Relocation Anxiety Update

April wasn’t the cruelest month but it was one marked by a high level of stress for me. After living with my partner Naomi for 10 years in her home in Westchester County, N.Y., we relocated to a condo we bought together in a Boston suburb.

The downsizing and packing began after we bought the place in December. At the end we had 200 tightly taped containers, ranging in size from shoeboxes to weighty trunks, each bearing color-coded location labels and notations on the contents ("books" was especially popular).

Before the movers delivered everything in mid-April, my tendency to let the bats fly out of my belfry intensified as I worried about lurking disasters. We used Noah’s Ark Moving and Storage, which I had hired four times before as I bounced around Fairfield County, Connecticut and to Westchester County. These guys know their stuff and did an estimate based on a video walkthrough of the house. Still, the more we packed, the more I fretted that the 26-foot truck wouldn’t hold everything. I had zero evidence for this beyond my fevered imagination. Maybe we would need a gigantic 18-wheeler? Should we arrange a back-up plan for local storage? I was spinning like a top.

Letting go

Finally, I decided to take the 12-step approach: Let go and let God, or, in this case, let go and let Noah. End result: what looked like an enormous collection filled about half the truck. I moved on a Monday with medicated-to-the-gills cats Jerry and Basil, then on Tuesday the movers hauled boxes and furniture into the condo. Naomi arrived on Wednesday and the serious settling in began. New furniture arrived on Thursday and the rooms took shape.

Delivery done, I needed something new on which to obsess. Where were my atorvastatin pills to control high cholesterol? I know I packed them, I could visualize them in the little sack from CVS. My supply was running low and I had to find them. I tore through boxes for my office and, bathroom cabinet supplies and checked boxes before I flattened them. Did I lose them in the car? I found lots of socks, toothpaste and floss but no atorvastatin.

Every box I ripped open was like a medical version of Cracker Jacks. When would I find the pharmaceutical prize? Naomi suggested it might be in the last box I packed, as I was keeping the medicine out—so I wouldn’t misplace it. With my pill supply shrinking by the day, I dug through boxes like a fox terrier. Finally, slicing packing tape with a letter opener, I opened a shoebox and inside found mostly religious items: a Torah volume, a book of Psalms, yamulkes—and the precious container of atorvastatin. The roller coaster of anxiety slid to a stop, or to be more emotionally accurate, a pause.

Cancel culture in the condo

What’s next on the relocation anxiety agenda? The condo comes pimped out with GE appliances—fridge, washer/dryer, microwave, dishwasher. A few mornings ago the washer suddenly lurched to life, rumbling and flashing the phrased “CANCELLED.” I frantically pushed the power button and that didn’t turn it off. The owners’ manual didn’t tell me anything. Even though the water didn’t come on, I still had visions of a biblical flood. I rapidly searched for  “GE washer gives a ‘cancelled’ message.” Well, this is a common problem with some GE washers, although it usually happens when the machine is washing. After a few minutes the message vanishes. That’s what happened.

So this sent me to Reddit and the Better Business Bureau. There I found comments that made my hair stand on end. Could those horror stories of unfixable machines and baffled repairmen apply to our new environment, here in the house of GE? Do I dare use the dishwasher of doom?

The washer kicked on again in the same way. I’ll ask around the condo if anybody else has had this mysterious occurrence. My exhausting quest for problems faded, for now. Maybe I’ll just let go and see what happens. Every day brings a different challenge but, based on experience, I somehow cope.

Down and out at the RMV

In fact, no sooner did I feel relaxed than another "lost" episode began. Naomi and went to the nearby Register of Motor Vehicles to switch to Massachusetts plates and licenses. We had gathered all the necessary paperwork, including insurance coverage from a new carrier. When we finally reached a representative behind a bank teller-like clear partition, Naomi's paperwork sailed through and she got her Bay State plates. The representative shook her head at my auto title; it showed a major bank as a lien holder. I couldn't register the car and get a title if the car had a lien against it.

"But I paid that loan off years ago," I bleated. I could register but the title would be sent to the bank to certify the lien had been cleared. She said I should have got a letter from the bank at the point where I paid the auto loan off.

My stomach fell down to the sub-basement of the RMV building. I would have put the letter in a bulging car folder that held repair bills and other paperwork. But I couldn't remember seeing the folder when I was packing. When had I last seen it? It had been in a two-level file cabinet under my home office desk. I would have stored that with important folders.

Back home, I relived the atorvastatin routine, ripping open boxes to find this sizeable folder. Nothing. I plunged into a garage storage area. I had parked plenty of folders in the trunks, tied with twine to keep them together, but no car folder. I checked every trunk and box twice. I found literary output going back 40-50 years, evidence of obsessive self-chronicling, so that was all fun to find about totally useless at the RMV.

My sense that I had misplaced or lost the folder in the months before the move became terribly real. I couldn't put that unsettling sense of absence out of mind. Digging through the trunks and boxes, I could picture the folder's former location and even found folders I kept in the same drawer. Thee folder would no doubt have had the lien release letter and it had dropped off the face of the earth. 

I called the dealership where I bought my car and had it serviced and spoke with a woman who sounded familiar with the issue of the lost lien letter. She said somebody from the finance department would call me back. While that gave me a sliver of hope, I still woke up at 4 a.m. wondering what would happen next.

I called the dealership back the next morning and learned it no longer dealt with the major bank that held the lien and didn't have anybody I could call. The best she could do was direct me to the New York State DMV to get a new title. That was another dead end because I needed to produce the lien letter.

Next step: I called the bank, which I imagined as a forbidding bureaucracy that would brush off my little problem. An online search turned up a title department, so I called the number and soon was talking to an angel in human form who listened empathetically and looked up my account. I had indeed paid off the loan balance off on April 29, 2019--exactly six years before my call. We both chuckled over that. She said the lien release letter had gone out then and I could get either a copy or a new version. Since the RMV clerk said I had to provide a "wet" version, a letter actually signed, I told her I needed a fresh one. That would take a week or so, then another week for the mailing. I asked about expediting the delivery, could they just charge the fee to my bank credit card?

That wasn't an option but I could give them a UPS or FedEx account number and they could send it that way. By day's end I signed up with UPS. 

So, while I can't say the episode is over until I get the wet letter and dash down to the RMV, I do feel immensely relieved. Later that day I had a "how'd we do" email from the bank and I gave the representative all 10's for her "empathetic, confident and highly informed guidance." Credit where credit's due, I say.

The search for the lost folder continues. The notion that I threw it away while packing makes zero sense. It may be gone or it may be in some nook or cranny I have yet to uncover. 

Is this the last lost episode of the 2025 relocation season? I can't predict anything. I thought the atorvastatin hunt was bad enough, but this was much more serious. 

These regrettable but common cycles remind me of the joke about the Jewish telegram: “Start worrying. Details to follow.”

The Roots of Obsession

Next month I’ll be leaving Katonah for a Boston suburb, moving from a house to a condo. Besides a lot of books, I’m bringing personal papers: journals, clips from my journalism days, letters, research files. I’m obsessed with what I call self-chronicling.

