Memories | The Gad About Town

Daily Prompt: Reading People

Posted on September 17, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The woman next to me on the plane was in acute distress. She did not tell me this herself, but she appeared to me to be bearing a weight of grief and/or worry. I did not know what the source of upset was. She checked and re-checked her watch, and kept shifting her weight in her seat but kept herself leaning forward like an intense talk show host. She picked up the Airfone (this was in 2000) and considered doing something with it but returned it to its cradle. She picked it up again. She put the mandatory flight nuts in her handbag and did not accept a soda or water.

I am a dunderhead when it comes to feelings. With some experience in public speaking, I find that I can read a room more accurately than I can read an individual. Furthermore, I can tell when someone is ticked off at me far more capably than I can tell if a person is happy about something I have done or said or even if they are happy I am in their life. I need a lot of positive reinforcement.

On the plane, I knew that my ego wanted me to be this woman’s white knight and to be an attractive shoulder for her to lean against, but because I knew that this was what my ego wanted (or believed it wanted—what if she had leaned against me and actually wanted to talk and cry?), I knew I should simply keep reading my magazine. I did.

Anyone in a relationship knows their partner well enough that they can tell from a “Hello” text message with no other words or punctuation whether their partner is happy, upset, or confused by something. Or all of the above at the same time. Usually, not always, but usually, my girlfriend and I avoid the confusion that texting or other quick modes of communication can bring, and, when one of us detects something is off, we turn it into a phone call. We keep matters open and clear. I am grateful that we have not had many fights, but our worst fights have come when one of us did not phone and the communications got snarled and then so did we.

Was the woman beside me trying to get my attention with all her huffing and not-quiet sobbing? Anyone’s attention? Was she with the people across the aisle? They appeared to be a couple. Was she with them? No. Definitely no. There are ways to have a private moment in public spaces and then there are ways to have private moments in ways that may earn, well, the legitimate sympathy—and even empathy—of strangers. I do not profess to know that I can identify the difference between these two types of moment, in the moment. This fellow passenger on a flight from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Newburgh, New York, was proving to be a test of my ability to read a human being.

If I do not know my own emotions very well, which is something I started to write about recently (“For Crying Out Loud!“), I am not going to be able to correctly interpret another complicated human being’s complicated emotional displays. And I did not know my emotional inner life very well back in 2000; I did not know how complex the palette of emotions on display can be.

It may be that the woman beside me on the plane had brief moments of wanting to pour her heart out to me separated by moments of unapproachable grief or whatever she was suffering, but my default facial expression resides somewhere between poker-faced and perturbed by a distant sound that only I hear. (Look at my portrait accompanying this web site.) I probably looked as unwelcoming as possible, and then confused things when I would attempt to look welcoming, “just in case” she wanted to talk. I asked, “Are you okay?” and her shoulders replied with a surprised shudder and nothing else, no look in my direction, no words.

The landing was suspenseful, which is to say that technically it was uneventful but each sound from outside the plane, each bump of turbulence as our plane dropped into the thicker air, was audibly registered by the passenger beside me. Perhaps she was merely a nervous flyer? No. On the ground she took or placed (I do not remember which) a call on her cell phone to get a hospital address. She rushed to the front of the plane with no words to me or anyone, without waiting for the go-ahead from the air stewards.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 17 asks, “Are you a good judge of other people’s happiness? Tell us about a time you were spot on despite external hints to the contrary (or, alternatively, about a time you were dead wrong).”

There will be no column from The Gad About Town tomorrow, September 18, as I will be attending a television show taping in NYC. Yay, me.

A Two-Ton Hand-Me-Down

Posted on September 10, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

We are talking now of events in the fall of 1973, when the blue Buick came into our lives and the OPEC oil crisis started to unfold; the price of a gallon of gas went up by half in just a few months that year, from about 40 cents a gallon to just under 60 cents. Getting a second car was no one’s idea of practical, so I do not think it was in my father’s plans or dreams, either.

A 1955 Roadmaster in 1973 was not yet a collectible classic and it was also too old to be of much use as a second car for a young family with one driver. (Did it even have seatbelts?) Thus a 1955 blue Buick Roadmaster in 1973 sat smack in the middle of useless. Even though the car was 18 years old, it had not been driven much; for some reason I remember hearing the sentence, “It has its original tires.” This was probably not a selling point.

My great-uncle, my grandfather’s older brother, had died. If there is a statute of limitations on offering condolences, this meets the requirements: He was an elderly man, he died over 40 years ago, and I never met him. I have seen precisely one photo of him, and that viewing happened almost 30 years ago, too. In my memory, he is standing in a doorway in the photo and he looked like Myron Cohen. (For anyone who is even one day younger than me and not a fan of old Borscht Belt comics, this reference is perhaps a bit obscure.)

He left his personal sedan to his brother, my grandfather, who did not want the vehicle. To the best of my memory, my great-uncle lived in Manhattan and retrieving it was ~~going to be enough of a chore, I mean,~~ reward enough. My grandfather enlisted my dad, his son-in-law, to pick up the car and they brought it up to upstate New York and our home, where it became our first-ever second car. In the long history of uncomfortable and long car rides, I am given to understand that this may have been a top-ranked long, silent drive. (My father can be talkative only after he warms up to you, and my grandfather was not a communicator, either.)

