daily prompt

Daily Prompt: Voices in My Head

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“You should be on the radio.”

I have heard this sentence from childhood, when my voice suddenly and without the typical teenager pitch shifts and volume wobbles—the “Peter’s voice is changing, this week on a very special episode of ‘The Brady Bunch'”-type changes—deepened and thickened to a baritone/bass. In the past, I blamed this on doing theater starting in junior high school, as that school did not have a stage at all and my high school theater did not have a sound system, so I learned at a young age how to project my voice and fill a big room without sounding like I am yelling. I now realize that this theory, like many of my theories, makes approximately no sense.

“You should be on the radio.”

A woman behind me on line said it to me a few days ago. She did not even say hello, which is usually how this moment transpires: A stranger hears me speak and tells me that I sound like an announcer. Some ask if they have heard me on the radio. (This is possible, but not likely.) Some suggest I send a recording to a radio station.

It is always a compliment and I appreciate it. There is no “but” to follow that sentence, even though it probably sounded like I was about to turn it into a complaint. Compliments are nothing to complain about. When I was younger, I did not know how to take compliments for things I have no responsibility for, like my voice or my height, any more than I knew how to accept insults for things I have no responsibility for, like my voice or my height.

I recently discovered that there are videos online from 1985 of a high school production that I was in. (The fact that the onstage star is currently the husband of a famous television personality is I think why these particular half-dozen are online, as he is the only person in all six clips.) It is a production of Frank Loesser’s “How to Succeed …,” which is a musical that must be performed by every high school in the United States once each decade for the school to retain accreditation. (It’s the l-a-w!) Because I can not sing, deep voice or not, whenever my school was producing a musical I had to find any available non-singing roles and make them mine. In this clip, I am the offstage voice of the book that young Finch is reading.

I was 16 and already sounded like, well, like someone who should be on the radio or someone who should be announcing subway stops. Or someone whose job is recording outgoing messages for funeral parlors—that young me sounds so serious, and it is not, I promise, not because of anything the “role” required. He was, sadly, indeed that serious. Well, that is how I remember me at 16. I had a lot on my mind.

My voice now sounds a bit more lived-in. Living will do that. I have a little more control over it. But my girlfriend tells me that she knows when something has my “alpha male” riled up: She says I sound like a radio announcer or the voice of a book when I feel like I need to make my point in a debate. (Not with her; she established long ago with me that she sees through a lot of my quirks and will ignore those that are unimportant.)

So now when someone at the grocery store tells me that I ought to be on the radio, I refrain from making wisecracks about how adults, unlike children, should be heard but not seen or twist it into an insult about how I am being told I have a face for radio. It is a gift, period.

We all hear at least three voices in our heads: our speaking voice as we hear it leave our mouths, our speaking voice as others hear it (when we hear a recording of it), and the voice of anything we read or write. The one voice most people claim they hate to hear is the second one, what our voices really sound like when we hear it. This is no longer the case for me.
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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 11 asks, “Your blog is about to be recorded into an audiobook. If you could choose anyone—from your grandma to Samuel L. Jackson—to narrate your posts, who would it be?”

I suppose my answer to this is me.

A Two-Ton Hand-Me-Down

Posted on 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.)

55-buick-roadmaster

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: Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears a Crown

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In a family with two children, the terms “oldest” and “youngest” are black and white, apples and tornadoes. I am the oldest of two, the older brother who acted like an heir to the throne in high school and then like the off-the-hook kid brother in an extended Peter Pan near-adulthood, both of which must have presented my kid sister with unique challenges.

Family order and the psychological effects of being sibling number one or being sibling number nine is a favorite topic for many commentators simply because we all carry around with us the expertise of being a member of a family. (Being adopted can sometimes make these concerns even more unique or sometimes prove them to be universal, anyway. Being an only child can, too.) I will never know what it is like to be the younger sibling. (There should be a support group for us; I am a member of quite a few already as it is.) My sister will never know what it is like to be the oldest—unless our septuagenarian parents do something rather odd in the near future, such as murder me and then manufacture or otherwise acquire a new child. But my parents are not royals, and my family does not live in a “Game of Thrones”-type world in which something like that might very well happen over brunch next Sunday.

In a royal family, sibling order is truly defining. Sibling number one is the heir to a throne, any throne, and everyone else is tied for not-first. Every person born into a royal system has a job to do that they are born into; the first (and sometimes, only) job requirement is to be born. Not one successful royal on this planet has failed to be born—yet. In well-entrenched royal families, all of the other siblings (and cousins and extended cousins and all the myriad not-firsts, the “soblings”) have duties to perform and fiefdoms to fief over. Each one is number one in his or her own respective well-defined and limited roles and traditions, which usually require them to wear remarkable costumes. And then, in turn, all of their first-borns are the heirs and chief inheritors of whatever their specific fiefdoms include.

In America, the world of Big Business, we sometimes see something similar transpire with corporations and inheritances, but not as often as the soap operas (and the news programs that can seem like soap operas) depict.

Of course, the impending growth of the British royal family, the one that inspired today’s question, would be of no interest to us had it not been for the fact that in 1936 the then-king, Edward VIII, decided to quit and cede the crown to his younger brother. The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 9, asks, “A second #RoyalBaby will soon be joining the Windsors in England. Given the choice, would you rather be heir to the throne, or the (probably) off-the-hook sibling?” Edward VIII’s younger brother could have been an “off-the-hook” kickabout, but, per his royal training, he proved to a quite capable king (whatever that means), George VI. (This is a good thing, as many historians—not some, many—have found and shown evidence that Edward rather liked Hitler and his plans and would not have opposed a Nazi-governed Great Britain. The government under his younger brother appointed him governor of the Bahamas to keep him out of Europe for the duration of the Second World War.) The current royal family is George VI’s; his daughter is the queen and his grandson is the current heir, Charles; William is Charles’ first-born, and since William and Kate have already produced his first-born, the new baby is William’s potential gadabout, layabout, off-the-hook kid royal.

In the House of Aldrich, my not-at-all-royal house, I am the first-born but I spent much of my adulthood as the Failure in Waiting, so I have lived versions of both answers to this question. One of my larger contributions to my sibling’s adult life (she is only two-and-a-half years younger than me, so we have shared many experiences in life and sometimes she has a clearer memory of my life than I have) has been as an signpost warning her against venturing where I did. Perhaps my providing an example of how not to live has been a version of being a dutiful older sibling; now that my life is a bit clearer and happier, perhaps I am filling that role better now.

But we’ll never be royals.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 9 asks, “A second #RoyalBaby will soon be joining the Windsors in England. Given the choice, would you rather be heir to the throne, or the (probably) off-the-hook sibling?”