When we’re young our thought processes don’t include much personal maintenance. Youth doesn’t have to think about eventual degradation because, for the most part, every thing’s in working order and body parts can still take a fair amount of abuse without something falling off and rolling across the floor. This is the magic of youth and it’s the same way we feel about a new car…what could go wrong? It’s new, it’s hot, it’s clean and ready for a long and distinguished run. Why even think about it?

At 58, I’ve got an entirely different perspective on things and it’s a primary reason why parents and offspring see life so differently. But I believe that if children could somehow feel, in any temporary way, what life will eventually dish out, physically and psychologically, they would find an easier  generational commonality and gain some valuable perspective on the fine art of living.

I’m beginning to really experience the wheels coming off and the train jumping the tracks and, frankly, it’s taking with it some of my last remaining cool mojo and that’s nothing if not a sobering alert that stuff is wearing out. On the other hand I’m, at this precise moment in time, almost perfectly straddling youth and old age. I’m still playing basketball with guys 30 years younger than me and I’m being told by an orthopedic specialist that my knees are a wreck and will, eventually, have to be condemned out of concern for arthritis and years of pounding and abuse.

This is a weird place to be. I can’t say that I’m fully embracing advancing age because I’m not, but I’m not fooled by the illusion of youth anymore either. Is this what Joni Mitchell meant by “I’ve looked at life from both sides now”? I’m not sure, but that’s what’s happening to me. I’m having to become an advocate for both my youthful side and my aged side, both at the same time. I can’t emphasize how much of a weird place this is to be.

I’ve got the psychology of a 16 year old and the knees of a 90 year old. Stuff happens to me now that I’ve never even seen or heard of and my cries of “what the hell now?” are mostly exasperated pleas for mercy. I’ve got crap happening that I can’t even put down in print! I’ve heard it remarked that aging is not for sissies and it is so true because if you don’t decide to ignore the things that bog you down and carry on in defiance, then you’ll be in a wheelchair in about 5 minutes. This is where youthful obliviousness comes in handy because it is that bravado that keeps us cooking.

So, I have an approach that I’m using that I hope will serve me until I am no longer, and it involves a little measured prudence with a little kamikaze. Sound dangerous? Not really, because the greater danger would be sitting on my sorry ass tabulating my infirmities. Now that sounds dangerous, so I have no intention of doing that.

Anyhow, my formula for future success is 1) let only the severity of pain dictate what I will and will not physically do, 2) ignore the pain, 3) make good friends with ibuprofen and, finally, 4) leave all pride parked at the door since it won’t be needed.

Have a nice day…

For the most part, I do not understand any families that I’m associated with. They often seem like foreign countries with agendas and a language that is, well, foreign to me.

They hide things from me that they think I shouldn’t know or create attributes for themselves that they don’t possess so that they might appear noble. They do this in the name of St. Coping; patron saint of head games. But all it does is cause me confusion because their actions do not, like a badly dubbed Japanese film, match their language. I see their mouths moving but little of what is said seems to correlate to reality and, more often than not, leaves me wondering if these people haven’t actually invented bullshit.

With a few exceptions, my own family is like that, my wife’s family is like that and, not to let myself off the hook, I’m sometimes like that.

Speaking for myself, when I make crap up to suit a need, I do it because it supposedly helps me dodge some uncomfortable circumstance that I can’t deal with. I do it because the truth is confrontational and hard to handle and makes me feel like entering the witness protection program.

But that feeling of flight betrays the benefit of truth because, although painful initially, it’s way less time consuming and energy sucking than constantly manipulating the facts of the matter so you come out looking good on the other end.

I know this is true because my wife says it is.

Alright, I’m being cute here but it’s true because that is how she tries to live everyday and while she might not have a perfect track record, she adheres to the truth when it matters the most; when it’s necessary for healthy living and that’s when it should count the most. When it’s crunch time, she picks up the ‘truthteller’ standard and carries it fearlessly into battle and a lot of people are not going to like you for that.

How crazy does that sound…’people are not going to like you for that’.

No, my brother, when the truth is not welcomed you will see all sorts of flailing and bailing, denying and lying, bobs and weaves, and every manner of avoidance a person can conjure up. The more intelligent, the more sophisticated the ruse but, in the end, it’s the same nonsense.

