daily prompt | The Gad About Town

Daily Prompt: Little ‘Big’ Man

Posted on September 2, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 2 asks, “In a reversal of ‘Big,’ the Tom Hanks classic from the 1980s, your adult self is suddenly locked in the body of a 12-year-old kid. How do you survive your first day back in school?”

(Like Hollywood movie makers of the late 1980s, the WordPress Daily Prompt prompters appear to be quite taken with the age-transfer/”Be careful what you wish for” theme.)
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“Big” came out in the summer of 1988, and that year I was neither 12, Josh’s age in the movie, nor 30, the age of grown-up Josh (Tom Hanks). I was 19 going on 20, so the movie was really made for someone like me.

Like almost every American, I love that movie even though I have seen it only the one time, in a movie theater (the details are perhaps: Poughkeepsie Galleria, probably with a high school friend, $5 for a ticket). It has a 97% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Being almost exactly between Josh’s two ages means that I was adult sized but with no clue what being an adult meant or—and here is the kicker—what it was going to mean. I knew that 19-going-on-20 felt like being Tom Hanks in the movie and 12-pretending-to-be-30, but minus his good looks and charm.

I was still living at home but working for a living and a college student, single but not dating and falling into epic, private crushes; my frustration tolerance levels were at my all-time low, I think. I had a crush on Elizabeth Perkins after “Big,” but she never responded to my never moving to Hollywood.

Orville A. Todd Middle School. It was a junior high, grades 7 and 8 in the early 80s, and is now a 6 through 8 middle school. That tree was much smaller in 1980.

The year that I was 12 was 1980, and it was around then that the attitude that disquieted me into my adult years began to develop; it was the year I discovered that wherever I was I did not want to be. Orville A. Todd Junior High School was the place, and to this day it is one of the school buildings I dream that I am wandering, as I wrote about recently. It haunts me, which is why it is the photo accompanying this. (What do you mean you can’t see the ghosts in the windows? They’re there.) And I think I just figured out why I have dreams in which I am ever searching for something and it is often in this building here: my locker was frequently (okay, always) on the opposite side of the building from classroom I was next due to visit. Todd Junior High was (is, I would surmise) one long, narrow hallway with a couple bends and staircases that bottleneck the traffic. It was a living nightmare and I dreamed logistical dreams about it even back then.

I had as much difficulty talking with 12-year-olds then as I do now (I am not yet a father); it is an age I do not get, and being 12 did not mean that I got it then, just because I was living it. To be clear, I was no help for myself in this matter at all. I was interested in the news, already had a subscription to Time magazine for most of 1980, started a student newspaper, and I remember conducting a poll of my fellow junior high students regarding the upcoming presidential election, Carter vs. Reagan. (I think J.R. Ewing, Reggie Jackson, or Mork won.) I was no help. I was the only correspondent for the publication; something I certainly relate to now.

So the idea of waking up tomorrow nearing the ripe old age of 12, with one hair growing super-long from my chin but the rest of my face peach-smooth (shaving meant lathering my entire face with my dad’s brush, even my forehead, just to get that one long whisker), with thick plastic-frame glasses that were always one growing pains stumble or bullying shove into my locker away from breaking apart on my nose and requiring “nerd” tape to hold them together, which would result in more bullying shoves into my locker, this does not appeal to me. At age 12, I knew that I was already counting down the days to turning 18 and grown-up-hood, much like Josh in the movie, but six years looked like an enormous trek.

I still suffer from not wanting to be wherever I am, though. I am 45 going on 46 now, but 1988 looks like a more plausible date for me to write or look at than 2014.

Daily Prompt: Work, Work, Work

Posted on September 1, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 1 asks, “In honor of Labor Day in North America, tell us what’s the one job you could never imagine yourself doing.” (Canada celebrates Labour Day on this first Monday in September as well, but with a U fancifying the name.)
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“It was Ellis Island that ruined my shoulder.” A friend told me that today. I pressed him to explain. For many years he held a job etching signs for the sides of buildings, huge signs hand-made on enormous lathes, and the combination of a great deal of repetitive motion with delicate manipulation of heavy slabs of metal took its toll on his body. He blames the enormity of the Ellis Island job on his injury. He now works on a smaller scale and forges swords for a living.

My sister is a bank teller and on one of her first days on the job, the bank was held up at gunpoint. More precisely, she had a gun pointed at her. (It turned out that the gun was a dummy, but my sister is no dummy herself and she did everything as trained, as if the robber could have shot her.)

I have been friends with house cleaners, and every one of them has reported that they have had “that one house” every week whose owners either live disgustingly or insist on creating the image of living disgustingly, perhaps to test whether the cleaner can keep a closed mouth. I will spare you details.

I have police officer and firefighter friends, and their stories of everyday life on the job combine the terror of micromanaging superiors with the perpetual possibility of random gore.

Please travel back with me to August 21, when I wrote in “Punch the Clock,” “Off the top of my head, from age 15 till 40 I held 14 different clock-punching jobs from almost as many employers, with a couple employers that hired me more than once.” Each job is one that someone has described to me as something they could not or would not now or never do. Car mechanic friends have told me they can not imagine standing in front of a class and talking, which I have done; but I hate grease and do not comprehend mechanical engineering. Theirs is a job I misunderstand (car engines operate on magic, to the best I can tell) at best.

It is said that if you choose a job you love to do, it can not be called “work.” Everyone I cited above loves his or her work. I love whatever it is that I do, too. Work performed with a sense of love and duty is work worth celebrating.

Today, September 1, 2014, marks the 120th national Labor Day, a federal holiday, in the United States. For a decade before 1894, several states around the country started to mark Labor Day with parades and celebrations of work and workers. Labor Day is the American equivalent of International Labor Day, which is celebrated in many countries around the world on May 1 and is often referred to as “May Day.” In the United States, this correlation is ignored, as “May Day” here is associated with the practices and traditions of communist countries; thus, it is not a good thing. We celebrate our Labor Day in September not because we hate communism and its holidays but because a workers’ protest in Chicago for an eight-hour workday in May 1886 ended in a massacre, the “Haymarket Massacre,” and Labor Day-type celebrations in May tended to be about that violent day. The developing labor unions suggested September, and the government acquiesced. (This does not describe the relationship between labor unions, workers, and the United States government in the United States of 2014.)

Through the 1880s, workers fought and sometimes died for the right to work in reasonable circumstances and for reasonable hours. Capitalism with profit as the only goal and with production achieved through the cheapest means is unfettered capitalism, and companies will take advantage of every opportunity to cut costs, such as wages or safety; in this country, unfettered capitalism hit its lowest depth in the practice of slavery, which is free labor.

Thus, it is a true North American holiday. It is as American as the fight between slavery and employment, between being voiceless and fighting for the right to vote. America’s greatest moments have come when we have fought together to achieve greater fairness; our lowest, when interested powers have deemed “fairness for all” to be insufficiently fair for themselves and have fought fairness with bullets and jail.

Labor Day was established to celebrate work, but in our 2014 world we celebrate work with retail sales offered in stores that do not pay their workers double-time or time-and-a-half for the privilege of working on what is supposed to be a vacation day. Capitalism 1, Fetters 0.

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.