Nows and Forevers

True confession time: I’ve only ever seen one football game my entire life.

It’s true. (I don’t count high school football, where my kids were in the band.) The only football game I ever attended was a very cold and windy University of Connecticut football game in the winter of 1984, when my father took me, his girlfriend and her two kids to the old Storrs football stadium. I don’t think we even stayed the whole game. I have no idea who UConn played. All I remember is how cold it was.

Even when I went to UConn, and lived essentially right above the football stadium, I never went. (I could hear the crowd from my dorm room though if I had the window open.)

My lack of interest in football comes as a shock to many people, here and abroad. It’s a little suspect in a football-heavy city like where I work. It’s even looked askance by people I know in Europe, who naturally assume every American is that kind of football fan. I’ve certainly seen parts of a few Super Bowls, but it’s been more about the ads and the friends. And in recent years, not even that. I never grew up with football in the house. I’m more of a baseball fan.

Depending on where I’ve lived in the country, it’s been more of a problem. In New York and Connecticut, where I spent more than half my life, it was no big deal. And in northern Maine, the big passion is basketball, another sport I know nothing about.

But this lack of familiarity with football does come back to bite me every once in a while, and not just because I have to stare blankly every time someone asks me about a game. I used to cover the NFL on the media side. While you don’t have to pilot a 767 to cover airlines, it would be a disadvantage when I’d have to talk to former players turned broadcasters. And I had no frame of reference. In my job now, in one of the top football cities in the country, I sometimes have to write about the team, and I don’t have a frame of reference there, either.

Oh well.

I am still a Toys R Us kid, long after I grew up.

In the ’70s and ’80s, as I tell my kids way too much, we didn’t have a ton of options for toys. There were a few toy stores and toy sections of places like Caldor and Bradlees when I was growing up in Connecticut and Massachusetts. When my dad would take me into Manhattan, a couple of times a year, he would let me go to the big FAO Schwartz store in Fifth Avenue.

I had kids too late to appreciate FAO Schwartz. Now THAT was a toy store.

They had Toys R Us, although sadly, that too went out. It was gone but not forgotten. Now it’s back, thanks to a deal with Macy’s. It’s nowhere near its former glory. It’s what they call in the business “a store within a store.” At my local Macy’s, it was about a dozen shelves of toys.

Nothing can be like it was, I guess.

I was on my way last week to revisit a part of my past when I ended up running into another one, in the same place.

This is Florida, New York, near where I used to live and work in the Hudson Valley. I have a connection to the town, but haven’t been back in a long time. On my way to where I was going, I went by this: A Finast trailer!

Haven’t seen one in a long time. When I was growing up, Finast was a big grocery chain but it went out in the early ’90s when I was still living in Connecticut. It’s one of the places we used to go for groceries.

I don’t know but I don’t think it was there the last time I was in Florida, more than 16 years ago. Gave me something to think about, seeing as I was there for a totally different type of nostalgia.

I’m starting the year with a beard, or at least the makings of one.

I stopped shaving my face almost two weeks ago, while in New York for the first time in years. I had planned to be cleanshaven for my visit to my daughter’s grave and especially my mother’s and grandparents’ graves. It made sense to me, because my mother wouldn’t want me to be unshaven.

I haven’t fully shaved since. I had a razor but no cream, and I used water to clean off the sides of my face. I kept a goatee, for lack of a better term.

I have a checkered past with beards.

The first one was in my senior year in high school, where I let my hair grow a little long and I stopped shaving. I imagined myself as some kind of artsy hipster, the kind you might see 20 years later in Brooklyn. In reality, I probably looked a lot like what I was, a teenager crying out for attention. And trying to get the girls to notice me.

Anyway, it lasted for a month or so. My parents, bless their hearts, turned the other cheek. They probably knew it was just a phase, and that eventually I would be back to my ruddy, cleanshaven complexion.

Which I did, right after the girl who was my friend who I had a secret crush on, told me she liked me better without the beard.

It was gone just about the minute I got home. And I got a haircut soon after.

That was my last longhaired look. I’ve got what Frieda in the Peanuts would call “naturally curly hair,” so ever since I was in high school, I’ve kept my hair short in an effort to keep it under control.

But a beard, that’s another story.

Well, I should clarify. Haven’t ever spent more than a couple of months with a beard. I think a little over 2 months is my record. Maybe a little bit more. But that’s happened on a number of occasions, usually around my birthday, in early October, whenever the Red Sox have gotten into the playoffs. So that’s 1988, 1990, 1995, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, and 2013. I didn’t have a playoff beard for 2018.