To the best of my recollection and some reasearch, this is the Buick. A 1955 Roadmaster. (http://www.fossilcars.com/blog/classic-buick-fan/2012/10/15/1955-buick-roadmaster-series-70/)

The car sat in our driveway, a one-car-wide driveway, a blue mystery to my five-year-old eyes. Life had presented me with one more strange equation: “Someone that you have never heard of but is somehow related to you dies = new car.” No sadness, new car. Except the car was not new, it was old, even in my limited car knowledge. The backseat was not a seat, it was a bench, the same color as the outside of the car, and it was awkwardly, overly cushioned. Thus it was as welcoming and yet impossible to sit on as any plastic-covered furniture I had encountered in the living rooms of “old people.” I could kick out my legs without touching the back of the front seat, which was also a bench and not two seats. I do not have a photo of the vehicle that I came to loathe, but research and my memory has presented me with this photo of a 1955 Buick Roadmaster, a four-door, which is what I remember, in the car’s exact shade of blue. The exact shade of blue.

My father neither put the car on blocks nor sold it, at least not immediately. To be fair to him, even if he had tried to sell the car in that time period it probably had no takers, given that it was not yet a classic and never was fuel efficient. It was a two-ton tank. Thus, even in the gas rationing era of 1973-’74, we had a second car and it had to be started up and driven every so often. The destination was usually my elementary school two uphill blocks away, a ride that only took the blue Buick 20 minutes to make. These were the longest 20 minutes of my life every morning, especially in winter, because that car did not have a heater, or its heater was what people in 1955 expected, or it did not have a heater. I would walk from the back seat/bench to the front and ask when the heat was going to kick on. My father would reply with chattering teeth and I would walk back. At least the walk kept me warm.

The one thing I clearly remember about that evil car is crying from the cold. There is, as you know, outdoors cold, which can be tolerated because you know that you are outdoors, and indoors cold, which is always colder than anything you can tolerate because you simply expect it to be warmer inside a building or a vehicle. That Buick was always colder than the outdoors. Life had presented me with another new equation: It was a dead car given to us by a dead man who had cursed our family.

It disappeared one day. I think my father sold it or put a brick on its gas pedal and jumped out as it drove into the Hudson River. Its whereabouts today are unknown and perhaps unknowable. But I knew one thing, well, I knew two things about the blue Buick: it was frigid in all seasons and conditions, and if something like the blue Buick is what you get when you inherit something, this car was one more reason I wanted everyone around to me live forever.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 10 asks, “Clothes and toys, recipes and jokes, advice and prejudice: we all have to handle all sorts of hand-me-downs every day. Tell us about some of the meaningful hand-me-downs in your life.”

Daily Prompt: ‘What Am I, A Farmer?’

Posted on August 29, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 29 asks, “How often do you get to (or have to) be awake for sunrise? Tell us about what happened the last time you were up so early (or late …).”
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Some 16,700 sunrises have been available for me to view since I came on the scene—all of them free of charge. I have treated each one as mere scenery, equally majestic and thus, equally drab. Earlier this summer, I estimated that I have missed at least 16,000 of these sunrises. Every single sunrise was screensaver-glorious somewhere, and each one also heralded the start of “just another day” for someone, somewhere else.

(“I Like The Sunrise” from Francis A. and Edward K., Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington Orchestra)

But, ah, the winking parenthetical ellipsis at the end of the Daily Prompt’s question; that ellipsis is Dr. Evil’s pinkie aside his mouth—”the last time you were up so early (or late …).” In my head, I hear “late” pronounced in three syllables. (And, seriously, the question is quite imprecise in its meaning, as one Daily Prompter points out in “Preposition Precision.”)

In upstate New York, a tree-filled, short skyline part of the world, sunrise is a rumor for most of us on the ground or second floor. When I am awake at a little before 6:30 a.m., which is the official time of sunrise around here in late August, I do not see sunlight until around seven. By then, it is DAY. Unless you are a shepherd hanging out in the mountains—the Berkshires, Catskills, Adirondacks, Poconos—or on one of the few available upper floors, the angle of light keeps it dark a bit longer. I grab that extra 30 minutes/several hours of sleep, because my dad made a good enough living for his children to not be farmers.

(My father grew up on a small farm in Vermont and he never made the life of predawn chores sound idyllic. I am proud that I come from farmers and rural … life … everywhere. Just … everywhere. Not a city slicker among them. On both sides of my family, small-town and farm life extends into the [sunset] distance. The rurality of my heritage is a point of pride, even if I am not myself even a gardener.)

Because much of upstate New York is tree-filled, I hear rather than see the sunrise most mornings. The creatures of the night shut down their nightly production at around 11:00 p.m., and sometimes precisely at 11:00 p.m., which is creepy beyond measure, and then the morning birds start singing each other awake at around 5:00 a.m. I miss the birds chirping each other sunny in winter.

So I rarely start my day with the sun, as I am neither a pet owner nor employed. For most of my life, this has not been a point of pride, as some inner, rural, farmer version of myself considers me a lazy bum shirking on his many chores … again. Day after day after day. Being one’s own harshest critic means that one is neither critical of the things worth being harsh about nor correct very often. This is one of my many conflicts with myself, chronicled here regularly.

But the few dozen sunrises I have made it my point to see, when I have had occasion to stay up late, those have been spectacles, indeed. An early morning flight into Chicago, watching as dawn broke on the upper floors of the skyscrapers and then extended downward into the night-filled streets below. One New Year’s morning as daylight filled the streets of Manhattan, after a New Year’s Eve in midtown Manhattan, and all that that phrase carries with it.

For a year I worked for a rural newspaper in Sullivan County, New York, and sometimes would stay with friends not in rural Sullivan County, New York. I would drive west in the morning with the sunrise at my back; often mine was the only vehicle commuting into rurality and not away from it.

The sunrises that were not spectacles were not spectacles because of me and my need for the day to unfold as “just another” one.