It starts on a specific though unpredictable day each August when midday shadows suddenly become a bit softer. It’s very subtle, but I notice it every year. The season is changing.
September anticipates the serene melancholy of fall. Squirrels get busy stocking up for winter—we all do. We pull out the summer clothes from our closets and fluff up our long-sleeved flannel. We look at the mess in the garage and think about paring it all down.
Where are those Christmas lights? I need to find them.
Looking forward to what comes next is natural whether we’re thinking about next weekend, the holidays, or a spring vacation we’re planning. But as I get older, now that I’m paying attention, I’ve started anticipating each new tomorrow and discovering small things I’ve always seen but never really noticed.
Anticipation is what makes life worth living. Best of all, it’s personal. As my dear friend and blogging partner Anita Garner so eloquently put it:
“Anticipation is the only thing I can control. It’s the looking-forward-to part of life and I get to decide when it starts and what it means.”
That sentence is what inspired my thoughts here and many more. If we have your attention, read Anita’s wonderful perspective here:
This is an abbreviated portion of a chapter from a book I’m writing. As slowly as I write I figured I might as well put this much in blog form. Maybe it will encourage me to get on with it.
Surviving Childhood
One of the things we aging boomers love to talk about is how much safer the world used to be when we were kids.
I guess it was in some respects. Mostly, though, I wonder how we survived. As kids in the 1950s and 60s we were allowed to roam our entire neighborhood from sunup to sundown free from fear of death or kidnapping. Nobody was ever snatched off the street.
We didn’t have drive-by shootings. Heck, we didn’t have drive-thru hamburger joints. Back then if you wanted to buy a burger or shoot somebody you had to park the car and get out first.
It was a simpler, more forgiving time. But it was also a daily horror show we never even noticed.
Cars didn’t have seat belts until the mid-sixties and by then they seemed silly to those of us who grew up literally bouncing between the back and front seats as our parents sped along two-lane highways. They didn’t mind in the least as long as we didn’t start fighting.
Enough protection to stop you from shoving a kitten or puppy in there but little hands were welcome.
We had room fans with no protective covers to keep little fingers out of the whirling steel blades. If you had invented the electric fan doesn’t a protective cage over the front just seem like a natural piece of the big picture? How did they not think of that?
I never heard of a single injury.
The heat in our homes came up from the floor through metal grates that got hot enough to sear a waffle pattern into tender toddler butts and feet.
Everybody smoked cigarettes, cigars and pipes everywhere. I mean everywhere: on buses and trains; in grocery stores, movie theaters, restaurants, churches and in every room of every home in America. That’s where this attachment to “fresh air” started, you know. Think about it. No matter where you live these days, big city or wide-open spaces, the air is no fresher outside than it is inside.But you still say, “I need some fresh air,” and then you step out of a filtered, air-conditioned room into downtown San Bernardino. When we stepped outside in the fifties it was like walking into the Alps. Nobody complained about smoke. It was just a natural part of life.
Dogs ran free when we were kids.
You’d let the dog out and he was gone to who-knows-where until he eventually came back to the porch and waited happily to be readmitted to the house. That might be the next day or the day after that. If he bit somebody while he was out you never heard about it. They didn’t sue, they just swore. If he tangled with another dog you’d see him trot back into the house at dinner time, tongue and tail wagging joyously, with one bloody ear and a mangled eyeball. You didn’t take him to the vet unless he’d been hit by a car and even then if he could hobble out of the street on three of his four legs Skippy was good to go.
We had deadly toys.
We would have wars using air-powered BB-rifles that allowed us to fire tiny steel balls with enough velocity to embed them under the skin of another kid, a dog or a cat. It stung but we loved it. This is where we first heard the sentence, “You could put an eye out with that!” But nobody I knew ever lost an eye to a BB-gun assault.
If there weren’t enough BB-guns to go around, we’d just throw rocks. Seriously, rock fights. And worse.
We had toy bows and arrows. Oh sure, the arrows had rubber cups on the end. You just took those off, threw ‘em away and whittled the wooden shaft into a pencil-sharp point.