This enthusiasm began with a little booklet with envelopes for grades 1-12, called “School Days: Records and Memories.” My mother bought this when I started at William Jennings Bryan Elementary School in Mission, Texas.

The first grade envelope shows a photo of me looking rumpled and dazed with a bump on my head. I must have walked into a tree. The envelope includes my report card, a Red Cross card certifying me as a beginner in swimming, two stapled pages with an explanation of my score on the Metropolitan Achievement Test, and a photo of my teacher and me taken on my birthday.

As the years rolled by, the envelopes thickened with achievement tests, honor roll listings, photos, event programs. Envelopes started tearing out of the booklet, so from the 7^th grade on I stuffed the ephemera into manilla envelopes.

Why did I save so much, and still keep it? The older I got the more I depended on academic achievement as a keystone of my identity. The honor rolls and certificates validated me since, otherwise, as I felt like an outsider. My self-image was fragile; I wrote my height and weight on the 5^th grade envelope: 60 inches tall, weight 110-115, with the note “Gosh I’m heavy (I don’t look it).” Have I ever not felt that way? Still, journaling captured my emerging sense of living in history.

A turning point came in the 6^th grade, spring of 1970. Students wrote an autobiography. I did so by putting pages in a green binder with metal tabs to hold the pages together. That fall I moved to junior high. I had wanted to start a journal and now I saw how. I added page to the autobiography and wrote my first entry on September 15, 1970. In parallel to ongoing journal, I saved whatever struck my fancy over the decades: report cards, notes stuck into my locker, a ticket stub from a Dallas Cowboys game, every issue of the newspapers and magazines where I had an article, every letter from my mother and other relatives, with carbon copies of letters I typed to them. Newspapers from presidential elections and events like 9/11. A folder of bad job reviews, now those make for fun reading. Morning-after notes from stormy 1980s romances.

I lugged this pile around from Texas to Brooklyn to Connecticut to Katonah. Fearing I would soon be auditioning for “Hoarders,” I began shrinking the stack a year ago knowing we’d eventually move. I donated hometown newspapers to the local historical museum, sold or gave away 80 percent of my record collection, sold posters from the Soviet Union. I even donated coffee mugs celebrating George Bush’s 2001 inauguration, gifts from a Texas friend.

Anyway, the accumulation mostly stopped in the 1990s. No more vinyl albums, no more journalism clips, digital photos replaced prints. I stopped buying newspapers covering historic events; email made letters obsolete. My book interests are so specific (Judaism and the Soviet Union) that I rarely buy anything. The people to whom I wrote letters died. 

I’m still thinking of “why.” The chronicling since the 1960s constantly informs my creative output. while I jettison the bulkiest materials (all those back issues of Advertising Age, Video Store and the Princeton Alumni Weekly!), I will always keep the most personal collections. Letters to and Mom and relatives were a weekly report of our lives. And I think about future generations. I didn’t know much about my parents or grandparents, but I’m creating a way for people of the 22^nd century to know something of my life and times. The unending chronicles show how I see history as it happened. I’ve already planned to donate trunks and binders bursting with millions of words to Princeton and let the librarians decide what it means.

Best of all, I don’t have to remember anything since I recorded the big moments and saved letters and emails. I’ll never run short of material.  

Aunt Charlotte's Daybook, 1982

My Aunt Charlotte, my mother's sister, loved to write letters. I've saved all of them she sent me in the 1980s and 1990s, until she passed away in 1997. Her daughter Linda has forwarded to me photos and other materials, including her 1982 day by day journal. As a dedicated chronicler myself, I was eager to see how she recorded her life. I've delayed a close read of the journal because my cancer-stricken mother lived with Aunt Charlotte from 1981 her death in January 12, 1984; I dreaded entries that touched on my mother's suffering. 

But since today is January 1, 2025, I decided this marks the time to start reading Aunt Charlotte's daily notes, which are geared to events rather than musings on life. 

And football. Like all good Texans, she keenly appreciated the sport, especially back when the Dallas Cowboys were riding high as America's Team. And Aunt Charlotte lived in Tyler, Texas, east of Dallas, practically in the Cowboys' back yard.

Here's what was on her mind on January 1-3:

January 1: Texas beat Alabama in the Cotton Bowl. Texas came from behind to win 14-12.

January 2: The Cowboys beat Tampa Bay in a playoff game 38-0. Linda invited us over for supper. San Francisco Chargers [I think she meant San Diego] beat the Miami Dolphins in another playoff game. At the close of the reg. game the score was 38 all. The final score was 41-38.

January 3: Giants lost to LA Rams. Cincinnati beat Buffalo. Went to S.S. [Sunday School at Green Acres Baptist Church] 

I'll post updates of interest as I find them, straight from Aunt Charlotte to you.  

Searching for Connection to the World to Come

Who has ever heard a message from the dead, had a near death experience, or had vivid memories of a past life? Ever played with a Ouiji board? Consulted mediums? Joined a seance, saw a ghost? 

None of these interested me other than near-death experiences. Teen Ouiji board parties were as close as I got. But last month’sopen mic involved a graveyard and since then other datapoints made me consider links between the living and the dead. For example, I read the book of Deuteronomy’s warning about occult practices:

You shall not learn to do like the abominations of those nations. There shall not be found among you a soothsayer, one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer.

Well, that settles that. But at the same time I was also reading a book from the discard pile at the Katonah Village Library, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife, by Leslie Kean.

With its carefully documented chapters on channeling past lives, mediumships, poltergeists, moving objects and materializations, Kean’s book talked in terms of highly credible evidence about the reality of the World to Come and other matters. The book opens with cases of two boys who from a very early age identified details from past lives, one from a pilot killed in World War II, the other a Hollywood talent agent. She uses real names and photos of the boys, and the men whose lives they channeled.

Kean also wrote about near death experiences where people saw light, heard music and encountered loved ones.

If this wasn’t enough to stir my imagination, I saw the final episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm’s season 5, “The End.” Larry David donates a kidney to comedian Richard Lewis, then months later is dying in a hospital room. His wife, father, friends and a rabbi gather around him. As he expires, they start bickering over money owed and other matters. While comic, the scenes closely track real near-death experiences. He flatlines, then finds himself flying through light and clouds to heaven, emerging with a full head of hair. Kindly robed guides (played by Dustin Hoffman and Sasha Baron Cohen) meet him. The World to Come looks ready for him, with legendary Ben Hogan eager to play golf with him with the news that Marilyn Monroe was a big fan of Seinfeld and is eager to meet him No need for bathrooms! Then he encounters his querulous mother Adele, played perfectly by Bea Arthur.

But David’s earthly behavior patterns get the better of him. His guides decide he’s not ready for Heaven and he reluctantly slips back into his body. The machines start beeping with life. even as Marilyn Monroe appears to sigh, “I really love your sense of humor.” The flatlining machines start beeping to signal a fluttering return to life, everybody is stunned, and Larry lives to speak his mind in many more seasons. While the intent is humor, David’s foray into and out of the World to Come closely tracks other near-death experiences. Dialogue with his wife Cheryl (played by Cheryl Hines a/k/a Mrs. Robert F. Kenney Jr.) shows the profound impact of such a glimpse of the other side:

Larry: “What a thing, huh?”

