Category Archives: Men

A Thanksgiving Timeline

26 Wednesday Nov 2014

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bob and the turkey

BY BOB SMITH

Thanksgiving, always a happy time, has evolved in our family. When I was 10, Mom and Dad and my four sisters and two brothers, ranging in age from 1 to about 13, were all crowded into a small split level house with three bedrooms and one and a half baths. It was tight, but we made it work.

There was a standard menu for Thanksgiving Day — candied yams, onions in cream sauce, mashed potatoes so buttery they were yellow, green beans, and of course a massive, crispy-on-the outside turkey, plump with fragrant bread and raisin stuffing. The cranberry sauce was a gelatinous cylinder with ridges corresponding to the can from which it came.

Sometimes Uncle Howie from up the block would stop by before dinner, while his wife Dolores was busy in the kitchen at home. Howie owned a transmission repair shop and his fingers were permanently stained with grease. Dad would pour him a big double Scotch, and Howie would sit and sip it at the head of our dining room table.

“She threw me out again, Jimmy,” Howie laughed as he lit another one of the long menthol cigarettes he loved. “Can you believe it — I’m useless in the kitchen!”

That was the Thanksgiving drill pretty much through my graduation from high school: all of us at home, eating the same great Mom-made meal year after year. There was something comforting in the routine; the certainty of it all. It seemed like it would never change.

When I was in college, I had a steady girlfriend and so did my brother, so one or both of us had to stop by their parents’ house either before or after dinner. Sometimes I’d miss Howie’s visit, or skip dinner entirely. After dinner, if we could get away with it, Jim and I still poked our fingers into the carcass in the kitchen to find blobs of undiscovered stuffing, but the holiday routine was a little less predictable.

After college, when a few of us had gotten married and started having kids, Thanksgiving entered its next phase. Mom still made most of the food, but it was getting crowded in that little house, and her stove couldn’t handle all the side dishes. So we all started bringing sides, and desserts, and wine to help her out.

And, most importantly to Mom and Dad, we brought grandkids. To Mom’s and Dad’s delight, the cousins rolled around the living room, tickling and laughing (and crying and fighting too), while my brothers and sisters and I hung around all day eating and drinking together. This became our new immutable Thanksgiving routine.

But over time people started moving away, and some of the cousins got girlfriends or boyfriends whose parents had to be visited, and the roster of guests got spotty again. A number of us started having the holiday dinner at our own houses, to start our own family Thanksgiving tradition. So some years we were all together; others not. Howie no longer came by because he’d dropped dead of a stroke one Thanksgiving morning, right in his wife’s kitchen.

Then a few years later Dad got sick and died, and the holiday changed again. The first Thanksgiving after he’d passed, we all came together at the house, and it felt like a memorial dinner — more somber than festive. We kept that tradition up for a few years, and things got happy again. All of us brought the side dishes and wine and all the kids we could muster, helping  Mom put together a dinner that looked a lot like the dinners we’d had before.

But a chunk of life had drained out of Mom, who was visibly older and less capable than when Dad was alive. And her dementia was setting in too, so cooking Thanksgiving dinner soon became impossible for her.

So we entered the itinerant phase of our family Thanksgiving dinner: one year we would host at our house for Mom and anyone else who cared to come; another year it was at the home of one of my other siblings. Most years we weren’t all together; we were just too scattered. The unchanging routine in Cresskill had given way to new unchanging routines we’d all established in our own homes.

Now a number of my brothers and sisters and I are becoming grandparents. Pretty soon we’ll be the doting older folks clapping in the background as the kids play, letting the younger generation do the heavy lifting of cooking and cleaning up the feast.

The unchanging routine is changing again.

My (Un) Bucket List

05 Wednesday Nov 2014

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BY FRANK TERRANELLA

One of the realities we over-50s face is the reality of time. We all sooner or later come to view time as a precious commodity. It’s something that we are going to run out of sooner or later. So it’s time to make some hard choices.