Our neuroses take on such a powerful presence that we lose perspective on the reality of what is before us. While we’re massaging our damaged psyches we totally lose sight of actual good, for ourselves and others, that could be done if only we’d give up this mental chain-gang labor.

And it’s not only others that fact-shifters are working on…it’s themselves and it is immensely hard to convince yourself of a fiction and then sustain it for ridiculously long periods of time. Pure, back-breaking labor.

Dysfunctional families do this all the time. It’s their bowl of Wheaties; their energy drink; their psychotropic of choice and I’m beginning to have strong feelings of repulsion for the whole thing. While they’re avoiding reality, I want to avoid them.

So, here’s my pact with anyone I’m related to. If we’ve got a mutual problem and it takes a village to figure it out and you make yourself a worthless paper weight in the middle of negotiations, stop talking to me or interacting with me because you’re nothing but a distraction and I’ve got no use for you.

You know who you are…or maybe you’re so delusional, you don’t.

By the fourth grade I should have known better. I should have known that I was going to take my lumps for hanging onto Santa Claus the way I did but, damn, I’m nothing if not dogged in my point of view and that pretty much brings up another associated problem at the time.

My dog was involved in the entire mythology of Santa and if I was going to still believe in Santa I was also going to have to buy into Santa’s otherworldly ability to talk to animals and that meant accepting my dad’s (father #2) assertion that my German Shepherd, Pal, spoke to Santa about me often and that I should consider that in any future behavior.

For me, the behavioral issue was no big deal but the fact that my dog spoke to Santa was a really attractive possibility and something I wanted to be true because it was cool and gave me new found respect for Pal. On television there was Mr. Ed (the talking horse) communicating with his owner, Wilbur, but this thing with Pal was the real deal and I wasn’t afraid to share it.

And, of course, I was met with resistance from two principle sources.

First, there was fourth grade classmate, Eugene, who took great umbrage with my story, feeling it necessary to debunk Santa and my dog all in one fell swoop. This only strengthened my resolve to stand behind my reality because it had to be true and the only way to cement that truth was to sell it with all the conviction I could muster. So, I sold it, sold it and sold it some more until Eugene threatened to beat me up if I kept on, which created an immediate impasse and an end to all future discussions.

Hell with it, I’d keep it to myself.

But I didn’t, because the next day at my baby sitter’s house (I stayed there during the day when my parents were at work), I let loose with the same story and everyone involved said, in other words, that I was full of shit. “Your dog can’t talk to Santa Claus!”, said her son, Gene. “Yes he can…my dad told me”, said I, and so we went around and around until Gene’s mother sided with her son and confirmed that dogs couldn’t talk to people and my dad was just telling a tale.

Now, here’s exactly what I thought and felt during all of this and I still feel pretty much the same way.

Intellectually, it seemed like a monstrous long-shot that my dog could talk to Santa Claus but I wanted to believe it, I was 9 years old and, obviously, wanted to suck every last ounce out of the legend before dull reality set in. The talking dog aspect fit the paradigm perfectly. Santa was already talking to his reindeer and they all seemed to understand what he was talking about so what would be far-fetched about Santa talking to dogs? This is Santa, and Santa carries with him some serious magic mojo so it was all working for me. If I believed in Santa, I’d have to believe that he could talk to my dog.

Now you expect kids your own age to be a little brutal with their righteous truth and I could forgive that but when Gene’s mother and other family members, as a group, shot down my story I thought, what a bunch of assholes, ripping the illusionary joy right out of my head because they had to be right.

I don’t know why someone would do that to a 9 year-old but I do know that, unlike today’s ‘fast-lane’ kids, there’s no reason to make a mad dash for the mediocrity and very un-magical reality that is adulthood. In fact, if I could put my knowledge on hold and buy into that whole Santa thing again, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

Raymond, among the many middle-class families in our extended neighborhood, was very poor indeed. One look at the disheveled exterior of his house, crying out for the touch of a paint brush and a weed whacker, and you could see that not only was there little cash flow but an assumed degree of neglect.