We had firecrackers. We made bottle rockets out of wooden match heads cautiously jammed tightly together into glass aspirin bottles. When they weren’t made carefully they became instant bombs, igniting in hand and shooting shards of red-hot glass dozens of feet in all directions.
I’m not making this up.
One idiot kid I remember used to lie down on the ground and have the rest of us drop a huge rock — say, the size and weight of a bowling ball — right over his face. He’d always roll out of the way before the rock hit the ground. He never failed.
We climbed trees, great cottonwoods in my grandparents’ front yard, scampering twenty feet above the ground. Once I fell, skinning my bare back as I slid down the trunk of that great tree, landing hard on its exposed roots. Grandma sprayed Bactine on my injuries and gave me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white Wonder bread. I watched Popeye on TV and felt a lot better.
We jumped off the roof of my grandparents’ house with totally ineffective home-made parachutes fashioned from a bed sheet with ropes tied to the corners. One of my goofy cousins used to climb onto the sloped roof of their two-story house and bounce up there on his pogo stick.
We made go-carts out of two-by-fours and orange crates with tin coffee can lids for headlights and roller skates for wheels. A steep hill provided propulsion, a rope tied to each side of the front axle made for a delicate steering mechanism that was just as likely to dump you into the middle of oncoming traffic as it was to steer you out of danger. There was no braking system. For that you merely had to wait until the thing slowed of its own diminishing inertia or crashed into a parked car.
When I was a kid we had plenty of playgrounds in our neighborhoods and schoolyards were never enclosed by locked fences and gates. Still, we often just played baseball or football in the street. A parked car was first base or end zone marker. Second base was a smashed tin can; a water spigot was third. We played with broken wooden bats that had been glued, nailed and taped back into service. The baseball had ripped seams and a cover peeling off. Once the tear got so big the ball made a fluttering sound when thrown we’d peel it off completely and wrap the remaining ball of yarn into a solid mass of black electrician’s tape that needed to be repaired or replaced after bouncing along the pavement a few times. Any baseball becomes hard to see after sunset, especially one made of black tape but we played long after daylight had faded to deep purple and the cars rounding the corner into left field had their headlights on.
As I think back on those days fifty-plus years ago I can’t remember any boys who didn’t have patched jeans and scabs on their knees and elbows. Many of the girls, too. Blood was simply a part of everyday life through no small fault of our own. We all fell off our bikes into asphalt and parked cars because were just clutzy kids. Occasionally one of the real numbskulls in the neighborhood would intentionally ride his bike off the roof of a house or try to leap a row of thorn-laden rose bushes on a bike with the help of a pathetically engineered plywood ramp. These stunts nearly always ended in bloody failure but they didn’t stop us from trying again.
Nobody died. We seldom cried. And now we worry about our own kids and theirs.
People like to ask what I do every day now that I’m retired. It’s a hard question to answer because I do a lot of things that fascinate me but would sound like a complete waste of time for nearly everyone else.
I do stuff around the house, I write, I watch a little TV, and I nearly always take a nap with the dogs. But you know what I love most? Thinking. It’s something I haven’t had time to enjoy for most of my adult life. It’s the ultimate indulgence.
“Sometimes I sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits.” – A.A. Milne (Winnie the Pooh)
What amazes me about getting old is the constant revelations of things I never gave much thought to.
Sometimes those revelations only create more and much bigger questions. Physics, for example: the construction and meaning of life. I’ve always been as curious as everyone but shrugged it off as unknowable, and what the hell, let’s order another drink. But recently, as I approach what we all assume will be the end of our existence, it has become a fascinating focus of my curiosity.
Who am/was I and why?
I want to soak up as much information as I can before it all becomes irrelevant.
The last couple of days I’ve been listening to a Lex Fridman podcast in which he talks with astrobiologist and theoretical physicist, Sara Walker. She’s one of those people with an IQ that’s off the charts. People who make the charts don’t know what to do with her. Lex keeps up with her pretty well but I get lost in nearly every exchange.
My progress is slow, the podcast is long. I feel stupid. I don’t know what I’ll take from it when I’ve reached the end but I do know it fascinates me.
