"You had a great childhood if..."

Seriously?

...you had a great childhood." That's pretty much it.

See, it doesn't come down to whether you owned a pair of Nike sneakers with the "red swoosh" or whether you swam in a lake or had a bike with a banana seat. A good childhood is bigger than that, right?

I know this is obvious, but it doesn't stop people (especially my age -- early fifties) from posting memes about irrelevant conditions and crediting them with the sum-total of our experiences as children. Yeah, I, too, traded baseball cards with my friends, and it is a fond memory, but it wasn't a fulfillment of the Coleridgean ideal, like a child running through the Somerset countryside.

And parents. If I see one more meme about how "great" a dad is because he does something entertaining, I am going to bite my computer. Just as my unenthusiastic licking of colored and tasteless ice crystals labeled as "Sno-Cones" didn't mean my youth was a stateof euphoria, a dad taking cute pictures and letting his daughter paint his toenails doesn't make him a "great dad."

I know what you are thinking: "Duh, Chris. It's just a way to point out the cuteness or the nostalgia. No one really believes these outward shows are indications of quality."

Maybe not. But, as with all things we are repeatedly presented with, these posts tend to nudge us farther and farther into superficiality in our casual thinking.

Staying out and riding my bike "until the streetlights came on" is a fond memory. My independence as a kid, being out and playing pick-up baseball and basketball games with my friends in the summer is something I wish kids today would do more of. But, they are only components of what I remember as a pretty darned good childhood.

What's the harm? Well, it reduces thinking into a real reliance of conditions and possessions. It places importance on material things: toys, clothes, styles. It's just more hum under the music of life. Even our nostalgia is becoming superficial. We're training our kids to someday post a picture of an XBox controller that says, "If you had one of these things in your hands fifteen hours a day, you had a great childhood." We should be nostalgic for that night we talked until the sun came up, not that we had a shore house in which to do it.

It wasn't the house that made that night great. It's not the toenail polish that makes the dad great. It's not the sneakers that make the childhood great. Dig?

Sure, the cute dad is adorable. But we need to stop calling him a "great dad" because he and his daughter are squishy and lovable. Last I checked, people didn't become parents for credit; to be recognized. They did it out of love and dedication to the formation of a healthy child.

To go back, once again, to Hamlet, we need less "seeming" and more "being" and these memes are not helping. (Let's face it, the whole Internet culture is about seeming, isn't it? Maybe it is an un-winable war I'm waging here. I just saw a meme about how "sexy" a good dad is. Yuck.)

We get anaesthetized. Great dads and great childhoods don't come down to appearance. They are about soul.

The Yellowing Pages

I used to escape from the loud house-full of happy Philadelphia-area Italians into my grandmother's basement. Down I would float down over stairs that were wearied over the years into a flexing, barely perceptible bounce by playing shoes and late-to-work shoes and furniture-moving shoes. Down, I'd go, into the deep smell of earth, books, boxes and gently musty air that floated cool between cinder-block borders broken only by thick block glass squares in rectangular rows that let in just enough light to color the basement into more of a secret world than a scary place.

My retreat spot lay over by the little book case filled with aging paperbacks standing at attention under the shoulder-to-shoulder pressure of each other. I'd sit on the carpet under rafters hung with aged and drying red peppers...but first, to re-inspect the weathered half-barrel that hung on the wall.

It look very much like this more famous book. 

I'd open the clasp on the front and it would swing open to reveal gold-rimmed shot glasses and Scotch glasses and tumblers in neat semicircular rows, each half-sunken into its wooden nest. Just a peep, to see the secrets inside and to hear  the echoes of parties that had been centered around it as my impossibly-young grandparents poured ice-tinkling drinks for guests whom I pictured to be composed of black and white movie flickers; the women trim and jaunty in their wide hats, like Lois Lane from the George Reeves Superman show; the men in double-breasted suits with hats cocked sideways. The laughter muffled itself as I pulled the sides of the barrel to; stopped as I fastened the clasp.

Below crouched the book case, itself, swirled in antique yellow, its outer frame planed into symmetrical undulations, little circles carved into the corners by the cabinetmaker's hand. Sitting Indian-style (it was okay to call it that, then) on the old, green, sculptured carpet, I could see the book I had left from our last trip to visit Grandmom here in Northeast Philly. I'd left a toothpick in it to mark my place. On the cover was a painting of four men in a life raft, sprawled and tumbling, mouths shaped into replica fear as they tumbled amid white-capped oil-painted waves.

