As a Jewish boy growing up in Queens, NY in the Fifties, the prayer for all of us was to become doctors. If you couldn’t quite cut it academically, dentistry would be your penance. It was also cool to become a lawyer back then, but I am not sure about that today. At around age 10, I had a modest doctor’s office in the basement bathroom. Robert Ross was my only patient and he had a knee bruise. Fortunately, I was able to save his entire knee, without any loss of movement. His was the only card filled out in my alphabetized listing of my patients, including all the necessary life saving information. i was forced to abandon my practice due to a lack of patients and the fact that the unfinished basement was prone to flooding.
The truth is, I was not supposed to be a doctor. It became incredibly clear to me as a pre-med freshman at Queens College when I had to dissect a little dead pig, whose arteries and veins were injected with different dye colors. I am pretty sure I knew all along I did not have the discipline or commitment. I was left flatfooted and clueless without my pre-ordained career. Thank God for political science because in hitting the default lever, that is what forged forward. It was one of the easiest majors and that was important to me. My People frowned upon getting any failing grades or, God Forbid, getting left back, not graduating precisely when you were supposed to, if not before.
I remember being shoved into math and science aptitude classes as a kid and not feeling comfortable with it. As a little boy, I literally sang for my father and sometimes wonder what would have happened if I got involved in performance at that age. I took the mandatory piano lessons, but my fingers, feet and mind didn’t get along.
While treading water in college, I took some radio and television courses, keeping in mind this was decades before the explosion of all forms electronic communication. I grabbed a part time job at NBC to do menial tasks during the Johnson-Goldwater election coverage of ’64. At that time, Goldwater was looked upon as a fringe lunatic of the Right, but is a saint in comparison to today’s Big House occupant.
I felt really drawn to the incredible power of television, but as a creative medium not as a conduit for selling vacuum cleaners to old ladies.
All too often, we let the world happen to us, at least that is what I did when I was sorting out a path for myself in the midst of the confusion about finding my thing. During the week, I wore cheap suits, working at NBC, after wangling my way into a full time job as a result of the college exposure. On weekends, I’d put on my black, cracked leather bomber jacket and ride my 250cc Honda around the East Village, where I lived when it was a pretty tough neighborhood, long before its gentrification.
I got into the advertising agency world a few years after Mad Men and that business was filled with people who had no idea what to do with their lives. It was the highest profile industry in NYC, with a handful of brilliantly talented individuals and the rest were lost souls like me, but we put on a good show.
Non-conformity was a form of juvenile delinquency where I came from, but I caught the bug of not wanting to be like everyone else. I was a mini-leader amongst the slide-rule toting, bicycle riding, ultra high IQ, little boy Semites in my neighborhood.
In my early Forties, I had to break away from the high-walled prison of conformity I had built around myself. With hugely, painful difficulty over leaving my little boys, I dropped everything and headed out to Santa Fe, NM, believing it was time to reignite the search for my thing.
None of this should be misconstrued about the “thing” being what kind of work you do. I am referring to the never ending search for passion, whether we want to own it or deny it.
I spent my first years out there living in a small, adobe home, where it felt like I gave birth to a new variety of Larry. I loved the life I created for myself and it felt like my heart won the battle with my mind, which was rigged like a wrestling match. When I actually decided to undertake my cross country odyssey, the fix was already in and a successful outcome was never in question. Besides, only other explanation would have been insanity and I didn’t like how that sounded.
Here on Kauai, the remnants of that fight occasionally surface in the form of fleeting doubts. I would never want the idea that just because I am writing about something, I am not smack in the middle of it. I have no special vantage point here.
I feel the desire to keep looking for your forever, elusive self and forgiving your so called imperfections and smelling the feint scent of passion, is a terrific pastime. Good luck to us all.