Cheryl: “Yeah. How do you feel? Do you feel different after all this?”

Larry: “Yeah, I mean, come on, I’m a changed man. I’m a completely different person.”

[Series spoiler: He doesn’t change at all.]

This all comes as we approach the Jewish observance of Yom Kippur, starting on October 12. That involves the Yizkor service, remembering those who have gone before us. I post the names of relatives in my synagogue’s Yizkor book. Would I like to hear from them, my parents, grandparents, friends gone too soon? Sure, but I’m not seeking them out with all the techniques so well discussed in Surviving Death.

Instead, I’m thinking about what the 19^th century writer George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann Evans, wrote:

“Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.”

I once wrote a science fiction story based on this idea. A cop killer was sent to a penal colony on the Moon. His punishment: he wouldn’t die until everybody forgot him. But people kept remembering him. He truly had a life sentence.

So if the dead aren’t talking to me even in my dreams, I’ll just talk to them. They may be there, in a realm surrounding us but beyond our reach, glimpsed hazily in shadows and during a blink of our eyes. Or do our realms interact? At the Yizkor service I’ll remember, I’ll tell stories and write stories, I’ll say their names. In doing so, I keep them alive. The questions we all have about near death, after death, the World to Come—we all discover the answers in the end. And that may just be the beginning.

"The Price You Pay:" A novel with a kick of reality

 I recently read the novel The Price You Pay, by Jim Fusilli. I knew of him through his music writing for The Wall Street Journal but I hadn't read any of the novels he's written since 2001's Closing Time. I've now corrected that with his latest novel.

It tells the story of Mickey Wright Jr., part-time business major at St. Peter's College in Jersey City, N.J., sleep-deprived worker at an Italian bakery and a liquor store, and target of his ill-tempered and violent father, a widower and cop with the Jersey City PD. Early in the book, his father forces Mickey to get a "real job" working at a trucking company in Union City with the Teamsters, starting in the office as a "router-typist." 

But Mickey soon learns that the office job is just the start of a position that involves much, much more. The Price You Pay has been described as a coming-of-age story, a thriller, and a crime novel, and it brings all those elements. What made it memorable for me is Fusilli's total grasp of the time and the blue-collar union/mob milieu that's utterly foreign to me. But not to Fusilli; according to Wikipedia, "While in college, Fusilli joined the Teamsters Local 560 as a clerk at Smith Transport, headquartered in Hoboken." And that first-hand experience shines through in the details of work at a transport company, along with descriptions of Jersey City and adjacent towns. He shows the mean streets with no romantic coloring.

Fusilli grabs readers by the elbow and serves as a Hudson County Dante escorting us as Mickey Wright struggles against his seemingly unstoppable descent through the circles of deceit, larceny, political corruption, family violence and murder. He does so with prose that always aims to describe and move the story along, without navel-gazing. This passage about the approach to his new employer, Impact Trucking, captures Fusilli's pitiless eye (and olfactory abilities):

Drawing near on his drive from the Heights, Micky was jostled by potholes, then greeted by the odor of gasoline and motor oil and the sound of grinding gears and barking men. He watched as incoming trucks, their steel-gray bodies sullied by grime, zipped in backwards to their stations while the semis required pinpoint dance-like maneuvers to precisely position them for loading.

The corrupting process started early, with Mickey recruited to lie to wives and others calling about drivers. Here's how it goes:

One late afternoon, Joey Baldessaro Jr., a Jersey City-based driver, pulled Mickey aside. He said, "Listen, if my wife calls, you tell her I ain't in yet."

Baldessaro was in his early 30s; like most of the drivers, he was fit and rough around the edges, but had had a kind of charm and an easy laugh. His father was a driver too; Joey Sr. gave his son his good looks but was taciturn and often abrupt. It was said both men had quick tempers.

"What?" Joey Jr. said.

"I'm not comfortable with that," Mickey told him.

"Yeah, well," Joey Jr. said. "Pretend."

Soon, many of the Jersey City-based drivers counted on him for cover. "He's not in yet, Mrs. Flannery," Mickey said when she called looking for her husband, though Flannery dumped his load three hours ago. He lied to Tommy Malzone's daughter, telling her he wasn't sure where her father was when he knew Malzone was buying rounds and getting sloppy at Rudy's, spending cash he won when he hit the number. 

Will Mickey escape the fate of a violent path? Can his toil in a bakery pay off? And what about Debbie Olsen, the young woman he meets in class and goes on a date with at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Get your hands on The Price to Pay and find out. 

June 1980: A New Graduate's Welcome to the Real World at Forbes Magazine

June always takes me back to my graduation from Princeton in 1980. Do my fledgling steps in the job market hold any lessons for the class of 2024? Read on. 

I was an economics major planning a journalism career. To that end, I mailed out resumes hoping that summer newspaper jobs and my economics degree might stir some interest. I had also passed the Foreign Service exam, so global public service beckoned as a career option. As my classmates talked about travel plans, I thought a summer of backpacking in Europe could be educational. The Peace Corps intrigued me, but my practical-minded mother back in Mission, Texas, warned me, "Van, if you go into the Peace Corps, I'll make you pay me back every dime I ever sent to Princeton." And she was serious about that, too. So that option was off the table. 

None of these pleasant fantasies happened. The job search plan worked – catastrophically well. Instead of landing in Baton Rouge or Corpus Christi, I parlayed the Princeton connection, writing samples and a gift for good job interviews into a reporter-researcher job at Forbes Magazine, "the Capitalist Tool." The catch: I had to start a week after I graduated. Visions of travel vanished as, buckling under maternal pressure to get a job, I accepted the offer of a $12,000 yearly salary and scrambled to find a place to live. I plunged into the world of work and New York living with absolutely no break. By mid-June I was in a sports coat and tie, humping along in the sweltering A train from the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in Brooklyn to West 4th Street in Manhattan wondering what I had gotten myself into. 

On the surface, an entry-level job like this made sense, a way to build on my skills. And it would have – but not at Forbes. Back then it was a twice-monthly magazine with a fearsome reputation for hard-hitting stories and a delight at squeezing the gonads of executives. Insecure, inexperienced, anxious and wildly nonconfrontational, I struggled like a guppy among piranhas in the Forbes fishbowl.  

Problems began immediately. My journals from 1980 are full of anxiety and pep talks to myself as I tried to get the rhythm of checking financial stories that blended arcane (to me) business concepts with punchy opinions and quotes that sources often did not want to appear in print. As I recall, fact-checking required guile and mental gymnastics, since we could not read quotes directly back to sources, only paraphrase them. That meant sources didn’t know exactly what we wanted them to confirm, and they couldn't retract or alter a quote. 

Trying to look like I know what I'm doing, 1980.