For example, of all the places we can travel to in the world, which do we need to make happen, and which are a lower priority? The number of future vacations is limited; it’s time to focus on the important ones.

Which activities do we need to try and which are not important? This is why we have bucket lists.

Drawing up a bucket list requires making some choices. Some things go on the list and some don’t. So for every bucket list, there’s an un-bucket list — a list of things we have not done that we’ve decided to pass on (at least until after we complete our bucket list). In that spirit, I have compiled my own un-bucket list. It’s just mine and I don’t expect that anyone will agree with all of it. But I think it’s a useful exercise to list some things that I have never done that I absolutely don’t have to do before I die:

1. Hike the Appalachian Trail. I have visited every state in which the Appalachian Trail travels and I don’t need to hike it.
2. Golf my age. I’ve played golf and I like it, but I don’t need to shoot a score to match my age. Anyway, I don’t think that human beings live that long.
3. Scuba Diving. This is something I might have done when I was younger, but the boat has sailed, so to speak, on this one.
4. Sky Diving. I don’t care how old George Bush was when he did it. It’s not natural to jump out of an airplane. But then again, it’s not natural to fly. Of course, it is natural to fall, but falling several thousand feet does not strike me as fun.
5. Water skiing. I used to drive a motor boat for others to water ski, but never wanted to do it myself. I still don’t.
6. Surfing. I love to watch, but this is definitely a young person’s sport. My balance and reflexes are not what they used to be.
7. Rock climbing. I swear these people have a death wish.
8. Visit Asia. I’ve visited Turkey and so I’ve technically been to Asia but I have too many other places I want to see in the world before Asia (including Australia, South America and Africa), so if I have to miss a continent, this is the one.
9. Run a marathon. I don’t even want to drive 26 miles any more if I don’t have to.
10. Go to the moon. When I was a kid, a trip to the moon in my lifetime was a given. People spoke of honeymooning on the moon some day. Now, this is one dream that I have come to accept will never be realized, and I’m OK with it. But I’d still like to orbit the earth!

The Bullied Often Stand Alone

04 Tuesday Nov 2014

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Bullies are bad
BY BOB SMITH

When I was in junior high school, we looked up to, and generally feared, the upperclassmen who were in tenth grade or higher — all between 15 and 17 years old. Some of them were shaving already, some driving, and if you believed their stories, all were having rampant sex with every hot girl in town.

And to demonstrate their dominance over the pimply horde that comprised the seventh grade, the nastier ones among them would administer “wedgies” to any unsuspecting kid they caught near the railroad tracks on the way home. It worked like this: you got behind the victim, reached inside the back of his pants, and grabbed the waistband of his underwear. This was the late sixties, long before the “homeboy” look, when you’d actually have to reach inside someone’s pants to find underwear.

It was also before kids started wearing boxer shorts or designer underwear in exotic patterns and colors — most, if not all, the boys in junior high were wearing tightie whities. So you’d reach in, grab the elastic waistband, and yank up as high and hard as you could, causing the victim’s underwear to lodge firmly in his butt crack. Thus the name “wedgie.”

A fairly innocent (if crude) prank, you might think. But then came the “atomic wedgie,” a particularly nasty variant invented by the more sadistic upperclassmen. In the atomic wedgie, the perpetrator would yank on the waistband so persistently, and with so much force, that the elastic ripped away from the fabric of the briefs. Once critical mass was achieved and the waistband ripped off, the pressure of the wedgie subsided.

However, the victim was left not only humiliated and in pain (the wedgie put extreme pressure on the entire groin area), but he was now wearing an elastic band above his waist and saggy, ruined briefs below. And he had to puzzle-out as he walked home how he was going to explain to mom what had happened to his new BVDs without admitting that he’d been bullied, and had taken it like a wuss.

