Let's Reminisce

If you are fortunate enough to be blessed with a dog, or perhaps even twice blessed with two, then you know the axiom, "Let sleeping dogs lie," isn't just something clever to say.

It's not even that clever.

A sleeping dog is a beautiful, taciturn thing. Well, okay-- sometimes it can be a grotesque thing, I'll admit. When Finley sleeps, all 68 pounds of him, he thrashes and twitches and snores with all of the feverish intensity of a gored ox. He looks quite epileptic, as all of his limbs erratically jut about, and it seems improbable that he's enjoying any peace at all. Of course, the optimist might say that he's dreaming about himself as a puppy, twelve or thirteen years ago, gallivanting about and racing through the imagined fields of his youth, with unbridled exuberance and glee.

Oh, my darling. Oh, my pet.

Molly asleep is a thing of beauty. Of course, she's pretty stunning when awake, if you don't mind me fawning and falling all over my own dog, but asleep she is magic. When she curls up onto your lap or falls asleep on your chest, there is just nothing in the world like it. The moments before she falls asleep are edible. She will brace herself up on my chest with her forepaw and stare into my eyes, struggling to keep her little head up, as if to say, "Why? Why are we not in bed yet? I... I don't understand." And her eyes will close of their own volition, slowly, and the head will droop, and that'll be that. Her breath makes a gentle whooshing noise, soft and warm, and she's quite gone.

But, life goes on around her. The dryer buzzes and demands attention, we have to get up from the couch to make lunches for tomorrow, the remote slides out from under the blanket and falls onto the hardwood floor, and the beige head and the gray head jerk up. Canine slumber is disturbed. And it's our own little domestic tragedy.

As a general rule, I try to let sleeping dogs lie in my own personal life, too. If there is a situation from the past that caused me grief or pain, I try my best to let it go, to not hold onto anger or sadness over things that happened that I cannot change. I try not to seek people out from the annals of my own personal history and pick up old fights or rehash careworn arguments. Likewise, I'm not someone who especially likes to engage in the nostalgia effect, either. Recently, my wife found a bunch of quite-forgotten about photographs (you know, actual ones-- like, that were developed in a drug store) of she and I when our relationship was younger than it is now.

"These will make you pretty schmoopie," she said, offering me the packet.

"But, I'm already schmoopie," I replied, looking deeply into her eyes.

I don't know what it is, but I just don't want to go there. And so I didn't. I didn't look. The packet of photos sits on top of a green filing cabinet in our office, leaning up against a sewing kit my mother bought Mrs. Apron for her birthday a year or so ago. I guess I just like to let sleeping dogs lie, even if they're nice dogs. Good dogs.

Stay.

I wasn't always this way, of course.

"Mommy," I used to say, "let's reminisce about when I was a boy."

I couldn't have been more than ten or eleven when I would make this request. And my mother would dutifully pull out the photo album that held the images of a long-ago time when a small boy with a large head absolutely covered with long, fine strands of light brown, almost reddish hair could wear a luridly-hued striped shirt beneath Osh-Kosh overalls-- with bell-bottoms.

And my mother and I would leaf through these pages together, in her bed or on the living room sofa.

Me as a doctor for Halloween-- 1986. My father had carefully applied a felt red cross to the breast pocket of a white button down shirt of mine. I wore a brown clip-on necktie, green pants, and in my hand I clutched a plastic, tan briefcase used to house colored markers. A large red cross, also in felt, was emblazoned upon the briefcase. I looked at the camera with a gaze of utter seriousness, as if I were about to perform a craniotomy on one of my stuffed penguins.

My birthday, 1987. I had just opened a package that contained a beautiful white teddy bear, dressed in a black vest and topped with a black bowler hat. I named him "Oliver," after Oliver Hardy. Of course.

There are others, yeah, just like there are in the albums of your past. I could go on, but I kind of like to let sleeping dogs lie.