Forbes veterans felt exasperation with my bumbling. For example, senior editor Bob Flaherty dubbed one hot-shot Wall Street investor a “cult figure.” So I dutifully underlined the phrase in red ink on the draft as a fact to check. When I called the guru, I  asked him, “So are you really a cult figure?” That didn’t help my reputation at all. 

Indeed, I knew from the beginning I was out of my league. From my journal, June 26, 1980: 

Work is hell. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I am checking my 1^st story and it is a nightmare. . . I’m afraid I’ll get run over when it hits the press. My manager is very helpful, but my lack of attention and knowledge is hopelessly frustrating. 

And on July 5:

Work has been an experience. Fact-checking is much more difficult than I expected. My 1^st story was one by Howard on REITS [real estate investment trusts]. I am sweating blood about some things I underlined but did not check. I think the spellings are all OK, but I’m just not 100% sure. I’ve heard that capital punishment is preferable to the penalties affixed to misspellings that checkers let past. I just have to wait. 

I don’t know how exactly to evaluate the experience so far. The people are OK and the education is good, but I can’t help feel a Sword of Damocles is over my head. The thought of getting fired has of course entered my head, and it is possible after the 3-month probation I might be let go. If that happens I could either try the Journal of Commerce or Jewish publications. If they want me, fine. If not, it won’t be the end of the world. I could have used a vacation. Now I know why I didn’t write to the biz mags—I must have thought something like this would come up. I wonder what I was thinking about when I started this search. I suppose I did the right thing, given what I wanted to do and the market. Ideally I could work through next May, try to get a position someplace else, then take the summer off. I think my considerable strains of late will be alleviated when the July 21 issue comes out w/o pain, and when I finally develop a social life. Last Friday I attended services at The Village Temple and they made me feel quite comfy. As I was leaving the rabbi said, “We could use a few more single men here, for these young women.” 

By August, the alarm bells rang loud enough for the head of the research department to warn me about my lagging performance. While other new reporter-researchers were getting articles published, I hesitated to write anything, until I finally broke into print with short newsmaker items. 

August 14: 

My manager called me into her cubicle and told me, essentially, I had the next three weeks to get my act together, by the end of the three month probation period. It’s gotten so nobody has a great urge to work with me, which probably accounts for the revolving door series of people I’ve worked with. I’m too slow and unsure and just don’t seem to be jelling with the system. 

By December I had a talking-to that left me in tears, and I should have cut my losses. Forbes management could have done that also, but I remained. These days, I’d tell my younger self to bail out, get a Eurail Pass and don’t look back. Use your post-college youth on more rewarding activities if you clearly see a mismatch and no future at a job. However, that path would have required accepting that I had failed in the sort of high-status job worthy of a Princeton grad. Given my utter inability to make that mental leap, I couldn’t slink back to Mission, Texas with my tail between my legs, or stay in New York without a job. Instead, I soldiered on the best I could. 

Hovering over the entire operation at 60 Fifth Avenue was the merry and mischievous warlord, Malcolm Forbes. He was an outsized, unique character who garnered massive press coverage. Reporter-researchers dreaded the ritual of the “townhouse luncheon,” when Malcolm and his sales executives would wine and dine a corporate chieftain who probably had been the subject of a major article. Malcolm and the CEO would then sweep into the research department with a copy of the fact-checked manuscript. The CEO would review the manuscript with the trapped reporter-researcher for errors and demand explanations for anything that looked wrong, while Malcolm relished the fun. 

My turn as the townhouse luncheon dessert finally came. A compassionate and alert senior reporter-researcher, Gerry, warned me that Anthony O’Reilly, CEO of H. J. Heinz Co. (the ketchup company), would be the honored guest and peruse a story I checked. O’Reilly’s host that day was actually Malcolm's son Steve Forbes, fellow Princetonian, flat-tax advocate and presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000. O’Reilly looked at the manuscript, didn’t see anything amiss, and moved on. I collapsed in relief at my desk, head resting on my IBM Selectric typewriter, and took the rest of the afternoon off. 

I began to think I was getting a handle on the job. How wrong I was. By the spring, soon after signing the lease for my first apartment at 131 Amity Street in Brooklyn, my manager took me out for a lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Greenwich Village and told me to find another job. She didn't set a specific timeframe for leaving. I thought I was getting a promotion, that's how deluded I was. Then I found myself involved in a libel suit for my involvement in a story where a touchy executive was referred to as “unsavory.” And then my mother had a fatal bone cancer diagnosis. And then I had a tempestuous romance with Joanne, an older woman (as in, she was 30 years old) from the Upper West Side who I met at Congregation Emunath Israel on West 23rd Street. Those tumultuous weeks in 1981 swamped my boat in every possible way but I stayed afloat.

Aghast and ashamed at this reversal of my post-college trajectory, I never could tell recruiters why I wanted to leave the plum job at Forbes. I finally became an editor at a meek trade magazine, Quick Frozen Foods, a monthly published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (HBJ). This job was a better fit for my skillset at the time, and it paid 50 percent more than Forbes. I did solid work there, with a fondness for articles on kosher food regulation in New York and the foodservice department at Sing Sing Prison. 

Two years later, HBJ moved its New York magazines to Cleveland. I decided to stay in town and try freelancing. My career arc plummeted from Princeton to Forbes to Quick Frozen Foods to an unemployment line in downtown Brooklyn in three years. My mother died before I ever held another full-time job.

On the upside, I lived by my wits as a freelancer, which resulted in four years of enjoyable writing at publications like Advertising Age and Whole Life Times, the freedom to finally travel the world, fast times with the invaluable National Writers Union and eventually a job as the East Coast Bureau Chief of Video Store, a magazine then owned by HBJ.  

May 29, 1981: 

Do I want to remain in this type of media work? Reporters, who demand such lofty ethics from others, often ply their trade under the sleaziest of styles. That’s the contradiction of the job. I keep mine high but I’m not often in the touchy situation. I love writing, I find increasing evidence that I do it well, so I can certainly pursue it through other channels than kick-ass reporting. . . . There’s something with my name on it out there and I just need to find it.   

June 26, 1981: 

I’m leaving Forbes. Wednesday I got an offer from HBJ’s QFF. I am bored beyond belief, which means of course it’s time to clean my apartment.

I never read Forbes after I left, although I did buy the March 18, 1990 issue of OutWeek magazine, which appeared just after Malcolm's February 24 death, with the headline "The Secret Gay Life of Malcolm Forbes." The Forbes Building at 60 Fifth Avenue, with its ground-floor museum of toy soldiers and Fabergé eggs, forever loomed over me like Sauron’s Dark Tower in The Lord of the Rings. I imagined Malcolm’s all-seeing eye scouring the sidewalk in search of hapless hobbits like me to torment after townhouse luncheons with muscular orcs. To this day, over 40 years later, I never, ever walk in front of the (former) Forbes building, lest its haunted shadow fall over me. Instead, I cross to the other side of Fifth Avenue to keep the wraiths of memory at bay. 