How would I know this? Did I ever go in his house? No. Did I ever meet his parents? No. Did I even know if he lived with his parents? No. But then I didn’t have to because Raymond carried the ‘air’ of neglect on his person each and every day he came to school.

I knew him from Kindergarten on and was alternatively repelled by the constant body odor and dental disaster and sorry that he had, apparently, no one to guide him in a better direction, making sure he had clean clothes to go to school in. To make matters even stranger, Raymond was like a 40 year old in a 12 year old body, having facial stubble that none of us were to have for many years to come. Combine that with greasy, unwashed hair and you could see why Raymond was socially marginalized.

Even so, I tried to see what was at the heart of every kid, not just their immediate grooming habits or lack of. So I tried to hang out with him a little bit, doing the nothing that we would often do. We had some whackadoodle idea that we could build a rocket out of these large cylinders we’d found but, of course, that was an immediate dead end when it became obvious there was no way to power the rocket and even if we could find an engine lying around we wouldn’t know what to do with it. So the cylinders stayed cylinders and, outside of a brief fist fight near our lilac bushes, Raymond and I didn’t spend too much more quality time together.

But for about a week in 1964, Raymond became the guy to know as we hit 8th grade and hormonal chaos. Getting a glimpse of the female anatomy was of interest to a lot of the guys and most of us still hadn’t seen the real deal so there was much false boasting and wild conjecture as to what was what and what went where, little of it probably accurate. Then Raymond came to school with clear documentation to put the rumors to rest and pretty much flaunted his prize possession.

Raymond had a Playboy Magazine centerfold carefully folded and stuffed in his jeans and at some point during social studies I caught wind of this revelation and immediately worked at getting on Raymond’s good side so I could have a look. This meant I was going to have to do a major ’suck up’ since the last time we’d hung out I was punching him in the head in my backyard. Fortunately, I’ve never been one who loses sight of the greater cause and so, by the end of the school day, I ‘borrowed’ the centerfold.

At the time, to a 13 year old boy, this was like winning the lottery and I carried it with great reverence because this was the anatomical tutorial I’d waited for and my hormones were already having a hoedown in my pants at the prospects of checking this thing out. I’d had no real sex education, either in school or the lame attempt by my dad to explain the phenomena, so this was going to have to suffice and I’d fill in the blanks as I went along.

For some, mostly women, this will sound like a simple prurient interest but for those of my kind, it was a seminal moment that I shall remember in the same way as the Kennedy assassination or 9/11. I’ll always have the day, the centerfold, the excitement, carefully etched into my memory.

Too many years have passed and most of those newly-minted hormones have set sail for more youthful harbor, but on that day Raymond delivered the pictorial proof of all we’d imagined and the party was on…

When I was growing up in the ’50’s and ’60’s, environmental concerns weren’t on the average person’s radar and, in fact, Rachel Carlson’s ground breaking 1962 book, Silent Spring, was the only serious look at pollution and was primarily concerned with the use of poisonous chemicals, dispersed in the ground water supply.

So, when the fall leaves dropped to the ground by the bushel, we raked them up on the curbside into a tidy mound and set them on fire; a blazing heap that chucked out smoke like a runaway barbecue pit. Oddly, the expected acrid cloud was rather pleasant, with an aroma similar to a campfire.

Multiply that single act with designated leaf burning days and you had what amounted to a neighborhood bonfire with nearly every curbside contributing to the fog that spread across the adjacent streets and filled the air with the unmistakable smell of fall.

It’s the smell that, in the sensory memory of those who experienced it, will always be associated with the season. Leaf burning was something that brought neighbors outside to talk and kibitz with one another; a giant social event with a 5-alarm ambiance and a role for everyone to play.

Children did a lot of the raking, if for nothing else than the payoff of diving headfirst into the pile, so it was a chore of joy that was so good we had to do it repeatedly because our leafy playground would end up spread far and wide as if we’d never raked in the first place. At some juncture, the adults took over the operation and the fires commenced. Leaf herders with a constant watch over their fallen flock had to make sure the fire stayed within the confines of reasonable although me and most of my little pyromaniac friends were just prodding the herders into bigger and brighter blazes.

