Skateboarding Lessons

I’ve lost count of the number of times when, after hearing about a teenage driving tragedy, I’ve said piously, “That’s the thing about young people — they think they are immortal; they never believe it will happen to them.”

There needs to be a new category of people who are just as idealistic, naive, blissfully ignorant — “who think it will never happen to them” — employees over 50.

Harry Truman once wrote, “It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.” Hell, yeah. And depression is a key side-effect of losing your job. Along with a total loss of self-esteem and an increase in self-doubt and sudden crying jags.

Baby boomers were raised with the ethic that if we worked hard, offered an employer loyalty, didn’t make waves and always stayed busy and made positive contributions to a company, we would have jobs. Our parents worked for 30 or 40 years at companies: IBM, P&G, GM, police and fire departments, banks, insurance companies. They retired with these now near-mythical things called “pensions.”

But in the last couple of decades, the situation has changed. There are very few lifers in lifetime jobs. That’s not a bad thing, really. But what has become frightening is what downsizing, RIFs, recessions, redundancies, etc., have done to those of us over the age of 50 who simply want to work hard and do something related to the field in which we earned college degrees. (Seriously, who in the 1970s-80s foresaw that a journalism/communications degree might be a dead end?)

Like my teenage children, I honestly believed it would not happen to me, even though it happened all around me and often to good and talented people. In a previous job I was ordered to lay off four people in my last week there, losing several weeks’ sleep over it. Two-and-a-half years later, the bitch that is karma left me standing at the elevator toting a cardboard box containing my Yankees coffee mug, family photos and editing style manuals.

“It’s a reduction in force across the board,” the HR staffer reassured me. “It’s nothing you did or could have done differently.” As the newest kid in the department, my number was simply up as the company moves toward sale or consolidation.

In the past two months I’ve found myself wondering just how I got here. Damn it, I think to myself, I used to BE somebody! I traveled the world, won awards, served as vp of a national association, met presidents and popes, and interviewed politicians and celebrities. Job offers came out of the blue. But that was then, and this is simply not then.

Printed publications went the way of the Edsel. I turned 50. I took a big paycut and made a lane change to try to keep my career afloat. And today I’m known as a case number to the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.

Does age make finding a job harder? I didn’t always think so, but now I’m not so sure. There have been books written about unemployment for women over 50 (but I don’t have the money to buy them now!)

At one job interview a few weeks ago, in a very hipster-oriented ad agency where employees actually rode skateboards throughout the office, I could tell the managers were surprised when I introduced myself. I don’t necessarily look my age, but I’m clearly over 45. My skateboarding days are not only behind me, they never existed….I am of the era of roller skates with clamps over shoes.

I don’t have a problem with working with skateboarders. I can even name some popular skateboarders, as well as most of the cool musicians, TV shows, movies, reality celebs. I own t-shirts with clever sayings on them. No, I’ve never worn them to work, but there’s always a first time, right?

The reality is, however, that first impressions based on looks/demeanor/style/age are important. I’ve left the interview suits in the closet, since no one really seems to wear them anymore. I am incredibly adaptable and stay current. But I doubt some of the hiring managers have the time or willingness to find that out. There are other, younger candidates; I’ve seen them leaving the interviews. It’s probably easier to take a chance on them.

I’ve spent most of this “down” time trying to update my software skills, to read all of the marketing/social media/management trends/project management books and articles I didn’t have time to read when I was working. I find all of the “use this time to reinvent yourself” advice difficult to heed. I don’t want to reinvent myself. I liked what I did. I can do it somewhere else, if someone will hire me.

“I was happy being a journalist; I didn’t realize losing my job, my identity went with it,” Maria Shriver once said in an interview. Like Maria, I had no idea how much of my identity was tied into my work. If you asked me, I would always have said — and still would — that being a mom was my most fulfilling role. It’s a role that thankfully has not gone away. But when my job went away suddenly, a big part of my identity got very confused. I was no longer a former journalist-turned-digital-media-maven. I was just out of work.

So the past few months have not been the wonderful journey of self-discovery about which some authors wax rhapsodic. There’s been wallowing. There has been self-pity. Anger, lots of doubt. Fear. Fear is a big one.