Forbes magazine has struggled in the digital age, relocated to Jersey City in 2014 and has been tossed from one owner to another. I wish it well in these traumatic times for publishing. Looking back, the pressure-cooker environment of the reporter-researcher department incubated tremendously talented people who went on to careers in journalism, publishing, Wall Street and law. Life in the editorial trenches created durable bonds and "Front Page" style humor. One writer groused after a particularly trying week, "I need a brain D&C." I grasped the humor in that after looking up D&C in a dictionary.

Management kept me on staff far longer than they had any reason to do so, a humane gesture that resulted in me staying in New York rather than relocating. I've been treated much more brutally elsewhere. In 2006, the accounting firm KPMG laid off almost its entire proposal team, including me, in a stunning four-minute listen-only conference call. 

At Forbes, I learned the value of fact-checking and wrote some of my favorite all-time stories for the “Personal Affairs” section in the back of the book. One was about executive portraits. My very last story, “Private Eyes for Inc.’s,” appearing in the July 6, 1981, issue, covered corporate investigators. Malcolm himself wrote “Fascinating story—MF” on a draft copy, which I still have. That moment gave me great satisfaction, tangible proof that sometimes I knew what I was doing.

I stayed in trade magazines until 1995, when Video Store laid me off after eight years. A year later I landed in firmwide communications at Price Waterhouse, the accounting firm now known as PwC. I continue to work in accounting as a proposal writer, a niche that ideally matches my skills and personality. Why do I like proposal writing? Because it involves hard deadlines, high stakes, a respect for facts and a minimum of fluff, clear and persuasive writing and, as I once explained, “I like to win.” 

As unlikely as it would have sounded to me in 1980, I’ve evolved from the anxiety-wracked 20-something fact-checker to the informed, experienced and unflappable (outwardly, anyway) proposal pro who confidently guides teams through the pursuit process and spins out persuasive copy as fast as I can type. AI's got nothing on me. 

My advice for new grads: Dare to dream, but if you fail, learn from the experience, don’t be humiliated by it. Savor the wins, build skills and be flexible. Use The Elements of Style by Strunk and White to learn to spell correctly, use proper grammar and write in a jargon-free and logical style—that will give you an unbeatable advantage over AI and the semi-literate competition in the job market. If Plan A doesn’t work, go to Plan B, don’t recycle Plan A. You'll be working a long time, so if you want to see the world, get that Eurail Pass and start packing.

And if the Peace Corps meets your vibe, then join the Peace Corps and find out what life has in store for you. Let that desire be the road you take. 

Validation from the Boss. 

 

 

Two Microstories and Four Long, Terrible First Sentences of Novels

Here's a collection of short pieces--two microstories and four entries in the Katonah Village Library's Bulwer-Lytton writing contest, in dubious honor of the 19th century English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel Paul Clifford begins with "It was a dark and stormy night." I did my best to equal his awfulness, but I didn't rise to the level of the winning entry at the library. But practice makes perfect. 

Let’s open with two 100-word stories I recently wrote:

Embracing the Man-Bra

After years of hitching up droopy pants, I finally took action beyond tightening my belt: I bought suspenders after seeing them on “Queer Eye.” I chose a snappy black set at Tractor Supply Company. Immediately I noticed a difference as my britches reach my bellybutton and shirts stay tucked in. Eureka! I describe suspenders as the “man bra,” uplifting what an aging body can’t hold up. I’m looking and feeling like a new hombre. Next up: thinner suspenders for the Wall Street vibe and others to wear under summer shirts. Finally I’m enjoying the support I need. Thanks, Man-Bra! 

Demon Rum at Princeton

Given my teetotaler background, my first encounter with booze at Princeton had to be memorable. Guys in my dorm organized a Friday party with trashcan punch, as in screwdrivers. I liked it and kept pounding them down. Soon, my roommates and I were drunkenly dancing in a circle. Next memory: leaning over my bed barfing my guts out. Saturday morning: headaches, nausea. I wobbled to Commons for a restorative brunch. Recovered, I pulled my first all-nighter writing a psychology paper. That weekend introduced me Oscar Wilde’s axiom: “All things in moderation, including moderation.” Alas, I took his advice too well at certain turning points in my life, typically involving demon rum.

 

And now, my entries in the Katonah Library’s Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest. These are terrible very long opening sentences of novels:

The Long, Long Wait on the Train Platform

Sheila shivered under her tastefully knit woolen muffler as she waited at the Katonah Metro-North station, the winter dawn’s icy wind pummeling her like a dinner-deprived Labradoodle, while she peered up the track willing the train’s arrival (“breathe,” she whispered, “Namaste”), since her large macchiato from Dunkin’ Donut had raced through her digestive system like a downtown express and she feverishly imagined the train’s clean, hopefully unoccupied restroom, because she really, really needed to pish.

 Another Day at the Ox Office

Jennifer’s request for “exotic, intense yarn” as a birthday propelled husband Noah on a wild goose chase (not that geese produce yarn) across a secretive network of farms dedicated to exclusive curated yarn offerings, where sophisticated knitting connoisseurs jostled to personally gather raw materials from pampered mammals, genetically bred for peak pelt performance, and that resulted in Noah, sprawled legs akimbo on a musty scratchy woolen blanket, gingerly plucking thick, yard-long hairs from the swollen scrotum of a baffled but visibly delighted musk ox who moo’ed with masculine modalities; for Mr. Musk, it was just another day at the ox office.

 Stugots at the Seder

THAT Passover seder began when the college kids demanded the right to cross out references to Israel in the siddurs and use the term “enslaved future colonizers,” which enraged family patriarch Zaydie, who clutched the siddurs to his bony chest and called the collegians “ungrateful shmucks” in his Chernobyl-via-Miami accent, so in a compromise the collegians snapped their fingers when they disagreed with a passage and that kept the peace until somebody demanded “free range anti-Zionist vegan matzoh” and Zaydie shouted, “You, stugots, go sit in the formal dining room we never use!” (when excited, Zaydie lapsed into Neapolitan dialect he learned when stationed in Italy in the 1950s) so the families could finish the ritual with the search for the hidden matzoh piece called the afikoman, beloved by toddlers but disrupted this time when teens chased the little kids around filming them for social media and one knocked over a bowl of boiling matzoh-ball soup that slightly scalded matriarch Bubbie through her Lululemon cargo joggers, but the doctors at the table applied ice packs so this year’s seder ended with no shrieking trip to the ER, Baruch Ha-Shem.

 Manly Memories at the Dinky

Memories of Princeton University tumbled in Dudley’s memory while he rode the “Dinky” shuttle from Princeton Junction to campus, where he had studied classics, invaluable for his position as senior vice president of Poppy’s investment house, and he mused on manly nude oiled initiates playing “Trees andTrolls” in his highly selective eating club on “The Street,” and his junior semester abroad, spent pursuing lissome European coeds unencumbered by the rigid Protestant neuroses of “imports” who flocked to Old Nassau on weekends, but, alas, now he desperately fished for his Reunions hotel reservation misplaced in his paisley orange and black jacket and matching trousers.