I would be content to live retired without much mental stimulation. I love my wife, our dogs, our home, and our family and friends. I enjoy old movies and TV shows as much as the next old fat guy. But thinking about things I don’t understand excites me. It sends me down rabbit holes far more entertaining than the old Star Trek episodes I’ve been binging lately.
I think Sara Walker would agree without having a good handle on it herself.
I’ve loved many dogs in my life and they’ve all loved me back even more. It’s easy for them. They’re not conflicted by human distractions. They’re dogs, pure of spirit, and if you treat them well they will wiggle inside your heart like no person possibly can because, unlike people, to a dog, you’re all that matters.
She ran from me when a much bigger dog shocked her at the entrance to the veterinarian’s office. She’s always nervous about going to the vet and her fear lunged at her at the door. She slipped her collar and bolted. I chased her down a dangerously trafficked four-lane highway. When she darted across the road I swallowed my heart and followed, terrified that she would be hit, never thinking for a moment that I might be hit.
Amelia’s a lot faster than me and though she stopped a couple of times to look back to see that I was following, she continued her instinctive flight from what she perceived as a predator. In my panic and fear, I yelled at her and that didn’t unconfuse the situation; she didn’t stop, my yelling just assured her Daddy was coming.
Then she was gone, into a wooded area, a muddy bog along a creek, presumably infested with bugs and vermin and quite likely coyotes and bobcats. I sunk up to my knees in the mud, literally, and couldn’t follow.
CarolAnn and I spent the next two days walking the area calling Amelia’s name. We reported her missing to all of the appropriate authorities and veterinary hospitals. We posted signs on the streets and social media. Over and over we kept going back to where we last saw her, calling her name knowing it was useless.
We got a few crank calls from people who had nothing to gain by lying to us, telling us that they had her; nothing except their sick satisfaction. Dogs are pure. Some people are deranged assholes.
CarolAnn and I worried terribly for two nights. The miracle came in a phone call on Saturday while she was at work.
“Did you lose a dog?”
“Did you find one?”
“I think I have her. I was jogging past the creek and saw your flyer.”
She sounded honest. I prayed that this was no crackpot. I asked questions and she gave me great answers.
Stunningly, she was our next-door neighbor.
Reunited within minutes Amelia and I were both physically and emotionally drained.
Reunited, exhausted
CarolAnn was in tears when I sent her the picture of us together, hot and haggard.
For the last three nights, four of us have all slept together in our tiny double bed, CarolAnn and me with our pure-of-spirit babies, Amelia and Cricket, who love us unconditionally and without the fear of imagination.
Look, I know this isn’t a big deal story in the grand scheme of things but in the small scheme of hearts, where life really matters, it has changed us all.
The big tree at Big Tree Park, Glendora, CA. CarolAnn and I lived half a block away. Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
I wish I knew more about the lives of my parents and theirs. My dad, born in 1929, was of a generation that believed children should be seen and not heard. It sounds mean but it was common sense at the time. Dad just figured if I were going to be in the room with adults it would be better for all of us if I sat quietly and just listened. I could learn and they wouldn’t be bothered by my childish interruptions. That probably makes some sense but it didn’t allow me to ask questions.
The attitude extended to what amounted to an information blackout. The grownups wouldn’t tell me much about their younger lives. They’d drop a little nugget here and there but if I asked a follow-up question or two we soon got to the point where I was told, “That was a long time ago. Go outside and play.”
My childhood was a long time ago and I still want to know more about the people who gave me life, loved, and taught me. That’s why I write these essays so that my kids and theirs can know me better than conversation ever allowed.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could learn about our ancestors back many generations if our grandparents could introduce us to theirs and so on over the decades and centuries past? If we could get an idea of who we are and why we belong here, wouldn’t we take ourselves a bit more seriously? Maybe we’d try a little harder to be worthy of the chain that binds the family to humanity.
We are all the sum of many; we are each the result of thousands of loves.
Shortly after graduating from Highlands High School in 1969, I started working at a radio station and making a ridiculously high salary of $400 per month. It was a union job and in 1969 that was an insane amount of money for a 17-year-old kid who had never gotten more than a one-dollar weekly allowance. I went wild and rented an apartment for $120 per month. It was a lot of money for a one-bedroom apartment but at 17 the world was my oyster, as people apparently used to say (though I’ve never heard anyone actually say it).
