Time's Swift Flight

We all know about the speed of sound and light.

As we enter and go through school, at least one time or another the scientific formulas of each traveling rate are readily explained. What we are never aware of at an early age is how short our life on this planet really is. Each and every year going by seems to gather speed along the way. When we expectantly wait for something as a child, we all have trouble with how slowly the time passes. But a strange thing happens to all of us as we struggle with life’s path; what seems like just yesterday, turns out to be five, ten, or twenty years ago.

It was thirty-two years ago when an actress well at the end of her pregnancy, stood before me in a recording booth, preparing to audition for a voice over commercial. Today, that very same actress, Anne, once again stood before me at Kalmenson & Kalmenson preparing to audition for yet again another voice over commercial. This time, she wasn’t pregnant.

Seeing and directing an old friend is the blessing of our business. When I reminded Anne of the now famous pregnancy incident, she was a little astounded I recalled the exact circumstances. While I don’t recall the product she was reading for thirty-two years ago, I do remember some of the important particulars.

The job called for the actresses reading for the commercial to be available for work that next day. That night after her audition thirty-two years ago, Anne delivered her eldest son. The next morning, the advertising agency producer called in a booking for Anne to record. She had been selected for the role she had auditioned for the day before. When I explained to them she was unavailable because of the new baby they replied with an affirmative, “We’ll wait.”

Four days later the new Mom completed the gig.

My, how time does fly by.

Friends from the Street

Preface

Hallucinations.

Have you ever tossed and turned during the night knowing the cause was being over tired and wiped out? That was I some few days ago.

Our business is so damn strange; it always has been.  We can sit and stare at the walls wondering whether anyone exists out there in the realm of advertising or if they have all expired into the wind, and been blown out to sea.

Thankfully, June 2012 has turned into a battle of the fittest. We’ve been slammed with business. Slammed to the point of being bone weary at the end of each day. But the real culprit, or tipping point (as some would call it) as cause celebre for my exhaustion is my freeway drive home at the end of each day. It’s an easier task handling the traffic in the morning than the madness that transpires when we’re attempting our return home.

If what follows seems to be a touch disjointed, it’s not without reason. My words were stimulated by the mish mash, which took place during the wee hours of the morning. I chose to scribe as the thoughts entered and departed, in and out of my brain at around three AM these past few mornings. If it doesn’t make sense, I apologize, but ask along with your forgiveness to please not question me as to the saliency of what I have transcribed. Perhaps, if life disturbs your sleep, you’ll be able to identify with me, or maybe not. My dreams are only special because they are mine. I am told that most dreaming takes place only moments before we awaken. That being said it becomes amazement when these surreal sequences are taking place in a few short seconds before we are actually fully cognizant that the dream itself has come to an end.

 

Let My Dreams Be Told

·               Time, unknown

·               Origin, unknown

·               Players, from my past

Friends From The Street

            They entered my bedroom all at the same time. Participants as real as in any dream I’ve ever experienced – in living color and simultaneous black and white. All appearing in a sweep across my screen, without the benefit of a screen, accompanied by a recognizable variety of sounds and smells from my then ten year old existence. From my bleary mindset I said to myself this has to be a dream. Yet it was as real as it ever looked when I was actually back there with my friends from the street. We never expressed verbal love for each other; thinking about it assures me love was there, it had to be. 

My Friends from the street – we were all different, yet all the same. You have to love them, I know I do; I probably always have.

(As an aside…)

Disclaimer: Bridled by the deceit of being in a constant state of political correctness, the average person I run into (almost daily) appears to be afraid of their own ass. I suppose it would mean they are probably afraid of everyone else’s ass as well. These are the wonderful folks who trudge through life in a state of constriction.

“The constricted are the restricted.”

(Aside continues…)

Don’t say this and don’t say that and be ultra careful about becoming offensive to anyone and everyone. We’re in a new society of “let’s be careful.” Watch what you do in addition to watch what you say. “Let’s Be Anal Time,” a great name for a reality show, don’t you think?

What follows is a basically an unedited version of a dream sequence as best recalled by a man who rarely gives thought to political correctness. He laughs at the folly of others as if they were his own.

***

Ah…

Breathe in deeply the streets of Brooklyn, New York. My home territory was spread equally between Brownsville and Flatbush, both townships within the borough of Brooklyn.

Each of these communities had recognizable neighborhoods, fully stocked with the world’s ethnicities.

If Noah were required to take two of each from our streets, his ark would not have been big enough. That’s not to imply we were like animals. It’s my way of being descriptive and truthful, as opposed to being politically correct.

I admit I am not now nor will I ever be confused with those who stammer along in life with the terrible burden of political correctness. 

“The heartiest laugh a person can have is when they are laughing at themselves.”