 

Who Was Kate? Who Was Mary Kathryn?

The letter from 1968

I found the note in a stack of family letters. Dated July 15, 1968, the handwritten letter came from my father Mark’s wife Kate, whom he married after he and my mother Shirley divorced in 1961. In elegant writing on stationery with an embossed “W,” Kate wrote to my mother, brother and me:

I hope you are all well and having a good summer. Mark and I are very very proud of your excellent grades Van and Cooper. Shirley we comment over how in each set of pictures they change. Van is certainly growing up fast and Cooper also. We would love to see them. Mark is very busy and both of us delighted to be in NY. With kindest regards and love to Van and Cooper, Kate.

Dad finally visited us for a weekend in Mission, Texas in 1970, our first time to see him in eight years, and he told us about Kate. Cooper and I first met Kate when we visited them in New York for a week in 1972. 

Kate, summer 1975, New York

Now, gazing at this brief letter from 56 years ago, I asked myself: Who was Kate?

I remember Kate from visits in the 1970s and early 1980s. She was slender, elegant, a great cook and always polite with what I describe as a Irish-tinged New York accent. She always existed in the shadow of my father. He combined public charm with private bullying when my brother and I bridled at his unhinged criticism of our Texas upbringing (especially our mother) and balked at his grandiose plans to mold us into refined East Coast preppies.

Dad shared details of Kate’s wide-ranging life: from a family of pioneers of Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, ballerina with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, former nun, proprietress of a ballet school in McAllen, Texas. With all the tension with my father, I couldn’t see Kate as an individual—that motivated this essay, to attempt to imagine her apart from Mark Wallach. She had no formal role in my life, not as my stepmother, aunt or anything other than the woman married to my father. She must have walked an emotional knife's edge between empathy for two small-town teens and her relationship with her devoted husband. What was her life outside of her marriage?

The one time she commented on my father’s bizarre plans for me came in 1975. Dad had arranged for me to lose my virginity to the “physical therapist” of a friend of his. While sorely tempted for my very own “Maggie May” moment, I refused to grant him any say in this part of my life.

Kate offered she had met the woman and thought she was “very nice.” That did not change my mind.

The McAllen dance school,
photo courtesy of Mariessa Anton

Married in McAllen, my father and Kate moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1962, then Manhattan in 1967. In 1977 they left their apartment at 220 E. 63^rd Street in Manhattan for an apartment at 101 Gedney Street in Nyack, New York. They attended my Princeton graduation in 1980, meeting my brother and me in one part of the campus while my mother and other relatives, who drove up from Texas, waited elsewhere. My mother was adamant that she did not want to see them. I last saw Kate in 1986 when I met her and my father for dinner in Astoria, Queens, where I then lived. Photos from that meeting show Kate suffering from Alzheimer’s. She died in 1988. They had been married for 26 years. My father remarried in 1995 and lived in the Gedney Street apartment until his death in 2018. 

Finding the 1968 note, which my late mother saved in papers that I eventually inherited, stirred my interest in Kate. Internet searches went nowhere when I looked for “Mary Katherine Dougherty.” I knew she had operated a ballet studio in McAllen until she and my father left in 1962. Finding nothing about her, I posted a request on a Facebook page on McAllen history for any information people could share. I had no idea what to expect.

To my surprise, I immediately had many gracious responses from women who had been Kate’s dance students from the 1940s to the 1960s at her McAllen studio at 409 N. 12^th Street. No wonder the digital trail went nowhere—I had been misspelling her middle name. They all loved her as a teacher, role model and friend. To them, she was always Mary Kathryn.

The Brownsville girl who became Mary Kathryn Dolina

Equipped with the accurate name, I found many more details. Kate’s picture came into sharper focus, thanks to digitized newspaper stories from 1909 to the 1960s. I found many through the invaluable Portal to Texas History, a project of the University of North Texas. Some findings:

• The marriage license for her parents, William J. Dougherty and Lillian Dougherty (yes, that was her mother's maiden name) was reported in the Brownsville (TX) Herald on July 19, 1909.
• Ancestry.com showed she was born in 1912 and died in 1988. Her father, William John Dougherty, was born in New York City on December 13, 1878 and died in Brownsville on January 26, 1942. Her mother Lillian Sheridan Dougherty was born in 1882 in Brownsville and died in 1952. Kate was their only child.
• eBay has signed ballet publicity photos of her from the early 1930s, taken by New York society photographer Achille Volpe.

The research explored topics that place her in the context of the Rio Grande Valley’s history. The August 4, 1909 wedding article in the Herald had the headline, “Prominent Couple Married.” It gave invaluable details that connected Kate to the turbulent real estate market in the Rio Grande Valley. The story said,

The union of this couple is of general interest in this section. The bride is the daughter of one of the oldest families in Brownsville, her father, the late James Dougherty, having been for years the editor and publisher of the former Brownsville Cosmopolitan, which was afterwards bought by the Herald. For several years Miss Dougherty has taught school at Hidalgo, and it was there that she became acquainted with the man whom she is destined to wed. She is the sister-in-law of John Closner, of Chapin, one of the most prominent men of the Lower Rio Grande Valley.

Dr. Dougherty is the son of Wm. A. C. Dougherty of New York. He attended Manhattan College, Columbia School of Mines, and New York University, taking his medical degree from the former institution. After his graduation, he became instructor in nervous and mental diseases at the New York post graduate college, going from there to the Bicetro in Paris, where he took two years of special work in nervous diseases under Prof. Pierre Marie, the pupil and successor of Charcot. Returning to this country, he began practice in New York, becoming connected with various institutions, among them the Hospital for Incurables [now St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx] and St. Vincent’s, being chief of clinic for nervous and mental diseases at the latter . . . In the latter part of 1906 he came to the Lower Rio Grande Valley to look after some land interests owned by him here, and has remained here since, devoting himself to the development of his land near Hidalgo. During spare moment in Hidalgo Dr. Dougherty has read law, as a result of which he was admitted to the bar at Galveston last October.

That union produced Mary Kathryn Dougherty. The Brownsville Herald of October 14, 1934 published a profile with the title, “Member of Russian Ballet is Former Brownsville Girl.” The article provides an invaluable timeline on her life, worth quoting at length:

Brownsville Herald
Oct. 14, 1934

Mary Kathryn, who is the daughter of Dr. Wm. J. Dougherty, noted neurologist, and Mrs. Dougherty of 132 Locust Hill Lane in Yonkers, N.Y., was born in Brownsville and lived here until she was two years old. She visited here frequently during her childhood and her mother is now renewing old friendships while visiting in the home of her sister, Mrs. John Closner.

Although under 20 [actually, she was 22 based on a 1912 birth], Miss Dougherty has had a remarkable career as an amateur, dancing at many charity and society events. She made her first marked success at 14, when she danced during a notable affair at Madison Square Garden.

Since the start of her professional career she was a member of the Monte Carlo Ballet Russe and rejected an offer to tour with the company this summer in Spain. Recently she appeared for two weeks with the Fokine Ballet at the Lewisohn Stadium in New York City.

