Why Nothing Matters…It Really Does

What follows is an essay written for some online concern. As the author of Seinfeld FAQ, I was asked to delve into the subject of nothing...and I did.

It’s been eighteen years since the last episode of Seinfeld—“The Finale”—aired in prime-time. Since then, the iconic sitcom has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that nothing matters and, too, that nothing lasts forever.

Ironically, Seinfeld’s creators, Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, never, ever promoted the notion that their trailblazing sitcom was about nothing—on the contrary as a matter of fact. David and Seinfeld admit to having been absolutely flabbergasted that a joke—a line from the mouth of George Costanza—became a mega-hit with the fan base. The “show about nothing” aside in “The Pitch” assumed a life of its own and became ingrained in the popular culture. It also established a remarkable staying power as the simplest way to describe what Seinfeld and the off-the-wall antics of Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer were all about.

While the show was very obviously about something—a whole lot of something—Seinfeld’s distinctive nothing aura is precisely why it has legs. Sure, in the eyes of some, it is hopelessly dated—a ‘90s thing they just can’t get past. After all, Seinfeld was largely of a time before the Internet, smart phones, and GPS technology. It was a pre-Netflix age when individuals actually patronized—in the flesh—brick-and-mortar video stores to rent movies on clumsy VHS tapes. And God help the poor sap who forgot to rewind one before returning it—like the hapless George, who had rented Rochelle, Rochelle in “The Smelly Car.” For the younger generations, videotapes, phone booths, and Rolodexes are the sole province of museums and, of course, nostalgic baby boomers’ Facebook memes.

Time marches on with the inevitable technological advances and changes in everything from sartorial tastes to hairstyles to societal mores. The only constant with the passage of time is nothing. And better than any sitcom before or after it, Seinfeld’s savvy writers understood this. In wading through the daily grind—in engaging in the mundane minutia that is part and parcel of everyday living—human behavior invariably runs true to form and hasn’t really changed all that much over the centuries. Shakespeare is timeless because The Bard of Avon was keenly cognizant of the potent and enduring force of nothingness. He knew that nothing mattered. It really did. Some four centuries later—as a committed observer of the human condition—Jerry Seinfeld followed in the man’s not inconsiderable footsteps.

There were low-talkers and close-talkers in Shakespeare’s day. Neurotic, nihilistic men and women have long been part and parcel of “man’s inhumanity to man.” George once so eloquently described what is undeniably an unenviable task—for anyone, anywhere, and at any point in history. “I hate asking for change,” he said. “They always make a face. It’s like asking them to donate a kidney.” The man who ran the mercantile store in Dodge City, circa 1870, no doubt had a similar reaction when asked to make change. A nothing snapshot in the humdrum moment—perhaps—but something much larger in the grand scheme of things.

Once upon a time in the sixth grade at St. John’s parochial grammar school in the Bronx’s Kingsbridge, classmates and I discoursed on—of all things—the subject of nothing. We were twelve years old and this is what passed for philosophical discussion. We had long been inculcated in our school—and in church—that we came from nothing and would one day return to nothing. So, naturally, some of us couldn’t help but wonder: “What would nothing look like?” Fast forward four decades and I think I know the answer. It would look a lot like Seinfeld because I, for one, think of the show very often as I make my appointed rounds. I experience Seinfeld moments—nothing moments—time and again, so they really must mean something. Nothing matters, I’m certain of that much.

Human to Human

I had a curious close encounter this morning. For one brief shining moment, I thought I was running errands in Dickensian London and not tony Riverdale in the Bronx. My peripheral vision observed an individual approach a Hispanic man, who was sitting alone on a park bench with only his iPhone as company. I heard him say, “Excuse me, Señor, can I have a word with you?” The man told him in imperfect English, but in no uncertain terms, to make like a tree and leave. “I’m not trying to sell you something,” he said to no avail.

Waiting nearby for a light to turn green—and fast—I realized that one man’s courage to kiss off an unwanted intruder was another man’s potential albatross. Mine, I feared, in this instance. Purposely, I hadn’t even glanced over at this person, who was looking for a word. Keeping eye contact to a minimum in the hopes of keeping any contact to a minimum—or better yet, none at all—was what I had in mind.

The best laid plans of mice and men. After getting the brush-off, said individual looked around and saw only one person in taking distance—me. “Mind if I talk to you—human to human?” he asked as he came up alongside me. I didn’t say yes and I didn’t say no, which to him meant yes. When I got a fair glimpse at my fellow human, I was surprised to see how young he was. He appeared to be teenager, or maybe a little older than that—but I doubt it. As a formerly young person, I find divining people’s ages increasingly problematic with the passage of time. Some forty year olds look like they’re collecting Social Security; and some seventy year olds could pass for fifty-somethings. But this was a kid...or so it seemed to me.

Anyway, this young fellow, whatever his age, began our human-to-human talk by decrying the state of the economy and how tough it was to find work. I couldn’t argue with him on that score. He then proceeded to tell the tale of his having to buy a new jacket to go on job interviews—the one, in fact, that he was wearing, which cost $65. He told me, too, that he had gotten a haircut, so as to look his best while job hunting. The problem was that he was now broke, and he wondered whether he should return the $65 jacket and go on interviews with his old, ratty coat and, of course, school transcripts showing that he was qualified for a job, despite looking like Oliver Twist.

At one point he said, “Sixty-five dollars may sound like a lot of money to you,” which momentarily confused me. A more effective argument might have been: “Sixty-five dollars may not sound like a lot of money to you…but to me…it is.” Our little chat largely occurred as we crossed a very busy street. My fellow human being never delivered the punch line I thought was coming. Brother can you spare an inflation-adjusted dime. I’ll sell you my $65 jacket for $30—a bargain if ever there was one. He seemed, though, to sincerely want an answer as to whether or not he should return his $65 jacket. I believe that I was spared further discussion with this young man when he found another ear—at a bus stop—in our path. My parting words to him were: “Good luck.” And he replied, “You see: Even you don’t know what to do.”

This parting salvo, in particular, disturbed me on multiple levels. After all, this kid was in a bad way no matter how you slice it. Drugs…possibly. Out of work…definitely. Family…where were they? Of course, I could have been on Candid Camera or Punk’d. Har har hardy har har. That’s really funny: Should I return my $65 jacket—or keep it even though I’m broke—and take my chances with my rags and fair to middling school grades. Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. However, I don't know the truth in this case, which is probably for the best.

(Photo from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Good and Evel

Recently, I encountered a ghost from my past festooned in a garish leather jumpsuit. Actually, it was by pure chance that I unearthed the memory of this individual—someone whom I hadn’t thought about in a very long time. And when I was a callow youth back in the colorful 1970s, he was big—really big.