- HK

And laughing is what life is all about (in my humble opinion). We kids at play in the streets (dodging whatever happened to be headed our way at the time) always spent large chunks of our day laughing at everything, everybody, every sound, and especially at each other. We weren’t class clowns… anyway not all of us… well, probably most.

The kids who were one year older than us were the leaders. They were known, of course, as the big guys. Our chronological age designated us as “the wannabes” – the younger kids always designated as the followers. The particular ethnicity was of no consequence when it came to leadership amongst us kids. I t was always the same: the big guys and the rest of us.

And there they strode into my bedroom with the same gusto we all lived our lives with. Brooklyn, New York was frenzy while it happened and a frenzy getting ready to happen. Good God, was I ever capable of moving at that kind of fever-pitched pace?

In a split second, the kids were gone and their parents somehow took their places in my life. The pace slowed momentarily but the energy level increased. They dressed as if it were yesterday, a kaleidoscope of color and style. Foreign languages mixed in with broken English, neighborhoods adjoining without the divisiveness of walls. It was an overall environment stoked with dignity. The streets were mobbed with people and in a split second they moved into an enormous room with no dividers to separate them. The neighborhood had been instantly melded into a single community of mixtures, ever changing as I observed them. I knew them all, but was unable to single out any one person or family.

What I retained was the abundance of people from all over Europe gathered together in a huge room within my bedroom holding a community meeting.

Background: From the Early 1900’s

Both sides of my family held their own special meetings. It was not an uncommon happening amongst the hordes of immigrants in our distinctly ethnic neighborhood. Within a few short miles of our Brownsville Brooklyn neighborhood we were jam-packed with humanity. Each denomination shared the alikeness of taking a first step on their land to be, all in the same fashion. Regardless of the country of origin, all of them felt a pride in having been welcomed by the Statue of Liberty.

None of us gave thought about the reputation Brownsville Brooklyn was building for itself. Until I became an adult I wasn’t aware there was such a thing as the Jewish Mafia AKA “Murder Incorporated.” It wasn’t that any group of people were prideful about having their own group of gangsters, it was simply a way of life. The immigrants arrived, the good and the bad. And within each neighborhood, the dedication to one’s family and faith was an apparent driving force. 

Within the Families

Not all family or friends are welcomed or revered…

There are times when certain aunts and/or uncles are known to be on the not-ready-for-revered list. Revered or not, part of their entertainment was to regularly visit other members of the family.

Almost without exception, all the immigrants had large families.

(My Mother’s side had eight siblings who survived a midwife delivery; my Father’s side had nine.)

My cousins and I found the whole visiting bit a chance for us to be alone while the adults solved the problems and vagaries of the world we lived in.

I quickly discovered many things about my relatives that provided great humor for me. The aunt with her endless chatter, the uncle who continually makes a variety of awful sounds, and those who indiscriminately drag children along for the disturbance aspect of what helps to create a dysfunctional group. When they all show up in a dream at the same time, the noise is deafening.

…And as the enchantment of an aria from Madam Butterfly came through the speaker of my alarm clock radio, they were all instantly gone.

Flying Toast

Back in the days when I lived in Kid-Dom…

(You know… like childhood but you didn’t know that… I mean I didn’t know that.) 

A time when you were under the impression that all of your discoveries were yours alone; it was kind of like inventing the wheel.

In order to draw a correlation between how it was then and how it is now, I call upon experiences. Like always, throughout history somethings never change. Two things persist: the emotional aspect of cause and effect and the wonderment over what they will come up with next.

I doubt if there has ever been a period in time when fathers and sons didn’t enjoy the togetherness of learning how to do things and discussing what it was like for the poor souls preceding them without the luxury and conveniences of the modern tools they currently enjoy.

My Dad and I marveled over the way the extremely popular comic strip character “Dick Tracy” made use of his wristwatch. Few people in that era had their own telephones let alone a wristwatch that they could use to talk to one another.

My father, mother, and grandparents escaped from Europe by boat. They never dreamed that someday their own relatives would even think of returning to Europe on vacations by use of an airplane. Nonstop flights weren’t even a possibility across the United States let alone the Atlantic or Pacific oceans.

My father talked about the number of days it took for a letter to go from New York to California amazed at the fact that it only required a four-cent stamp.

And the beat goes on...

The lifestyle improvements are endless. My memories of conversations with my father Charles are vivid.

Without gadgets…

But the most lasting reveries I will always have belonged to the laughing we did.  It was almost constant. Can you imagine – the two of us never missed a day laughing about something together?

Of course I recognize that most things are funniest when they are taking place. Most incidents lose a thing or two in the translation of the event. Knowing this as a fact, I’m still going to relate a laugh that became an event.