As I blogged about a little while ago, last month I capitulated and joined modern society and bought myself a new BlackBerry Curve, letting AT&T put a choke-chain on my soul for another two years. It's not that bad and, sometimes, when they tug on it in just the right way, it feels kinda good. The phone plays the theme from "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" when people call, it shows pictures of my family and my friends when they call, it browses the internet with startling speed and efficiency, it keeps my text conversations in that charming little bubble format, and it sends my Gmails, my Yahoos, and my texts and my Facebook updates right to my pocket where, evidently, they all belong.

In short, in matters vegetable, animal and mineral, my phone does everything I want it to do.

It also does something I don't want it to do.

Every now and then, the phone will blip, indicating that I have an email from my Yahoo account. And I'll look.

Sender: Dave B.

The first time it happened, my heart absolutely stopped. It was as if a voice were calling to me from the dead. Not dead, of course. Just from long ago and far away. My former best friend, who stopped speaking to me-- what is it-- almost three years ago now? It's hard to remember.

And I mean that.

I was utterly confused and frightened and sad-- why could he be contacting me all of a sudden? What did he want from me? Why is it that when I'm about ready to put him behind me this stupid motherfucking piece of fake chrome and plastic boops to announce his return? And then I looked closer.

Send Date: April 22, 2006

In the past month, three old emails from Dave have popped up on my phone, all from 2006-- maybe the height of the powerful friendship we shared together for so many years. One email, also from 2006, popped up just a couple days ago-- from the florist we hired to create the flowers for our wedding. And, as touching a memory as reading that one way, I deleted all four emails, because, sometimes, this dog just wants to sleep.

Forging Ahead Back In Time

While I was away on vacation, my sister had a baby.

I was relaxing on a small beach in Rockport, Maine, watching a ten-year-old blonde girl stab a hopefully deceased lobster with a stick when I got the typically dry text message from my father:

"NOAH is doing great was born
around 1 today big baby 7 lb 11 oz
everyone is doing great i love you
dad take"

My father's text messages are always the same: factual, uneffusive, grammatically dubious/containing scant punctuation and always, always concluding with one extraneous word. I suppose that, whenever he wants to send a text message, he merely recycles one he already sent, deletes most of it, starts anew, and forgets to delete the final word of the old message. Often I receive texts from him that end in a word having to do with his business-- manufacturing undergarments for sports teams. One day prior to Noah being born, he sent me a text about my mother:

"mommy is a nervous about everything
Now I know where you got it from ha ha ha
love dad phillies"


One thing he has gotten very good at with his phone is taking pictures. My wife and I enjoyed several of them while we were in Maine, sent as attachments to his bizarre text messages ("mom @ noah" [ed: I presume that meant "mom & noah"] "you sister is running away" [ed: the picture that accompanied this text is my oldest sister holding Noah as if he was a bomb slathered in radioactive honey] and, my personal favorite, "mom is high" [ed: I have no idea what the fuck that means.]) It was only upon our arrival home tonight that we were treated to the full barrage of Noah pictures on my father's cell-phone, including two others of my oldest sister holding her new nephew both gingerly and increduously. According to my father, my oldest sister's nose looks inordinately larger in these pictures than it ever has before. He now refers to her as "Pinocchio."

While a new baby was entering my family's life back in Pennsylvania, it seemed only fitting that I should make the acquaintance of an old baby in Rhode Island. Last night, I got to experience my wife as a captivating, newly-minted four-year-old girl, courtesy of some dusty Betamax video tapes, and the perhaps even dustier Betamax player that resides in her mother and father's bedroom and, miraculously, still functions. While we fumbled our way through setting up the Betamax player, which had lain dormat since, I presume, around 1987, when most of those items went the way of the dinosaurs and vinyl bench car seats, I realized that people were more intelligent back when Betamax players were popular. For example, the Betamax video cassette cases were emblazoned with the word "epitaxial." I mean, I can only presume that average, run-of-the-mill 1987 grown-ups knew what that word meant, otherwise they wouldn't buy things listing it as an apparent selling point or virtue. Also, you had to be pretty clever to actually set up the Betamax player, and being Hercule fucking Poirot couldn't hurt if you need to find the tracking dial.

