When the hurly-burly’s done

I woke up early this morning, at around 7. Not early by my usual standards (I’ve mastered the art of moving silently through the upstairs of my current living space in almost pitch blackness, and can tie a tie without looking and manage, most mornings, not to stub my toe on anything dangerous), but early for a Saturday morning. I knew I had to get over to Fairfield U by 9:30, so I’d counted on waking up around 8:45, getting a quick shower, dressing, and driving the 15 or so miles to get here.
But I was awake at 7, and the light was coming through the thin blind just so, creating a red haze behind my eyelids when I tried to shut them. The temperature in my room was perfect, so I didn’t want to mess it up by pulling the blankets up over my head, so instead I gave in—I knew I’d regret it later, as my triplet friends are celebrating their birthdays this evening—and switched on my radio.
Saturday morning radio. I never was much of a fan of Saturday morning cartoons growing up. It might have been the sensory overload—there were just too many to watch, too many characters to know, too many bright colors and loud noises and banana-peel sound effects. I don’t know. I do remember that every few weekends, my parents, my sisters, and I would walk around the corner to Ed Mitchell’s, that bastion of really expensive clothing. My parents dropped us off in the kiddie area, where there was a large TV, plenty of soda, and a huge bowl of lollipops. Meanwhile, they’d walk around the store, admiring clothing which they’d most likely never buy. I can see it now, though I never saw it then, my dad fingering elegant silk ties laid out neatly in plump piles on small round wooden tables, my mom trying on wool jackets. They wouldn’t buy the clothing here when they could get similar items from less-glamorous stores, but still they browsed. Also, if you looked serious about your browsing, you felt less guilty about cadging hotdogs and hamburgers from Ed Mitchell’s parking-lot barbecue.
Saturday morning radio, though, is a different beast entirely. Morning and weekend radio has been the bonus track to the soundtrack of my memories for a very long time now. In middle school, my dad would drive me to school most mornings. I remember sitting on the sticky vinyl front seat of his blue Chevy Malibu, tracing a capped pen or my finger along the light blue plastic (but woodgrained, for some reason) molding on the dashboard and door. The car was so old, so non-fancy, that it only had an AM radio (at some point, my dad bought an FM radio that attached to the steering wheel, which can’t be right, but I think it’s right). I got my first exposure to morning shock-jocks riding in that car, and in the ’83 Buick hand-me-down that followed it. My dad was a huge fan of Don Imus’s radio show. This was Imus before he got interested in politics, before he interviewed people like John McCain and Andrea Mitchell. This was Imus while he was still on drugs, when the show consisted mainly of skits and parodies (I remember a serial story about a Mexican cowboy named Tres Huevos). For the most part, I had no idea what he was talking about, but it was loud and boisterous and my dad liked it, and that was enough for me in 6th grade. Note: This piece was written before Imus’s very public career suicide. So it goes.
On Sundays, my mom drove the return trip for our hebrew school carpool. After a long morning of nothing of any particular value, my friend Wendy and I would find my sisters (and sometimes this other kid, Josh) and make our way out to the parking lot where Mom would wait in our silver Volvo wagon. Despite my pleas, Mom never had any good music in the car—my attempts at slipping in a Bon Jovi tape were always foiled—and instead listened to Jonathan Schwartz’s Sunday afternoon radio show on WNYC. The show, which I now listen to regularly, consisted of an old man talking about songs only moms liked, then playing the songs. “Listen to this version of ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin,’” he’d say in his soothing this-won’t-hurt-a-bit voice. “Remarkable. From the same year that Sinatra recorded his, same arranger, but completely different. I love this.”
It’s amazing how much of an impact this kind of radio listening had on my sisters and I. During the week, my mom always listened to the news on WCBS, which is one of the most well-regimented, anally-scheduled stations I’ve ever encountered. I haven’t listened to it in years—I think their 9/11 coverage was pretty much the end of that for me, because pretty soon after that I moved out of my parents’ house for almost the last time, into a room in Morningside Heights, and I kept my radio tuned, as any good arty intellectual New Yorker would, to WNYC and its NPR programming. I can, however, still tell you, at any given minute, what’s going on on that station. If it’s the top or the half of the hour, they’re reading two-sentence top stories. At the :08s, they’re doing first traffic (and there’s a schedule for when they focus on Jersey, Westchester, or Connecticut traffic), then weather. :15 and :45 are sports, :50 is business news, and :55 is entertainment news, which usually has to do with the show Wicked. In between are a lot of commercials for the US Window Factory or some guy with a really nasal voice telling you about smart investing. One time, when we were driving back from Florida, we saw a car in the parking lot at the Vince Lombardi rest stop. The remarkable thing about this car was that on the rear ledge, Hannah and I noticed, was some equipment labeled “WCBS 880.” As Mom and Dad went into the rest stop one last time before the final leg of our trip, Hannah and I listened to the radio, trying to figure out which of the reporters we grew up with were reporting live from the Vince Lombardi rest stop. Even the realization that the report obviously wasn’t live (because it was played on the radio about fifteen minutes after the car pulled out of its spot) didn’t dampen our excitement. And we thought this was normal.
