Jane has a mechanical mind. That’s not right. Her mind is Yankee. She can fix it. My mind says first read the manual . Jane’s mind says reach for it, it won’t bite. Jane’s mind has no fear or little of it; my mind sweats anxiety. In The Longest Day, I believe, Cornelius Ryan (I hope I have his name right) writes of the Allied infantrymen coming up against natural hedgehogs (defensive systems)in the French fields, or wildy overgrown growth made thickly of briar and bushes, impenetrable and a perfect place for the Nazis to install their machine guns and snipers. What to do? An American serviceman welded a blade-cutting contraption of his own device to the front of a tractor, perhaps a tank, that simple chewed up the hedges as if they were being roto-rooted. American ingenuity on the spot.
Similarly Jane is the hedgehog immolater here, and I am the scarecrow in the field, abandoned to phobic space, self-fearful of the inanimate world. And so Jane took my “new” vintage stereo system – collected over one month from eBay, consisting of an old Pioneer turntable from the 70s,80s or 90s combined with a vintage integrated amplifier from the same period (Harman Kardon), adding two new speakers which makes sense because the foam in old speakers can rot out, wired the system, jacked it in and made it playable. For awhile, I thought the turntable wasn’t working. So I jacked in a clock’s wire plug and it did run; the amp was getting power. I left it at that stage until Jane tells me offhandedly that she has the turntable playing. She simply futzed with it and figured out how it worked. I would have emulated Rodin’s “The Thinker” and still remained befuddled.That’s Jane; That’s Matt.
I now know when to step back and let Jane step forward, for is quite handy. I surrender in those areas I know I am befuddled. I am very good at strategizing but I leave the field tactics to Jane. I see the world panoramically, in vista-vision; my sensibllities are global, macro, not micro; I relish the overall picture, the big picture, and I feel inept in the alleyways behind the housing project. I see all this and that, as this and that; particulars are annoying to me unless they are particularly intriguing, worth my concern and interest. Jane is out of this paragraph now because she can account for herself. When I practiced as a therapist, I tried to get the central organizing dynamic of the client, the total gestalt, the clothesline strung out between the poles so that interventions or interpretations that I might give would be integrated by the client, be true to who he or she was — that they would adhere and belong to the self-image he had of himself. I was involved with the whole person, details came last, unless critical or consequential.
I puchased Sennheiser ear phones. Jane can now listen to the violin records privately if she so chooses, although upstairs I enjoy the music on the vintage system as she goes about cooking, et al. She finds it pleasing and so do I. I feel there is an enjoyment in that the system is inherently imperfect, scratches, pops, static flares as opposed to the perfection of CDs. How we often buy profoundly into present day change concocted for us by the hidden persuaders, that old term coined by Vance Packard in the 50s. We are subliminally betrayed by the empties we are surrounded by in this “culture.” The serendipitous surprise has been the quality of records that are at least 30 years old, often near mint or mint. Sometimes they are sealed (and what fun that is to break into something that has stood the test of time for decades, new and unused). When I go to remove the shrink wrap and handle the record itself and its sleeve, I can imperceptibly, for certain records, smell the must from aging, although the record plays beautifully and imperfectly!
I’ve purchased classical, rock and folk records off Ebay, sometimes in job lots, sometimes singularly. I thought back to the70s and 80s and ordered the Fifth Dimension, Judy Collins, Tracy Nelson, Simon and Garfunkel, remembrances of things past. Classically, for Jane, violinists — Stern, Kreisler, Heifetz, Sonnenberg; symphonic music by Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy, Ravel. all making me think of the early college course I took in music appreciation in which the instructor shared his love for the music he played. In those days he had a turntable and a supply of records which he played. Imagine? And how wondrously tactile and very feeling, it seemed to my 18-year-old eyes, as he caressed the records with affection. Records have a precious appeal, it seems to me, for they are handled in a very specific way, cared for with diligence, and their album covers are an art genre all by themselves. Name a cd in which you can read the lyrics with ease. Records were always stored on their sides, never in heaps. I recall how the titles and numbers of the records were on the spine and how we would go to the Schwann catalog (Was that its name? So long ago) to look up all of Sinatra or Sibelius. In 1958 I had a summer job in S.J.Klein’s in Hempstead which my father got for me. I worked in the record department and the manager was a Sinatra fan and that’s what he played all day long. It is a decent memory of an age long ago in a faraway place in my mind.