Happily, I was never on either the giving or the receiving end of a wedgie — atomic or otherwise. But I’m ashamed to admit that I witnessed a fairly brutal wedgie being adminstered to one of my classmates. The bullies — three burly wise guys — were repeatedly pulling on the waistband so hard the kid would briefly leave his feet, crying and screaming for them to stop.

But they were trying to “go atomic,” and his underwear wouldn’t rip. They must have yanked him up and down nine times, each time hoisting him off the ground and eliciting pitiful wails and cries for mercy. He’d dropped his schoolbooks, and his shoes were scuffed and dirty from being dragged across the rocks by the railroad tracks.

He looked to me once for help, but I just stood there. I rationalized my inaction — he was an acquaintance, not a friend. With three big guys against us, I couldn’t possibly make a difference. It was going to stop soon in any event. But the truth is, I was terrified of getting beaten up, or of becoming a wedgie victim myself. So I did nothing.

The older kids grew tired of the game and ran off, laughing, as quickly as they had come upon us. I helped him pick up his books, and find his glasses, and told him I was sorry I didn’t help him. He said he was all right, and that he understood — he just asked that I not tell anyone about it. We walked the rest of the way home in glum silence.

Bullies today terrorize, belittle and threaten their classmates online, or they post embarrassing pictures for the world to see. In the online context, the victim can feel utterly alone — there’s not even a sympathetic (if cowardly) friend standing by to console you, and help you clean up afterwards. There’s no way to ask anyone not to tell. The story’s out there beyond control in the blink of an eye, and it persists forever.

Bullying by schoolkids has always been brutal and disgusting. Now, however, in today’s electronically enhanced form, it’s downright dangerous.

Long Live Old Friends (As Long as We Both Shall Live)

29 Wednesday Oct 2014

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(From left to right) Skip, Frank and Pat.

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

There are a group of over-50 actors on Broadway right now in a play called “Love Letters” by A.R. Gurney. It documents the almost-lifelong correspondence between a man and a woman who come to realize that they are soulmates. But like the couple in another play “Same Time Next Year,” they always seem to be out of sync.

The play is performed entirely by actors of a certain age like Brian Dennehy, Mia Farrow, Alan Alda, Carol Burnett, Martin Sheen, Candice Bergen and others. These stars alternate in pairs over the four-month run of the show.

The format of the show is quite simple. On a stark stage with only a table and two chairs, the actors read a lifetime’s worth of letters.Slowly the relationship of the couple becomes clear, and we watch it mature as the years fly by. It’s a premise that is best appreciated by people who have lived more than half a century. Like the actors who bring the correspondents to life, we over-50s know long-term relationships for the long and winding roads they are.

The idea of a best-friend-forever (BFF) is more idealistic than realistic for most of us. BFFs are precious because they are the exception to the rule. For most of us, relationships with childhood friends, elementary school friends, high school friends and even college friends are limited to reunions every few years, if we are lucky. Most BFF relationships do not survive into the right side of 50.

Distance is most often the cause of losing touch. But changed circumstances can also contribute. For example, becoming a parent is often so demanding of our time that we lose touch with our single friends. It’s tough to get together for a drink after work when you’re rushing home to pick up a child from daycare. And even if you can get away, conversation becomes a problem when your focus is on children, and not seeing the latest movies, plays or museum exhibits.

But in rare cases, you can be so in sync with someone that the relationship stays alive. Oh sure the relationship has its peaks and valleys, but with a little effort you stay in touch. It’s actually a lot easier to do that today, what with Facebook, e-mail and instant messaging, although actual contact is still necessary.

Lifelong friends are a precious commodity needing to be nurtured. These days many young people may feel that since they have hundreds of Facebook friends, many of these will be BFFs. But being “friended” on Facebook doesn’t mean you have a friend. A friendship requires that you put yourself out to have human contact on a regular basis.These days that can be as simple as a regular Skype call. If Siri is the only friend you talk to on a regular basis, it’s time to use the phone part of your smartphone, and have a real conversation with someone you used to know.