Anyway, back to this morning. Among other things I heard was a report on Morning Edition that Major League Baseball has made a deal that would pretty much make it impossible to watch televised out-of-market games without a satellite dish. They’re trying to squeeze the cable companies and make them carry their new channel, but in the meantime, watching baseball this year is going to be weird. It won’t be that bad for me, as the Mets are carried here in the Connecticut suburbs, but I think about Evan, who is a Red Sox fan living down here, and Aaron, who is the only Royals fan east of Kansas City, and my friend Kat, who proudly (and regrettably, I am afraid) supports the Yankees all the way out in Seattle.
But then I realize that it might be better not to be able to watch baseball on TV at all. Because I remember being in third, fourth, fifth grade, when I loved baseball for the first time, when I used to keep box scores while watching the games on Saturday afternoons, happily wondering why strikeouts were recorded with a K and why people persisted in calling a walk a Base on Balls, instead of just a walk. I had gotten into the habit of listening to the radio at bedtime, as background music first for reading, then for drifting off. In the winter, I’d listen to an elevator music station, getting really excited when I recognized a Simon & Garfunkel song in the syrupy violins and xylophones. But from April until September, I’d listen to the Mets. Bob Murphy’s gruff, nasal voice was somehow reassuring and was not unlike the voices of the old men in my life. Gary Thorne, the other guy whose name I could never remember, seemed to know everything. I’d listen intently for the first five or six innings, then fall asleep. Rarely would I wake up when my mom came into my room to shut off the radio after she and Dad finished watching on the TV in their room.
About an hour and half before the baseball broadcasting report, Kurt Andersen spoke with British author Howard Jacobson, who is, apparently because of his seeming obsession with Judaism, modern life, and the humiliating and fulfilling intersections of same, called the “British Philip Roth” about his new novel. From what I can gather, it’s a book, much like Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, about a Jewish guy trying to make it in Gentile society by doing such things as marrying (and discarding) WASPy girls with names like Chloe and Zoe and internally bristling at Holocaust exploitation jokes. It actually sounds like a book I’d enjoy reading, and like the kind of thing I’ve tried writing.
Andersen asked Jacobson how he thought being Jewish in England was different from being Jewish in America. The answer, Jacobson replied, was that in America Jews are all over the place. Yes, we’re in the arts, the media, the economy, politics, but more importantly, we’re in the culture. Yiddish words are spoken as part of American English. I can’t tell you how weird it is to correct a beautiful blond corn-fed Kentucky girl from her lifelong habit of calling her admirably posterior her “tookas,” instead of her tuchus. Seinfeld could only come from the US. And nobody on that show is even blatantly Jewish—a couple of the actors are, but the closest I’ve ever seen the show get to dealing with Jewish issues was the episode in which Jerry makes out with his date while watching Schindler’s List. But it’s still our pop-culture’s best depiction of that kind of American Jewishness that blankets pretty much everyone who lives in certain parts of New York City—either Upper Side, large swathes of Queens and Brooklyn—and its suburbs. Old women wearing plastic rain kerchiefs pushing wire-mesh carts with their groceries, middle-aged men in light spring jackets and sneakers, the fact that even Jesuit Fairfield University can sell you a good bagel, Broadway and Jonathan Schwartz and all that. I’m not talking about the hip Jewish underground, or even the mysterious popularity of proselytizing Hasidic reggae artist Matisyahu in Greenwich, but the hardcore, the shellfish-eating Jews who go to Friday night services and out to dinner afterward.
In England, though, Jacobson said that Jews are taught from an early age to keep their heads down, to not expose their differences to the outside world, to stay insular. This has, I suppose, kept the Jews of England safe since Cromwell invited them to return, but it seems to me that England’s been missing something. And it got me thinking about aspects of my own upbringing and childhood that I don’t let out all that often. My radio fixation is definitely one of them. Now, at 29, it really is nothing more than fodder for inside jokes with my sisters—I made Hannah, that devotee of all things WCBS, a mix CD consisting only of songs that mentioned oft-congested thoroughfares in the great New York area: rapper Busta Rhymes bragging that he’d “bounce down the Henry Hudson,” punk-rockers Rainer Maria complaining about “going nowhere on the BQE,” etc. But it’s something that’s part of me, that has influenced how I look at the world and how I get my information. And even though I’m a blogger, a Web 2.0 enthusiast, a person who aggregates his own news from a hundred sources and repurposes it to his own needs, sometimes there really is nothing better than laying in bed on a weekend morning and letting a faraway voice tell you what it thinks you should know.

