Man, I am such a damn creature of habit, it even shocks me at times. I usually write my stories to you at the end of each week, on Friday afternoon and sometimes Saturday, often finishing up one I started. It would be quite out of the ordinary to wait until Sunday afternoon, after my motorcycle ride with the Sons of Kauai. What little I know about social media, and I do know very little, consistency is important to maintain readership. Well, everything got fouled up this last weekend.
Toward the end of the week, I traveled to NJ to visit family, my son, daughter-in-law and grandson. Believe me, I am not complaining, but my schedule got totally thrown off track. Days were busy being with family and by the time I got to bed, both my mind and body were shot, partially from adjusting to the travel dislocation and from the activities of the day. Well, you won’t believe it, but the weekend whizzed by and I knew any story would have to wait, most likely until I found myself strapped in, prisoner on one of several planes headed west, back to Kauai.
I am not sure when I decided that I would not write about other people in my stories. These days, privacy is such a precious commodity, most likely an illusion anyway, but I stopped feeling comfortable about bringing anyone into my pieces a few years ago. Here I am, just having spent a sweet handful of days with my family, with nothing else going on, but I only want to share a story with you that leaves them to their lives.
It came to me in a photograph, of all things. My daughter-in-law took a picture of my grandson, my son and myself, when we were all at an NBA game at the Barclay Center in Brooklyn. It had snowed that afternoon and I actually got to see my breath! I looked at that picture and the story came to me. It also helped that on one of those days, we drove to 69-30 179th Street, to take a look at the home and neighborhood I grew up in. I pretty much spent the first twenty plus years of my life there, going to Queens College and continuing to live at home until I left to go on active duty in the Army Reserve in ’67. While I didn’t do a Trump, it did keep me out of the Vietnam War, where I definitely would have died.
When I was around my grandson’s age, it would have been 1956. I did a very quick cruise through the year on Wikipedia, while sitting at the Newark Airport for the first of three flights home. I had pretty much come to terms with my father’s death, which happened a few short years before. No, I don’t mean I got over it, but the excruciating shock had lifted and I was carving a brand new groove going forward. Elvis Presley had his first number one hit, with Heart Break Hotel and I was a huge fan. I distinctly remember excitedly tuning in to the Ed Sullivan Show to watch him and our shitty DuMont TV went out. I ran across the street in my underwear to my friend, Allan Small’s house, to watch the King. He changed the world as I knew it until that moment. All of a sudden, it became cool to be young and grab onto something our parents couldn’t understand.
Politically, Dwight Eisenhower was running for re-election against Adlai Stevenson. Ike was a war hero, father figure, who presided over the country during a rare time of peace, a word no longer in fashion. The Korean War, if you could even call it that, had ended. Stevenson was an extraordinarily articulate man, who spoke to the country as if it had an inherent intelligence, not the stupidity and bias epidemic today. Huntley and Brinkley went on the air, along with Walter Cronkite and broadcast journalism was just that, a carry over from the dedication of print media to ferret out the truth, the whole truth and nothing, but the truth.
Right around my son’s age, I had settled into a brand new life in New Mexico. With a tax refund from a failed bar in Easton, PA, a long story and not for now, I had enough money to buy a small adobe home, just south of Santa Fe. I had already been there about two years and the shock of relocation had been replaced by a sense of grace with the place. I belonged out there in the high desert country. My little casita was on five acres, off a dirt road, off a dirt road. I had gotten a hybrid wolf and named him Sikhis, Navajo for friend. I could finally let my hair grow, no longer a part of the NYC, broadcast advertising business. I got my ear pierced right before I left the City. I had become a volunteer fireman, with the Turquoise Trail Fire Dept. I got into camping in the middle of nowhere, most often in the foothills of the Rockies, up in Colorado. In the summer of ’89, I promoted a Sunday concert series, called Music in the Pines. I booked people like Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Hornsby and Etta James. I was home.
Lastly, here I now am, picking up the rear, so to speak. I get to look back at so many lives I have been privileged to live. I have been here on Kauai for around sixteen years. I grew up in New York City and spent the first forty some odd years of my life there. As a kid, I lived in a terrific neighborhood. Today’s fears were not born back then. I’d play on my block with my friends, ride my bicycle everywhere, walk to elementary school with friends, even take the subway, when I was around my grandson’s age.
When I was a couple of years younger than my son, I left my two boys, a years before broken marriage and a career that felt increasingly hollow. In many ways, it was a terribly selfish thing to do and it has left its markings on us all. I am too old to justify any of my choices and too old to be burdened by guilt either.
I love my life on Kauai. When I was my grandson’s age, I used to think that I would be very rich and retire to some kind of paradise. I wasn’t thinking about family or jobs or anything remotely grown up. It was a fantasy that took root somewhere inside me. Right around my son’s age, it dawned on me that the fantasy was just that and nothing would happen if I did nothing about it. I don’t know if it was my father’s early passing that slowly and subtly made time matter more to me, but paradise was not going to wait. I was a bona fide grown up and I became afraid my life would just pass me by, without feeling like I had truly participated in it. The move to New Mexico was like closing my eyes, stepping off the gang plank, my only possession a belief in that paradise and nothing else. Leaving dry land and swimming here to Kauai seemed so natural to me those sixteen years ago and I’ve never looked back, not once.
I look at that photograph and see my life through the lives of my blood.
(Sending this while sitting in the LA airport, waiting for my flight home)