I opened it and fell back into its story of four American pilots shot down over the Pacific -- this book written decades before I was born by someone nobody remembers -- whose name might not even have been what was written -- but who managed to crank out solid pulp fiction for a living. The characters wielded names like "Nick Andersen" and "Captain Buck Blake" and they talked about cigarettes and "dames" as they snagged sea turtles and drank their blood or after they'd paddled off a school of tiger sharks. You could almost see the aesthetic way their shirts frayed; how they fiction-burned, instead of suffering under the misery of bubbling skin and cracking lips. They endured heroically in that silver-screen way.

But I don't remember the story -- that one or any of the other dozens I read -- much. What I do remember is how I always noticed the way the pages were framed in yellowing age. I would wonder how many year that took to happen; how old you'd needed to be to own a book that had turned yellow... Then, in the low light, I'd sink back into the adventure, still aware of the darkening edges cupping the words like, hands full of water, on the page.

Now, unlike most grown-ups, each year I suffer that same, sad, downward tug at my heart as the school year stands only a tomorrow away from me. And as I wait, inhaling the coquettish scent of fall that teases the time for school, I then exhale and look at the book I am now re-reading; a book that hand-holds its reader barefoot through the grass of summer into the day before the stiff new shoes of September have to cage the toes: Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine. And I feel the hearts of Douglas and Tom Spaulding as their summer of 1928 closes like my Grandmother's old barrel. I feel like a boy each year at this time, filled with the leaden resignation that the freedoms of July and August are soon to be no more.

But as I look at the pages, a book that I bought myself, brand new, I see what I once used to think the province of those born in the black-and-white days: alas, the pages are beginning to yellow. My own pages. And so, the words in my own little boy heart are cupped by the gentle but ever progressing yellow edges of time...

The bookshelf is mine, now, and it stands in my living room, filled with books of poetry. Some day, my sons will find Keats there. Or Sandburg or Heaney. But the men in the life raft have long since gone to dust.

A Childhood that Feels Like Home

I try to give my sons the most complete picture of the human experience I possibly can. Often, I try to give them a sense of how the world has changed since I was a kid -- not so much in terms of "how much better" it was back then (it wasn't) but simply in terms of how simply different it was. I think it might be impossible for them to fully understand having known only what they know, the same way it was impossible for me to fully understand my parents' youthful years.

Recently, I posted this meme (I rarely post memes) on Facebook: 

My comment was this:

Yeah. I am. I just am. No judgement or curmudgeonly argument about how much better things were. No "golden age thinking." I really just am grateful for it.

As with many topics I address, this is not about saying what should be or to point out how horrible things are now. (They really are not horrible and I'll bet my kids look back fondly on their childhood days, some day...) It's just that I am what I said I am: grateful. 

I am grateful I had to wait for an entire year to see The Wizard of Oz on TV. I'm glad I had to be in front of that TV at a certain time on a certain night to see the Charlie Brown Christmas special, each year. I am glad I had to buy a record album and that, since it was one of the few I could afford, I listened to it until I had squeezed every drop of juice out of it while I saved for another. 

I am glad that, on Saturday mornings, I had to sit and wait until ten o'clock (for some reason, I had decided that was a good, polite time to calla house phone) to call a friend to play (I still remember my good friend George's number, even though I haven't seen him in decades) and I am glad I had to do it on a rotary phone in the kitchen and that I could not be contacted twenty-four hours a day on a cell phone. And I am glad that I met George at the baseball field on summer days and that we just waited for people to show up for a game; I'm glad that sometimes not enough people showed up and that, if "closing right field" was not enough, we wound up making forts in the woods instead, gloves left on the pitcher's mound, unmolested until it was dark and time to go home. 

I'm glad that when a teacher talked of China or of Ancient Egypt in class that the images she showed us in a filmstrip were not something we had already seen on our phones after a millisecond search; I'm glad our eyes went wide as we learned of places and cultures too far to see and too expensive to visit. 

I'm not glad that discrimination of those in the minority (socially or ethnically) was far more prevalent, but I am glad that my young mind could explore wonders and dreams instead of having been constantly bombarded by arguments over the rapidly shifting parameters and mores of social boundaries. Yes, protests happened and marches occurred and debates turned ugly, but I saw them in a two minute news spot; I wasn't standing always in the middle of them like a tree being choked with ivy. 

I am glad that girls were mysterious to me and that a kiss was a big deal. I'm happy that "waiting until marriage," although it didn't apply to most people, hadn't yet become a punchline. 

