Tony Bennett
and Me
Except for Elvis, we all survived our trip to Graceland. Helen went back to Michigan, the ducks went back to work at the Peabody, and we drove on. I hadn’t thought about it when we planned this part of our trip, but we were really becoming change detectives. We sought out people who had been down the road of relocation, dislocation, and upheaval ahead of us. Our friends in Nashville, Jo and Ira, had moved there a year or so earlier. Since Ira was in the music business, it had been only a matter of time before he landed there. Jo, an ace copywriter and marketing executive, had decided to seize the opportunity and leave the corporation. Still in a transitional phase, she was trying her hand at a variety of things, seeing which fit best. I admired her attitude. She had no preconceived idea about how this portion of her life was going to turn out. One thing was clear: She did not miss our mutual corporate past either. It was wonderful to catch up with the world’s best e-mailer face to face. We ate well, toured well, and felt good being together. Yet somehow the clock in our heads was ticking. We didn’t want to go home, but our self-imposed leash was tightening.
Somewhere in Kentucky it started raining. As a consolation prize, we found our cheapest gas of the trip: 89.9 for regular. Lunchtime, and no bakeries in sight. While Sandy drove, I nuked frozen New York bagels that had 14,500 miles on them and were still pretty tasty. Next stop, Cincinnati, and the driveway of friends, Ed and Marci. They too had moved within the last year. He’d bought a business he was struggling with, and she was trying to develop her psychology practice. Not an easy thing to do in the current health reform climate. They were thrilled to have visitors from home. She knocked herself out and cooked a fancy French meal. Sandy weeded out the brussels sprouts from the carrots. Marci pretended not to notice. That’s a real friend. Next morning we were on our way again.
In West Virginia the fall colors were nearly peaking. The rolling hills, with occasional barn, horse, or paddock, reminded me of the American primitive scenery on our bathroom wallpaper. Art is Life. Life is Art. As we came into the home stretch, our pace picked up. Lingering was impossible. We visited the Scotts, Sandy’s family on his mother’s side. Aunt Helen was always a favorite of mine. My mother-in-law’s younger, wilder sister, Helen had been married and divorced twice, lived in several states, taught college-level English, and raised two boys. I got the impression she’d raised a little hell in her day too. We hadn’t seen her in three years; now we visited her in the home where she was recovering from surgery. Cousin Tom, a physician, warned us that a stroke the year before had left its mark. We peered into the dining room, where a sea of white heads were bobbing over their early bird specials. I knew things were fine when they rolled Aunt Helen out to us in a wheelchair, dressed in chic black slacks and black and white sweater, complete with earrings, and lipstick on her round cherubic face. We had been sending her hard copies of our e-mail, and she remembered more about our trip than we did. She demanded we roll her outside so she could get a look at the Sue.
“You kids,” she said, smiling. “I think it’s just great what you’ve done. You kids.”
Not many people called us kids anymore, and the encouragement was right on time. I needed a little emotional reinforcement just then. One thing I felt was certain about Aunt Helen’s future—she wouldn’t be hanging around with those old birds long.
That night we had supper at the country club with Tom and his wife, Jean. Still a practicing orthopedist, Tom had recently become the first Republican state senator since anyone could remember. Quite a transition, I thought. He liked politics and loved meeting people and doing the social thing. Jean, a very pretty brunette, smiled as if to humor him and said, “Why you know, you’re not officially dead in this town until Tom Scott’s been down to the funeral home to shake a few hands.”
Maybe politics and doctoring aren’t that far apart. Both are about fixing things, making people feel better. It was a good visit.
* * *
After being sociable almost continuously for a week, a night in the woods alone felt incredibly liberating. We had become accustomed to being quiet, having time to read and time to think, often referred to back home as “doing nothing.” The only acceptable way, I remembered, to “do nothing” was to take up meditation. Then you could do nothing but actually be meditating so it was regarded as okay. I thought meditating was fine, but it wasn’t doing nothing. That was something else again. Weird.