But having written that, I am a little excited to be back in the job market, although I wish it weren’t under duress. The thought of working in a place where I can make a contribution again excites me.

And if it means I have to learn to skateboard, I’m game. Just give me the chance.

George

November always makes me think of Dad, and for some reason, George — which makes me smile.

Nope, not an old beau or pet — well, not really.

George was the gorilla who lived in the closet of my father’s den in their home in Florida. At least, that’s what we were told. The kids were convinced over the years that they’d caught glimpses of him. George, we were told, was quite shy. When our clan headed south for a visit, George usually packed up and went to visit his brother out West, Dad said. He always tried to make it back before we left for home, but it never quite happened.

“How’s George, Grandpa?” was one of the first questions the kids would ask when they got my dad on the phone. A shaggy dog (gorilla?) story would follow about the ape’s latest adventures, and they were stories that always thrilled.

George was a surprisingly good correspondent. He wrote letters to the kids, inquiring after their grades and activities. He had nice handwriting, not unlike my father’s elegant script . . . and for some reason, I always envision a gorilla wearing a beanie with a propellor sitting at a school desk, his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth as he labored over a letter.

George was something of a surprise to me, as my dad wasn’t much for children or whimsy during my own early years. The potential for it was always there, but it was never realized until Gabrielle came along in 1991 and Daniel four years later. Whatever mistakes or omissions Dad made during my childhood he made up for with my kids. No, he never changed a diaper, but he sparked their imaginations in so many ways.

“Remember George?” the kids still ask each other at times, and it’s always followed by grins and giggles and more Grandpa stories.

George faded away as my father did, disappearing somewhere into the mists swirling in Dad’s mind. But George’s memory is still strong in the minds of the grandchildren who never actually saw him, but knew what he looked like as surely as they did their grandfather, thanks to his elaborate descriptions.

I look at this photo, taken on his 80th birthday — just seven days before his November 27 death in 2007 — and mourn that creativity and whimsy and gentleness and delight in his grandchildren, particularly his young namesake, his only grandson. At the end, Dad did not know my mother’s name or mine, or even that we were related, but his visage would light up when his grandchildren entered the room, and he would fire  an imaginary cowboy pistol at Daniel in acknowledgement of that recognition.

Every November, I  think of the great poker game that’s going on in the next world. My dad and his buddies — Bill, Leo, Smokey, Ray, and probably my Uncle Larry — are sitting around a table. There’s a coffeemaker brewing endless pots (not decaf, either!), and there’s an Entenmann’s cake or two nearby.

And I always imagine George sitting next to my dad, wearing a green eyeshade, of course. It’s his deal.

Welcome to married life; the weather is likely to be unpredictable.

My very beautiful niece, Meighan, got married on Saturday in Rye, NY. She and her new husband, Ralph, planned a late fall wedding with an autumnal menu, leaves and sunflowers in the decor, and the venue, an elegant old mansion attached to a Greek Orthodox Church, offered a picture-perfect stone patio where the vows would be pronounced at dusk.

What they got was 8-10 inches of slushy, heavy snow, downed trees everywhere, a few empty tables because relatives and friends had tree branches fallen on their cars, power outages or impassable roads, a leaky tent on slippery wet stone for their vows, accompanied by the sound of cracking branches and cascades of rain into the tent during cocktails, and a temperature that put the kibosh on any outdoor strolls or photos.

I think it was great. Welcome to marriage, you two. This is kind of what it will be like.

Plans will go astray, and once you have children, in particular, most planning is futile. Your control over your lives is limited. The sooner you accept that, the better married life will be. Things will be crazy. A sense of humor is vital.

John Lennon noted that “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” After 23 years of marriage, some of it tough, most of it amazing, I can tell you that’s very true. So go with the flow. Accept the things you cannot change. Laugh about it all — even when it’s gallows humor. (Because sometimes it will be.)

Always try to remember how much your eyes shone  — and why — when you said your vows to each other on Saturday, when you danced together for the first time as husband and wife. 

My gift to you is that advice, and also, as you may have discovered if you opened your gifts, another reminder of the day: a watercolor painting of some of Meggie’s favorite flowers atop your wedding invitation. My own mother-in-law gave me a similar gift when your Uncle Gary and I got married, and it was undoubtedly my favorite gift. It was one of the few that stood out from the china and stemware and towels.