Before there were multiple electronic distractions to dumb down social events for kids, sanctioned fun with fire and smoke was something to look forward to. It plays into every irresistible urge kids have to control the potentially uncontrollable, so what could be better than an entire neighborhood flickering at dusk?

“Hey kids, let’s go outside and play with matches!!”

We weren’t even content with our own fires so we made the ‘flammable tour’, roaming the rest of the neighborhood to check out the fires of our buddies on other streets.

Now, to be honest, this wasn’t a risk-free activity because there was the outside chance that a pant leg might catch on fire or somebody’s house was a little too downwind but those were acceptable hazards to be dealt with if necessary. In practice, the only regular danger we encountered was leaping into the pre-burned pile only to discover some kid-maiming surprise, like a rake or other mystery object.  But that’s part of the charm of the unknown and if you were going to get squeamish about a rock in the side of the ribs or a ground steak upside the head, then leaf pile jumping wasn’t for you. We really didn’t weigh the negatives of inhaling tons of toxic fumes because, well, we just didn’t because we were as oblivious as the 1950’s sometimes were. If you didn’t consider the disasterous effects of 3 packs of Lucky Strikes a day then you were hardly phased by pile of burning leaves.

At its peak, the haze just hung in the trees, like one of those World War II movie battlefields covered with artillery smoke. It completely changed the character of the neighborhood and made it, in an odd way, sort of an exotic getaway. I always loved it when the familiarity of home morphed into something else, whether it was 10 feet of snow, an ominous sky before a tornado or, as in this case, scads of little bonfires.

For environmental and safety reasons, nearly all cities have put a stop to that kind of thing and now you see the leaves raked and stuffed in those biodegradable paper bags, lined up neatly on the curb, waiting for trucks to pick them up.

It’s probably a good thing we didn’t have those back then because I’m sure we would have set the bags on fire too. Sorry, Smokey.

After years of assessing my strengths and weaknesses, there’s no doubt I’m a highly distractable person. What would that be in today’s coded vernacular…HDP? I’m sure if I were in high school now, psychologists would be breaking it all down into a neat little prescription to be filled at the pharmacy but all it really boils down to for me is an inability to focus sometimes in the midst of surrounding activity. When I’m creating something (this story for instance) and the phone rings or someone calls to me, it’s like one of those near-death accounts where, on your way to the glorious light, you come reeling back to mundane life. It’s jarring and causes an automatic restart.

It’s why my creativity has always thrived in the wee hours of the morning. I like being awake when most people aren’t. It’s like being in one of those sci-fi flicks where the guy realizes that the entire human race has been wiped off the planet and he’s the only one left and he’s got the run of the roost, but unlike the sci-fi guy I’m comforted to know that the isolation is temporary and, eventually, the rest of the world will get out of bed and I won’t die alone.

I’ve been this way since I was a kid and after this many years it is an easily definable part of my character. When I was young, if school hours permitted (and sometimes even when they didn’t) I’d be up at 2am doing virtually anything; reading, writing, making model cars, writing songs, studying the jokes on comedy albums, creating lists of anything that came into my head and sometimes I’d just sit and think of shit.

It may sound like ‘thinking of shit’ is an empty activity but that is far from true because most of my best ideas are formulated in this vacuum of uncluttered time. It’s in this time that my brain becomes well-ordered and everything makes sense in a way that the cacophony of day to day activities do not. I admire those who retain clarity while standing on a teeter board, juggling 4 balls and reciting the Gettysburg Address. I just don’t seem to be one of them since all I want to do is get really good with the teeter board and then move on to the juggling.

My wife, on the other hand, is a marvel of powerful thinking in the eye of the storm. With a teeter board under each foot and a bucket full of balls flying at her, she can quickly breakdown the situation and reign it in like Einstein herding relativity into an understandable theory. It’s amazing to watch her in full operational gear.

Now, this is not to say that I’m not quick since in my profession as an entertainer I have to stand in front of groups of people everyday and corral an audience with off the cuff comedy and a perfect flow of music. In the midst of what most people might consider a frightening chaos, I’m as clear as a laser and know exactly what to do and when to do it.