I know it’s stupid but I felt that it was a great way to honor my hometown team. I would stop shaving when the regular season was over, sometimes sooner than that, and then shave it off soon after they got eliminated. Between 1988 and 2000, that wasn’t long at all. (It helped that my significant other at those times hated facial hair and wouldn’t go near me.) It lasted a little longer in 2003 and still longer in 2004. My former wife, who was loving and graceful in all things, loved me equally clean shaven or scruffy.

In 2004 I kept the beard into November because the Red Sox won the World Series that year for the first time in 86 years. I couldn’t believe it, and maybe a little bit of me thought that somehow the time-space continuum would be upset and the World Series invalidated if I shaved.

Eventually, though, I did shave.

And that’s the case in the other times that I’ve had the beard. Gone as soon as the Red Sox were done.

It’s not even a beard for long. I preferred some type of goatee, which accentuated my red hair. That’s what I have now.

I don’t know how long I’m going to have it, either. This time it’s not tied to baseball but instead symbolic of my return to New York, which has meant so much to me in my life. I went there last week and I resolved, for reasons that still elude me, to not shave for a while. Will it be until I get back? I do not know.

My former wife, Melissa, and I were fans of “The West Wing,” and she used to love to watch “thirtysomething.” She told me that my beard, along with my red hair, reminded her of Timothy Busfield, who was in both shows. I had hoped that she would remember Busfield as ace reporter Danny Concannon and not Busfield as Elliott in “thirtysomething.”

“Of course I think of you as Danny,” she said. “I was more of a Ken Olin fan in ‘thirtysomething.’”

She always knew what to say.

I’m thinking of her as I grow this beard, even though she’s no longer alive. No one ever appreciated me for me, in all my good and bad, than she did.

When do the lights go out?

Driving around tonight, I wondered why there are so many holiday lights still out. It’s Jan. 5, for pete’s sake.

This year it felt like the holiday lights were out earlier than usual — early November — and even just about two weeks after Christmas, at least half my neighborhood has them out and bright still.

Most holiday lights stay on until at least Jan. 1, right? But then that’s the unofficial end of the holiday and they should be removed and put away? But Jan. 1 was a rainy Sunday around here and maybe that’s why the lights are still mostly on. But this weekend, no matter what it’s going to be like, I would think most would be down.

That would be two weeks after Christmas, and eight days after New Year’s Day. Must be some kind of record.

Counterpoint: My holiday lights aren’t down yet, either. But that’s only because of laziness.

Call me whatever you want, but I have used two movies as a litmus test for picking friends: Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire” and Whit Stillman’a “Last Days of Disco.” We can still be friends if you don’t like these two movies, but it’s gonna be harder.

I have been a fan of “The Last Days of Disco” ever since I saw it in 1999. It tells a very specific story about a group of friends in Manhattan in the early ’80s, at a time when disco was on its way out. (Hence the title.)

Scenes in “The Last Days of Disco” takes place in a night club, but it’s not really about disco. Stillman is an acute observer of class and relationships. It has a good soundtrack, even if you don’t like disco. (Although you should, because disco brought a lot of good to the world and its smashing in the late ’70s and early ’80s was both racist and homophobic.) It’s really about being out of college and living in New York City.

It’s a great movie. Yet it’s kind of a cult movie. And until the Criterion Collection DVD came out in the mid-2000s, it was almost impossible to find on either video or DVD. A friend of mine and I loved this movie so much that in 2005 she and I scoured stores in Manhattan to try to find even the VHS copy, to no avail. The other of Stillman’s trilogy, Metropolitan (1990) and Barcelona (1994) are pretty good too, but I like “The Last Days of Disco” the best. And there are common actors and even characters between the movies.

Don’t go expecting laughs. It’s not that kind of film. (Neither are “Metropolitan” and “Barcelona.”) But the end credits of “The Last Days of Disco” is my favorite ending to a movie ever. It’s fun, it’s well choreographed, and if you’ve ever lived and worked in New York City (and I have), the credits a tremendous homage to the subway and Manhattan itself. What a great use of the awesome 1975 No. 1 hit for the O’Jays, “Love Train.”

Anyway, it won’t hit as much if you haven’t seen the whole movie. But after the heaviness of “Last Days” and “Metropolitan” and “Barcelona,” the end credits are an amazing release and a joyous celebration of New York City.

As the O’Jays sing: “If you miss this train at the station, I feel sorry, sorry for you.”

“What can be said in New Year rhymes,” wrote Ella Wheeler Wilcox in her poem “The Year,” in 1910, “That’s not been said a thousand times?”

Fair point. I’m not sure about what I could say about new year’s that hasn’t been said before. But in this poem, written 113 years ago, there’s a lot that still speaks to me.
As a writer, I appreciate a turn of phrase. Wilcox uncorks a good one:

We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.

Sixteen words that tell a story.

Sixteen words that tell a lot of stories.

