Category Archives: Pointless Nostalgia

Parental Guidance, Pointless Nostalgia, Tuneage

Parental Musicology

When I was a little kid, like 5 years old, my mom had this habit of asking me who was playing on the radio. Eventually I figured out that whenever she asked me this, the answer was invariably The Beatles. So she upped the ante by asking me which Beatle wrote the song.

“C’mon, you gotta know this is Paul!” she’d say. “Listen to all the different parts that are in it. It’s like a suite!”

I didn’t quite appreciate such nuances, the differences between Paul’s symphonic ambitions and John’s love of more traditional rock and roll. But to be fair, I was 5.

In this grand tradition, I often play a song for The Baby and ask her who it is. Not so much because I think she’ll know the answer, but because it’ll introduce her to stuff that I think is great. I have no illusions of turning her into a music snob at her young age, but I like putting her in a Cloud of Information, the idea being that at the very least, she’ll have a lot of information rattling around in her little brain and can one day do crossword puzzles with it.

Usually, the “instruction” is little more than me telling her who performs a particular song. Like the time Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker” came on the car radio and I informed her of the responsible party. “That guy sings crazy!” she said. Yes, he does.

My dad did something very similar to me–unconsciously, I think. He liked to watch British comedy on PBS a lot, and I joined him on occasion. Much of the humor flew straight over my head for reasons of vocabulary, historical context, and foreignness. So I’d ask him to explain a joke to me if I didn’t get it, which he invariably would, even if there was no way on earth I should have understood it. I’d do the same thing with Mad Magazine Super Specials, which often contained reprints from 10-15 years earlier, lampooning people and movies from before I was born. That’s how I could come up with a good zinger about Edward Heath or Spiro Agnew by age 8.

Recently, we were driving home from somewhere and had just parked the car. The radio was playing Frank Sinatra’s version of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” So I tried to give The Baby a two-tiered, family-themed music lesson. I explained that this was one of Nanny’s (my mom’s) favorite songs, since she was a big fan of Cole Porter. And I also explained that the guy singing it was my Nanny’s (her great-grandmother’s) favorite singer. It was an attempt to both school on what she was hearing and give her some familial context for why the song struck a chord with me.

From the backseat, she gave me this puzzled look. “I like rock and roll music,” she said, simply, emphatically.

Long pause. “Yeah, I like it, too,” I said, and we went home. There’s plenty of time for more nuanced lessons.

Oirland, Pointless Nostalgia

Tales of Punching from the Old Country

I wish my father were still with us on a day like today, because only he could simultaneously express pride and shame in being Irish.

The pride was the same as that of any other person of Celtic heritage. The shame was borne more of his experiences in Ireland as a young’un, and his disgust at how Irishness is “celebrated” in America. He lived in Ireland until he was 12, including a few very unhappy years when his father moved to New York for work and had to leave his family behind while he saved enough money to send for them.

One of the first American events he ever went to was the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Back in Ireland, this was still a solemn, nationalistic, deeply religious occasion. In New York, he saw mounted police teetering and puking from atop their steeds. It was a culture shock, to say the least.

As an adult, he had little good to say about Ireland or the Irish. He noted with bitterness that every one of its best writers had to leave the country (James Joyce, Oscar Wilde), and the few who didn’t fell in line with disastrously romantic notions of self-destruction (Brendan Behan). He traveled all over the world for business,* to India, ex-Soviet republics, Indonesia, and a million other remote locations. But the only place I heard him express displeasure at having to visit was Ireland.

* What kind of business? Very good question. Based on that curious itinerary, and the fact that each one of them experienced strife immediately before or after he arrived, I have my suspicions.

And yet, he would often declare his pride, ways both voiced and unvoiced. His small library contained almost nothing but Irish books, including an annotated version of Dubliners. He once told me he turned down a consulting gig with Reuters because “they’re a British company!” (The from the man responsible for my love of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers.)

Biggest sign of all: he never became an American citizen. This was partially due to his inherent laziness, but it also required him to get his green card validated every few years, which in turn required a lengthy, bureaucratic-nightmare-filled trip to the Irish consulate.