I can't speak for Mrs. Apron but, for me, it was a pretty strange experience, sitting there on the edge of her parent's bed, next to my 27-year-old wife, watching her four-year-old self be-bopping around a totally different world. I mean, there she was, opening up presents that turned out to be not Anthropologie skirts but Babar & Celeste music boxes and puzzles. And, unlike in all the photographs I've seen, this version actually talked! She looked straight into the lens, at me, and she told me about how she went into the swimming pool at the Howard Johnson's and she stuck her head under! I mean-- what a big girl! What a sweet girl. A bossy girl on occasion, but, on the whole, a sweet girl. With her raven-haired father and her smooth-faced mother, clad in the eye-popping duds of the day. Frozen in time and bustlingly alive with motion, all at once. I'm glad the Betamax held on for one more trip down an epitaxial-laden memory lane.

We never had a video camera when I was a little boy. The earliest film of me comes from when I was twelve years old, filming a 6th grade English mockumentary about the Loch Ness Monster in which I played four characters, including the program host, and I referred unknowingly to another character called "Constable Clitoris." Thanks, Monty Python. Fortuantely, my English teacher refrained from calling home about that. Though it was an innocent faux-pas, the more innocent, earlier years exist only in still pictures, and I think that's actually okay. If I could see my beautiful and energetic mother moving around, devoid of her trigger finger and her arthritis, my robust father with more, well, hair, I just don't know. I don't know if I could sit through that without hot, blinding tears streaming down my cheeks. I don't know how my wife did it. I felt a thickness in my throat last night, and they weren't even my movies, my history. I guess I just look at the world differently than she does, and I think that's okay, too. Sometimes it's nice to just sit back and enjoy the world the way it used to be, without obsessing and depressing about what it is now or what it will be in days and years to come.

Well, I suppose it is anyway. I wouldn't really know.

It's okay, though. There are always new memories to enjoy, to someday join the old ones. There may not be Betamax films to preserve in a layer of dust-bunnies, but there are text messages, like the one my father sent me on Tuesday. He's been on a mad dash to find my sister, her husband, and their brand-new baby a house, seeing as they're rapidly outgrowing my sister's one-bedroom apartment. He sent me a text to inquire about houses for sale on our street:

"We just saw a twin near you the
realestate kathleen stupid blond told
me twice on the phone 185,000 i went
there at 5 to c it she said sorry mistake
its 285,000 i almost toppoled her out
the fucking window"

I Remember...

I remember when I used to want to be a newspaper columnist.

I thought it would be a great thing to see my name in print each week, to have my sentiments and musings on peoples' lips that day, to have them write me nice letters, and nasty ones, about my column. I thought it would be nice to change my own little corner of the world through writing, because I thought I was reasonably good at it. And while 20 or so editorials and commentaries of mine have made their way into area newspapers, I'm no newspaper columnist.

When I read columns written by people who are newspaper columnists, I can't say I'm especially moved. Or engaged. Or inspired. I can't remember the last time I said to someone, "Hey, did you read the column on bloo-blah by Blah Blahsberg? Wasn't it great?" Most opinion columnists are afraid of losing their plum assignments and their beholden to the advertisers in their papers that nobody reads anymore, and so their once perhaps fiery tongues are definitely doused at best. They write, but they don't say anything.

Not that I could do it any better, mind you. Maybe, but I doubt it. When a paycheck's involved, I can be a pretty big pussy, too.

I remember when I used to want to be a cop.

I used to be arrogant enough to think that I would be a great boon in the effort to combat the consistently negative public image of law enforcement. If my call number was assigned to be dispatched to a scene, citizens would encounter a bookish, well-spoken, Jewish, skinny, bespectacled, dry-humored police officer who would do his best to listen patiently, sort fact from bullshit, and make logical, rational decisions. I thought it would be nice to change my own little corner of the world through competent, compassionate policing.

My decision, at 22, threw my solidly upper-middle-class Jewish family into utter turmoil. My mother was thrown into depression and despair. She pleaded with me not to do it.

