Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

When I was a child, Christmas Eve was an occasion for our extended Philbin family to gather at my great-grandparents’ place, to meet or reacquaint with relatives we both knew, and hadn’t known we had. There was a huge ham in the kitchen, and at some point a visit from an uncle-Santa (there were a few over the years) in full regalia, with just a whiff of something flammable in his beard.

At some point in the evening it seemed that the only people who were in the room were women and children.

My great-grandparents’ property had a main house, where the festivities were held, and a second house back in the lot where an uncle and his family lived.

One year I realized that there was a very jolly party happening in the back residence, and I snuck back to see what was up. Turned out that the bulk of the male Philbin population was back there playing cards and having the kind of fun that the uncle-Santas, at least momentarily, had to eschew.

I certainly can’t say that these Christmas gatherings were a Philbin Woodstock. I’m certain that there was classism and old grudges roiling just below the surface, but I find it remarkable that we nonetheless came physically together once a year and, in a way, accounted for each other.

How I wish I could walk back in there as an adult and hear the stories that in our diaspora have slipped under gravestones, unheard by those who could have related them.

OK, so here I am down to getting my fashion tips from the WSJ. Seems that Airpods, that terrific invention that saved us from a Luca Brazzi moment if our corded headphones got snagged by a passing scooter dude, are jumping a shark and corded phones are back in with “influencers”.

I never gave up my corded phones despite the potential promise of stumping a panel of actuaries (and because I’m cheap), and here I am back (?) in fashion.

This quote from the article speaks to a brand of body language that has its attractions. Plus, new Airpods $549; corded headphones $19.

“A cord also projects a “you can’t sit with me” factor that some people find appealing. While AirPods subtly blend into your look, making you at least appear available to the outside world, corded headphones wall you off from others. Natalia Christina, director of strategy and brand for the Digital Fairy, said that contributes to their allure. “It gives the air of ‘do not disturb,’” she explained. “So it’s kind of subconsciously related to that grungy aesthetic, where it’s about being moody and having that physical barrier up.””

and so the pretty part of fall, that caramel-apple lie that masks its underlying bitterness, continues its party-line promise of unsustainable Indian summer, with endless shimmering golds and reds and its misleading cohabitation with a stock market approaching flood tide;

until inexorable planetary mechanics perversely drain the light from each day, uninfluenced by legislative tampering, and we huddle, chastened, hoping only that the recession of the light spares our now-singular investment in one more vernal equinox

The hazards of dotage: so, you’re eating something soft (cheese), and you drop a shard on the floor. It’s your floor, so what the hell, you look down and see something the same size and color. You pick it up and pop it in your mouth and it’s … crunchy.

Not like cheese.

Still, it WAS your floor. How bad can it be? You chew more and swallow.

 Early on in the pandemic I saw the virus as aliens in a game of Space Invaders, missiles to be dodged and ducked by scurrying into the street to avoid people walking in my direction, holding my breath for 10 seconds and presenting my mask if someone passed unavoidably close.

With my first shot of vaccine the imagery has shifted.  I now see a burgeoning atmosphere surrounding me, thickening with each passing day.  By the time of my second shot I expect to see bursts of light and showering sparks as hapless viruses plunge into my impervious ether like so much space junk.

Until then I hunker, and watch the dinosaurs for signs of imminent extinction.

Musings on clutter.

I ran across this piece today in the New Yorker by author Ann Patchett. Her best childhood friend’s father had died, and over the course of several weeks she assisted this friend in breaking down his house and distributing the plethora of stuff.

As that task unfolded, she consulted her husband and they decided on a pre-emptive purge of their own house, which had not changed ownership in 26 years.

If you’ve had a similar experience of ridding out a parent’s house after a death or involuntary downsizing, you’re familiar with the drill. It’s an archaeological expedition whose hieroglyphics are a stream of disassociated objects rather than something meticulously chronicled. One thing might trigger a flood of memory, the next an inscrutible puzzlement.