Recently, I reconnected with an old college friend of mine. We had been in touch sporadically over the years. He lives in Maine, and so distance is a factor. He also hates cities, and so getting him to come to New York is always challenging. Most recently, we were in touch through Facebook. But I had not seen him in 10 years. So I decided that this was a relationship worth nurturing, and if Skip wouldn’t come to New York, I would go to him.

Now truth be told, going to Maine is hardly a punishment. It’s a beautiful place. But it is a LONG car ride since Skip lives near Augusta, which is still a few hours ride after you reach the Maine border. But my wife, Pat, and I chose what we thought might be a good weekend for foliage viewing, and we decided to get in the car and go. It turned out to be a great weekend and Skip and I got a chance to re-connect in a way that you just can’t do electronically.

When I talk to my stepfather about what it’s like to be 91, he tells me that the hardest thing is that all your friends are gone. You see, the forever part of BFF is not really “forever,” but only “for as long as we both shall live.”

It’s tough to lose friends to the grim reaper. But losing friends due to laziness is criminal negligence. Like plants, your friendships need attention, or they wither and die.

As we travel down the road of life after 50, it’s especially important to maintain contact with our old friends. They’ve traveled the road with us and they can bring out the best in us. At the very least, they remind us of our young selves. They remind us of a time when the road ahead seemed long and full of promise. They remind us that life can still be like that, even after 50.

Welcome 60! (Farewell Gremlins)

23 Thursday Oct 2014

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BOB 60

BY BOB SMITH

I turned 60 on Monday, September 29 — just three weeks ago. I didn’t write about it right away because I thought it was no big deal — at least that’s what I told myself. But in retrospect, I didn’t write about it right away because, at some level, it bothers me a lot.

Happily, there was no big party to mark the “milestone” birthday. I’d made it clear to Maria that I didn’t want any elaborate celebration, so we had a nice quiet dinner and an ice cream cake at home. I got some nice gifts — money to put toward a 12-string guitar, a gift card to my new favorite bait and tackle store in Florida, and a nice cotton tropical-weight sweater.

There was only one jokey, old-guy gift: a mug with the legend on the outside, “I’M SORRY YOU’RE OLD,” and inside the rim, as you raise it to your lips, you see the words, “THAT’S ALL.” Better than the basket of Depends, M&M’s masquerading as Viagra, laxatives and antacids I’d seen other 60 year olds get on their birthdays.

There was also a greeting card showing a man (presumably me) reclining on a chair atop a high bluff with a small dog at his side. He’s dangling his fishing line in the water below, happily oblivious to the fact that he’s about to hook into a fish longer than the man himself. The dark part of me whispered that this could be a bright metaphor for something horrific — it’s the universe telling you, via a plastic fish decal on a Hallmark card, that you’ll be very sorry you put off that colonoscopy.

“You won’t be the little guy smiling on the boat much longer when you reel in that bad news,” said the gremlin, laughing. “At your age anything’s possible.”

The happy side of me: “At any age anything’s possible; you never know.”

Gremlin: “But at ‘your age,’ lots of bad things are a lot more likely than they used to be.”

Tough to argue with that …

For some reason, the arithmetic in your 60s feels fundamentally different than in your 50s. Then (a mere three weeks ago), being really old (which in my mind means in your 80s) was 30 years away, more or less. Now it’s only 20 years.

That’s scary in itself because time telescopes so much as you age. The distance from 20 to 40 was huge — I turned from a kid with no direction or shape to my life into a lawyer with a career, and a young family, and a house in the suburbs. From 40 to 60 was a radical evolution too — the kids grew up, left home (mostly), we acquired a vacation condo in Florida as the southern counterpart to our house at the Jersey Shore, and I retired.

But both of those significant chunks of my life, in retrospect, flew past in the blink of an old guy’s eye, to paraphrase Bruce. What major changes do the next 20 years hold (if you’ve even got 20 more in you, whispers the gremlin)? Who knows?

