“New day, new week, new year, new decade.” This is what my brain said, as hopefully as it could, as I bounced down the front steps into a withering wind on Monday morning. It was back to school, back to work, back to the subway, and, most terrifying of all, back to the alarm clock and its piercing beep-beeps-beeps in the morning. Back, as they say, to the grind, to the treadmill that keeps us moving forward but doesn’t give us much time to look around or slow down as we do.
Every year I take the two weeks that surround Christmas and New Year’s off, vowing to leave the treadmill and look at a few of the things—movies, DVDs, records, books, art shows, TV shows, restaurants, bars, sports that don’t involve a yellow ball being batted back and forth—that I only have time to glimpse out of the corner of my eye during the previous 50 weeks. Every year I come back to work at the beginning of January a little disappointed at what I was able to see and read and think in my time away. It’s true again today as I try to get re-adjusted to my rightful place in the world, i.e., staring into a computer screen for eight consecutive hours. Did I fail to explore enough while I had the chance? Should I care? Typing those words, I feel like the guy in the song “At Home He’s a Tourist,” by the British band Gang of Four, the chorus of which goes, “He fills his head with culture/He gives himself an ulcer.”
Still, shifting my schedule and opening up eight extra hours a day alters my perceptions considerably. After a few days, my mind leaves its narrow, goal-oriented track and expands to make room for more thoughts, even the useless thoughts that normally come burdened with anxiety when I'm away from work. Here, before the grind sets back in and we get back to talking about a little yellow ball being batted over a net, are a few scenes from my time away.
At the Rink
Bright and early on a snowy December 26, I went to see my 6-year-old nephew play in a hockey tournament along the border between Connecticut and New York State. I knew that the sport had a certain cult-like status in this neck of the woods, which is populated by prep schools that can afford to build full-scale rinks right next to their squash courts. But I was unprepared for how vociferous—how loud—hockey moms and dads can get when their little kids go skidding down the ice after a puck. This was the 6 to 8-year-old division, called the “Mite” league (8 to 10 are the “Squirts”). The older Mites can skate and handle the puck well enough to make the game surprisingly entertaining; you forget you’re watching little kids. That’s especially true of the girls, who mature faster and loom over most of the boys. With their ponytails and pro-style jerseys and helmets, they look like small versions of the enforcers from the sport’s 1970s Slap Shot era—Hansons in training. At first I was startled by the nonstop noise of the parents, but the game’s fast pace and whiff of danger made their intensity understandable. Afterward, watching the grown-ups calm down, lose the red in their faces, and begin to socialize, you could see the game was about them, about their own happiness and excitement and competitiveness and social life, as much as it was about their kids’. And why shouldn't it be?
On the Highway
Next on the agenda was a trip from upstate New York to Pennsylvania. The roads that get you from one to the other, mostly Interstates, gradually lead farther into wooded back country. Slanting off from these roads are rivers and streams that wind lazily through the trees toward nowhere in particular; it’s hard to tell if the water is moving at all. I’d always loved the sight of them as a kid, but I could never have told you exactly why. That feeling came back on this trip at one particular moment: I could see one section of a river at first, then a few seconds later I caught a glimpse of another section of it, in the distance, which had been hidden behind a bend. That glinting, secret second stream of water looked restful, reassuring. Why? It didn’t represent anything eternal in nature, but it was close. I’d say that in my head it represented continuity, the fact that things keep going. There’s something reassuring in that.
Movies Seen
Revolutionary Road
Better, deeper, more satisfyingly harrowing than the reviews made it out to be.
Up in the Air
Less satisfying than its reviews made it out to be; it lurches from one emotional button-push to the next.
Last Year at Marienbad
A 60s French flick that, halfway through, I realized I’d seen before and hadn’t grasped before. The same thing happened this time. In the past, I’ve gone back and watched surreal art movies like this with the DVD's commentary track on. A film critic or professor—or even Jack Nicholson himself in the case of The Passenger—talks over the movie and tries to explain it. It usually works for me; on many occasions I’ve gone from thinking a movie was excruciating nonsense one day to believing it was an all-time classic the next. This time I didn’t have the patience to sit through the whole thing again.