Steaming up the windows of the Sue, water boiled for pasta. In the hills of northern West Virginia, we sat side by side on our sofa and hugged, mentally bracing for reentry into the world. Our rolling nest had never felt cozier. We ate dinner by candlelight while heavy rain and strong winds brought leaves down around us by the bushel. We continued in our Greta Garbo mode, wanting to be alone. Were we heading in the wrong direction? Before we went to sleep, we changed our watches back to Eastern Standard Time. By any measure, a phase was coming to an end.
The last element of this trip that we had planned before leaving home was a visit to Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home of a Mr. and Mrs. Kaufman, in southwestern Pennsylvania. It was pleasantly distracting to be tourists for a day. The remarkable cantilevered house leans out over a stream and, in effect, becomes part of it. Local stone and Wright’s audacious use of seamless glass corners give the impression that there is no difference between inside and outside. It is a magnificent achievement to look at. But it must be a miserably damp and cramped home to live in. Wright was five foot eight, and damn anyone who was taller, he designed houses that suited him. We strolled around the property, now 4,600 acres owned by the Nature Conservancy, and enjoyed the colors.
As we headed east through Pennsylvania, the sun refused to break through the gray clouds. Everything looked to be made of metal: steel sky, copper leaves, iron road. Around four o’clock a little blue crack appeared, allowing a faintly yellow, weak sunlight through, moments before darkness fell. The scent of wood smoke from houses nearby cheered me a little, but not much. It was much too soon to go home. Just as the beginning of the trip reminded of youthful days at camp, now I remembered the feeling of dislocation going home. I was also jolted by the first night of the new time. It was dark much too early. The first night of winter time is my least favorite night of the year. I hate the theft of that hour of daylight, the sudden blackout, and the implication, the threat that it will only get worse. This year it was doubly difficult because it turned out to be our last night on the road. This was death-of-the-year time, the time of year when my mother had died, my aunts had died, my cousin had died, and all life died. I hate this time of year, and especially this artificially truncated day.
Our last night camping we found a place miles off the highway, which was good since we were getting dangerously close to “civilization” or, at least, suburbs. It was pitch dark when we arrived, and the office was closed. Without regard for views, we hooked up in the first site and decided to take showers before it got too cold. It would be good to get under the hot spray. I gathered up the necessary equipment and made a dash for the shower house. Pushing open the heavy metal door, I saw that the lights had been dimmed for the evening, creating a moody effect. I was alone in a room meant for a dozen or more women, with four toilets, three shower stalls, four sinks, and a baby changing table. Music played from speakers in the ceiling. The acoustics were grand. It was the voice of Tony Bennett. Rich and familiar, reassuring and effortless. It required nothing of me: the words were not important, just the calmness they evoked. There was a certain timelessness about it. It could have been 1995. It could have been 1955. In my mother’s kitchen during that time before dinner, while we waited for Daddy to come home, the radio was always on. As I peeled off my layers of road clothes and walked under the hot stream of water, the words faded completely, leaving the comforting rhythm and reverberation. I shampooed twice, shaved my legs, and got ready for civilization. The music was still playing, the singer was still singing. Though some things in
my life had changed, the earth was still beneath my feet, and I knew we were going to be okay, no matter which direction we headed next. Drying off enough to get into cozy flannel shirt, sweats, and slippers, I made a run through the chilly night for the Sue, that soothing voice still humming in my head. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad fall this year after all, I thought. Thanks, Tony.
* * *
I was driving when we reached the last tollbooth. We’d both been quiet, trying to absorb the weight of the “real world.” In front of us the majestic steel and glass skyline of Manhattan loomed. I handed the toll taker a ten-dollar bill and stared at the city, waiting for change. Abruptly, a huge voice echoed through the Sue. It had the purity and resonance of a baritone preaching in a cathedral.
“Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon in there?”
I jerked upright in my seat and stared at the toll taker, but his lips weren’t moving.
“Who said that?” I stupidly asked Sandy.
“Your old pal, Marble Mouth. The CB is on.” Of course. What a dummy. The clarity of the sound and my ability to understand the speaker were amazing.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” I replied. There were dozens of truckers around us. Which one was he? I took my change from the attendant and eased away from the booth slowly.
Now I had a coach. “You’re lookin’ good, darlin’. Come ahead. I wish my old lady would drive when we’re on vacation. Twenty-four seven, all I do is drive. Got any hot coffee in there?” he ventured.
“Sorry,” I said, laughing with my new best friend, “kitchen’s closed until dinner.” Which one was he?
“Well, have a good one, honey. Take care.”
“Ten-four. You too, buddy.”
Sandy and I smiled at each other, then grinned, then laughed out loud. How nice a simple conversation with another person could be—especially when we finally understood what he was saying after 15,241 miles. Now he sounded as clear as Tony Bennett.
The Do/Be Ratio Calculation
or
Change Is Not a Dirty Word
We were home for the holidays. We had a cocktail party to welcome ourselves back, Thanksgiving in Vermont with the family, Christmas and New Year’s with our regular troop of friends, a warm and fuzzy reunion with Pete and Norm. It was good to see and be seen, but now we had to prove we were more than just a novelty act. We had always felt the trip was supposed to be an interlude. Now what?
When the driving stopped, the planning started, but even the logistics of that process were not obvious to us. Although we had to care for a house and an apartment, we no longer had any reason to spend the work week in the city, the weekends in the country. We had no obligation to be anywhere at all. In fact, the disjointedness of going back and forth became apparent in a way to us that it never had been before. We came home to a schizoid life. A spacious house on a quiet lake, in a community where we had no roots. Outside, a few colorful leaves still gave off their scent of death in the watery sunlight. Around the apartment the city streets were humming with life and full of triple-parked cars. My favorite cardboard sign, propped in a window, said,
NO RADIO, NOTHING IN CAR, NOTHING IN TRUNK, THANK YOU.
Thank you for not smashing my windshield or stealing my car. That’s my town.
I was confused. Home was where? We loved our house and had put ourselves and our souls into rebuilding and decorating it, but I now realized I felt no sense of place at all when we were there, outside our perimeter. Perhaps since we had always come there to collapse and recuperate after working seventy-five-hour weeks, I found myself immobile there. It seemed like no place at all, more like a rehab. In the city we had a tiny New York apartment, but the world outside was huge and beckoned. My adrenaline pumped like mad. Being in the city was like drinking a sextet of espressos. And whenever I was there, I loved it, but now I also noticed I felt a little like the Energizer bunny, banging a drum, going around in circles.
By any yardstick we had “made it” in New York, so according to the Chairman, Frank S., we could make it anywhere. But from what we had seen, I don’t think there was anywhere else to make it that had rules I understood. What, exactly, would making it in Wyoming entail? This here was my game, the game, as far as I was concerned. That is, while I was playing the game. Game’s over. Time’s up. I had chosen to put myself out of play, and now what? I loved spending time on the road. No time or reason to think—-just, literally, go with the flow. Get to the next stop, the next campground, meal, or mountain. Somehow, being stationary, all the little demons in my mind started to circulate, singing a low but demanding chorus of “Whaddaya gonna do, huh? Whaddaya gonna do, huh?”
Back in the swing of things, the net of the familiar, people began to lean on us about our intentions. Well-meaning friends, family, and former colleagues tossed job possibilities our way, forcing us to reconsider and recommit to our decision to build a new life, even if the particulars remained vague. We had learned to live outside the box we had previously put ourselves in and had felt expansive in a world without bounds. We learned to embrace the freedom outside those four walls where the pictures were always safe and familiar. We resisted the temptations laid before us to come back, join the fold, and be the same.