Miss Dougherty was given the name Dolina with her admission and will be known professionally as Mary Kathryn Dolina. Only five new members were admitted after rigid tests and Miss Dougherty was the only American accepted. Her unfamiliarity with the Russian language, Miss Dougherty finds, has been offset to marked degree by her splendid command of French. She also has a fair knowledge of Spanish as result of childhood associations.

On June 16, 1935, the Herald reported that Kate was performing in a satirical review in titled “Parade.” Produced by The Theater Guild, it opened in Boston and then moved to New York’s Guild Theatre. The Playbill brochure for Parade lists “Katherine Dougherty” as one of the “Chorus Girls” and “Parade Girls.”

The next story I found in the Herald, Dec. 27, 1942, was her wedding. Her father had died earlier in the year. The article describes her as the “daughter of Mrs. William J. Dougherty, and the late Dr. Dougherty.” She married Albert William Reed, son of Mr. and Mrs. Albert William Reed.” I couldn't find more information about the groom nor any reference to Kate as "Mrs. Reed."

The Mary Kathryn Dougherty Studio of the Dance

What happened with the marriage? When was she a nun? Nothing turned up. The Mercedes (TX) Enterprise of April 26, 1951 ran a story with the headline “Edinburg Orchestra to Present Dances, Violist Tonight.” The text says, “Miss Mary Kathryn Dougherty of McAllen will present a number of her pupils in a program of dancing, and Michael Wilkomirski of Edinburg will present a violin program. Miss Dougherty, formerly of New York, was a member of the Ballet Rouse de Monte Carlo there, and is recognized as a performer and teacher."

The last article I found is from May 10, 1962 in the Mercedes Enterprise, headlined “Benefit Dance Friday Night to Aid Crippled.” It read in part:

The Mary Kathryn Dougherty Studio of the Dance will present an evening entertainment at the McAllen Civic Center Auditorium . . . for the benefit of the Hidalgo County Society for Crippled Children and Adults, Inc. Miss Dougherty for the past seventeen years has maintained her studio in McAllen.

Besides the Ballet Rouse experience, the article said she had been a "Guest Artist" at the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center in New York. I especially noticed the fact that she had operated her McAllen studio for 17 years—that means it opened in 1945. 

From Facebook comments of students from 60 or more years ago, I learned Kate brought a classical rigor and wonderful teaching ability to her dance instruction. She inspired devotion from her students. More than articles, their vivid memories brought the woman they knew as Mary Kathryn to vivid life. Students were heartbroken when Kate closed the studio and moved away in 1962, never, as far as I know, returning to McAllen, where she had such deep roots. One student shared a May 18, 1959 program guide from a performance with me, where Kate outlined her approach:

In presenting myself to instruct my students, it is my aim to stress the educational value of the dance as a means of artistic expression, poise and self-discipline, attributes so essential if we are to have a well balanced personality. Mere gyrations, that unfortunately are frequently referred to as “dancing”, make impossible the attainment of this desirable goal.

Wyleen Wilson King Aalberg recalled: 

I was a student of Mary Katherine and loved her!

As a young girl, I never knew what happened to her. I remember being so excited about dancing starting back up after the summer, and then it didn’t. I was crushed.

The studio was in her home. I remember the wooden dance floor, mirrors on three of the four walls, the pianist, handmade recital costumes that were so beautiful, and recitals at the Woman’s Club and later at the Civic Center.

I remember Mary Katherine tracing our feet on a piece of paper to order our dance shoes.

I remember getting my first toe shoes and Mary Katherine teaching us how to tie the pink ribbons on them.

I remember thinking how Mary Katherine reminded me of the ballerina in my jewelry box, she seemed so delicate and graceful.

One memory especially surprised me, to put it mildly. Harriet Kirsh Pozen wrote,

Mary Katherine was my ballet teacher, and Mark [my father] was my Jewish religious school teacher at Temple Emanuel in McAllen. I still have a book about hieroglyphics that he gave me because I was so engaged with him as my teacher, I still have the book.

She nurtured my love of dance and in many ways feel like I am still a ballerina because of your mother. My posture and the way I carry myself, the way I hold my fingers even in yoga is the way she taught me. It’s beautifully engrained in me.

My mother also loved her and we would visit her from time to time. Mom would say even if you don’t learn to dance you will learn to be a “lady” from her.

I loved our performances and especially the stunning costumes.

This Hebrew School reference was news to me, because I never knew my father taught at McAllen's Temple Emanuel, where my parents were married in 1955. He always treated Judaism as a club to pummel my brother and me with about our shortcomings. Had he stayed connected to us and shared Jewish learning in a positive way while we were growing up, as something meaningful to him, our relationship with him might have been better. 

Reflecting on Kate’s life journey, from Brownsville to Yonkers to New York to European ballet to McAllen and back to New York, I learned about her life force and devotion to dance as a calling. With her education and expressiveness, she could have written a compelling memoir covering everything from Texas land holdings to world-famous ballet companies to serving as a beloved role model for young dancers. Had I known her under other less strained circumstances, we would have had a lot to discuss. She had the kind of intriguing life I wrote about as a journalist.

Still, the research brought more questions to mind:

• What happened with the Dougherty family's extensive land holdings in the Valley?
• What led Kate to leave her dance and ballet career in New York, which seemed to be thriving, for Brownsville?
• How long was she married to Albert William Reed, and how did the marriage end?
• When was Kate a nun?
• Why did Kate close her dance studio in McAllen in 1962 and move with my father to Michigan? She was 50 at the time and, based on comments from students, very popular. She could have taught for years more. 
• Why didn't Kate and my father ever return to the Valley after leaving? Kate had family and social connections there, and my father had two very young sons. My father came back for one weekend in September 1970. What did Kate think about her husband visiting his sons one weekend in 10 years? Were they indifferent to us, or did some other factors come into play? I can't believe that my parents' frosty relationship alone explained for the permanent absence.

Perhaps writing about her life will lead to some answers. The woman I knew as Kate, always enmeshed in volatile family dynamics, now stands on her own as Mary Kathryn. 

But I'll never know either one of them.

The ballerina, New York, early 1930s,
photo courtesy of Mariessa Anton

 

The Grand Funk Brothers Get Closer to Home

I have broad musical tastes: Latin, 50s jazz, Israeli, The Great American Songbook, classical, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. But what concert caused me to drop everything, book vacation time and fly to Jacksonville, Florida in a state of frenzied anticipation? In three words: Grand Funk Railroad.

My brother Cooper, who lives in Florida and shares my fascination with Grand Funk, pitched me on the opportunity to hear the pride of Flint, Michigan. Of course I said yes, yes YES. How could I pass on this bucket-list thrill? In our early teens in Mission, Texas, we heard the power trio’s epochal third album, Closer to Home, and that was it. We were hooked for life on Grand Funk’s pounding, not-very-subtle sound and compelling lyrics. Well, they're compelling when you’re 14 years old, but they do sink in. Live Album, Survival, E Pluribus Funk and We’re an American Band were all on heavy rotation on our turntable at home.