But that’s a controlled environment (when I control it) that I’ve become skilled at over 4 decades of repetition and practice and doesn’t quite have the randomness of the majority of daily encounters. That’s what separates the thinkers from the sinkers and it’s why I do my best thinking when the bats are getting their exercise. Life just sort of gets put on ‘pause’ while I get some work done.

There are only a couple of other comparable times where there is perfect clarity and that’s in the morning when I’m just coming out of my nightly coma, before I set one foot on the floor. I’m at my organizational best at that very moment…lining up the days events, assigning myself a series of necessary tasks and planning a well-appointed day. I only run into trouble when I get out of bed where the quandary of order becomes an issue. Up until that time I’m the best secretary I’ve ever had. Too bad the secretary ends up being a temp.

The other time is in the shower. The shower is like an isolation tank where your only task is to bath, which leaves it wide open for thought. Nothing but you, falling water and an open mind. I have come up with some great stuff in the shower and if I were wise I’d install a waterproof, digital recorder on the wall.

I think my DNA is hard-wired this way and as much as I struggle to make it work more like my wife’s I know it never will be. Getting older is worthless for running faster and jumping higher but for knowing what you’re good or bad at; it’s the perfect clarifier.

I am what I’ve always been; a very, very, very poor man’s Stephen Hawking, a sharp intellect that only comes out after midnight and is this close to being interviewed by Anne Rice.

When I was at the peak of my ‘Trick or Treat’ powers, primarily the grade school years, neighborhoods far and wide opened up like candy dispensaries.

It wasn’t just a particular street or area that opened up its doors but every street and nearly every door. As long as you could keep walking was how much bounty you came home with and we didn’t use conventional bags or those plastic pumpkins because that limited the size and poundage of what we could carry. Instead, the large-scale operators like myself used pillow cases. By the end of the evening, if you did your job properly, you looked more like a candy hoarding Santa Clause with a full pillow case tossed over the shoulder.

There was something so communal about the event, so many children out there with one common goal, that no one was really alone and although the youngest children still had a parent on hand, this was primarily a no-parent function where everyone watched over everybody else. Potential perpetrators, if there were any lurking, were relegated to the sidelines due to excessive foot traffic.

My friends and I used to do a geographical sweep that always involved note comparison. The protocol for running into another group of kids was an exchange of information about areas they had been in which you had not and vice versa. What were they giving out? What house had the best stuff? Was it possible to go back twice? What houses to avoid and what was just a waste of time. You ran into so many children that it was like having an advanced social networking reconnaissance.

Unlike today’s TOT environment, the most sought after and heavily traded information had to do with treats that were made by homeowners; things like popcorn balls and candy apples. The folks that usually made these things knew their craft and loved what they were doing. They’d make the stuff from scratch and the treats were, by and large, fantastic. Treats like this were coveted because any kid could walk into a store and buy a candy bar but homemade fare was a random Halloween delicacy largely unavailable but for one day a year and you had to canvas a neighborhood to find it.

I don’t remember exactly when the homemade Halloween food scare took hold but it shut down a valuable mom and pop industry that had thrived for a very long time. Exposed as an urban myth (with no documented evidence to the contrary), the ‘razor blade in the apple’ story not only stopped the flow of candy apples but, for a period of time,  it virtually put a halt to the tradition of Halloween, proving once again that we are a very skittish and hyper-reactive people.

But back when I was walking the streets (should I rephrase that?), that bag got heavier and heavier and eventually dictated how long you stayed in the game before the strain on your shoulder forced you home. Having a bag full of candy that was three times the size of your head was a much sought after accomplishment, so most of the time we suffered for our diligence.

When you finally lugged that sack of sugar into your house it was like hitting the finish line in the Boston Marathon but, unlike the Marathon, the exercise was incomplete until you dumped out everything onto the floor and took inventory. It wasn’t uncommon to have an inordinate amount of Smarties but, then again, that’s hardly the worst thing that can happen to you. Chocolate was the goal though, and you needed plenty of chocolate to call the evening a success, but what put you in the upper echelon of TOTers was the ‘homemade’ tally…lovingly referred to on our block as the ‘good crap’.

After inventory there was the customary trading portion of the event and the living room floor became the New York Stock Exchange and you might either enhance or downgrade your initial investment. In the end, though, it was win, win all around because you’d had a great night of bumping into friends, getting exorcise, half-freezing your ass off, unraveling the great neighborhood treasure map and coming home with enough candy to kill 50 kids.