Having never lived anywhere except with my parents I was still a child, nervous about living alone so I invited my buddy, Ray Hunter to move in with me.
Soda Springs, CA 1968, Me and Ray
I don’t remember how we came up with furniture, but I think the exorbitant monthly rent was because the place came furnished. I can only remember that there was a cheap couch and a cheaper dining room table. I do know Ray and I each brought our mattresses from home and tossed them on the floor in the bedroom. That was all the comfort we required.
To celebrate our official graduation into adult-adjacency we went grocery shopping so we could stock the kitchen like real grownups. It was weird. Neither of us had ever been grocery shopping for anything more than an RC Cola and some junk snacks. Now we were pushing a cart up and down aisles we had never visited. Should we buy baking supplies? What kind of soap did our moms buy? Do we even have a laundry room?
When we got home we put away the groceries like a couple of excited kids opening Christmas gifts under the tree. It involved animated discussions about where things should go to be easily accessible for convenience. To open a can of soup, for example, we should put soup near the can opener. Or the other way around. (Do we even have a can opener?)
On that first night, we celebrated with home-cooked steak. Neither of us had ever cooked a steak or anything else of course, so we did what seemed obvious: we got out a frying pan and tossed the meat onto a gas burner.
As good as they looked and smelled we didn’t understand why fried chuck steak was so tough to chew.
It wasn’t long before Ray and I settled into a steady diet of Fritos and bean dip.
But here’s what started me down this lovely memory path: dry beans.
Dry red beans. We never opened the bag.
Weird as memories are, buying dry beans is the strongest recollection I have of that first-ever grocery shopping adventure in our neighborhood Albertsons supermarket. As we wandered down the aisles we snatched up stuff we had seen in our moms’ kitchens without considering whether we needed or had any idea how to use them. Ray grabbed a large bag of dry beans. His mom was a school cafeteria cook and always had dried beans in the pantry, though neither of us had ever eaten any that way, as if dry beans were just poured into a bowl like cereal. We had no idea what to do with them but if they were important to Norma Hunter we knew they were crucial to our nest.
Now, 55 years later I have finally learned how to prepare dry beans for consumption. I spent 12 hours on a batch yesterday and Ray, old friend, I can finally tell you it’s not worth the effort. Canned beans weren’t that expensive even 55 years ago when we were flush with cash.
February 11, 1977 – When my son, Jeremy, was born I phoned my father from the hospital to give him the news. The baby was his first grandchild and my dad said something unintentionally funny.
“A boy, great! Our name will continue.”
“Dad,” I replied, “Williams is the third most common name in the English language. The name is safe.” We both laughed. It was one of those special moments between a father and son that I knew I would remember forever.
28 years and ten days later my son had a son and today is his 19th birthday. It’s a big day for him, bigger than he realizes.
I’ve always thought moms deserve the annual birthday celebrations for having done the physical and emotional work. Creating a human inside of yourself is quite literally an unimaginable miracle.
Fathers are bound to their children, too, but physically less so. We have to work a little harder at finding our way into the spiritual connection mothers create naturally.
“My father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.” – Clarence Budington Kelland
Parents and grandparents talk a lot about how quickly time passes. It’s true but what we don’t acknowledge often enough is that the time we’ve spent with our children and grandchildren, fast as it seems to pass, is also infinite.
I’m 72 and I think often of my grandfathers, though I wish I knew them better. I marvel at the similarities between us. I appreciate the lessons they taught me through their sons and daughters.
My father died 22 years ago but I think of him daily. He is still my hero but I couldn’t tell you why. We just have that bond.
“A father’s love is like your shadow, though he is dead or alive, he will live with your shadow” – P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar
Tyler Goold Williams, I love you for your birth, for who you’ve become since, and for who you will yet be. I celebrate each day of your existence. I wish I could hug and laugh with you more often. I hope we’ll spend more time getting to know each other but I assure you this: you are the result of thousands of generations of mothers and fathers who loved one another deeply. You belong in the chain of families whose love created you.