The only downside for a fan: Grand Funk never worked as a teen romance mood enhancer, if you get my drift; nobody slow-danced to Grand Funk at Friday Night Lights post-game dances at the Mission Civic Center. The chicks I liked were more into the Carpenters, Carol King, the Jackson 5 and the Partridge Family (and one really liked the Edgar Winter Group). So I cooled it on Grand Funk to show enthusiasm for Top 40 favorites. That didn’t add any more teen zip to my social life, but at least I learned a lot about the Carpenters.

Besides listening to the group, I kept up with all the Grand Funk gossip. Mostly that involved their disastrous legal battles with evil genius manager Terry Knight, who fancied himself as Grand Funk's equivalent of Elvis's Col. Tom Parker. I remember one headline in Creem or, who knows, maybe Tiger Beat: "The fight to control Grand Funk!"

While Cooper heard Grand Funk in concert before, I never had. The group broke up in 1976 and spun through several reincarnations. Lead singer Mark Farner was in and out of the band as he pursued a solo career, and drummer Don Brewer and bassist Mel Schacher at one point fired Farner. I read about the band but never expected to hear them.

But then Cooper’s call came, and I answered, “Yeah baby!”

Cooper greeted me with Grand Funk t-shirts we’d wear to the concert on a Saturday night. My black shirt accessorized well with black jeans and black hiking shoes, and my well-worn Tractor Supply Company camo hat. We were ready for a road trip!

The Thrasher-Horne Center for the Arts in Orange Park was packed, 1,700 seats almost all filled. We fell into the lower end of the age distribution. I doubt 10 people there were under 40. I called the scene “rock and roll and walkers.” And that’s OK, this was a bonding experience for Baby Boomers who craved the visceral thrill of hearing Grand Funk live. And it’s a fact: Grand Funk is Homer Simpson’s favorite band.

Before the show we posed in front of the stage, with its banner celebrating the 50th anniversary of the release of  "We're An American Band." I recorded an open mic in the lobby to capture my enthusiasm for the moment. We were pleased that drummer Brewer and bassist Schacher were still touring, then disappointed to learn Schacher had been sidelined due to illness. Still, Brewer kept this from being a tribute band. 

The Grand Funk Brothers take the stage!

They mostly played songs I recognized. Cooper remembered the lyrics better than I did, singing along to “Paranoid.” We thrust our fists skyward and joined the serenade. The crowd roared when Brewer, now the Grand Old Man of Grand Funk, waved an American flag and wore an Uncle Sam stovepipe hat. The big finale was, of course, “Closer to Home,” then “American Band.”

Don Brewer goes All-American

Back home in Katonah, I told friends about my experience. Several guys responded with wild enthusiasm; Closer to Home was the first album friend ever bought.

For one night, I was back in 1972, 15 again. Unsure of myself, hormonally addled, I responded to songs like “Heartbreaker” and “I Can Feel Him in the Morning,” with a children's spoken intro with the haunting line "if you're good, you'll live forever, and if you're bad, you'll die when you die." For a teen dealing with a serious crisis of faith, that song meant something.

Hearing Grand Funk struck me with the notion of getting “closer to home.” I remembered my family, my friends, the turmoil of being young in a small town. Maybe we cannot, ultimately, go home again, but with Grand Funk’s musical support I can get closer to home.

Afterward, I wrote haiku poems about the Florida experience. Here’s one of them:

Closer to Home means—

What? I never really know but

I keep wondering

The current incarnation of The American Band. 

In the Time of the (Basement) Flood

Sometimes, timing can shift the shock of life challenges. What can feel like devastation can become an opportunity.

Last week, our area endured pounding rain. I anxiously checked our basement in Katonah for dampness. Wednesday looked normal. Thursday morning I was lugging down the traditional load of laundry when I saw rippling waves shining at the bottom of the stairs. I yelped and stumbled back upstairs. My partner Naomi and I raced down to gauge the extent of flooding. Estimate: 3-4 inches across the whole basement. My look at the storage room where I keep writing examples, research materials, records and books both relieved and shocked me. Many materials were in sturdy plastic bins, records were on a table—but a cardboard box with tax returns and legal papers was a solid soggy mass. Plastic bags with hundreds of pages of printouts, including unpublished novels, were soaked. And my only electronic copies for the novels were waterlogged 3.5 inch memory disks that went out of style in Y2K.

Naomi immediately called John Hobby Jr. Plumbing & Heating, who are old hands at pulling our plumbing nuts out of the fire. I feared they were swamped with calls from flooded homeowners and it could be days before they could come over. But no! Our timing was fantastic. Within 60 minutes a Hobby squad arrived in their distinctive red van. They pumped out the water and replaced the sump pump, which had given up the ghost in the wake of too much rain. Meanwhile, Naomi contacted First Response, to get the drying process started (that’s First Response as in the remediation company for home cleanups, not pregnancy tests). Again, I thought the process would take days. Instead, Vinnie the project manager arrived as the plumbers were leaving.

Vinnie assessed the situation with a practiced eye. The next morning, his crew arrived with industrial-strength dehumidifiers and fans that we moved around the basement from Friday through Tuesday. While I tossed some stuff, I decided to try to dry out tax papers and research materials. Every couple of hours I probed the depths of my wet papers. I saw progress, as I rotated files in front of the roaring equipment. Gradually, materials dried, even if they are permanently crinkled.

But wait, there’s more! A big part of cleanups involve brawn. As fate would have it, Thursday afternoon we had a visit from Naomi’s nephew Ian, who was visiting the area. Ian, you should know, is a 30-something commercial fishing boat and tugboat captain from Alaska (and the brother of remarkable Alaska back-country athlete Ben Americus, who makes terrifying videos of his adventures). Ian arrived to see us at just the time when we could use a strong, rugged Alaskan to move heavy cartons, flatten boxes and make the clean-up process vastly easier. Otherwise, Naomi and I would have struggled to move, flatten and throw out things, given our status as two increasingly creaky baby boomers.

When we told Ian the sump pump broke, he felt our pain. “On a fishing boat we always have multiple sump pumps,” he said. That sounds prudent for a vessel sailing the roiling icy waters off the Bering Strait. 

By Monday my materials were dry enough to leave the basement. First Response picked up their gear on Tuesday. We switched immediately to washing laundry, including every towel we own.

I know the recovery could have been much slower and messier, had the timing not gone our way. If plumbers and remediators weren’t available, if the rain kept coming, if Ian was out wrestling with giant tunas in Alaska. And the opportunity from the flood: the clean-up turbocharged our decluttering efforts. The basement never looked and smelled better!

This afternoon I looked over my mostly dry papers, 20 to 30 years old. I’m trying to smooth them out. This time around I’ll be smart and store them in plastic bins, away from any watery threat. As an obsessive self-chronicler, I’m not going to let something like a basement flood keep me from my materials. There’s still literary gold in those stained, slightly soggy pages. From the grit of the flood comes the essay.