Category Archives: Pointless Nostalgia

Pointless Nostalgia

Your Future in Pictures

This is a picture from my grandparents’ wedding.

wedding

In the middle, you see the happy couple. To the left, my grandfather’s family, the Leykamms. Most German last names have literal meanings, but I’ve never been able to determine what “Leykamm” means, if anything. What I can tell you, and what you can surely see, is that the Leykamms are having a blast.

The woman you see in mid-uproarious laugh is my great grandmother. When I was little, she used to steal my blanket and hide it, usually by sitting on it, because “you don’t need that thing.” She found this very funny, mostly because Little Kid Me didn’t think it was funny at all. She would eventually give it back, with the admonition that I “should learn take a joke.” That may seem cruel, but looking back on Little Kid Me, I know I was an uptight kid, too uptight for my own good. She thought she was doing me a favor.

My mom describes the Leykamms as “beer garden people.” Fun loving types. My grandfather’s father bartended at a local joint, the Eagle’s Nest, on the weekends. That wasn’t his regular gig; I think he did it partly for extra dough, but mostly for kicks. My grandfather used to say of his parents, “they never left us at home.” In other words, when they went out for a good time, they took the kids with them. Fun was a family affair.

On the right, you’ll see my grandmother’s parents, the Bauerleins. Bauerlein means “little farmer” in German. The Bauerleins appear very different from the Leykamms. They look a lot like little farmers, actually. Stoic. A bit uncomfortable indoors. Though they are smiling, it seems rather forced, almost through gritted teeth. My great grandfather’s suit looks old fashioned, even for the era. It’s closer to The Jazz Age than The Swing Era.

My great grandmother looks like it’s taking all her strength to smile. She had a tough life. Nowadays, someone like her would be treated for clinical depression. In those days, you were told you suffered from “nerves” and would also be told to just deal with it (especially if you were a woman).

My grandmother was a very loving, nurturing person, but there was an edge to her. Her favorite phrase was this too shall pass. She loved to ask you how much you paid for something so she could be annoyed by the answer. She had this syllable she would frequently intone–if I had to spell it out, I’d choose uy, though that’s a poor approximation. Basically, uy meant, Here we go again. Whenever she said something a little harsh or mean, my grandfather would say it was her Bauerlein coming out.

To be fair, there are extenuating circumstances to this scene. You’ll notice my grandfather is wearing an army uniform. He was on leave and would ship out overseas soon after this wedding. I know he made it home in one piece, but no one in this picture could know that. For all the Bauerleins knew, their daughter might soon be a widow. I’d have to think that has at least a little bearing on their expressions.

Then again, the Leykamms had to be just as concerned for their son, but you don’t see that on their faces. These were just two different kinds of people. The Leykamms couldn’t help but have a good time, no matter what. The Bauerleins couldn’t help but worry about what might happen down the road.

I’ve always felt within me this war between two impulses: the desire to laugh and crack wise and have a great time, and the tug of worry. I’ve never really been able to narrow down what I do and choose one thing in which to specialize. One minute, I’m writing something dumb and silly, the next I’m getting angry about the world or wondering what the hell will happen next. Whenever I’ve pushed one aspect of myself down, it just pops up, bigger and angrier, in another spot. At times I’ve thought this was a bold choice on my part, an unwillingness to be pinned down, man.

And then I look at this picture, and I think that maybe this wasn’t a choice at all. Maybe I had to be this way. And it’s not even due to my own upbringing, but the meeting of two people well over 60 years ago.

All of us like to think that we’re our own people, that we define our universes and chart our own courses. In reality, so much of what we are was set in motion decades before we were born through the union of two people, the clash of two viewpoints, the mingling of two sets of DNA.

The difference, then, is what you do with your raw materials in those tiny spaces that are only yours.

Pointless Nostalgia

Ishmael vs. Ahab vs. Jean Shepherd vs. Myself: One Night Only!

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To my father, the height of art was Jean Shepherd reading poetry. Shepherd often read poetry on his radio show–performed it, really, as vaudevillians once did with famous verse of their day. The poems could be genuinely great writing like classic Japanese haikus, or melodramatic slop like “A Drunkard’s Dream.” He made no distinction between high and low art, and recited both with equal fervor.

Of all the poems Shepherd read on the air, my father loved most his reading of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem “The Hunting of the Snark.” He spoke of it rapturously, as people often do of things they know they’ll never see or hear again, and was fond of repeating the poem’s last line, in a Shepherd-esque low, For the snark was a boojum, you see…

I’ve been listening to old Jean Shepherd radio shows for well over a decade now, ever since new interweb technology allowed people to digitize their old reel-to-reels of his broadcasts. And yet, it was only some time last week, while listening to one of these shows on my commute home, that I realized I’d never heard Shepherd’s rendition of “The Hunting of the Snark.” My father always spoke as if this was something Shepherd did regularly, and yet I’d never heard it? I felt personally insulted, as if the thing was hiding just to screw with my head, and determined I must find it.

Anecdotal evidence indicates that Shepherd read this poem annually in the early 1960s. But when I searched The Brass Figlagee—an enormous cache of Shepherd shows in podcast form—I found nothing. The fansite Flicklives.com has listings for a few programs from 1962 and 1963 whose titles fit the bill, but none of these are available in any form (begging the question how anyone knows the content of these shows in the first place). Max Schmid, a DJ at WBAI and old time radio enthusiast, has literally hundreds of Shepherd shows available for sale, but near as I can tell, none of them contain The Snark.