Through all of that, through all of time past and future, you are the only Tyler Goold Williams who has or will ever exist.
That’s why we celebrate birthdays.
Be happy, stay healthy. Live your life as you wish it to be.
Love, Grandpa
PS. Call us sometime. The phone works both ways, ya know.
I love Christmas and all the songs that celebrate it but the answer for me, hands down, is the entire Christmas Portrait album by The Carpenters. Even the title is perfect; it’s a glorious audio portrait of everything that fills us with the love and magic of Christmas.
The arrangements, lush orchestration, and Disneyesque choir of this album wrap me in a beautiful soft snowfall and a warm, crackling fire. More than five minutes into an overture and medley of traditional religious carols we are primed for Karen Carpenter’s arrival with her angelic voice singing “Christmas Waltz”.
That album was released in October 1978. My wife and I were in our first new house; our son was approaching only his second Christmas, the first one I figured he could appreciate — bright lights, shiny ornaments, presents, and beautiful music.
And that’s the thing about music, isn’t it? It reflects the powerful emotions of our lives past and gives us a path of hope for the future.
For you, Christmas touchstones may be ignited by Mariah Carey, Michael Buble, or Bing Crosby. Play it loud and often.
In case you’re curious, Elvis had the best-selling Christmas album of all time.
(CarolAnn has always said I should write a book about my radio career. I don’t think it’s a big deal and haven’t cared while I was still working. Now, recently retired, I’m going to try, one short essay at a time. — DW, December 20, 2023)
My senior yearbook picture, Highlands High School, North Highlands, CA, 1969
As near as I can figure, my first day working in radio was June 16, 1969. It was less than a week after I graduated high school with the great honor of addressing my fellow graduates with a speech I titled, “The Crystal Dream”.
I was only 17 but already writing too-flowery purple prose.
The speech concluded, “You can grab this world by the tail but you must be quick, lest you find yourself holding the shattered fragments of a crystal dream.”
(The word, “lest” is a red flag of purple prose.)
Some capped-and-gowned wiseass back near the 50-yard line fired off a bottle rocket. A guy in the front row lifted his gown and flashed me his privates. Parents and grandparents in the bleachers applauded appreciatively; maybe half of my 400 classmates clapped too, glad that I was finished.
Then we got our diplomas, tossed our caps in the air, and life started.
I went searching for a pithy quote about November and this is where I stopped looking:
“November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.” – Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson has always cracked me up. I know I know — she is widely considered to be America’s greatest poet. I’m a troglodyte when it comes to poetry. I’ve spent 25 years ridiculing the “Belle of Amherst” since I wrote a play making fun of her work on nearly every page. After I finished writing it I was shocked to learn that Harvard University Press still held the copyright on most of her creations and they insisted on reading my two-act mockery before granting permission for me to quote her.
Even more shockingly, they decided it was fine, go ahead and perform it!
Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul…
– Emmy again
You can’t make this stuff up. Oh, I get it, in this famous piece, a bird is implied as a metaphor for hope. I just find most metaphors to be unnecessary and often unintentionally funny abstractions.
And yet, when I went looking for a pithy quote about November I was hoping to find a touching metaphor of life approaching its final days.
Since I turned 70 more than two years ago I’ve made an effort to think philosophically about aging. Songs and stories are always referring to May to December romances and such.
Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few
September, November
And these few precious days I’ll spend with you
– “September Song”, lyrics by Maxwell Anderson, music by Kurt Weill
I retired from radio yesterday and I’m very happy about it. I have no second thoughts and no regrets.
I just wanted to say something pithy that would express my complex sense of aging and, quite coincidentally, of leaving one’s lifelong career in the past.
Norway would have never occurred to me.
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
-You gotta love her, Emily Dickinson
I have wondered if it was sheer bravado whenever I heard retired people praise their retirement as the “new chapter” in their lives. Maybe it is for some, but I’m all in.
I’ve had a wonderful life and I still do. I’m more aware than ever of how fast my life has gone because I cherish every moment. I wouldn’t change a thing. I mean that literally.
I also know that I’m relatively close to the end of my life, but I’m not there yet.
Happily, I’m finally old enough to get it. These really are my golden years.