What worries me more is how quickly, in retrospect, will they have passed? But the happy side of me ultimately prevails: worrying about the view, in retrospect, is living ass-backwards. Look ahead, live in the moment, and barrel forward with gusto.

Drive this car as if you’d stolen it. And it you fly headlong off a cliff, with the gremlin shouting, “I told you so!” as you fall, at least you’ll have had a hell of a good time.

I Have Become My Grandfather. Except I Can Look It Up

21 Tuesday Oct 2014

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Frank phone

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

Most of us have reached the point in life where names and titles sometimes elude us. I distinctly remember the same thing happening to my grandparents. As a child I would often prompt them with the names that were just out of mental reach

“What’s the name of that actress with the big nose?” my grandmother would say.

“What’s that guy’s name who’s on that TV show I like?” my grandfather would ask.

As a dutiful grandson, I provided the answers.

Well that was then. Fast forward 50 years, and now I’m the one asking, “What’s the name of that movie with Groucho Marx and Marilyn Monroe?”

And I can see them both in my mind’s eye as they play a scene together. But I can’t get back to the title screen. I have become my grandfather.

The difference between me and people my age 50 years ago is that I have in the palm of my hand a 21st-century machine that supplies answers to everything anyone would ever want to know. It has apps like Wikipedia and IMDB, that are like having my own grandson at my beck and call.

My smartphone remembers all the things that I don’t. Just a few years ago, before I had a smartphone, my wife and I would struggle to recall names and titles. I remember many a Sunday afternoon at my mother’s house where all the adults around the table would agonize to recall one important name or another and my son, who was the only one at the time who had a smartphone, would simply look it up and take us out of our misery. Now many of us over 50 have smartphones, and they are fabulous for quickly finding those names that are on the tip of our tongues.

So today, we grandparents don’t have to rely on grandchildren to provide the answers to life’s persistent questions. We can look it up online. But just as using a calculator robbed us of the ability to perform simple mathematics, and having phone numbers programmed into phones made us forget our phone number, I fear that knowing that we can use Siri as a virtual grandchild will make us even more dependent on technology than we are already.

Years ago we were forced to rack our brains to remember things and usually the brain came through — eventually. I can remember many a morning waking up with a name or title that had eluded me the night before. But if we never challenge the aging brain to retrieve information, won’t we eventually lose that ability as well?

So I guess that like everything else, we need to rely on our smartphones in moderation. Leave the less important questions like movie trivia to stew in our brains (overnight if necessary). “Use it or lose it” applies to brains as much as anything else.

And it’s a good feeling to come up with a name or title on your own. Anyway, the day may come when a smartphone (or the Internet) is not available. And maybe when that day comes we will be able to come up with the answer on our own. Or maybe not. Just to be safe, I plan to have my grandchildren around as a backup. You can’t have too many lifelines in life.

I Hardly Knew You, Laurie

06 Monday Oct 2014

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lauries2

BY BOB SMITH

Laurie ran a local farmstand that sold tomatoes, corn, peaches, the usual summer fare, along with odd items like jumbo homemade Hula hoops covered with electrical tape, and dreamcatchers made from jute and antique jewelry findings. She sold local honey at exorbitant prices, and by the cash register there was a take-a-book, give-a-book exchange-shelf filled with tattered thrillers from 10 years ago.



Often when I rode my bike, I would pass by Laurie’s to buy an overpriced peach or two and chat about the weather, or the tourists, or what it’s like in the winter at the Shore. Her black Lab mutt, corralled in the back, would whoof loudly when I approached the counter.  

“Calm down Sammy, it’s okay!” She laughed. “He’s almost 13.”

As if that explained his ill temper.

“He’ll probably outlive me.”



He did.