It’s a shame what happened to Halloween. It was a magnificent piece of childhood entertainment, screwed up by malcontents, weirdos and wild rumor, never to be experienced the same way again. Even though it has made a modest comeback in recent years, it’s just not the same kinetic experience that had us looking forward to the night like it was Christmas Eve. Trust has leaked out of our society and parents are assuming that there are hordes of evil beings just waiting to scoop up their offspring. Beyond that, there’s an actual theory that suggests just walking around in a costume, especially a mask, increases the risk of falling down and premature death by as much as 4 times. Maybe they’re right and the scaled down version of Halloween was necessary because we live in more dangerous times, or kids are clumsier, I don’t know.

Whatever happened though, it’s a shame that children can’t experience the night with the same wild abandon that we did, in neighborhoods that looked like New York City streets at rush hour, because that was some awesome, cool, shit.

My step-dad (father #3 if you’re counting) has been in my life since 1972 and when I dare to count the years, which I often don’t, it adds up to a majority of my adult life.

On Sunday morning, May 24th, 2009, he passed away due to cancerous complications.

From the moment I met Bob I wondered if the word ‘gregarious’ were too meager a term to describe this guy. His personality lit up like a neon Vegas sign; open for business 24/7. How could he keep the energy flowing like that? And yet, he was clearly feeding off of the same electricity he was expending. He was like one of those self-winding watches that sustains itself off of simple motion.

His entire working life, he was a master salesman, entrepreneur and idea-man with an unstoppable enthusiasm for people and an insatiable appetite for the joy in life. Bob wasn’t just a salesman because if he were only interested in raw profit margin he would’ve had only moderate success. He was never selling just a product but an idea as to why you needed the product and why you needed him and how he could actually help you in some tangible way.

He researched and understood his clients and suggested innovations for their products (many of which became the practical property of his employers because of contract) and he made a personal connection with his clients that endeared them to him for the whole of his working life and beyond. Businesses that routinely dodged salesmen, looked forward to spending time with my dad because he was genuinely interested in them and they sensed his earnestness. He wasn’t just a smart and clever salesman, he was someone you ended up trusting and caring about…a collaborator, an ally, a friend.

Selling was what Bob did for a living but, in a larger sense, it was just Bob being happy being Bob, putting himself out there because he loved the interaction. He relished the chance for his cleverness to convince your common sense that he was acting in your best interest as well as his own. This is, perhaps, where his salesmanship took a definite turn from the commonplace.

Bob often blurred the lines between business and friendship because he liked people. He was ecstatic to know you and when you were with him, you were the focus of his attention…you were special. That is, unless you were a transparent schmuck, and then he had a course of action for that as well, because under that gracious exterior, Bob was a very shrewd person and as genuine as he was with his friends, was how conversely cunning he was with folks he didn’t care for.

That larger-than-life persona was his ultimate strength (and legacy) but it was also his biggest weakness. Like two sides of the same coin, his constant quest for joy, success and satiation also left him, on the flip side, somewhat ill-equipped for the more negative personal challenges in life. Dealing with sticky family problems, in particular, seemed a chore that he needed to hand off to my mother. He probably didn’t quite look at it that way but that is how I saw their roles playing out from the earliest days.

He didn’t defer these family problems for lack of insight or critical thought, which he had an abundance of; it seemed to be the sheer drudgery of having to tackle discomfort. I think his inability to tend to some of these things was an anomaly in his character for which there seemed no other answer than his wiring just didn’t work that way. He wasn’t superficial or cruel. He just simply didn’t understand how to cope with untidy parts of life and found it necessary to channel all his unbridled enthusiasm to where he could get the best bang for the buck. I found it occasionally unsightly but we’ve all got holes, so…

To me, he was kind and generous in ways that I never had from a father when I was younger and, in that sense, I was fortunate to have him in my corner even though my lack of paternal parenting in the developmental years left me ill-equipped to know what to do with his attention. Nevertheless, I worked some of that out as we both got older.