I admit that I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen “wreathe” as a verb. (No doubt that’s a bug of my incomplete education.) But I know what it meant. Dictionary.com’s four definitions for “wreathe” as a verb has two related to wreathes. The other two make more sense in this context:

• To surround in curling or curving masses or form
• To envelope

The latter’s probably the one, although I guess you can curl a bride in a veil just as you would envelope her in it.

I admire Wilcox’s lines. There’s no adorning. There are a lot of active verbs. What’s more active than live, love, woo, wed? Those first eight words encapsulate a lot of what’s wonderful about this life.
But it’s the last two lines that make up that year Wilcox wrote, the year just past for all of us, the year ahead, all years before and evermore:

We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that’s the burden of the year.

There’s no doubt we have all of those ahead this year.

Here’s the whole poem from Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who was born in 1850 and died in 1919:

What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That's not been said a thousand times?

The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.

We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.

We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.

We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.

We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that’s the burden of the year.

A lot of the people I’ve been following have been jumping to Post and to Mastadon lately after Twitter’s slow-motion implosion. Today, I became one of them.
To be fair, I’ve had the invitation for a couple of weeks. Just with the holidays and also the aggravation with trying to learn a new social media network (hey, I’m old), I wasn’t as enthusiastic as I was when I started with Facebook and Twitter back in 2008 and 2009.
Mastadon seemed like a little too much than what I could do today. I’ve read about it but I decided against carrying through with it, at least until I can figure out more about it. It sounds a little too complicated.
Post, I did within 15 minutes.
I don’t know much about Post. It seems like an interesting platform, and maybe it’ll take off. It won’t be the same, at least right now, as Twitter. But it seems to be sort of between Twitter and a straight up blog, like this one, and I might as well give it a try.
So I did.
Not that it’s that much right now. I had to ask on Facebook if there was anyone that I followed who could point me in the right direction. I have found a few, but I don’t have any followers yet.
That’s OK.

For nearly 30 years, I’ve begun the year listening to Artie Shaw’s version of “Begin the Beguine.” I know it’s odd, but you could do worse than begin 2023 by listening to Artie Shaw.

I didn’t expect to start my year with this song. It just sort of happened, one of those funny little traditions that you start with yourself but you don’t really know why and you don’t make a big deal about it. I would doubt that anyone I’ve lived with since 1995 would have any idea I did that. It’s just something that I like to do for myself.

And it’s not an expression of luck, like eating pork and sauerkraut on New Year’s Day or throwing salt over your shoulder. God knows, “Begin the Beguine” have started both good and bad years. I can’t even say why I did this.

I just did.

I can say how I discovered the song and the music of Artie Shaw: In my late grandfather’s record collection when I was visiting my aunt in Newton, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1994. My grandmother had died a few months before and my aunt was cleaning out things that hadn’t been sifted through since my grandfather had died in 1976. My grandmother, who wasn’t very sentimental, didn’t want to give up any trace of her husband in the 18 years that she lived past him. The family respected that.

My aunt asked me if I wanted to go through Grandpa’s records. She was going to send them to Goodwill.

So I went down into the basement, and looked.

There were about two dozen records from the 1940s through the 1960s: Burl Ives, Roger Miller, Ray Conniff, Lawrence Welk, and other albums. This was early in the reign of the CD and even though I stopped buying albums years before, I still had a record player. We all did. I spotted a compilation of big band music that had a few songs and artists that I recognized and more I didn’t.

One I recognized the songwriter (Cole Porter) but not the song or the performer, Artie Shaw and his Orchestra. I picked that one up, one of the only ones I did take.

I drove home and broke out the record, placed it on the turntable and began to play. I was instantly hooked by “Begin the Beguine.”

My other grandparents had introduced me to big band music, what they had grown up to in the 1930s and 1940s, and I went from humoring them to actually liking it a lot. That was mostly Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey. I hadn’t heard about Artie Shaw, who grew up decades earlier where I had (New Haven, Connecticut) and who, in 1994, was still active as a musician and one of the few people from that era to still be alive.

And I loved the song.

I don’t know why I began 1995 by listening to “Begin the Beguine.” Maybe it’s in the title. There are no lyrics in Shaw’s version which came out in the summer of 1938 and quickly became his signature song. Apparently to his chagrin after a while. It was a long time before I listened to the lyrics on other versions. I still go back to Artie Shaw’s version.

I couldn’t say much about the lyrics at the time, although reading them over on the web right now, it hits a lot harder than I would have expected. It’s about wanting a second chance with a lover you had taken for granted before:

What moments divine, what rapture serene,
Till clouds came along to disperse the joys we had tasted,
And now when I hear people curse the chance that was wasted,
I know but too well what they mean;

I also know too well what they mean. But that’s another story. And one that can never be. I wasted my chance.

So in 2023, I began the year like I have with all the others since 1995. But this year, it had more meaning than I expected.