One, by the way, that drove my mother up the wall…

“Blondie and Dagwood” were the two characters in a series of movies staring Arthur Lake and Penny Singleton. Their origin was a comic strip bearing the same name Blondie and Dagwood, The Bumsteads that was well known and read from coast to coast. People like my dad were into just about everything the Bumstead family and their neighbors were involved with.

One of the films shows Dagwood tinkering in his home workshop with the family toaster, which refuses to bring the slices of bread to the top once they were toasted. In the next scene, Dagwood enters the house from his shop, toaster in hand, with his goofy smile announcing to the family how he had fixed it. Cut to the next morning at breakfast. Blondie stands at the counter waiting for the toast to come up. The end result being that Dagwood had fixed it all right, but when the toaster pops up, the toast comes flying out and Dagwood jumps across the room to make a saving catch.

My dad thought this was one of the funniest things he had ever seen. He proudly announced, “You know Harv, our toaster is just like the one they have.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but ours isn’t broken.”

My dad was quick to reply that it would ultimately loosen up and we could have the same problem as Dagwood.

I doubt if either of us gave it much thought after that initial discussion. Who would have thought that our toaster would begin firing toast into the air the very next week?

We were at breakfast awaiting the toaster to do its normal job. As was his normal procedure when eating, my dad concentrated on the food and nothing else.

Then it happened.

The toaster’s spring came loose and a piece of toast came flying across the room in my father’s direction. At the very moment of toast propulsion, my dad was in the process of shoveling a fork full of scrambled eggs into his mouth with his left hand. Without hesitation, or noticeably looking up, he extended his right arm and caught the flying toast in his hand. Then, without saying a word, he began buttering the errant slice of bread.

My mother, sister, and I stared at him in disbelief.

He looked up from his plate and said with a straight face, “What?” As if he did that every day of his life.

The room erupted with laughter…

I guess you would have to have been there in order to appreciate the humor of the moment.

From that day forward, toast became a funny word.

Are you doing anything important, dear?

Jasper and his little dog Prelude balanced precariously at the edge of the mountain’s precipice. Below, a 600 foot drop to their certain death. Only the strength in Jasper’s finely tuned athletic body could save this young athlete and his companion.

There would be no turning back.

 

And then, from the next room comes the inevitable call to arms.

“Harv… Are you doing anything important?”

You were in the process of writing. The creative juices were flowing. One thought after another, depth giving way to further depth, more than you ever thought was in you. And then it happens – the ill-fated interruption.

“Harv… Are you doing anything important?”

In my mind I answer, “Not any more.”

Now I’m sitting there trying to figure out what in the name of hell I planned on doing with Jasper and his dog Prelude.

It’s all gone now.

Not only am I in a state of complete and impossible literary insurrection, I no longer give a damn about either of them. 

I type in the words, “…and they plunged to their grizzly death,” and yell through the speakerphone, “When do we eat dinner?”

My two heroes are gone forever along with my desire to ever continue writing again.

(Well maybe that’s a little too dramatic, even for me. Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow, or even tonight after a couple of shots of single malt scotch. In the old days, I would have talked about opening another pack of cigarettes and working into the night. There were many times a couple of cigarettes would be burning in an ash tray at the same time.)

There is absolutely nothing more debilitating for a writer than to lose a pregnant thought.

I’ve been asked the question: “What about when you were going through your divorce?”

Yeah, sure it was emotional, but it gave me all kinds of things to write about. Bad stuff will usually provide a well of substance. There is also the unforeseen, which emerges generally as the unexpected.

A young person’s question: “I’d like to write about something tragic,” she allowed.

My instant response, “Write about your wedding.”

After her indignant look faded, a slight smile began to appear as her mental conjuring of her wedding day began to take shape.

I had, seemingly pressed the correct button.

I sat back down at the screen – void of emotion – the words appeared:

        

He had lost his best friend Jasper and the now gone forever side kick Prelude.

 

There was nothing of importance left in this world to write about.

The next morning, as I combed my hair in preparation for a new day, it came to me.

I would write about the shallowness of some men.

Thank you Lord for giving me back my creative flow.

Independence Day

            It was on a Sunday morning in 1776 that our flag was born. 

            We became the country that would ultimately lead the world in commerce, as well as altruism, never before or since equaled. 

            Tomorrow we celebrate the legal holiday of Independence Day, the Fourth of July. But it is much greater than a time to light up your barbecue or light up firecrackers. 

            All over the world we have spread our service men and women in a never-ending stand for world peace. 

            Whether or not it works out, we will never stop trying. 

            Our direction as Americans is as inbred as our fabled apple pie.

            The simplest thing of significance I can do as an American this Fourth of July is pray for our troops and say God bless America - this land is ours and still free.