That final week in the hospital, a day before a kidney biopsy would go all wrong, I sat in his room with my mother while he downed a bowl of ice cream. Bob was a dedicated eater and we all needed to get out of the way while the operation was underway. But it was strange this time because, as he made waste to that dessert, he looked straight at me in a way that forced me to lock in on his eyes. At that moment I knew that this wasn’t going to play out well, and it’s as if he were concentrating on this ice cream because it might be the last bowl.

It was. The next day internal bleeding from the biopsy sent him into an unrecoverable tailspin. Even though doctors stopped the bleeding, the damage was done. Already on the precipice, with an incurable  cancer he had been on the run from for longer than most survivors make it, Bob settled into a world that steadily, throughout the week, receded from ours.

My mother asked me if I thought that he’d go home eventually and I couldn’t bring myself to deny what I was sure was the truth. “No, Mom,” I told her, “I don’t think he’s ever coming home.” I suspect that she knew the truth of the matter herself but everything happened so quickly that we were all unprepared for the course of events.

Bob was, as the saying goes, a bull in a China shop; unaware of food dribbling down his shirt or the ear-splitting volume of a voice that had the potential to make dogs howl. I’ll say this, it got your attention and there was no mistaking who was in the room: “HI, SON!!!”, he’d roar as if he hadn’t seen me in 30 years.

None of us escapes this world without our flaws and weaknesses, and Bob wasn’t without his, but people passionately loved him and he loved them in return, often stopping to cajole, council or commiserate and, if his memorial was any indication, he touched a whole hell of a lot of people.

Occasionally I found him a little too self-indulgent, but then he’d turn right around and give you the most generous part of himself. I think he used self-indulgence like a blunt weapon against boredom and sadness, and a host of other life-wrenching moments; that loud, boisterous voice, knocking down misery like a row of tumbling dominoes.

There are days I wish I could do that…it sure worked for him.

In the 1950’s, unlike today, TV broadcasts had a daily shelf life and at some time in the morning, say 3am or so, after the late movie and some nebulous local half hour show no one watched, the voice-over announcer would explain that the broadcast day had concluded and would return at such and such a time. Then they played the national anthem with the flag waiving away and then, boom, nothing but static and white noise.

When I got up around 5:30am on Saturday mornings for cartoons I deliberately got up a bit early, before the programming day began so that I could watch and listen to the test pattern. Oh yea, the test pattern. That was traditionally the precursor to actual programming that came out of the signal-absent white noise and usually displayed a low-tech calibration screen with a head-dressed Indian in the middle of it. Accompanying that image was a high, steady tone that hummed away for 30 minutes or so and it was that intoxicating hum I was after.

Perhaps it was the musician in me or the simple sonic lure but I used to sit right in front of the TV, in somewhat of a trance and hum along with it. I might have been employing some kind of yoga meditation without even knowing it.

Humming right on the tone kept it steady but moving above or below the pitch, however slight, would cause the tones to start oscillating against one another. If I was relatively close the oscillation was quick but when I moved farther off pitch, the tone would get wider and slower and I basically played with those tones for all of the time leading up to cartoons. These are all basic acoustical concepts but I had distilled the science down to pure, geeky fun.

But it wasn’t just humming fun I was attracted to. The half hour of test pattern humming went unusually quick, as if time had been suspended…another indication that I was surely on a psychological surfboard to utter serenity. Unfortunately, about the time I had reached a complete understanding of the universe (known and unknown), Heckle and Jeckle or Mighty Mouse would come on and drag me back to my childhood.

I don’t think I was a particularly odd kid but as an only-child with no distractions, something like a 400 Hertz sine wave was a perfectly viable plaything and it appears that I had inadvertently stumbled on the electronic approach to nirvana. It makes me wonder what the potential childcare application might have been if I had introduced the idea to the public and become kind of a Buddhist P.T. Barnum.

Thousands of little kids humming away at their sine waves, no longer acting out but completely zen and one with the kid next to them. No more ADD drugs being dispensed like candy. No more restraining orders being taken out by teachers. No more pulling hair on the playground. Nothing but meditative, spiritually attuned minors with a penchant for poppy seed muffins and virtuosity.

Ah, but with the demise of the test pattern on modern television, all that potential peace and harmony have signed off forever.