The man’s occupation was daredevil. He liked jumping over things—usually while riding his motorcycle but, occasionally, utilizing other forms of transportation, like a steam-powered rocket. Dean Martin roasted the guy—the ultimate evidence back then that he was a somebody. Robert Knievel, aka Evel Knievel, was his name and he’s in the Guinness Book of World Records for having cumulatively broken more bones than anybody else…and lived to tell. Evel Knievel is no longer among the living, but his iconic status is eternal.

Evel Knievel impacted our lives. I remember this affable kid named Eddie from the old neighborhood, who wasn’t, in retrospect, the brightest bulb in the chandelier. Eddie was coaxed by his  friends, who regularly made sport of him, into performing an Evel Knievel stunt on his old Sting-Ray bicycle—with the banana seat. The agreeable, always-game, and stupidly fearless Eddie rode his bicycle up a wooden plank into the air, which enabled him to hop a short wall. What goes up six feet, though, must come down six feet—it's the law of physics—and down Eddie came. He lost control of his bicycle on the concrete grounds and crashed into a garage.

I witnessed this local Evel Knievel moment, which had been advertised—date and time—by word of mouth. And like Arthur Fonzarelli, aka the “Fonz,” who jumped the shark on Happy Days, it didn’t quite end on a high note. At least the Fonz made it over the man-eating white shark, which was his goal. Eddie’s goal amounted to  just doing it—come what may. Mission accomplished, He hurt himself—just like Evel and the Fonz—but lived to tell and ride another day.

Big Ben: the Bell Tolls for Thee

While growing up in Kingsbridge in the 1970s, independent pharmacies and pharmacists ruled the roost—the Bronx Prescription Center, Stuart’s, and this hole in the wall storefront run by a man named Benjamin Something or the Other. Actually, we called him Benjamin "Decker," which may or may not have been his real name. Probably not but pretty close. I wish I could remember the actual name of the pharmacy, but I don’t.

I do remember Benjamin, however. He was a cadaverous figure—picture William Hickey in Prizzi’s Honor. Old Ben was a bona fide eccentric and more than a bit strange. For some reason, my younger brother and I bought candy from him for a period of time. With so many more traditional alternatives in the area, I think I know why. We were somehow drawn to oddball characters and off-Broadway theater. We were fascinated with this unconventional, peculiar-looking neighborhood pharmacist—the master of his little shop that not only filled prescriptions but sold everything from toiletries to shampoos to hair brushes. I only wish I had snapped a picture of this charismatic geezer—this independent medicine man—from an era when the little guy still counted.

I distinctly remember tins of the sore throat lozenges, Sucrets, on a rack in front of Benjamin’s unusual glass mirror-prism countertop. How long would that last today? But it was the larger than life man himself, festooned in his sky blue pharmacist smock, that made the drug store worth visiting. When the jingling bells attached to his front door sounded, alerting the proprietor he had a potentially paying customer on the premises, Big Ben would emerge from the recesses of his apothecary. He was a certified Notary Public, too. He notarized my $1,500 student loan for Manhattan College—from the Washington Heights Federal Bank just next door to him—which covered about half of my year’s tuition. Notarizing the document with an expired ink stamp, and altering the expiration date with the stroke of a pen, the wizened pharmacist said to me, as I signed the document in his presence, “Singing your life away, eh?”

I truly miss Benjamin Decker—or whatever his real name was—in this age of ever-encroaching big chain pharmacies (and big everything else). Little guy pharmacy businesses, like Big Ben’s on W231st Street in the Bronx, are dinosaurs. I suppose the bitter pill would be easier to swallow if the big pharmacies were actually bigger and better—bargains—but they’re not. Sure, they carry everything—but not really everything—and can pay the exorbitant rents around town, but it's the Decker personal touch that is sorely missed.

In the Windy Old Weather

It was cold and windy in these parts yesterday. And I can honestly say that excessive wind speeds make walking with a prosthetic knee a little dicey. Nevertheless, I needed the exercise and concluded by early afternoon the worst of the winds had come and gone. The furious rainstorm of the night before—featuring thunderclaps and a symphony of overturned garbage cans—was replaced by incredibly bright blue skies and that ultra-sharp sunlight unique to springtime.

So, I hit the road with every intention of turning back if the wind beneath my wings proved more than I could handle. There were occasional gusts of import along the way, but I opted to soldier on and venture to Van Cortlandt Park about a half-mile away. While in the park, I rested for a spell on a bench—one that furnished me with a bird’s eye view of the elevated W242nd Street subway station. This is the first or last stop—depending on which direction you are headed—of the Number 1 “Broadway Local” line. Day and night, the trains come and go—and come and go again—patiently waiting their turns to dock. There’s lots of loud horn blowing and nails-on-a-chalkboard screeching, too, as the trains slow up and switch tracks. What goes around comes around, I guess, because I enjoyed viewing this same spectacle as a boy. But that was then, this is now, and the verb “enjoy” is relative.

Sitting on a park bench with a trusty cane at my side—and concerned that I might get blown down on my return trip—was not, it's fair to say, on my youthful radar. In fact, the exact spot where I sat at the southern tail of the sprawling park was—in my younger days—an asphalt softball field. Like so much of the park and indeed the city at large in the 1970s, it was not properly maintained. The asphalt was a sorry mess with weeds sprouting up from home plate to centerfield; first base to third base. It was not a wise idea to attempt a Ron Swoboda-in-the-1969-World Series diving catch there—let’s put it that way. The combination of cracked asphalt and broken glass beer and soda bottles were a certain ticket to the emergency room.

The Internet is rife with images of New York City in the dirty and dangerous 1970s. The stainless steel subway cars that I cast my eyes upon yesterday were sans graffiti and underground tunnel grime. Emblematic of the city’s precipitous decline, they were covered in the stuff forty years ago, not to mention inefficient and crime laden. I witnessed an armed robbery on the Number 1 train in 1978. And in the old neighborhood, home burglaries and street muggings were more commonplace than today.

It would seem then the logical conclusion to draw is that things are a whole lot better today when compared with the awful 1970s. Yes, I’m happy to ride clean, generally safer, and definitely more efficient subway trains. The park I visited yesterday is without question a visually more appealing place in 2016 than it was in, say, 1976. But what individuals who didn’t grow up in New York in the 1970s can’t possibly understand is that—for all its well-documented problems and assorted blight—it was for the most part a great place to be a teenager. Some neighborhoods were bona fide war zones, but most were alive—believe it or not—with neighbors whom you actually knew. That sense of community is largely lost in this sterile age of gentrification—everything is so damn expensive—and obeisance to devices. I was among the last generation to play the old city street games like box ball and stoop ball. People bought homes in the old neighborhood as foremost places to live—often for their extended families—and only secondly as investments. There are countless absentee owners now who look upon their properties as ATM machines in perpetuity. They rent out apartments to a revolving door of tenants who pay top dollar for the honor and don’t care a whit where they call home. And it shows! The 1970s in New York had character and characters—lots of them—and is sorely missed. Cleaning the city up was a necessity, but apparently we threw out the baby with the bath water.

