (and why) I stopped going to this McDonald’s.

And even though I have never had a cup of coffee in my life, don’t get me started on Starbucks and the premeditated murder of America’s local “coffee shops.”

I used to be able to find local seafood products everywhere. You can’t swing a dead catfish down here without hitting a fishing boat. Now, it’s beyond challenging if not downright impossible to find anything caught anywhere near here. As a matter of fact, most of the seafood I see in the stores wasn’t wild at any point in its life. It didn’t even have to be caught…it was “harvested.” Farmed tilapia, farmed salmon, farmed shrimp and so on…none of it local, or for that matter, none of it American at all. And I can get the exact same farmed seafood anywhere in the country. The Kahler Hotel in Rochester, Minnesota used to serve locally-caught Pike, and it was delicious. Today, the Kahler’s menu is replete with the same imported farmed seafood as everywhere else. This problem goes WAY beyond seafood. Does your city or town have ANY local merchants, local craftsmen, local farmers, local ANYTHING? How do you go about finding them? Do you buy a local tomato, or a cheaper Mexican one? Can you even FIND a local tomato?

In Florida, agricultural products must be, by law, labeled with the country of origin. I have not been able to buy American-grown garlic for years. From the taste I can’t really tell the difference between American garlic and imported garlic, but that’s not the point. Every year I see something or read something about the Annual Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California. Thousands attend. They even have a guy walking around dressed as a huge garlic bulb, and all manner of garlic products are featured, including, of all things, garlic ice cream. Now I can’t imagine that garlic ice cream has become so popular that the countless tons of garlic that Gilroy produces ALL go into that product (garlic ice cream slogan… “Bad Breath AND Clogged Arteries…You Really CAN Have Both…”). But they sure aren’t shipping it to stores near me. Is California garlic really a “local” product? It is when you compare it to the Chinese variety for sale in my local supermarket.

I was, fairly recently, in Maui, Hawaii, and found a beautiful “craft” shop in the town of Paia. I saw a wonderful carved wood plaque that had flowers and trees, and said “MAUI” on it. When I turned it over to check the price, I saw the “Made in Thailand” sticker, and I could not put it down fast enough. The mother-of-pearl headband that my wife purchased in the same shop was from France. I tried to buy some locally produced “Aloha” Shirts (the official uniform of The Association of Old Guys Who Don’t Give a Damn What You Think). After looking at dozens of them made in China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and so on, I was about to give up, when I FINALLY found some, actually made in Hawaii, at, of all places, the Maui COSTCO. COSTCO? Really? COSTCO? But if I hadn’t gone to that COSTCO (COSTCO Slogan… “Are You Sure That Five Gallons of Mayonnaise is Enough?” ) I would have had to purchase colorful and alarming shirts that were NOT made in Hawaii, which I did not want to do. It’s bad enough that my souvenir Eiffel Tower (purchased within sight of the real thing) was made in China. I would LOVE to know if anyone has seen, in the last twenty years, an American Flag Lapel Pin MADE IN AMERICA. I’m THIS CLOSE to offering a bounty for one.

Okay…I just read this over, and I’m starting to rant. Not a good sign at my age. But I think that you get the point. Alice Waters is on to something. We need to get the local character back, wherever we are. It won’t be easy, but it is worthwhile. A nation with nothing but Chili’s, Macy’s, Starbucks and so on, is a nation deprived of itself. We need to get back to the notion of the local product, the local vendor, the local craftsman, the local landmark…whether it’s a store, a farm, a coffee shop, or even a restaurant like Chez Panisse. Without landmarks, how will you ever know for sure where you are?

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.