And every time I look at the rose-covered cottage painted on the yellowing invitation vellum, I remember exactly how I felt going down that aisle, smelling the scent of lily of the valley, hearing Grandpa chuckle as we saw Uncle Gary’s nervous face and looking at the smiles of all those people filling the church. People who loved us. A lot of them are no longer with us, at least not physically. But somehow, I know they’re watching out for us even today.

Remember that we’ll all be here for you in the years to come. Call us if you need us. And enjoy the crazy ride that is marriage. You never know what’s coming around the bend. The weather may be sunny, it may be unexpectedly snowy. You just have to learn to build snowmen and make hot chocolate when it is . . .

‘A great disturbance in the Force’

In the first “Star Wars” (or the fourth, depending upon how you look at it, although it will always be the first to me), Obi-Wan Kenobi falters and grabs at something to hold himself up. When asked what’s wrong, he says, “I felt a great disturbance in the Force. As if a million souls cried out in torment and were silenced at once.” As moviegoers knew, the evil Empire has just obliterated Princess Leia’s home planet of Alderaan.

There are a lot of famous lines from the “Star Wars” saga, but that one has stayed with me since the very first time I saw the movie on the big screen in the summer of 1977.

Alec Guinness’ utterance came back to me on a cold December morning 30 years later as I was walking  the perimeter of an area I’d once known as a workplace. Most people today know it best as “Ground Zero,” but during the summer of 1981, the 72nd floor of one of the Twin Towers (north, south? I can’t remember) was where I could be found several days a week in the offices of the state counterpart of the city agency of New York I was interning with. I would walk over from our Worth Street offices and spend segments of the day attending meetings there as part of my three-month internship.

My train arrived from the Bronx  into the WTC station in the mornings, and I grabbed coffee and the newspaper at one of the stores and kiosks in the underground city that existed between the subway station and the lobby of the towers. You could shop, eat or drink without ever coming outside onto Chambers or Liberty Street, and the air-conditioned retail area was a refuge from the summer heat at lunchtime.

The elevator system at the WTC was complex, and it took this then-college student some time to figure it out. There were no direct elevators to the floor I needed to be on. Large elevator banks all went to different areas of the building. Depending upon how high you needed to be, you would take an express to the closest floor and then a local up or down accordingly.

The towers were constructed during my childhood, and we had all heard the stories that the buildings swayed in the wind. I was a little frightened to discover it was true. On a particularly stormy day, the view of the blackened, lightning-filled sky was amazing, and the gentle movement of the building was palpable. Long-time occupants chuckled at my lack of enthusiasm at the sensation.

If I left the WTC in the early evening, I would often walk over toward 1 Police Plaza to catch an uptown city bus to 34th Street and First Avenue. The summer of my internship was also the summer my dad spent in NYU Medical Center. From May until September, my mom and I alternated nights visiting him. Leaving the shadow of the towers behind me and emerging into the brighter summer sunshine of midtown is a memory that remains to this day.

I never went up to the Observation Deck. That was for tourists, not for native New Yorkers. Never ate or drank at Windows on the World. My only relationship with the WTC after that summer was coming out of the subway  to go to my mother’s office at Liberty Street or heading into the subway late at night as my friends and I left Harry’s at Hanover Square, a favorite Wall Street watering hole when we were in our 20s.

After 9/11, I found it impossible to return to New York, even for an annual visit. The thought of flying into the city and not seeing the towers, the idea of coming up out of a subway tunnel in midtown Manhattan and not turning automatically to see where the WTC was located in order to get my sense of north-south direction straight was impossible to bear.

But my dad’s death in 2007 and his subsequent memorial service back in the Bronx forced the issue. We drove through New Jersey and over the Tappan Zee in darkness, and I did not see the changed skyline. The day after his funeral, though, I geared myself up and got on the train. It was time.

When my husband and kids and I emerged at Police Plaza, the difference in the shadows was the first thing I noticed. Gone was the darkness that the WTC had cast over much of the area at different times of the day.