(Photos two and three from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Death Never Takes a Holiday Anymore

Actress Patty Duke died today; actor James Noble, yesterday, at ninety-four. Courtesy of trending Facebook obits only hours ago, I learned of their respective passings—such is life in 2016. It was indisputably a simpler time when must-see TV for me was Benson (1979-1986), a network sitcom that starred the melodiously named Robert Guillaume as the equally melodiously named Benson DuBois and the aforementioned Noble, who played the dimwitted but unfailingly affable Governor Eugene Xavier Gatling in the series. Happily still among the living, Guillaume is eighty-eight.

What I would really like to know is how so many of the men and women who graced the small screen of my youth grew so old—so really, really old? Joe Garagiola, who died at ninety this past week, was ubiquitous during my younger days—an always-agreeable presence teamed with the likes of the late Curt Gowdy and now eighty-year-old, long-retired Tony Kubek—on NBC’s weekly and postseason Major League Baseball games. But that was hardly the Garagiola be-all and end-all. I recall tuning into an eclectic smorgasbord hosted by the man—everything from a game show called Sale of the Century to the Today show to the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade.  

Earl Hamner, Jr. also passed away this week. He was ninety-two. Apparently, you’re nobody if you don’t live to ninety nowadays. I religiously watched his baby, The Waltons, downstairs with my grandmother and aunt in what was, seemingly, the last chapter in the extended family era. For some reason, Hamner’s voice-over narrations at the beginning and ending of each episode never failed to amuse my younger brother and me. In fact, more than forty years later, I can still recall some of the lines that we would parrot in an embellished Hamner-tone, such as: “Those were not the last mistakes Jim-Bob and I were to make, but we were truly ahead of the game. Our parents gave us decent rules to live by…yada...yada...yada.” Our teenage whimsy would sometimes have us refer to Jim-Bob as “Jim Boob.” Being from the Bronx, Hamner’s Virginia accent and singular intonations sounded very, very foreign to us.

Actor Joe Santos died this month, too. He was only eighty-four. The man played Dennis Becker on The Rockford Files, one of my all-time favorite TV shows. Who’s left from the cast? The seventy-six-year-old Stuart Margolin, Angel, that’s who. It’s been a rough month indeed—Frank Sinatra, Jr., Gary Shandling, and Mother Angelica have all breathed their last. Mother Angelica, founder of the EWTN cable channel, falls into the category of: “I thought she already met her maker.” As I encounter a never-ending story of death notices, this phenomenon is happening more and more to me. I guess when I read about some serious illness or major health setback, like a stroke, my brain reasons the afflicted individual is for all intents and purposes dead.

All I can say is that when I was watching Joe Garagiola in his camel trench coat in front of Macy’s more than forty years ago—his breath visible in the Thanksgiving morning chill—I was not remotely into what was trending vis-à-vis folks going on their vacations with God. (An elderly neighbor of mine coined that catchy phrase. She said at the time she was "not yet ready to go on her“vacation with God.” She has since has gone on that permanent  vacation.) I kind of prefer the days when death took a holiday—from my perspective at least. 

Life and the Jar of Peanut Butter

This year marks the thirty-sixth anniversary of my graduation from high school. Putting this number in some larger perspective is kind of weird—even a little bit disturbing—because I turned eighteen the year I graduated. And, lo and behold, I have subsequently lived eighteen more years and then another eighteen years after that. The sum total of my entire existence in 1980, which seemed to have covered a lot of ground at the time, was a mere drop in the bucket.

With the obvious accelerating passage of time, I can’t help but reflect on all that was and how I arrived at the present. I will say that a handful of things in my life have remained pretty constant through the years, like my preferred breakfast: peanut butter on toast with coffee. Growing up in the Bronx with an extended family—three generations under one roof—brought peanut butter and coffee, too, into my life at an early age. If we so desired, coffee was served to us at seven- and eight years old. Maybe it was an Italian thing or just the simpler times—I don’t know. What I do know is that my grandmother—a culinary wizard whose likes I will never see again—always kept a big glass jar of Skippy peanut butter on the premises for her grandsons. She, though, never once sampled the stuff. There was something about “peanuts bud,” as she pronounced it in her thick Italian accent, which absolutely repulsed her.

I remember finding a mini-jar of Skippy peanut butter in my Christmas stocking one year—glass again with an aluminum top. And not one of those jars ever ended up in the trash. They were repurposed time and again in an age before recycling; in an age of peanut butter. My family used to get a circular loaf of Italian bread delivered daily—in the 1960s and 1970s—from a nearby wholesale bakery called Willow Sunny. Imagine having a fresh slice of bakery bread slathered with peanut butter every morning for breakfast. My grandmother cut the bread like she was playing a violin—a true maestro—knife slicing across toward her body.

Fast forward a few years to an earth-shattering discovery of mine. I learned there was more to peanut butter than Skippy. There was Peter Pan, Superman, Smuckers, and the best of them all, I concluded—Jif.  Naturally, I expressed my newfound opinion to all who would listen that Jif tasted a whole lot better than Skippy. A certain family elder—undeviating in her worldview then as well as now—sniffed, “You just want to be different.” Granted, kids want to be recognized as unique individuals and I was no different. There’s that word again. But the fact remains that I did—believe it or not—prefer Jif to Skippy. I still do as a matter of fact. The proof is in the plastic jar of Jif that I pluck out of the cupboard at breakfast time all these years later. I guess I was really different after all.

Bye Bye Bakery

This past Sunday marked the final day of operation for a bakery that had been in business for sixty-one years. It was located in the Bronx neighborhood Riverdale, which is not too far from where I call home. The bakery was something of an institution—a mom-and-pop business that seemed like it would always be there. The reason for the shuttering of its doors: exorbitant rent that was too high for a bakery—even a popular one—to pay and realize a profit. A longstanding area fish store right next-door to the bakery closed earlier this year for the very same reason. Both businesses were dealing with a “fairer,” less greedy landlord—it has been reported—than the notorious conglomerate that owns a wealth of commercial property in this rather upscale neighborhood in New York City.

Having run out many mom-and-pops, that aforementioned notorious landlord’s “Store for Rent” signs are ubiquitous in windows, with many of the storefront’s remaining empty for years. I guess it pays—in some instances—to raise rents beyond what individuals can afford. I guess it pays—in some instances—to keep the spaces unoccupied, too. Now that doesn’t sound like very good public policy to me. And it is certainly a recipe for destroying the heart and soul—the uniqueness and diversity—of neighborhoods. But then that’s why landlords are so civic-minded and contribute in a big way to the politicians who make our laws.

The times are very definitely changing. And it’s not only the ridiculous rents. In the case of a neighborhood bakery, it’s harder to compete now for a whole host of reasons. When I was a kid, supermarkets didn’t have bakeries on the premises. We weren’t traveling to Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. Other small businesses are competing with the Internet and the likes of Wal-Mart and Target. Ten and twenty years ago, it would have been inconceivable that tony Riverdale would have a Subway, Starbucks, and Dunkin’ Donuts a hop, skip, and a jump from one another. But such is life, I guess—ever evolving and ever devolving.

