Nows and Forevers

I started 2023 much like I have in 2020, 2021 and 2022: Covid-free. But I’m wondering how long that’s going to last.

For more than a year, I’ve seen headlines all over the place intimating that my fortune in avoiding Covid is going to come to an end and soon.

As USA Today reported this week:

“The newest Covid-19 variant is so contagious that even people who’ve avoided it so far are getting infected and the roughly 80% of Americans who’ve already been infected are likely to catch it again, experts say.”

So there’s that.

That USA Today article quotes an expert saying that even masking isn’t going to save you this time. I credit religiously wearing a mask for the first two and a half years of the pandemic, and a good one, as one big reason why I haven’t gotten Covid.

Yet. Why I haven’t gotten Covid yet.

After I got my omicron bivalent booster in early September, I stopped wearing a mask so much. In fact, I’ve hardly worn one at all. What is a booster for, I reasoned, if I also have to wear a mask? Of course, that’s another stupid example of the fuzzy logic that has kept infections going on and on for so long. And one day, I know, it’s going to catch up with me.

Might even be this week. I’m waiting for my daughter to be done with her music class and there are two people in this room, the receptionist and a five-year-old, who are coughing. I have a mask with me, but I haven’t put it on yet. Yeah, I should.

It would have a certain irony if I caught the latest omicron variant racing up the charts across the country, one that was first detected in Connecticut and New York in October and is now pretty much all over the country by now. Why would that be ironic? Because I’m from Connecticut and I lived in New York for many years. If there’s ever a variant that was aimed at me, then it’s XBB.1.5.

My father and I were in the Hudson Valley in New York the last week of 2022, as this latest variant swept through. We stayed relatively safe. But I do wonder, that USA Today article notwithstanding, whether my luck is about to run out.

I can’t believe that it’s been seven years since David Bowie left us. I have to say the world hasn’t been the same since.

Even though he had been a recording artist since the late 1960s, and was one of the most popular singers in the world in the early 1980s, I never really thought of him as mortal. Bowie seemed timeless. And I have the feeling that he wasn’t done speaking to us when he died Jan. 10, 2016.

Primarily, he was a musician, though he was so much more. His “Serious Moonlight” phase, in the early ’80s, was perfectly timed with my awakening as a music lover. But he was also an actor, and I especially liked him as Pilate in “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

I feel we also lost something else, too: Bowie’s life, and the way he lived it, opened the door for youth and adults to live their lives the way they wanted. His bisexuality, and his openness about it, helped pave the way for acceptance. That’s a blessing, too, because I remember the 1970s and 1980s and the narrow views of society then.

I also like the way he collaborated (with Queen, with Brian Eno, even with Bing Crosby) and his desire to evolve and his ever-growing embrace of creativity in all forms. I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately, as I try to do things creatively in my own way (writing) that I’ve never done before.

“If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area,” Bowie said one time. “Always go a little further into the writer than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

Great, if scary, advice. But I’m trying to embrace the fear and confront what I fear. David Bowie’s advice still lives on in those of us who do.

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.