The air was bitingly cold, the sunshine bright. We skirted the edges of what was at that time a large, square hole in the ground. The debris was gone, and cranes and construction equipment filled the area, as did vendors hawking 9/11 shirts, snowglobes, posters and just about anything else on which you you could plaster the image of the towers.

Our kids didn’t have the sense of emptiness, of vastness, that Gary and I did. Unless you had experienced the towers, their absence was just an idea, a photographic image of “now you see it, now you don’t.” It wasn’t until you stood at the site and felt the enormity of what was gone, saw the gaping wound in the cityscape, that you really knew what a BFD these buildings had been. A little ugly, yes, they were. But they had become part of the inescapable landscape of the city, of New Yorkers’ everyday lives. They were a compass of sorts for all of us.

But at the site now best known as Ground Zero, even on a sunny, cold day in December, there was a great disturbance in the Force, as the fictitious Obi-Wan noted.

My family did not feel it. Maybe it’s the Irish, the fey, in me. Or maybe it’s my imagination. But to me, the very air at the site is charged. The oxygen cells, the ions — there is something there. Thousands of voices cried out and were silenced in mere seconds at this place. Life forces halted abruptly. Thousands of souls parted unwillingly from bodies. Such a massive loss of life does not happen without some kind of psychic, spiritual reverberation.  It’s in the dust that still clings to area buildings and street grates. It’s in the soil of the patches of grass and trees found in lower Manhattan. It’s in the air all around. It’s both organic and cosmic.

I’ve heard people talk about the feelings they’ve experienced visiting Pearl Harbor or Civil War battlegrounds. At some of those sites I’ve felt a great somberness. But Ground Zero is charged with something different.

My theory is that the material that separates this life and the next is a little thinner down there, perhaps tattered and filled with tiny holes. If you could just reach through the gossamer veil, you would see them all, hear their voices. There are souls hovering over Ground Zero. No other words describe it.

I won’t be going back to the site; at least, I don’t plan to. Tommy, my childhood pal, and the others lost that day, are memorialized in all our hearts, not in the inscribed stones that ring the reflecting pools. I won’t be watching the endless television programs this weekend aired by stations that profit from showing the horrific images over and over again. I can close my eyes and see the burning, shattered buildings at any time.

But on many clear, sunny days when the sky is a brilliant blue, I say a prayer for all of those souls and the families they did not come home to that September night.

 

867-5309/Nicole

We’ve lived in our current house for 18 years and had the same phone number for that period. But about two years ago, we began to receive frequent (a few a month) phone calls asking for “Nicole Berman.”

We don’t know anyone by that name. And I’ve told the callers that.

But apparently, Nicole may owe some money to creditors. A variety of them, too, based on the calls, which have come from rent-to-owns, credit card companies and other unidentified 1-877 numbers.

Maybe Nicole once had our phone number. Maybe she accidentally transposed a few digits on an application and it’s subsequently been picked up by other companies desperately seeking Nicole. You would think, though, that if just a digit had been transposed, there would still be someone by her name living in my area code, but there does not seem to be. I’ve checked. I mean, I did want to pass these messages along to her . . .

There are other, more nefarious explanations, I guess. I prefer not to think about those.

So I’m resigned to answering calls for Nicole Berman. They interrupt housecleaning or naps on the occasional day off. They take me away from cooking or laundry, pull me out of the shower too soon, bring me in from weeding, or just make me get up from a good book. At the risk it might actually be someone I want to talk to, I generally answer.

I don’t like getting her calls. But what I really don’t like is when the caller does not believe that he or she has the incorrect phone number for his/her prey.

“Well, do you know Nicole?” last week’s caller asked me, after I’d patiently explained there was no one by that name at our residence, never had been, and that we’d had this phone number for nearly 20 years.

“Are you sure you’re not Nicole Berman and trying to avoid talking to Acme credit?” bullied another. “That never works, you should know.”

Sometimes it’s a tinny electronic voice in our voice mail: “Wee r trying to reach Neecole-eh Berrrrman.”

“If you hear from Nicole,” another creditor sighed, “please give her our message.” Alrigghtty then.

I saw an ad recently for how to deal with creditors that bully and harass. I just don’t know if it applies to you when you’re not actually the debtor . . .