"That's not for you," she would say-- the same lingo she used to use when I was seven and I wanted a $150 model car or I wanted to watch "Amadeus."

"Oh, so it's okay for some other mother's son, but not for yours?"

"That's right," she said. "That's exactly right."

My sisters refused to even talk about it, to even acknowledge it was happening, even as I was pounding Boost energy drinks and running at the track every morning in preparation for the academy.

"So you mean, if I become a cop and I want to come over for dinner after work and I'm in my uniform, my sisters will refuse to be there?" I asked my mother one night during a regular fight.

"That's right," she said.

It never came to that: I left the academy after two days. I couldn't lift the weights.

I sure remember that.

I remember when I had friends.

Where the fuck are all my friends?

I remember when I used to wear jeans.

I wore jeans all through high school, I think. I have no idea why. I hate jeans. I think, during summer before ninth grade, my sister and mother took me to the mall to get me "prepared for high school" and I was purchased multiple pairs of jeans. My sister, who was going to be a senior in high school when I was a freshman said she would not be seen in the same school with me if I didn't stop wearing sweatsuits to school. In retrospect, I'm glad I wore jeans in high school and not sweatsuits. Not that it helped my love life. I didn't get my first blowjob until college.

I remember when my extended family used to get together.

Some great-aunt of mine died on Tuesday. I hadn't seen her in approximately ninety-four years, so I didn't really give too much of a shit. That's a nasty thing to say. Maybe I would have felt more attached to her and the other cast of misfits at the funeral if we had all stayed in touch more. I wouldn't know for sure, though, I didn't go to the funeral.

I remember when I enjoyed watching "The Today Show."

Yeah, I'm one of the seven people in America who misses Bryant Gumbel. Then again, I also miss Craig Kilbourn on The Daily Show, and there are only three people who miss him, and only five who knew he ever hosted The Daily Show in the first place. Meredith Viera poisons that show with her disingenuous attitude and her forced, constipated winces that barely pass for smiles. And the Today Show, like other news shows of its ilk, insists on replaying 5 second clips repeatedly just to give viewers something to look at. I mean, seriously, they showed the clip of Captain Courageouspants waiving and thanking his captors seven times in a five minute window. Why? Why do they have to show anything? Do yourselves a favor and turn on the goddamn radio.

I remember when I used to drive like a total fucktard.

I used to own a 1990 Ford Crown Victoria. It was a retired cruiser from the Delaware State Police. Fetishes develop early, don't they? It had rear-wheel drive and a 302 cubic inch V-8. Behind the wheel of this land-yacht, I was absolutely insane. I would drive through closed off construction zones and do figure 8's in gravel parking lots at 50 mph. I would floor the car in reverse for no reason at all. No wonder it fell apart after four months. I loved that car. And I remember it very, very well. Sometimes I dream about it, and those are good nights.

I remember when my wife and I were dating.

God, we were adorable. I love remembering those days and weeks and months. And years. I love remembering our 2am IM conversations. I love remembering our first awkward phone calls. I love remembering all of her hairstyles. I even love remembering the brain surgery.

I remember when my mother and father were younger.

Yeah. I don't think I can talk about that right now. I'll get back to you.

I remember playing in the basement.

I think it's funny that people with too much money spend thousands and thousands of dollars building playrooms and romper rooms and zoo rooms and whateverthefuck rooms for their kids to destroy. My sister and I spent our entire pre-adolescent lives playing in the basement, and we fucking loved it. We were down there a LOT.

God... I hope there was no asbestos on the pipes....

I remember my grandfather.

God, what a totally, legendary imperfect human being.

I also remember his funeral. I was 12, and the rabbi made some comment about how proud Harry would have been had he lived to see his only grandson be Bar Mitzvahed. I felt bad about that. I was standing at the graveside right behind my uncle, who was crying. Everytime he reached into his hip pocked to pull out a tissue, he elbowed me in the face. He did it four times before he realized he was doing it and he whispered a tear-stained apology and he put his arm around me. I haven't spoken to him in over a decade. And it has nothing to do with the bops on the nose.

These are the things that I remember.

What do you remember?