I plumbed the depths of the internet for days, poking around the scary corners where I sometimes venture looking for old baseball games on DVD, into long-dead Angelfire sites and LiveJournal pages. No dice. I begged on various social media, hoping someone would know what I was talking about, and received some helpful suggestions and offers of help but no paydirt. I pursued dead ends far longer than I should have, unable to convince myself that this thing was lost to the mists of time.

I couldn’t bring myself to concede defeat, though, at least not entirely. Since I couldn’t find this recording for love or money, I convinced myself to do something I’m almost too embarrassed to write down: Record a reading myself. My insane thought was, if all the Shepherd versions were lost forever, perhaps I could do a rendering that would approximate the feel and intent of the original, or at least what I imagine the original was like. It was such a idiotic and childish notion, I simply had to do it.

Continue reading Ishmael vs. Ahab vs. Jean Shepherd vs. Myself: One Night Only! →

Pointless Nostalgia

If You Need Any Clues…

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It is an odd bit of coincidence that the whole @TimesPublicEdit thing blew up this time of year, which is when my dad is on my mind the most. He had a love/hate relationship with the New York Times. Or perhaps love/snark is more accurate.

My father read the Times without fail every day, devouring what he could on the train to work and finishing it up on the couch once he returned home. He did the Times crossword with monastic dedication, particularly on Sundays, when he would fill in all the squares with his own strange brand of calligraphy. On weekends, Dad would often copy the puzzles so my mother and him could have competitions to see who could finish them first. (They didn’t waste their time on the Monday-Thursday puzzles; too easy.) Whoever won would throw down the completed puzzle in front of the other, saying “If you need any clues, just let me know…”

I joined in on the puzzling when I was old enough to figure out that finishing Times crossword puzzle has nothing to do with being smart. Through repetition, you’d figure out recurring ploys and frequently used answers. “Baseball family” was always Alou. “Pitcher” or “vessel” was almost always ewer.

Dad would work away at a puzzle for a while, trying to figure it out, then suddenly say, “Oh, stupid…” in this annoyed tone of voice. We knew that meant he’d discovered the “trick” of that week’s puzzle. But for some reason we’d always ask what his groan meant anyway, and he’d in turn always say, “You’ll figure it out.”

When he died, it came as such a shock that there were many details of his funeral we didn’t know how to handle. But we knew one thing for sure: he should be buried with a book of Times crosswords, clutched in his arm like a Bible or a rosary.

As religiously as he read it, the Times annoyed him thoroughly. In my own budget analysis, I think he had the resentment found in many smart people born to relatively humble circumstances (something I would know nothing about…). I think he believed that if he’d just been born in, say, Greenwich, he would’ve had access to the world of class and sophistication (and bucks) found in the pages of the Times. Instead, fate conspired to see him born in crushing poverty in Ireland, then move to Queens as a kid, and grow up the son of a baggage handler. He wasn’t ashamed of any of this, but I think maybe some part of him wondered what if…

He also had pretentions of his own, or did once upon a time. He wrote poetry as a young man. He used to try his hand at gourmet cooking. By the time I was born, he’d abandoned all of this, save for making trays of stuffed mushrooms at holidays. In the Times, I think he saw something he’d either given up on or decided was now worthless to him. A piece of himself, really.

So while he continued to read the Times to the end of his life, he also loved to point out its ridiculousness. If he found some especially pretentious piece, he would say, in his best Larchmont Lockjaw, “devastating article in the Times” (a line I’m almost positive was cribbed from Woody Allen’s Manhattan, though I haven’t seen it in forever). He loved to mock the recipes in the Sunday magazine with ingredients that were completely unavailable to anyone not within walking distance of Balducci’s. (“Wild boar pancetta?!”) And he loved to read out the bitchiest capsule movie reviews from the TV insert, often trying to find the ones with the least amount of words. Nothing cracked him up more than to see a film summed up simply with “Drivel.”

I didn’t start @TimesPublicEdit with him in mind, but as I continued to write jokes for it, his memory kept popping up. I’d write something about hipsters in Bushwick building tree forts and I’d see his disbelieving smirk at a sophistic essay or his eyes rolling at a trend piece that tried way too hard. Eventually I realized that @TimesPublicEdit was, basically, a high tech version of what he used to do on the couch after work, Times in his lap, brow furrowed.

I never quite articulated this feeling until last week, when my wife voiced it for me. As the Anderson Cooper tweet spiraled beyond my control and “tricked” a few news outlets, she said to me, “I think your dad might be proud of you for this.” And for a moment, I allowed myself to think, “Yeah, he might have been.” I thought the man who exposed me to Monty Python and George Carlin at a criminally young age might have taken some kind of parental pride if he’d been alive to see it.

In order to think this, of course, I’d also have to think that he’d have had any use for social media of any kind, which is highly unlikely. And naturally, within minutes of me allowing myself this hubristic thought, @TimesPublicEdit was shut down.

Last weekend, while the account remained shut down, I found myself back at my mom’s house. On Sunday morning, we divvied up the Times and read it silently around the kitchen table. For a moment it felt like I was back in high school, reading the Book Review and the Metro section, dreaming of escaping to the city.

But that was long ago. Now, my eyes just skimmed over the words. I tried and tried to take them in, but nothing registered. It was like the paper knew I’d been mocking it, and was refusing to be understood in protest. You think you’re funny, huh? Well, guess what: This is gonna be weird for you from now on. Even if you get your little Twitter account back, you’ll never be able to just sit here and read this paper and not feel vaguely guilty and punished. Happy now, smartass?

No, I was not happy. After a few feint stabs at trying to get through the Book Review, I accepted that yes, this would be weird from now on.

Still finished the puzzle in 20 minutes flat, though.