The reasons we had left and didn’t want to return to our old routines revealed themselves to us in an ongoing process. One day I came across this. In the May 25, 1947, issue of The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Simone de Beauvoir made the following observation about Americans:
In the United States one is always concerned to find out what an individual does and not what he [she] is; one takes it for granted that he is nothing but what he has done or may do; his purely inner reality is regarded with indifference, if, indeed, any note is taken of it. A man [woman] to be respected is one who has done things that have value.
Do or be, that was the question. Whether ’twas nobler to rake in the bucks and have no time for anyone or anything else, or get a life, had been the question in the beginning. Now I knew the answer that was right for me. Been there, done that. Now it was time to really raise the barre and test our mettle, not our margins. The Rockettes in my head said, “What about the money, honey? How you gonna keep it down to franks and beans, once you’ve done Lutèce?” Although the matter of money still mattered, we had experienced a much simpler way of living on the road that we thought would translate into living well anywhere but New York.
If time was indeed money, as the old saw went, I reviewed how I had spent the first several weeks at home. What was it worth to have the time to spend a couple of days with an old friend visiting from out of town who had recently lost her mate; have Alex and Fiona come up from Austin to spend his thirtieth birthday with us; take the whole family, including my eighty-plus-year-old parents, out for a long leisurely Sunday brunch; gather old clothes for donating to the hospital and books for the library in town; finally put all those photos in an album so you could share them with your friends; volunteer some time at an organization we both believed in; read a couple of books; have friends over for a homemade dinner, not take-out Chinese. Also, for the first time ever, I really enjoyed planning and preparing a few get-togethers for the holiday season. What was the do/be ratio here?
Coming back to the Northeast in early November, when everything looked hard cold and metallic, from the steely sky to the burnished-naked trees, made me see it as a place I could leave. Maybe not forever, but for longer periods of time than I’d once thought possible. It snowed in Vermont at Thanksgiving and would be muddy in the spring until June. Not for me anymore those twenty-below mornings when starting the car was a major event. I was tired of being on the inside looking out. I wanted out—but where to, and what was I leaving behind?
I interviewed myself constantly. Journalism 101: start with the W words.
Who we were was evolving. We no longer had job titles to present to strangers, and we cringed when described as “retired.” We were explorers in the new territory of life I’d dubbed the th
ird quarter. If the first quarter is for education, the second for career track and family building, and the fourth is retirement, we were third-quarter conquistadors, blazing trails into the territory between building it up and giving it away.
Where to do the evolving—that was the question. Gloomy weather, high taxes, and a big mortgage made our current setup far from ideal. On the road we had realized we needed very few things in order to be happy. Where would we keep them? New Mexico had charmed us, but there were plenty of places left to visit.
What we would do was beginning to have a shape, if not a name. We wanted to find work that was engaging and fulfilling, but we were no longer willing to accept the hallucination that working was living. It seemed logical to use our experience in publishing in some way, preferably together. If possible, I wanted to take a more smorgasbord approach to working: writing, editing, and teaching all had their appeal. (I noticed that Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin, for example, are constantly referred to with the honorific “Renaissance men.” Why are people in our era who enjoy a multitude of things generally seen as “unfocused”?)
When was more or less now.
Revising the do/be ratio required concentration. What counted as work? Who was doing the counting? Was money the only understood measure of value? Why did it seem to matter so much more once we got home? Why was Martha Stewart respected for making perfect pies and petunia beds, yet when the rest of us did those things, the world hardly noticed or, worse, sneered at our simplemindedness? Our friends and family politely asked us what our plans were. Inside it felt more like subways coming at us from all directions, trying to sweep us off our feet this way and that. Finding our way through the maze of expectations, unverbalized desires, and the need for security was a lot tougher than reading road maps to and from Alaska.
First We Quit Our Jobs Page 19