TV Shows Seen
Big Love
Can you watch five hour-long episodes over two days and still not be sure that you like, or even follow, a show? That’s how I feel with HBO’s Big Love. There’s something to it that makes me come back, I’m just not sure what. Maybe it’s not having anything else to do.
House
Little did I know that this beyond-formulaic hospital thriller is almost humiliatingly addictive.
Food Eaten
I may be New York’s last non-foodie, or at least the last man who remains almost entirely clueless about cooking. An example: A couple of years ago I spent a week at a summer house on Fire Island. The first night I was watching everyone else make dinner. A friend asked if I could chop a garlic clove. I had to hang my head and say, “No. I wouldn’t be able to do it right.”
Last week I found something I like to do with food: shuck oysters. Just when you think it’s not going to work, that you’re never going to get the thing open, that you might as well take a hammer to the shell, it opens up. I even found myself reading my first foodie book: The Big Oyster, by Mark Kurlansky, about how New York City grew up with the fish, and then destroyed its local beds with its refuse. Pretty soon I’ll know my Prince Edward Island from my Blue Point oysters. Maybe I’ll learn to chop garlic someday, too.
The Walk of Ignorance
So OK, I learned something about hockey moms, TV, and eating live shell creatures this vacation. But it took a walk through the Lower East Side of Manhattan to remind me that whatever I might know, it will never leave the slightest dent in what I don’t know.
The first stop was the Housing Works, a combination coffee shop/used bookstore that’s the kind of place I normally love to haunt. But I’d never been there; I’d barely even heard of it, and it was only about 15 minutes from my apartment. Next I passed an old bank that had been built by Lower East Side Jews a century ago. I’d learned all about this place, and its significance to the neighborhood, on a walking tour of the city just last summer. Now I’d forgotten all of that history, which had seemed so fascinating at the time; I couldn’t remember one fact about it. On the next block I looked up at a handsome old apartment building. Multiple architectural flourishes lined the windows and the underside of the roof. I tried to think of what these were called—cornices?; uh, gargoyles?—but drew only blanks. Our knowledge of the world is like a thin path through a colossal forest of cluelessness that opens up endlessly on both sides of us.
A Good Epiphany Spoiled
Do you like to listen to the music over the loudspeakers in the grocery store? How about in a discount clothing store? I generally find it soothing, even if the particular song being played is horrible. It was true again at the TJ Maxx in Williamsport, Pa, a few days after Christmas. As I wandered from knitwear to household goods and began to peruse the various $6.99 traveling coffee mugs on display, the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine” started to play. I have scoffed many, many times at this overbearing folk-pop anthem in the past. To my amazement and disgust, I now realized that I liked it—on the shopping-store floor, the voices sounded good, the tune sounded good. The only trouble was that the song’s opening was interrupted by a woman’s nasal voice, which broke in over the store loudspeaker: “Pam, can you come to the register?” she said in a rapid monotone. “Pam, can you come to the register?” While she was speaking, the song was paused.
When it resumed, I tried to put my finger on why it sounded so much better here. This was the my chance to realize something I’d never realized before, the perfect chance for an epiphany. Was it the fact that the human voice can imbue even the most ridiculous words with soul? Then I remembered the rock critic Robert Christgau’s line about hearing the guitar riff from Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded.” He said that the fact that he enjoyed it didn’t mean that the song was any good; it meant that he liked rock and roll too much. Did liking "Closer to Fine" mean that I liked music too much?
I never got to decide. Just as these thoughts were passing through my head, there it was again, that rapid nasal voice:
“Cheryl to layaway. Cheryl to layaway.”
With those words, my 2010 begins.
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I should be back on Wednesday to talk a little tennis.