 Someone in town mentioned that Laurie had died suddenly two weeks ago. I couldn’t believe it, so I rode my bike over there and, sure enough, it was boarded up. There was a white piece of paper on the bulletin board outside, weatherized with a taped-on piece of plastic wrap, with a simple announcement: “LAURIE’S FARM MARKET WILL BE CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT AND PRAYERS.”

Nearby, stood a creepy makeshift totem with purplish lipstick and braided blue rope for hair. It was decorated with draped netting and dangling clamshells, and at its base, lay a painted rock displaying the epitaph “Grow in God’s garden.”

Burnt-out battery-operated candles and a broken wine goblet completed the sad sidewalk tableau. A girl in her twenties passed by walking a dog. I asked her what had happened.

“She just died last Saturday night,” she said, shaking her head. “I live next door, so I heard right away. Real shame.”

“How’d she die?”

“Asthma attack. 54 years old.”

Now I was feeling uncomfortable, and very mortal. She had been six years younger than me. And dying from an asthma attack must be horrible – basically, you struggle for breath, unsuccessfully, until you suffocate. The neighbor didn’t know if the business would reopen.

“Depends if her kids want to run it,” she said, tugging her dog away from snuffling in the roadside weeds. “Which I think they don’t.”

She’d mentioned once she was divorced, but I had no idea she had grown children. And I’d thought the woman who made the hoops and dreamcatchers was her business partner or life partner or whatever, but nope – just someone Laurie had allowed to share the selling space, so she wasn’t taking over either.

She was a friend, but I hardly knew her. Like my older brother, she espoused a homespun hippie philosophy of live and let live, and doing the right thing for the world. With her jeans and work shirts and unruly blond hair, she could have been a pot-smoking Dead Head, but she wasn’t.

She worked hard. She got up early to go to the local farms to pick out whatever they had that looked good that day. Often she harvested it herself, and she had the dirty fingernails and scraped and calloused hands to prove it. But she wasn’t complaining. She seemed to love her work.

Two years ago she had boxes of exotic melons, perfectly round and bright yellowish green, like lime-saffron bowling balls. The fruit was remarkably sweet and juicy, with a subtle floral flavor that snuck up on you after the last bite. I tasted a sample Laurie had set out at the stand, and bought two on the spot. We cut one up that night and it was every bit as perfect as the sample. But we waited two days before cutting into the other one, and by then it was slushy, almost rotten inside, and we had to discard it. Apparently, they had a short shelf life.

“Snooze ya lose!” she laughed, plopping my free replacement melon on the counter. “Ya gotta eat the fruit while it’s sweet.”

Indeed.
lauries3

When a Peek-A-Boo was Simple

02 Thursday Oct 2014

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Frank post

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

One of the greatest changes in the lifetimes of the over-50 set is the Internet. We were all adults when it first became available to us. We all spent our childhoods having to look things up in encyclopedias and almanacs. It’s truly been a blessing for the last two decades and I’m sure that few of us would want to go back to a time without it.

But there is one aspect of the instant gratification we now receive daily from the web that I fear may ultimately be unhealthy for us, particularly those of us of the male persuasion. It’s pornography. I am not talking about pornography in the legal sense. I am just using pornography as a shorthand here for pictures of unclothed people.

Men over 50 grew up in a sexually-repressed society where the only place we could regularly see pictures of naked women was in magazines like Playboy and Penthouse. Obtaining these usually involved getting hold of a copy purchased by an adult male because most newsstands would not sell them to minors. So adolescent boys had to work to see pornography. Today, on the Internet, young males have to work to avoid it. (Now I know that there are some women who enjoy viewing pornography as much as men, but that’s the exception rather than the rule in my experience. I think that the limited appeal of magazines like Playgirl among women is evidence of that.)

Back when we over 50s were teens, the most common way for boys to see pornography was if a friend found his father’s stash and invited you over to have a look. It happened rarely. And back then, Playboy showed only (in the words of the song from A Chorus Line) tits and ass. Today, the most graphic pictures are only a few clicks away from any 12-year-old with an Internet connection.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I truly don’t know. There is one school of thought that says viewing porn allows males to vent some sexual energy that might otherwise be visited upon women against their will. And then there are those who say that viewing porn teaches men to see women as sex objects rather than people.