The stories from his youth were told for yucks, but inevitably involved violence or crushing disappointment, or both. Like the story I regaled a crowd with earlier this week. (If you missed it, here’s a variation on the theme.) Or the time his Uncle Paddy, a farmer, was kicked in the chest by a cow and retaliated by delivering a swift punch to the side of Bessie’s head. The cow let out a bovine moan of pain and keeled over, knocked out cold.

But my favorite is the one that best encapsulates his time in Ireland, his view of the place, and maybe Ireland as a whole.

Continue reading Tales of Punching from the Old Country →

Pointless Nostalgia

Awakening Eight Year Old Fears

Between Qadaffi going nuts, insane earthquakes, and nuclear power plant explosions, I feel like all of my childhood fears have come to life. As a little kid, I was terrified of earthquakes (despite living nowhere near a fault line), and the Libyan dictator was America’s Biggest Enemy.

But more than anything, I lived in mortal fear of a nuclear holocaust. It all started when I went to a friend’s house that was equipped with HBO. In between 800 showings of Beastmaster, we saw The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, a creepy-as-hell documentary on Nostradamus narrated by Orson Welles. Among its many predictions for the future was a cataclysmic event that would destroy a major city. The city was assumed to be New York, and with the Cold War still raging, the cataclysm had to be a nuclear attack.

Me and my friend literally ran upstairs to tell his mom. She laughed it off, of course, but we were terrified. “We never shoulda moved out of New Jersey!” my friend whined to his mom, without realizing that he used to live closer to the city than he did now in upstate New York.

Me, I went home feeling sick and doomed. My mom sensed something was wrong and managed to wring out of me that I was afraid the whole world was gonna get blown the eff up. This was around the time that she started going to Jehovah’s Witnesses meetings, so she handed me a recent issue of Awake! magazine. (The exclamation mark was part of the title, kinda like Wham!) The cover had a huge mushroom cloud, flanked by the caption “Will Man Destroy Himself?”

You’ve probably heard of or seen Watchtower, which is the Witnesses’ more Biblically-focused publication. Awake! is kind a current affairs magazine, viewing things in the news through the lens of their own band of theology. In the case of nuclear weapons, this article did not cheer me up at all. It basically said that nuclear weapons could be launched at any moment should the Cold War turn suddenly hot, and that Dr. Strangelove-type scenarios were totally plausible. And if those didn’t kill us all, then nuclear power plant meltdowns would. Chernobyl had just happened, so that frightening possibility was on everyone’s mind as well (including mine).

The solution, according to Awake!: You have nothing to worry about–as long as you believe in God. Because if you do, you will survive The End Times (which we are currently in, according to them) and will survive whatever monstrous conclusion God has for the Earth as we know it. You will then live in a paradise on Earth ruled by Jesus Christ for a thousand years. After that, Satan will return for some reason, only to be defeated for good.

Got it? No? Neither did I. But I did like the Not Having to Worry part. Just believe in the guy in the clouds and everything will be taken care of? Sold!

I used to like reading Awake!, because it would give you an overview of historical events or things going on in the news, in language even an eight-year-old could understand. No matter the problem–urban crime waves, poisoned Tylenol, weak job markets–their inevitable conclusion was Shit’s kinda fucked on earth, but don’t worry, cuz soon earth as you know it won’t exist.

Of course, the implication of an attitude like this–and that of many apocalyptic Christian sects–is that you don’t need to do anything to improve the world. Witnesses specifically say they do not want to be “part of the world.” So they don’t vote, they don’t donate to any causes outside of the church itself, and they don’t get involved in anything remotely political. They believe this world is sinking like the Titanic, so why bother polishing the deck chairs?

This extends to any kind of suffering, physical or emotional. It will all be better when God makes it better. Any relief you provide will be temporary, so just sit back and be patient. This once made sense to me, but now I consider it a reprehensible point of view. It’s like not throwing a drowning man a life jacket because you believe the Coast Guard will eventually come along.

As an adult, there is a terror involved in not believing that everything happens for a reason. But I think I’d rather live with that uncertainty than believe in a God who could end all suffering now but hasn’t for bureaucratic reasons that sound like they were lifted from early drafts of Dogma. Believing that the alleviation of suffering in this world is tantamount to sin is an idea worse than any nuclear winter could be.