ENG213 students, please complete this before 10pm Tuesday:

Think back on Friday’s class activity about the ancient sources of information on the Trojan War.  Now read these two modern interpretations:

Trojan War Summary

Odysseus in the Trojan War

Did reading these piece help you to better understand the Trojan War?  What are you still confused about?  Why do you think the Trojan War is such a well-known story?  How do you think Odysseus’s experiences in the Trojan War will influence his actions in The Odyssey?

So I just found out about CoComment, and it might be the most useful blog add-on I’ve come across yet. What it does is provide an easy way to stay on top of what you write not only on your blog, but in the comments sections of the blogs you visit. You can embed a simple line of code in your own blog to display all the comments you’ve written, and it automatically updates the list. If you look toward the top of the right-hand column on this blog, you’ll see my CoComment box. Those are just comments I’ve written since I set up my account this evening.

I can see this being really powerful for student bloggers. As you read more blogs, you start to comment on them. Now you can easily follow your thoughts throughout the blogosphere (and someone please smack me if I start using that word more than, say, once a month). I wish I was using this service back when the whole Dan/Sarah blog etiquette/NCLB throwdown was still going on.

Anyway, it’s definitely worth trying out. Learnerblogs users, you’re going to need to create a text widget (under the Presentation menu) in which to paste the code that the CoComment setup process spits out. I’m happy to show you how to do it, if you can’t figure it out on your own. Have fun!

Block 4 students: Here’s the Emily Dickinson radio show I didn’t get to play for your class today.  Please listen to it and leave a comment on this post with any observations, questions, or other related musings you might have…

Block 3 students: Feel free to play too, though your class heard this piece.

Other favorites in the American Icons series, in case you’re interested:

The Lincoln Memorial, Superman, Miles Davis’s great album Kind of Blue, Barbie, and The Wizard of Oz.

Two elderly women.

One wears a flamboyant hat, colorful beads, a huge smile. She looks to the future, it seems, ready for whatever might happen.

The other is smaller, more conservatively dressed in a sensible sweater. She looks at the camera, a small grin playing across her face.

These women were each a huge presence in my life, and within a few weeks of each other, they were gone.

The woman on the left is my great-aunt Helen Reiss. She passed away in the first week of February, soon after having checked into the hospital for the first time since giving birth to her second child. At 91, she was the kind of lady who would corner strangers (on the street, in stores, on buses and subways) and demand that they tell her how old they thought she was. Once that conversation started, she would tell her new friend that she had made the hat and jewelry she wore, showing off her latest work. Helen lived alone until the end, the very model of the independent elderly woman. At her funeral, both the rabbi and Helen’s daughter, my father’s cousin Jessie, told stories that illustrated these observations, commenting on Helen’s independent streak, her occasional lack of tact, her warmth, her giving nature, her way of becoming the center of attention in the room.

On the right is my grandma, Rose Wasserman. Her older brother, Sam, was Helen’s husband, but he died, with my grandma’s other brothers, young. I can’t think of any other way to say this, but Rose pretty much was the center of our family’s life for as long as I can remember. She was always the quietest person in the room–I can’t remember her ever raising her voice (though I’m sure my dad can, from his teenage hellion days), nor can I remember anyone ever getting angry with her. Grandma and Grandpa lived in a smallish apartment in Queens until they moved permanently to Florida and Grandpa died. Grandma spent the last years of Grandpa’s life caring for him, bringing him back and forth to the hospital when it was needed, nursing him back to health when he came home. When he died she started to deteriorate herself, and it came on quickly.

Remarkably, Grandma held on for ten years. She suffered from Alzheimer’s, hearing loss, vision problems, decreasing mobility, and a host of other ailments. There were times when she didn’t recognize visitors, when she stayed up waiting for Grandpa to come back home, when she was convinced that she was back in the Bronx of her girlhood. But there were glimpses through all of this of the old Rose, the quietly funny lady who wanted nothing but the best for her sons, her daughters-in-law, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. “What’s new, Rosie?” we’d ask, visiting her in the nursing home. “Not a damn thing,” she’d reply, and the old smile would play, quickly, across her face. Then it was back to sitting quietly, Grandma occasionally humming a Broadway tune or saying hello to everyone present.

I don’t know which of these two women lived the “better” life, or the “better” old age. Helen, who maintained her independence until the end, was a character. Rose, deteriorating mentally and physically every day, maintained her ways as well.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. I grew up knowing these two human beings, two old ladies who were always there. They were the constants–Helen’s Sunday morning phone calls, in which she announced “Helen’s all right!” before we could even say “hello”; phone calls from, then nursing home visits to, Rose, bringing her up-to-date on what all the grandchildren had been up to–and now they’re both gone, buried in the same plot at the cemetery in New Jersey. Twice we’ve gotten together with relatives we rarely see to mourn at the cemetery and to talk at the Saddle Brook Diner. Twice we’ve left, saying, “Under better circumstances.”

There aren’t too many more from Helen and Rose’s generation left in my family. There certainly aren’t any whose passing will likely affect me the way these two did. Helen Reiss and Rose Wasserman, you’re missed and will continue to be missed.

עוֹשה שָׁלוֹם בִּמְרוֹמָיו הוּא  יַעֲשֶֹה שָׁלוֹם עָלֵינוּ וְעַל כָּל יִשְֹרָאֵל וְאִמְרוּ אָמֵן