I suppose the truth is somewhere in the middle as usual. Like all pleasures, it’s a matter of degree. Where an occasional trip to a porn website can satisfy the curiosity of a young male, constant exposure to exposed bodies is probably not healthy. Nudists will probably disagree. They will argue that constant exposure is just what we need to take the sexuality out of nakedness. But even if that is possible, do we really want to remove sexuality from nudism?

Anyway, like it or not, it is a fact of life in the 21st century that before a boy can hear about the “facts of life” he’s already seen what makes the opposite sex different. The Internet puts it all within reach of everyone. So we all have to deal with it.

We try to deal with it by restricting the access of minors to the Internet. But that is even less successful than the prohibitions of porn magazine sales to minors back when we were kids. The reason is that the Internet is everywhere, not just on computers, but on phones, on tablets, and now even on watches. A child who wants to see what his favorite movie star looks like naked will probably succeed despite his parents’ best efforts. Nude selfies are not going away anytime soon.

So given that our children will be viewing and even creating pornography, I think the best thing we can do is educate them about what they are doing. Parents and grandparents need to do the difficult work of talking about healthy sex. As with curtailing all potential vices, it’s better to work on decreasing demand rather than restricting supply.

At the end of it all, we may end up with a society with a healthier attitude about sex. Or we may witness the fall of the American Empire. I’m not sure which. Life was sure a lot simpler 50 years ago.

I’ll Be Seeing You …

29 Monday Sep 2014

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GLASSES1

BY KENNETH KUNZ

The last time I managed to pass an eye test free of corrective lenses, I was a seventh grader in a Catholic
 grammar school in a smallish North Jersey suburb of New York City. Having taken the test soooo many times over the years, the E’s, the N’s and the T’s, et al, were somewhat engrained in my sub-conscious. I never had any problem whatsoever.

This year was different, though. I had recently been comparing my far-sightedness with one of my older brothers, who could hit a baseball a country mile in Little League, and then had trouble in Babe Ruth and high school. Come to find out, he needed glasses.

So I compared what he could see with what I was now having trouble seeing. I also had had a bout with conjunctivitis in sixth grade, which kept me home from school for the first time ever. Didn’t even feel sick. I always blamed the red eye for my eyesight degradation, and was not too happy about losing my perfect attendance record.

In those days, there was still a bit of stigma attached to those who wore glasses – “four eyes” people were called, and the weakling defensive cry, “you wouldn’t hit a guy with glasses would you?” was invoked when a playground left-jab lurked.

So I was relatively shy at the prospect of having to wear glasses. But I took the test, and passed. Seems that the school nurse used the same pattern with every student tested before me in line. I memorized the stupid chart. And passed. (Blurry as it really was.)

By eighth grade, the eye-scam had run its course. Wearing that first pair was quite depressing. I was even dizzy coming out of the optometrist’s office with my new brown, horn-rimmed specs. I was embarrassed. After all, I was lucky enough to be one of the smarter, and, dare I say, cooler guys in the class. How could I wear glasses and maintain?

Didn’t wear them all that much that year. Things had been blurry for some time so I was kind of used to it. Freshman year brought me to a private Catholic (still all-boys to this day), prep school. And it WAS preppy! And the glasses I needed to see now kind of fit with the blazer (sans any school emblem), white shirt and tie that were standard fare in those days.

Wearing those horn-rimmed suckers became an accessory, and since I was just another freshman face in the crowd, my cool was safe, despite being amidst a host of geeks and nerds. (Called them something different in those days but those terms seem to escape me at the moment.)