I don’t know Nicole. Really and truly. But I wish she’d pay her damned bills. Or get her credit report data up to date. And if I ever do come across her, she may get a bill from me for administrative costs. My secretarial skills do not come cheaply.

Now, about Ron Smith. We got four — count ’em, FOUR! — calls for him yesterday from Citicard . . . .

When you hope it’s a joke — but it’s not . . .

First read the story of Bongo last week, and I thought it had to be a joke. After all, it was the New York Post, so . . .

But today’s Post reported “a monkey miracle — Bongo has been found!”

No surprise, an “Upper East Side couple” was reported to be “grieving over the loss of a stuffed toy monkey they’ve raised like a son the past decade . . . “

How do you raise a friggin’ stuffed animal? Do you teach it values? Teach it to talk and walk and read? Feed it, change it, bathe it, walk the floor with it night after night? Hug it when it’s both bad and good? Love it no matter what it does? Cry with it when the other stuffed monkeys are mean in the schoolyard?

47-year-old head case Bonni Marcus said she “prayed” for the toy’s return. She and her 58-year-old beau lost the Beanie Baby while they were en route to dinner (at the asylum, one hopes) on Aug. 1. An unemployed man in Brooklyn found it on top of a parking meter and reunited Bongo with his  “parents” (even the Post used quote marks, thank heaven) after they posted fliers and offered a reward. The Post called the reunion “emotional.”

Bongo and his 'mommy'

When you think it can’t really get worse, the story wraps up with the wacko couple and the monkey “headed back to Manhattan to bar hop before returning home so Bongo could again sleep in the bed it shares with them. Bongo will also be reunited with his identical Beanie Baby brothers — named Doe, Ray and Me — who Marcus said, ‘were also suffering.'”

Any parent who has done the real work of parenting should be incensed at this story and the attention the mainstream media (well, ok, the Post) gave it when there are living, human children being abused every minute, going hungry to bed every night, and sleeping in cars, rather than a bed, being dragged up by a biological sperm and/or egg donor. There are living animals put to sleep every  minute of the day because a family could no longer afford to feed them or pay the vet bills, or because an elderly owner died.

Bonni could have helped a couple of breathing mutts or kitties draw a few more breaths with that $500; she could have fed a homeless family for nearly a month on it. Yes, it’s her money to throw away. And there are idiots out there who paid that much and more for Beanie Babies when they were a collector craze.

But you don’t get to say you “raised” it, “prayed” for it and had stuffed animals who “suffered.” That’s just wrong.

A goddess, I’m not.

First, the qualifier: I like LEGOs a lot. I should own stock in the company given all of the sets and loose figs we’ve purchased for our two kids in the past 20 years. On his 16th birthday this year, youngest child looked over his mature gifts and said, “No LEGOs?” So you don’t need to sell me on their popularity, their educational value, etc.

Having said that, the news that NASA today is launching the Mission Juno satellite with LEGO figures as part of its payload made me think, “WTF?”

Mission Juno will spend five-years traveling 400 million miles to Jupiter. The usual scientific reasons for the voyage are cited. I won’t bore you with the details. But whether it’s in the name of whimsy or science, the satellite is carrying “a crew” of three LEGO figurines. The 1.5 inch tall figures depict Galileo, the Roman god Jupiter, and his wife, Juno. (Galileo was credited with making discoveries about the planet of Jupiter, including finding four of its moons, and the little Galileo figure holds a telescope. Juno has a magnifying glass and Jupiter a lightning bolt.)

News stories report that LEGO is partnering with NASA to promote children’s interest in science, math, engineering and technology. I like that. My kids aren’t strong in those subjects, and I’m not sure LEGO could have changed that, but still. It’s nice to know SOMEONE, even if it’s a foreign toy company, is thinking about the math and science skills of American kids.

But my worry is this. Let’s say there’s some kind of life on Jupiter. The satellite crashes and the aliens open the wreckage to find this. Exactly. Anyone else think that even aliens would say, “WTF?”?

Not that Juno’s not a stunner of a LEGO, but do I want the aliens of Jupiter to envision Earth creatures this way? I think not. This is what we decided to tell them about earthlings?

We shoulda sent the Muppets.