Facebook Folks Say the Darndest Things

On a pleasant April afternoon almost three decades ago, I sat in front of my bedroom television set watching my beloved New York Mets on WOR-TV, Channel 9. The Mets were playing their chief rival at the time, the Cardinals, at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. And at some point during that spirited game of baseball, Mets’ catcher Barry Lyons found himself chasing a foul ball into the opposing team’s dugout. While in pursuit, the burly Lyons crashed like a ton of bricks into John Tudor, the ace of the Card’s staff, who was not—interestingly enough—pitching that day. When the Met’s second-string catcher unexpectedly slammed into him, Tudor was merely chilling out—resting between starts. He suffered a pretty serious injury that day—a broken leg, if memory serves. In the heat of the moment, my immediate reaction to this turn of events was less than sportsmanlike. I viewed the injury as a boon for my team—period and end of story. You know: All’s fair in love, war, and baseball.

However, after giving the matter some thought, I felt somewhat chagrined. I concluded then and there that deriving pleasure from another human being’s misfortune—generally speaking—fosters bad karma. Fast forward to the present and this thing called Facebook—Bad Karma City. 

Seriously, what is life coming to? When I got wind of the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia this past week, the first thing that popped into my head was the vitriol  I would most assuredly encounter when I next logged on to Facebook—friends of friends of friends caught up in celebrating a man’s death and saying all kinds of nasty things. I don’t wish death upon men and women with whom I disagree politically. That’s a recipe for some serious bad karma in my book. Let the dead rest in peace—for at least a few days. But now there’s a never-ending story—every day and always—of unadulterated insanity that knows no boundaries. And the entire political spectrum of peeps is equally culpable. The rage against the machine, as well as the rage against those raging against the machine, is a 24/7/365 thing and, if you ask me, rather unbecoming—it’s even scary on occasion.

 

It’s quite a spectacle watching Facebook friends—who are sometimes actually friends in real life—brutally attacking one another over political personages and the issues of the day. Is it worth torpedoing friendships over such things?  Real friends: definitely not; Facebook friends: perhaps. I fear it’s going to be a very, very long year; a very, very long year after that; and very, very long one after that one, too. And politicians will come and go—Supreme Court justices as well. But the fury, foolish memes, and recurring hysteria—it would appear—are eternal now, just like death and taxes.

January Blues

In the fledgling days of January 1994, a wannabe “motivational shaper” of young men and women—a slick, narcissistic retail store manager, actually—crudely produced an employee “handbook,” which he dubbed: “1994: A New Year, A New Focus,” It was passed out to his less than enthusiastic underlings. The thing amounted to yet another New Year’s series of resolutions to do better and be better on a whole host of fronts—yada...yada...yada. But these resolutions were for a workforce, chronicling what exactly was expected of them along, of course, with explanations why doing more for less would simultaneously build character and make the overall job experience more rewarding. While early January 1994 was, indisputably, a new year, the desired new focus, I can assure you, didn’t come to pass. In fact, whatever new there was about the 1994 focus was a whole lot worse than anything that preceded it!

From my perspective at least, the first couple of weeks in January have invariably been unpleasant—starkly so. As a boy, this stretch of time sealed Christmas’s coffin tight. All the preparation and anticipation for the holiday vanquished in one fell swoop! And the sour icing on the cake was that it was back to the always-dreaded school after a typically event- and fun-filled Christmas vacation—in the dead of winter no less—with very little to look forward to on the upcoming calendar. Trudging off to school in the New Year’s morning cold was nightmarish and a compelling reminder that all good things come with a price—and, too, come to an end. All that was left in early January was to pray for snow.

While Christmastime to me is now a mere shadow of its former self—my youthful exuberance irretrievably lost in the past—I still experience the January blues. On Christmas Eve 2015, the temperature here in New York City set a record: seventy-three. I ran an errand at four o’clock that afternoon without wearing a jacket. My trusty mailman, Yu, delivered the Christmas Eve mail in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. He also donned his plastic postal safari hat—summer wear and a sign of the climes. This morning—less than two weeks later—the temperature was in the teens, and Yu’s safari hat rested in his locker. Today’s bitter cold, too, at long last cast asunder 2015’s geraniums, begonias, and flowering roses. No frost in these parts until early January was unprecedented in my lifetime!

By chance on the second day of this month, I found myself in the vicinity of Rockefeller Center and the Christmas tree. Once upon a time, Christmas was incomplete without seeing that tree. But I hadn’t been down there at Christmastime—on purpose—in a very long time. I decided, however, to venture past it—for old times sake and, perhaps, for the last time. Because one never knows—I’m not getting any younger. Truth be told, I wasn’t very impressed. The tree seemed smaller and scragglier than I remembered it. I doubt that it was. But seeing it in the bright light of day and, yes, in January, was a deadly one-two punch.

On the heels of my tree trip to bountiful, I walked past Radio City Music Hall. And I didn’t experience the same feelings—not by a long shot—that I had when I saw A Boy Named Charlie Brown, Scrooge, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and 1776 at Christmastime (1969-1972.) Upon exiting a subway car at Grand Central Station at the age of just seven, I got wedged between closing doors. I was on my way to see the aforementioned A Boy Named Charlie Brown. Such is life! It’s 2016 now, a presidential election year, and there’s a thing called Facebook. When it’s too hot, people deliver sermons and when it’s too cold, they do as well. 2016: A New Year, A New Focus. Maybe this is the year I get stuck in a subway door once more and all will be well again.

Even a Clock Dies

R.I.P. my copper-colored kitchen clock shaped like a tea kettle. I’m sad to report that it shuffled off this mortal coil several days ago. Well, the truth be told, it was still keeping the proper time when I pulled the plug on it—quite literally—for the last time. I hated to do it. I didn’t like the idea of so unceremoniously consigning it to my recycling bag—with its plastic milk containers, tin tomato sauce cans, and pieces of aluminum foil with so much less history—but felt it best to do the deed as quickly and as painlessly as possible. It was Tuesday when this happened and Wednesday, you know, was recycle pick-up day.

Here’s how it all went down: Very early Tuesday morning, I was awoken by an extremely loud and grinding sound. I didn’t have a clue what it was but—suffice it to say—such noises in dawn’s early light are never appreciated. I feared something untoward was going on in the water pipes. After all, a running toilet a couple of flights above me had been for months running. I wondered, perhaps, if it had it taken a turn for the worse and would soon be pouring down on me. Typically, while in my bathroom, I would hear this never-ending water-on, water-off whoosh. So, as a test, I shut my bathroom door and that persistent grinding sound was louder than ever.