Later on in life, I began to wear contacts. I’ll never forget the first time I paddled out into the ocean to surf a bit, turned around and actually saw the beach! I saw the waves better as well. Were they always this big? Thought the lenses would bring a little relief from taking my glasses off to read, and then putting them back on to look at television, or whatever, but of course, I then fell prey to the macular degeneration so many of us are doomed to endure.

Working on a computer surely hasn’t helped the situation. Now I have umpteen readers – one on every level of my home, in my workshop, a pair or two in the car, one for work. All to wear while the contacts are in! I am rarely without some sort of specs – readers on the tip of my nose, regular glasses resting on top of my head or just on to see things when I’m not wearing contacts.

GLASSES2And strangely enough, I often also find myself walking around and about without contacts, readers, or eyeglasses whatsoever. After all, I’m not all that blind. I do still enjoy wearing eyeglasses as an accessory (helps rationalize NOT getting Lasik surgery as well).

I have my dress-up pair, my good pair, and my back-up pair, which I allow myself, at times, to fall asleep in. Not sure life is ALL that clearer as a result, but I have been seeing things pretty good these last 50 years or so. Maybe I’ll see some of you sometime.

Circus Drive-In Clown Not a Sign of the Times

17 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by in Men, Opinion

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Circus

BY BOB SMITH

There’s a clown on Rt. 35, just south of Belmar. He leers over the top of the Circus Drive-In sign with its Broadway-lit letters and neon-highlighted arrow pointing to the parking lot. But this is a sad day for the clown because, as the announcement board reads, “SUNDAY SEPT 7 LAST DAY OF THE SEASON.”

The Circus Drive-In opened in 1954 and, although the building appears to be well-maintained, its style is dated. Its circular roof has wide red and white stripes that hang over the facade so the whole place resembles a big-top tent. Cutout clowns, along with female performers that appear to be acrobats, stand hand in hand on the roof.circus 3

A metal awning with the tent motif stretches out from the right side of the main building, providing covered parking for maybe a dozen cars. A sign on top proudly proclaims “WEATHER-PROOFED CURB SERVICE,” meaning they bring the food to you right there in your car so you can eat without ever having to set foot in the Circus itself. You can even buy souvenir t-shirts bearing an image of the iconic sign and the restaurant’s slogan, “I’M WITH THE CLOWN” (which your spouse may or may not appreciate).circus 2

The menu, as you might expect from the décor, is heavily laced with cheese-laden appetizers, steaks, ribs, chicken, burgers, dogs, battered fish platters, and five varieties of French Fries. Oh sure they have salads, but eating green is clearly not what the clown is about. If you’re with the clown, you’re gonna eat grease.

I pulled in last Friday afternoon, just two days before lights out, but I couldn’t bring myself to order any food. It’s not that I wasn’t hungry, and I’m not averse to the occasional artery-busting plateful of mouth-watering, deep-fried everything. But, senseless as it seems, because the Circus opened the same year I was born, I felt somehow responsible for it, as if I had conceived of its garish style and approved its throwback menu selections.

I was embarrassed to be there.

1954 was the height of the post-war baby boom, and most people in the U.S. were feeling optimistic about the future. Good jobs were plentiful. Gasoline cost about a quarter a gallon, and you could buy a brand new Ford for less than $2,000. Cigarettes, not considered harmful at all, were still promoted in magazines and on billboards with ads featuring images of doctors and babies – even Santa Claus.

The Circus Drive-In must have been a pretty cool place to idle in your shiny metal machine, unfiltered Camel dangling from your mouth, waiting for your double cheeseburger, shake, and fries. The Clown’s gleeful smile must have felt exactly right for the times.

But look what’s happened since: assassinations, suicide bombings, terrorists beheading journalists, war after war after bloody “police action,” natural disasters, exotic diseases, overflowing jails – the list of modern ills is as expansive as the country’s 1950’s dreams. The Clown’s smile today feels forced; almost cynical. The Circus Drive-In’s season may have just closed on September 7, but the season of our optimism from which it sprang ended, sadly, many years ago.
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