Lotsa Luck!

I heard the first of summer’s cicada bug’s yesterday—incessantly loud buzzing in the trees of a nearby park. For me at least, their melodious vociferousness has this uncanny knack of underscoring summertime’s one-two punch of heat and hush. It’s actually been pretty hot in New York City the last few days, but I’ve experienced a whole lot worse over the course of my life. Growing up on the top floor of a three-family house in the Bronx, without any air conditioning, wasn’t for the faint-hearted, particularly in the days of recurring summer brownouts that did a number on our ice cubes. My father absolutely believed that feeling the deleterious combination of heat and humidity was psychological, not biological. In other words, it was all in our heads. I must say that the paternal side of my family—the Italian side—left very small carbon footprints in their wake. Nothing was wasted, including electricity to run those totally unnecessary—downright sinister—air conditioners.

If the temperatures were in the nineties and the humidity levels unbearable, it mattered little when I was a kid. My contemporaries and I bore much of the discomfort in the great outdoors. It was summer after all, a once-a-year thing to be relished. I don’t want to beat what has become an annual dead horse, but youths outside in the warm climes have gone the way of the VHS tape. They certainly are not playing the venerable street games that my generation played. And we were the Last of the Mohicans, as it were, who played the games little people had played for generations in urban milieus. Of course, as a fifty-something fellow now, who has grown accustomed to the more-or-less serene summertime streets, I’m kind of happy my windows are not being pelted with spaldeens and Wiffle balls, or my paths being intersected by marauding kids playing Round-up, Ringolevio, and Flashlight by night.

I was a big fan of a sitcom called Lotsa Luck! The show aired for one season (1973-74) only and starred Dom DeLuise. It had a great opening theme song that lamented the passage of time—when one “used to buy a pickle” that “only used to cost a nickel.” It emphasized, too, how things had taken a serious turn for the worse in the mid-1970s with its high inflation, increased traffic, and big-time stress and anxiety wherever one turned. Alas, the good old days “could be forgotten,” the song said, because “the world has gotten rotten.” And the cold hard reality was that “every day is getting tougher and it keeps on getting rougher.” The lyrical punch line and only apparent elixir for a world in such a sorry state were ample doses of luck—lotsa luck in fact! “In order to survive just to keep yourself alive,” one needed a heaping helping of it.

Well, more than forty years have passed and, I daresay, the rottenness of the world has reached new and unimaginable heights, making 1973 and 1974 a "Marshmallow World" by comparison. I hesitate to turn on the TV nowadays for fear of encountering the tragedy du jure. And there’s no light that I can see at the end of this tunnel. What exactly will the world be like in another forty years? I take some solace in the fact that my luck will have run out by then. But in the meantime: Lotsa luck!