I followed my ear GPS this time into the kitchen and came upon the clock—yes, the copper-colored GE one shaped like a tea kettle. Born in the 1960s sometime, this plug-in clock—those were the only kinds back then—was a family clock for almost three decades. It wasn’t my family’s kitchen clock but a friend’s. But since time waits for no man and no woman, the clock ended up in my friend’s brother’s kitchen until the latter passed away. The family matriarch by that time—an older sister—was poised to give the clock—with its storied life—the old heave-ho. My friend, though, intervened on my behalf. “Nicholas” was, after all, a collector of too many things to count and a nostalgia buff to boot. So, I inherited a spanking new vintage kitchen clock, which was approximately forty years old when it became mine, and it rather inconspicuously ran for another fifteen years, reliably and silently telling me the time of the day when called upon,

Honestly, I thought my kitchen clock would outlive me, just as it had so many others. Come on, it was a GE with an electrical plug no less, and every battery-operated clock that I’ve ever owned has ceased keeping the right time in a lot less time than sixty-five years. Sure, a Mr. Fix-It Guy probably could have repaired the thing and calmed it down for a spell, but I believe it merited going gently into the night and not having its long life prolonged. I made the right decision and recycled it. When the time comes when I’m making such awful grinding sounds, I would want the plug pulled on me just like I did with my copper-colored tea kettle kitchen clock.

The Inexcusables

While in the midst of a lengthy walk on a beautiful autumn morning yesterday, I spied an individual just ahead of me with two dogs. The canines were on separate leashes. Not the ubiquitous flexi-leads that so many people employ nowadays, but the old-fashioned nylon kind—both six feet in length. On both sides of the concrete walkway that all of us traversed were crab grass and dusty dirt patches—doggie heavens for sure—and I immediately sensed a potential problem.

In the hilly terrain of the Bronx’s Riverdale neighborhood, leashed dogs ambling to and fro at will on a public sidewalk give me pause. You see, the "pet parent" of the two very contented pooches was lost in conversation on his cell phone, completely oblivious as to what his four-legged friends were up to. As I neared the threesome, the two canines were sniffing away with unrestrained glee. They were, however, on one side of the walkway, giving me at least some room—albeit with no margin of error—to get by.

Bad karma, I believe, just wouldn’t permit me a smooth passage to other side. One of the great conversationalist’s dogs opted to bolt to the opposite side when I was a mere couple of steps away from them all, leaving—in effect—a public sidewalk cordoned off. Yellow crime scene tape blocking my way would have been a better alternative. At least it wouldn't have moved on a whim. Fortunately, I didn't trip and fall on my face. I tend to be on high alert for these situations. I have to be because they happen all the time in contemporary society, particularly in a big city like New York. Walking on the sidewalk can be hazardous to your health around here, just as crossing at the green can be.

An important footnote to this tale of one city is that the Man of the Hour—with the two dogs—profusely apologized, telling me in fact that his behavior was “inexcusable.” I didn’t ask for an apology or even lodge a complaint. Now that kind of absolute ownership of one’s inappropriate actions is quite rare in this me-me society of ours. I guess there really are happy endings every now and then.

A Monday to Remember

On this very day—a Monday—forty-two years ago, I know where I was and what I did. For a good part of the day, I attended school—the sixth grade at St. John’s in Kingsbridge. And during the afternoon hours, I sat in a Language Arts class taught by an agreeable nun named Sister Joanne. Most of the school’s nuns had by 1973 kicked the habit altogether. They were no longer festooned in scary black from head to toe like their more authoritarian predecessors. They no longer put the fear of God in their students because of their costumes. I was very fortunate that there was—by and large—a new breed of nuns on the scene by then, with most of the paleo-throwbacks to a darker age retired or no longer among the living—or some combination of the two. As I recall, Sister Joanne was an extremely nice woman and very good teacher, too. A friend of mine thought she was a dead ringer for JFK.

Anyway, on October 1, 1973, Sister Joanne wheeled in a ubiquitous school TV set, which rested on a very tall stand. She promptly plugged it into a VHF outlet, which was the exception to the rule, and not the UHF hole alongside it. Typically, television viewing in the confines of St. John’s school meant “educational” TV on a UHF station. In other words, we were compelled to watch some amateurish production with poor picture quality that was of little interest to any of us.

On this day, Sister Joanne recognized that many of us were very interested in the Mets’ games that afternoon—a doubleheader and the final two of the season. I believe she was a fan as well. I doubt very much that any of the scary nuns from the past would have been as thoughtful. Some things, after all, trumped learning the ABCs. Besides, two hours a day for 180 days a year was more than enough Language Arts to last a lifetime—one afternoon could certainly be spared.

Heavy rain in Chicago the previous day—and a game cancellation—necessitated the doubleheader. And it was still raining twenty-four hours later. But the game against the Cubs had to be played because the Mets’ "magic number" was one. They had to win one of the games to clinch their division. And so we watched the early innings—which was delayed a half hour because of the inclement weather—on an old black-and-white TV, which was okay by me, because we had an old black-and-white TV at home.

The Mets took an early lead with their ace, Tom Seaver, on the mound. And things appeared quite bright even in the murky gloom that was Chicago. But Tom Terrific tired that afternoon and the game got a little too close for comfort by the time the school day ended—dismissal with the game a far cry from over. I recall racing the few blocks home and, happily, witnessed the clinching of the Eastern Division of the National League in the comforts of home, sweet, home and not in a Language Arts class in St. John’s school on Godwin Terrace. It’s where I wanted to be. School had this uncanny knack of interfering with baseball. But Sister Joanne deserves her due for going above and beyond the call of duty. And thanks, too, for reading aloud to us The Big Wave by Pearl S. Buck.

Postscript: the Mets won the clinching game 6-4 with Tug McGraw pitching the final three innings to record a save. Relief pitchers did that sort of thing back then. The second game of the doubleheader was mercifully called off because of the weather and the fact that it didn’t mean anything in the standings and, too, that the Mets were flying high on champagne. The New York Mets’ division-winning record was 82-79. Sister Joanne, by the way, subsequently left her religious order—as did most of the non-habited nuns from my day—and became a wife and mother, the genuine article. You see, several years before Sister Joanne became a sister, the nuns at St. John’s were all mothers.

Be True to Yourself: Be a Goober

I just stumbled upon a disk that contained a mother lode of non-fiction book proposals of mine from—yes—a simpler time in the publishing world and world in general. Approximately fifteen years ago, I had a lot of ideas and literary agents, too, representing many of them. Some of the projects got past first base and were discussed in “pub board” meetings. However, in the end, salespeople typically had the final word and shot them down. Yes, the same men and women who champion their incredible knowledge of what sells and doesn’t sell in the book market by reciting a litany of books that have bombed. Countless titles—believe it or not—that the aforementioned all-knowing professionals somehow let slip through the cracks and see the light of day on bookstore shelves.

Anyway, that was a long, long time ago. I will say that the perseverance complex paid off for me in that I kept re-branding my ideas—after one rejection after another—until I hit pay dirt. What follows, though, is sample material from a proposed book—one that never was—entitled TV Dinners for the Soul: 101 Solutions to Life’s Problems and Riddles from Your All-Time Favorite Television Personalities.

