The recent elections in the U.S. have convinced me once and for all, as if I needed any more convincing, that life in these United States is only going to get more brutal and more brutish, more reactionary, more unforgiving, and more unbearable. And then I'm going to die.
Sorry, but I don't see any way out. Considering the stranglehold that corporations have on this country, from buying the politicians than run our government, to polluting the landscape and exploiting our natural resources, to continuously oppressing women, racial and ethnic groups, and any white male who happens to disagree with the right, along with the assault on public amenities and welfare systems - including the attack on health care reform - I see America going down a very dark path with no light at the end of the tunnel. If there is a light at the end of the tunnel, it certainly won't be an oncoming passenger train traveling at 200 mph. But whatever it is, it's still going to run over us. I don't see anything changing before I do die, and that's assuming I live to be a hundred. And I'm sick of waiting for this country to catch up with the rest of the advanced world in terms of . . . everything.
It's November now, when two thoughts concentrate my mind - my birthday and the coming of winter. I just turned 49 this month, and a storm hitting Alaska has sent cold air to the East Coast, giving the region a taste of winter and even a bit of snow. With the winter of my life still quite a way away but about to come on the horizon, I look at the things I haven't accomplished or haven't done and realize that whenever I've tried to accomplish or do these things, I never got very far. I've never traveled overseas. I've never had a girlfriend. Meanwhile, I'm living in a country that doesn't seem to be able to accomplish anything either. American civilization - which I am convinced is an oxymoron - is getting tawdrier and coarser, and people seem to like it like that. And it's a civilization I pretty much have to live in for the rest of my life . . . which isn't all that long anymore.
Whenever I get to feel this way - which happens to be often - I think about my childhood . . . my early childhood, before I even started kindergarten. My earliest memories are of living in this house in the late sixties in Kinnelon, New Jersey.
This is 57 Lakeside Trail in the Fayson Lakes planned community within Kinnelon. When I was a toddler, it had a different paint color and a different address - 5 Lakeside Trail North. Below is the backyard. It's a house with a half-sunken basement, and the recreation room in the basement has sliding glass doors that face the backyard, which is along South Fayson Lake. Directly ahead in this picture is an unnamed island in the lake.
I always think of the wonderful experiences I had there (the few I can remember, anyway), from going to nearby Sabeys Beach on West Fayson Lake with my mom and riding my plastic scooter to going out with my dad in our rowboat on South Fayson Lake behind our house and having a picnic lunch with him on that same unnamed island. West Fayson Lake, filled with sailboats with white sails each bearing stripes of different colors, seemed like Lake Michigan to me when I went to the beach. When I returned there in 2004, I was astonished at how small it actually was.
The fall and winter months were filled with their own pleasures, such as autumn walks with my dad along a huge bluff overlooking South Fayson Lake near a small cemetery, though the "huge bluff" turned out to be a molehill when I went back (amazing how your child's perspective is distorted after being away from a place too long after you've grown to adulthood), and building snowmen in the cold with him. (I also have pictures of me rolling in the snow after the great February 1969 nor'easter.) I remember all of the indoor activities in my house - me playing in rec room with my Matchbox cars on my figure-eight cardboard roadway, the sound of my mom's Glen Campbell records on my parents' hi-fi, playing with my newborn sister . . .. I remember and miss these things like Charles Foster Kane remembered and missed his sled Rosebud in Citizen Kane (sorry for spoiling the ending if you haven't seen the movie), and I desperately try to hang on to these memories of my pre-school years with only one artifact from that time to cherish . . . my Little Boy Blue bedroom lamp. I don't miss my sled all that much, but I do miss the amusement park/train set I got for Christmas one year. That's me playing with it in the photo below, taken in December 1967.
I was obviously too young to know about the turmoil the country was going through at the time - Vietnam, political assassinations, urban rioting. I just remember how idyllic everything was. My family moved to Pennsylvania in the summer of 1970, just before I started school, and after we ended up settling in a subdivision outside Philadelphia, things started to come apart - my parents got divorced three years after - and school became difficult for me. I had few friends. I was the smallest kid in class because I'd started kindergarten too early. I won't go into details, except to say that Thomas Wolfe was right.
One of the first pop songs I remember hearing as a kid in Fayson Lakes was Harry Nilsson's recording of Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin'" from Midnight Cowboy - a movie I didn't see until I was thirty - and I see the stark autumn landscape outside the window of the recreation room of my old house at Lakeside Trail in Fayson Lakes. (It peaked on the charts in October 1969.) How appropriate. "Everybody's Talkin'" is the tale of an introvert looking for his own place in the world, and my passage into middle age in one of the most politically and socially repressive times these United States have ever seen only make me ponder what I lost back in that corner of the world I used to call home as a little kid. Yes, I have friends today, and I'm grateful for them. But I still see myself as a loner who can never be completely satisfied, especially when I live in a country where contentment is becoming a luxury, not to mention a high-priced commodity. Is a right-wing anti-utopia all I have to look forward to growing old and dying in?
Music critic Denise Sullivan wrote that "Everybody's Talkin'," as recorded by Harry Nilsson, captures a sense of freedom that is "shrouded in regret and loss implied in the lyric." There's a lot of regret, and a lot of loss, I have to contend with. More often than not, my thoughts will wander - usually in the most stressful and least opportune times - and I'll look back on my life and wonder what went wrong. And eventually I'll think of my childhood in Kinnelon, New Jersey. And people will be talking at me but I won't hear what they're saying . . . only the echoes of my mind.
Sooner or later I hope to go back to Fayson Lakes and see my old house, and then I'll ponder where everything began . . . and ended.
Rosebud.
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