It is all a big circle, is it not? We return to the magic of youth, but I believe that we were unaware of the magic at that time. We turn it into magic after we age, for it is a kind of tenderness we bring to our younger years as if we are imposing a kind of sweet order to the world which at that time was fraught with as much ancxety as we have today. To reinvigorate that which is vintage in my heart and soul, in my being, only serves as a way of being kind and gentle to the youth and the playthings, interests and concerns, I had so long, long ago. After all, at 70 I can cradle my life’s experience, at all the different ages. Yes, cradle it, for I might as well as no one else will ever have this soft and gracious chance.
Make Merry
I learned years ago from a gifted psychotherapist friend that one should make “merry.” I worked as a therapist in his counseling center in the early 90s. Occasionally I was informed that the staff would have a get together, the usually drinks, usual snacks and the usual suspects. When I asked what was the occasion, I was met with a shrug or what need is there to ask, just go with it, a remnant of the 60s. In fact, Ben did this for the entire staff for no reason other than to make merry, which I cherish till this day, a celebration of blood running through one’s system and that I haven’t croaked as yet. As I grow older, I choose to make merry more often, given what psychological and monetary change is in my pocket.
In my last blog, “Acoustic Research, Pun Intended,” I more subtly applied the same insight to acquiring a vintage stereo system. As I waited for the amplifier, I bought some records off EBay; while that was going on I ordered a vintage Pioneer turntable and while all this was going on I bought new speakers from Amazon. It is the reaching out for, the taking in, the feeling of your being mercury spilled to the floor, merging into nook and cranny which self actualizes me — and you? Do you wait until life macerates you or do you venture out with spear from the primeval cave? Have hope — all these are learnable behaviors. Our culture makes us constipated with the hard suppository of bullshit of what and what not we can do. Think diarrhea and have a better existence. Nothing like an anal metaphor to get you to move, no pun intended.
Of late I have chosen to make merry by fantasizing a dream I may never obtain as part and parcel of my merriment: I want to move to Costa Rica. Oh, any reasonable Latin American country will do. I am finding out more about CR but CR doesn’t drive me so much as the merriment of trying to get a little retirement home in this country — it could be Belize, Panama, maybe Puerto Rico, Ecuador. et al. It smacks of the impossible dream but I am not into self-torture, unless you call Jewish anxiety such an experience. The impossible dream may very well become possible. I remember an anecdote I came up with as a therapist. It was for clients who had tunnel vison or were stuck or could not conceive of other choices or options in their lives; they were popsicles, frozen to their sticks. I would ask them to imagine standing on the shore and looking out upon the waves, very calming as it is. I’d then ask them to tell me what they made of the waves reaching the beach. Some of them were too literal, or self-blind. At last I would end the struggle and tell them that waves spit deep into the beach sands, others never arrive, some are middling and that if you looked across the span of the beach and waters coming in there was a vast variety of intakes here and there, of differing dimensions.
Sometimes I had to bring all this together. I’d tell them that this paralleled life’s choices. That no one wave comes across the shore at the same rate, the same dimension; to wit, when making breakfast one doesn’t wait until the coffee brews, one makes toast, one gets the cup out, one cracks the eggs for the omelet. The point of the anecdote is to help them act, to choose, to do other things until their ship comes in. It is very much like making merry. I’ll read about CR, google sites on CR, which I have done; contact real estate agents; Visa requirements; taxes for ex-pats if any, an endless array of things to do rather than waiting for CR to come into shore and dock itself. In the stirring up, in the arousing of feelings, we can truly make it happen. I did this more than 20 years ago when I came home to Rochelle and told her that I would go nuts if I didn’t have something else in my life as a teacher, some respite, some place away from the maddening crowd and the collective stupidities and inanities of schools. Withihn two years I owned property in upstate Canaan and build a little house — and the man who made that happen was Ben. It was all an act of serendipity — he came to me one night in my office and asked if I was serious about a country house. I said yes! He said that he owned land upstate and if I wanted come take a look. And so Ben’s merriment made my merriment come true.. Before that as a family we took small trips to New jersey, upstate New York to scout out possibilities, much like making that breakfast — no frozen moments for me. And so CR is on my mind. Sharing it with Jane has only led to a mutual dream, a mutual desire and mutual risk taking; I don’t have much gelt in the bank, but somehow I’ll make it happen. Of course, we have a small issue of mortality here. I don’t want to crack coconuts by backing up on them with my Mr. Mobility chair.
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Posted in Commentary, Culture, Reminiscence