Goober, you got real talent.

- Gomer Pyle to his cousin

Fall is Goober’s favorite season, he says, except for summer and spring. This is quintessential Goober: a simple man who loves life. Seasons change, but not Goober’s lust for living.

Simplicity defines Goober. It is the most admirable quality of Mayberry’s Forrest Gump. Like most of us, Goober experiences moments of despair in which he rues his lot in life. In Goober’s case, it’s pumping gas, changing oil, and fixing flat tires.

In The Andy Griffith Show episode “Goober Makes History,” the man grows a beard, endeavoring to erect an intellectual aura around him and cast asunder his image as lovable doofus. Goober takes a history class and pathetically attempts to dominate it with volubility decidedly out of character. In so doing, he transforms himself into an overbearing clod and achieves persona non grata standing in the community-at-large of Mayberry. Happily, Goober comes back to the reality of being Goober: kindhearted, ever loyal, and fun to be around. He accepts the fact that he’s not cut from the same cloth of William F. Buckley, Jr.

In yet another episode, “Goober Goes to an Auto Show,” he meets an old school chum and attempts to impress him with braggadocio. Goober tells his friend that he owns a chain of gas stations. This charade predictably blows up in his face and—one again—Goober accepts his lot in life.

What is his lot in life? For many years, Goober labored in Wally’s Filling Station, ultimately purchasing the place for himself. This is the American Dream personified and nothing to be ashamed about. Goober, the Big Kid, achieves self-sufficiency doing what he does best. 

All men and women are created equal under the Natural Law. But reality tells us that individual human beings are hardly equal. Some are blessed with great intellect, while others are vacuous airheads. Some are imbued with enormous physical strength, while others are ninety-eight-pound weaklings. And, sad to say, some human beings are bereft of even a shred of decency or compassion for their fellow man and woman. Individuals are individual to the core.

Goober, for example, is recognized as a gifted mimic in the confines of Mayberry, North Carolina, impersonating Cary Grant and Edward G. Robinson with hayseed aplomb. Maybe at Caroline’s Comedy Club in New York City he wouldn’t be graded so high. So what! Goober starred on the Mayberry High football team and was the town arm-wrestling champion for four consecutive years. He also won a pancake-eating contest at the county fair, consuming—with butter and syrup—fifty-seven of the breakfast delights.

In other words, Goober excels at being Goober. When being himself he is a winner. When he ventures far afield into arenas outside of his special talents and God-given personality, he fails miserably. There are countless Goobers in our midst who fall prey to societal pressures and feel inadequate in the process. This low self-esteem often augurs problems like drug and alcohol abuse and other self-destructive behaviors. Really, Goober Pyle is a role model for these confused souls.  

Cream Sam Summer: the Novel

Cream Sam Summer 

A Novel by Nicholas Nigro

The year is 1978, a simpler snapshot in time, when New York City neighborhoods had both character and characters—lots of them in fact. At once gritty and charming, the Bronx’s Kingsbridge supplies the vivid backdrop for Matt “Bean” Casale and his pals, who unwittingly find themselves entangled in the lives of their most eccentric neighbors. A hot and humid summer in the city adds further intrigue by simultaneously thawing out a police cold case and sorely testing the bonds of old friendships. Uncovering the real truth doesn’t come easy for the police and for the boys, too, who get swept up in both a Byzantine local soap opera and the rough-and-tumble of merely growing up.

Suffice it to say that the boys will never be quite the same, nor the neighborhood and world that they live in, after the Cream Sam Summer.

Cream Sam Summer ​is based on real people, places, and events from the past. 

http://www.nicholasnigro.net/novel.html

Sample Chapter 1 

A few weeks ago, Jimmy Kern went ballistic in his front driveway—a fist- pounding, foaming at the mouth eruption that was downright scary to witness. Known to most of us around here as “Red,” the man’s a certifiable neighborhood oddball. Somebody once told me that he received the nickname because he was a card-carrying communist, and that it had absolutely nothing to do with his redder than red hair and heavily freckled complexion. Honestly, I suspect my leg was being pulled and sincerely doubt that Red even knows what a communist is. I’m not very good at divining ages, but he’s considerably younger than my mother and father, who are in their mid-forties, and a lot older than me, a sixteen-year-old high school student. I’d wager that he’s somewhere in between and has celebrated his thirtieth birthday, and probably a few more than that, in the not-too-distant past.

The local consensus is that Red is simple—a “bit off” and not the brightest bulb in the chandelier—but he’s no a simpleton. I’ve heard through the grapevine that his childhood was anything but idyllic. For starters: Both his parents drank like fish. Mama Kern was something of a recluse, too. She came out only at night to run errands, which included picking up her regular whiskey stash and preferred smokes—Lucky Strikes, I’ve been told—but that was the long and short of her public appearances. My grandmother recalls her tying young Red and his older brother Peter to a sycamore tree in their backyard. Presumably, this was the oft-intoxicated mother’s foolproof method of keeping an eye on her two boys. Verbal interchange between this strange and solitary woman and her Kingsbridge neighbors—even basic hellos—just didn’t happen.

The reports are that Papa Kern was a tad more sociable. He would on occasion acknowledge his neighbors with the barest of nods, but he never, ever had anything to say. Sadly, the man met a tragic end. On his way home from work one summer’s eve almost two decades ago, the Kern family’s breadwinner fell in front of an oncoming subway train at the 181st Street station near the George Washington Bridge. The lingering scuttlebutt is that his blood alcohol level was off the charts. My Uncle Paul says Mr. Kern was a “tortured soul”—somebody who might very well have jumped in front of the train. Since the Kern patriarch shuffled off this mortal coil in such a dramatic fashion—accident or no accident—his surviving widow has seldom been spotted, even under the cloak of darkness.

Fast-forward to the present and the Kern house on Tibbett Avenue is an unsightly blot on the neighborhood landscape—a ramshackle eyesore. The family actually purchased the house brand new in the late 1930s—they were Kingsbridge denizens even before my grandparents, who moved into the neighborhood several years later. But forty years of utter neglect have rendered the place a complete shambles. There are broken windows in the front of the house, on the sides, and out back, too. Peeling paint is the rule. It’s late July now and the Kern’s front grounds are smothered in tall weeds. Sprouting up through countless cracks and crevices, a slate-tiles pathway leading to steps and the front door is also overrun with them. Our cigar-chomping mailman, Louie, no longer attempts to access the Kern’s rusty old mailbox attached to the house. Instead, he drops the mail into a thick patch of weeds, just beyond a corroded wrought iron gate along the sidewalk’s edge, which he says are the homeowner’s explicit instructions. I often notice uncollected letters and assorted junk mail in this urban jungle for weeks at a time—rain or shine. God only knows what the place’s interior looks like.