In engaging her own house, Patchett finds cache after cache of champagne flutes, brandy snifters, flatware, mixing bowls, much of which was still in its original packaging. It seems much of it was self-inflicted and not scapegoated by mistargeted wedding or anniversary gifts. It seems, instead, that they were aspirational purchases:

“I had miscalculated the tools of adulthood when I was young, or I had miscalculated the kind of adult I would be. I had taken my cues from Edith Wharton novels and Merchant Ivory films. I had missed the mark on who I would become, but in doing so I had created a record of who I was at the time, a strange kid with strange expectations “

We had a similar experience a couple of years ago when an overachieving toilet was paired with an underperforming side sewer, and our basement was flooded. We’ve lived in our house for 46 years, and you can let your imagination populate this disaster. The basement was chock full of stuff from 1975 on, an uncurated time capsule born of expedience and life’s inexorable velocity.

A team from the insurance company was on hand to remedy, and for each object we were faced with a binary decision: trash it or sanitize and repatriate.

I’ve said elsewhere that this was an exercise in speed-dating my past. As I regarded objects, I felt that in my case they were just souvenirs of a prior self, and not (with the possible exception of a 1980 edition of The Writer’s Market) aspirational. Just life trudging forward.

In the end, I’m mostly happy with the result in the basement, the sight of concrete floor that I hadn’t seen in decades, and I hope to spare our son the horrors of the other two floors. And I think Patchett’s takeaway may seem at first glance morbid, but in fact is liberating:

“I was starting to get rid of my possessions, at least the useless ones, because possessions stood between me and death. They didn’t protect me from death, but they created a barrier in my understanding, like layers of bubble wrap, so that instead of thinking about what was coming and the beauty that was here now I was thinking about the piles of shiny trinkets I’d accumulated. I had begun the journey of digging out.”

Click to engorge

So I’ve been watching Mad Men fitfully for a couple years on Netflix, haven’t pushed into the last half of the last season just yet.

It beguiles and intrigues me because it’s set in the 1955-1965 time when my parents were reaching the apex of their youth and surfing, however timidly, the incredible surge of the post-war economy and culture.  Of course, there’s the costumes and props and maddening telephone technology in Mad Men that resonate, but also wisps of the urgent issues of the day, and how the writers ingeniously filtered them through office culture.

I worked at summer jobs at my dad’s manufacturing plant ( they made glass for General Motors) in the late 60s, and, although we weren’t working in a Manhattan high-rise, we were still firmly attached to the skeleton  that underlay the social and professional fabric of the country, so in so many ways my dad’s office in middle America was just a door or two away from Don Draper’s.

43 years ago, perhaps to the day, (I’ll close this loop in a moment), Mrs. Perils and I returned to our post-college digs in Bowling Green, Ohio, from a breathtaking trip to Seattle.  We took a look in the mirror, and decided that we were going to be those guys that, as Huck Finn said, lit out for the territory.  We hitched a 4×8 U-Haul to my ‘67 Pontiac Tempest and headed for Seattle.

In the Mad Men episode I just watched, Don has just walked out of a meeting in Manhattan and begun driving west, to a future as uncertain as we faced in 1974.  Somewhere around Cleveland, the ghost of Bert Cooper appears in the passenger seat and recites Kerouac: “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”

The question, of course, is existential and not merely geographical.  It was sufficiently laden with emotion in the Mad Men plot, but - and I’m not a crier - I found myself suddenly misty-eyed, a late-summer squall exposing long-forgotten topology.  Where were we going back in October, 1974, taking leave of family we knew would feel our absence and (probably) question our choice?  By all measures, we’ve had a good life, and connected deeply with our families, but at the time it didn’t seem so certain.

I think “Whither goest thou” is a trenchant question for life’s next adventure.  And this car, this formerly shiny car, nonetheless seems up for another cycle around the odometer.