Most of all, I am glad I had time -- time to do nothing but lie in the grass or to draw pictures or to see what happened when I hit combinations of notes on the piano. I'm glad no one scheduled me into constant activity and that my parents did not have all-day electronic access to my grades and that they were only slightly involved in my school activities. 

Overall, I am glad that my past is a memory, dotted only with a few films and a few wrinkled photos and that it lives, more vividly, in stories told by voices that were there. 

There was quiet of the mind and of the ears. There was "boredom" and there was space.

There are many great things, now, but I am glad those great things were not there when I was a boy and when I was a young man. 

I am grateful for these things and no one can "argue" that away from me. It's not a prescription for everyone else; it's how I feel and what I prefer. It is good to have a childhood that feels like home. 

Cornered

Once, a bully chased me around the neighborhood. He was older and he was bigger than I was.

It was twilight and I needed to get home when the streetlights came on. Somehow that worried me just as much as what he might do to me.

I was carrying a plastic "briefcase" that my dad had given me. I think it was full of toys and probably drawings of Star Trek scenes. It never occurred to me, as I was running and crying, to drop it -- which is good, because, thinking I had evaded the bully, I hid up against a friend's house under a pine tree. It would either be a great hiding spot or it was "a corner."

It was a corner.

C&D Bike Repair (A Memoir Parable)

On a sprawlingly long, deliciously cool summer day, when I was about eleven or twelve, my friend Dave and I decided to put in some hard work. We were going to open a bike repair shop.

We dug in to the work, clearing out and organizing my parent's aluminum storage shed in the back yard. We put things where they belonged and hung things on pegs. We swept. We gathered up the available tools (not that many were around in the home of a trumpet player/arranger, but we made-do) and put them on a shelf, neatly lined up. If I'm not mistaken, we polished them with our breath and a rag, too.

When we were finished organizing, we examined the fruits of our labor -- must have been five-hours' work -- with fists on evaluative hips. I remember bending to pick up a small piece of dried leaf from the concrete floor. It wouldn't do to have the alabaster interrupted by some deciduous intruder, after all we'd done.

We looked at each other. What was next? We snapped our fingers: the sign.

We walked to the nearest store and purchased poster board with the change I kept in my room in a nine-inch high, toy Mosler safe (with a real combination lock). We gathered up markers and paints and pencils and rulers. I, having already been recognized as the neighborhood bohemian (despite my modestly impressive talents as a third baseman) was given the task of creating the sign. Dave reclined in the shade of our walnut tree, a blade of grass between his teeth, as I set to work. Eventually, he fell asleep, no doubt dreaming of the wealth we would accrue as bicycle repair moguls.

The Lingering, Languid Lick

It had been a long day for my eight-year-old son and for me, as well. School all day, then a hard forty-five minutes at the karate dojo for him. We came home to a quiet house -- my wife and other son were off at baseball practice -- and we had a nice, quiet dinner. The boy had one of his faves: cold pasta and meatballs. (I know, I know....) I had that classic combination of a phony vegetable chicken patty on wheat bread and a bowl of reheated pork-fried rice. Nothing but the finest, when daddy provides dinner...

After dinner we partook of a square of leftover birthday cake each. I made my self a nice cup of Earl Grey.

We cuddled up together on the couch for a little TV and, the gods smiling upon us, we found that Raiders of the Lost Ark was being shown on the SciFi Channel. Ahhh! We high-fived and pulled up the blanket.

The upside of Raiders being shown on SciFi: HD quality (I still have the original three dilapidated video tapes I bought years ago). The downside: commercials.

Yvonne DeCarlo; from the
good ol' days when vampiresses
left a little to the imagination.

Yes, commercials. That's when it happened.

You think, as a dad: Commercials. So what? Product ads. Ads for new shows on the channel. Maybe a public service message of some kind with some lame celebrity telling us that we need to save music in schools because music helps kids to be good at math. (Its only really useful purpose, you know.)

But what you don't expect is that, eager to market their shows to a particular (and particularly libido-driven) demographic, the station execs would completely ignore the fact that children might -- through some weird alignment of the cosmic energy channels; some fluke of fate -- be watching Indiana Jones at five o'clock on a Monday night. What you don't expect is to see a horrifying ad for a new vampire series.

But, you figure, "Meh...he didn't react to it, so I guess he wasn't scared. No harm done." Then, the rapid-fire, attention-span corroding edits slow down so that the viewer can focus on a shot -- a slow, languid shot (in glorious HD) of a young, lovely vampire vixen lovingly running her tongue up the cheek of another lovely vampire vixen.