Four summers ago, I laid eyes on the old lady for the first and only time in my life. Spying this ghostly pale apparition standing on her front porch—dressed in all black with a long shock of unruly white hair—sent shivers up my twelve-year-old spine. No exaggeration here: She was a dead ringer for Grandmama Addams. Nowadays, her reclusiveness is the stuff of legend. Seeing her in the light of day, or dark of night for that matter, is the Kingsbridge equivalent of a Big Foot or Loch Ness Monster sighting.

Red Kern, on the other hand, is a familiar face in this sliver of the Northwest Bronx. Just about everybody knows him. A notorious packrat, the concrete sidewalls of the family’s sloping front driveway are perpetually lined with his most recent street finds. He once amassed a diverse assortment of discarded glass containers—everything from beer and soda bottles to mayonnaise and cold cream jars. Red envisioned making “piggybanks” out of them someday. On another occasion, the man gathered together wood scraps of every conceivable shape and size that he plucked from neighbors’ garbage cans. He spoke often of his grand plans to build an extra room to the house—his room—in the driveway. Construction hasn’t begun.

When we were much younger, Richie Ragusa, “Johnny B” Bauer, and I christened Red “Cream Sam”—a sub-nickname of sorts to his more popularly known one. The three of us had gotten into the habit of parking our bicycles in his driveway during the warm months of summer. Red was always ready with a good yarn, opinion, or outlandish philosophical discourse on the meaning of life. He frequently spoke of the existence of these rare culinary delights—at least that’s what I think they were supposed to be—called “Cream Sams.” Red said time and again that we would just love these “Kingsbridge Caviars,” and he always promised to get us some real soon.

On numerous occasions, my parents have instructed me to keep my distance from Red and his combination driveway-junkyard. Richie’s ex-Marine father has laid down the law concerning contact with anybody named Kern. I have no doubt that Johnny B’s over-protective mother would lock him in his room, and throw away the key, if she knew what he was up to. But Red has just fascinated us too much, with both his never-ending stories and ever-evolving collections of rubbish, to stay completely away. And since our parents don’t have us under constant surveillance while in the great outdoors—this is 1978, not 1984—these decrees from on high amount to little more than a hill of beans.

Admittedly, there has always been a feeling of trepidation—an intoxicating whiff of danger—when standing in the Kern’s driveway, on the periphery of the open garage, or even when passing by the house on the front sidewalk. The mere possibility that a crazy old lady could, at any moment, materialize—brandishing an ax, sharp kitchen knife, or ice pick—is enough to make my blood run cold. The decidedly more visible and real specter of Peter Kern has long been part of the equation as well. While Red’s big brother doesn’t officially reside at the house anymore, he nonetheless keeps a watchful eye on the place and his kinfolk. The brutish Peter’s got an unsavory reputation in these parts for being perpetually drunk, habitually mean, and sometimes violent.

But there’s more to the Kern family mystique than a colorful cast of characters on a dilapidated urban stage. It encompasses, too, the unsolved mystery of a neighborhood boy from the past—a playmate of little Red and Peter—who one day just vanished never to be heard from again. My mom and dad remember Mr. and Mrs. Kern being questioned by the police, but so were many others on the block—men and women who were not considered suspects in the disappearance, or guilty of any wrongdoing. Still, bizarre and unfounded rumors persist to this day that the boy’s body is buried somewhere in the Kern’s backyard, and that Mr. Kern may have done himself in because he knew what really happened.

For further reading, click on this link: Cream Sam Summer

http://www.nicholasnigro.net/home.html

The Story of Us: Home Sour Home

For many years, my mother worked as a nurse’s aide in a local nursing home. It was not, by the way, a highly regarded one. I recall the familiar morning ritual of my mom recounting her war stories to my dad. Life on the nursing home frontier was never boring. My father, in turn, regaled my mother with tales from the dark side, aka the third-class mail center in the General Post Office on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, where he plied his trade. Pop had the not especially enviable four-to-midnight shift, commuting from Kingsbridge in the Bronx via the subway—the Number 1 train—for a quarter of a century. Although the behind-closed-doors postal-employee antics were frequently the stuff of TV sitcoms, my father’s job really wasn't a barrel of laughs.

The nursing home experience was completely foreign to me as a youth. I could never have envisioned anyone in my life circle—and certainly not me—ending up in one for any reason at all. While growing up in the Bronx in the 1960s and 1970s, families—by and large—took care of their own come hell or high water. There were certainly a few nursing home candidates in the neighborhood—by today’s standards at least—who remained in their homes courtesy of family on the premises.

Fast forward to the here and now and I have been in the belly of the beast. Fortunately for me, I was merely visiting a close relation for four months running. And happily for the patient, she escaped the nursing home confines and has lived to tell. A lot of people there will not be so lucky. For those ill-fated souls: the nursing home is their Roach Motel—they’ve checked in but won’t check out. Well, not exactly. They’ll leave at some point in the future—but they’ll be carried out feet first.

Visiting this particular nursing home as often as I did was downright disturbing. For starters, I’m not a boy anymore. I am closer to the end than the beginning. The patients I observed in the place ran the gamut from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest types to the deathly ill with one foot in the grave. I couldn’t help but consider this diverse lot of men and women, who once upon a time functioned in the outside world. They had careers and raised families; they cooked meals and took trips. They were Everyman and Everywoman, the living embodiment of what is in store for many of us.

I looked upon permanent residency in that nursing home—or in any nursing home—as a fate worse than death. It is, though, not out of the realm of possibility I could one day end up in one—a destiny, too, beyond my control. This reality bite is why I'm not interested in longevity for longevity’s sake. Anyway, to keep my sanity in the nursing home milieu, I embraced my rather potent cryptic side while there. The guy in the room across the way, I thought, was a Burt Mustin clone. He shuffled along in his pajamas like an old geezer out of central casting. His roommate—on the other hand—was a textbook blowhard who once worked as a cook, I learned. He awaited with bated breath his breakfast, lunch, and dinner—and also offered culinary commentary on everything on the menu.

Strange, but the paper menus that accompanied patients’ meals rarely, if ever, matched what was on their trays. As for the fare itself: I’ve never seen anything so consistently disgusting and utterly bizarre. Vegetable lasagna served with vegetables; baked ziti served with mashed potatoes and a slice of bread; and the most god-awful-looking macaroni and cheese served with a side of stewed tomatoes. And how pray tell can one screw up chicken nuggets? Well, this nursing home had the uncanny knack for doing just that. The chicken nuggets were nauseatingly soggy. I discovered that the hard way by sampling one. I incorrectly assumed chicken nuggets were beyond messing up. I often wondered what the well-compensated nutritionist on the nursing home payroll actually did while on the job.

I’ll give the place its due in that it was very clean. Just a few seconds in its interior ensured that your clothes and hair would reek of disinfectant. I always changed my clothes and showered, too, when I arrived home from the home.I had little choice but to conclude that if the strong disinfectant stink—or whatever combination went into that distinct nursing home aroma—attached itself to hair and clothing with such alacrity, it likely wormed its way into the food chain with equal rapidity.

A footnote on that ultra-unique nursing home cuisine: I must say that some of the residents considered it akin to roast beef at the Ritz. Still, so much of it went to waste. A gander at the rounded up post-mealtime trays told you as much. In fact, the waste of just about everything there—just like in hospitals—was mind-boggling. It’s little wonder why we are poisoning our planet beyond repair.

The nurses and nurse’s aides there were mostly good—a dedicated enough bunch who just had too many patients to contend with and too little time on their hands. Like, for instance, a woman who was perpetually crying out, “Please, will somebody help me!” I thought she sounded an awful lot like the mysterious voice that frightened young Jimmy Olsen in a black-and-white Adventures of Superman episode called “The Haunted Lighthouse.” You must remember: “Help, I’m drowning!” Jimmy was visiting his aunt who lived on an island with a lighthouse. As things turned out, his aunt—whom he hadn’t seen in a while—was an impostor and the disconcerting shriek from the foggy ether was a parrot. Anyway, I subsequently learned this poor woman in the nursing home was riddled with cancer, in horrible pain, and had every reason to be desperately crying out for help. An aide later reported this once very sweet woman mercifully passed away.

A nursing home is just not a good place to be—as a patient and as a visitor, too. New Age disciples like to declare: Life is good! It’s not typically the case in a nursing home. The blaring TV sets alone were enough to drive me batty there. They nicely complemented my disinfectant cologne.

The Chef Boyardee Experiment

Forty years ago during the first week in August—on August 5, 1975 to be exact—three boys from the Bronx embarked on a camping misadventure in the woods of Harriman State Park. (For more on that experience, check out an earlier blog: A Bohack’s Injection.) Recently, I was reminded of something monumental that had occurred during that rendezvous with nature: The twelve-year-old me sampled a peculiar delicacy—something, actually, as American as apple pie—for the very first time in my life. How fitting to be in a wilderness setting and chowing down on Chef Boyardee—cheese raviolis to be precise, which we had purchased at a local supermarket before the trip.

The elder on this excursion into the wilds—a sixteen-year-old named John—had made this peculiar culinary selection. It was peculiar, at least, to my older brother and me, who had never before consumed anything in a can sporting a Chef Boyardee label. There was no reason that we—who were growing up with our paternal grandmother on the premises—would have ever entertained the notion of eating raviolis from a can. For she was master of too many dishes to count, and unequaled when it came to pasta “gravy.” But there we were on our first afternoon in the great outdoors. It was lunchtime and we were appropriately famished after having hiked a pretty fair distance with all sorts of camping accouterments.

So it was decreed: Chef Boyardee cheese raviolis would be it—a well-earned repast for having reached our destination in one piece. Renowned for my fussy eating habits, the oddsmakers had the likelihood of me even sampling the raviolis as very slim, and the possibility of me actually liking them even slimmer than that. Well, will wonders never cease, especially when one is communing with nature. I not only ate the raviolis that afternoon but loved them as well. In fact, I thought they were shockingly delicious. After that August day, I had my mother purchase Chef Boyardee on occasion, even if it was sacrilege to the Italian side of the family.

After swallowing that ravioli for the very first time in summer of 1975, my eyes were opened to so many things. For starters, I knew in a flash what that “hot lunch” smell in grammar school signified. When the cafeteria served up pasta dishes, it smelled an awful lot like Chef Boyardee, even if it was only a close cousin. I had always considered myself fortunate that I could both walk to grammar school and eat my lunch at home. But after the Chef Boyardee ravioli experience, I wasn’t quite so certain anymore. In high school—without the “go home for lunch” luxury—I was compelled to dine in the cafeteria and enjoy the pasta there—shells—every Thursday if memory serves. That sauce, too, was prepared from the Chef Boyardee recipe book.

I don’t eat Chef Boyardee all that much anymore. The magic flavor that tantalized my youthful taste buds forty years ago doesn’t make the grade in the present—let’s put it that way. Nevertheless, to commemorate such a big anniversary, I purchased a can of Chef Boyardee beef ravioli—it was on sale for a dollar at a local dollar store—and wolfed it down a couple of nights ago. It was edible, I suppose, because I ate the whole thing. Yet, there was something strange about the whole dining experience. It was like my adult incarnation was resisting even being in the same room with anything Chef Boyardee. The smell alone of the raviolis being heated on the stove top brought me back in time—not to the leafy woods of Harriman State Park but to my grammar school’s “hot lunch,” which I never got a chance to try. And perhaps that really was for the best.

The Fruitless Journey’s Life Lesson

When my younger brother and I vacationed on Cape Cod some three decades ago, we frequently went for drives “in the country.” At least it wasn’t the Bronx, which was a welcome change of pace. Subsequently, we christened these car rides of ours: “fruitless journeys.” Typically, we had no specific destination in mind—hence the “fruitless” adjective. Sure, we dropped by our favorite antique junk shop on bucolic Route 6A on occasion and, sometimes, stumbled upon a nature trail or a flea market to explore. But mostly, we rather aimlessly drove around the back roads of the Cape with a local music station playing—one, in fact, that continually ran commercials for a nearby culinary institution: Thompson’s Clam Bar in Harwichport. For several summers running, we heard this iconic eatery’s classic radio jingle run over and over and over: “Hey, where you going? I’m going to Thompson’s Clam Bar because that’s where the tastiest clams are. Is the seafood good? The best by far! Let’s go to Thompson’s Clam Bar.”

Despite the Thompson’s Clam Bar jingle becoming—by osmosis—an integral part of our “fruitless journey experience”—and the Cape Cod ambiance as well—we never for a moment considered calling upon it. It just wasn’t our thing back then. Thus, we didn’t seize the day and marry the familiar jingle with a reality bite—a clam or something else fishy from Thompson’s Clam Bar.

While on those "fruitless journeys" of ours, we were definitely saddled with less of life’s baggage. The passage of thirty years almost always amounts to additions and not subtractions in the baggage department. Simpler times, I daresay. It’s funny but very often our “fruitless journey” climaxed when my brother and I got hungry. Pizza, roast beef sandwiches, or take-out fried foods ("Maalox Moments" now) were usually on our plates in those days of yore, not sit-down dining. And let’s just say that Cape Cod pizza is another animal entirely when compared with New York pizza. 

But herein lies a life lesson, I suppose: Never pass up an opportunity. Thompson’s Clam Bar on Wychmere Harbor in Harwichport is now a private club. I'm never going to able to sample "the best by far" seafood. The jingle, though, endures as a reminder of what was and what might have been. Shoulda, woulda, coulda gone to Thompson’s Clam Bar. The commercials, too, were ahead of their time, supplying listeners with pre-GPS directions on how to get there. Why didn't we listen and "take Route 28 to the clam bar sign?"