About Me
A bit about my headline: Sportscaster Howard Cosell used this term in a late '70s interview to describe NFL referees' then part-time status. It also is a perfect description of life on Earth at any particular point in history. Absurdity is what happens when ideals and standards meet objects and actions. I'ts what happens when effort is tossed up against aspirations, when ego flails against the force of a billion others; when human intelligence comes to grips with its own inadequacy.
Absurdity is real. Palpable. It gets up and makes breakfast, greets you at the door after work, cuts you off in traffic, makes comedy skits out of routine instructions. It waits for logic to carry the ball from here, for the lightbulbs to go off. Absurdity doesn't know how it concerns him, assumes you understand what it's talking about, and rests comfortably knowing that someone, somewhere has the answer. A five dollar a day youth center bordering the projects is absurdity. A $40,000 a year office worker with a 5,000 square foot single family home complaining about the rising cost of home ownership is absurd. Humvees in peacetime are mad absurd. High performance sports gear for couch potatoes, ropless jump ropes - all absurd. Almost as absurd as the inability to recognize that absurdity multiplied equals tragedy.
My personal slice of absurdity is my desire to find the perfect sound. Sound has captivated me since the cradle. My late mother recalled in a baby-book entry that she could not even clear her throat around me, as i was abnormally attuned to every sound around me. And, when I think about it, sound has been running in the background throughout my life. Through two careers, two marriages, five competitive sports, dozens of residences in four states, umpteen stopgap hobbies, sound has always been there, never quite showing itself Hanging around the edges of my vision, ducking around corners, disappearing into open space. It took years for me to determine that this spectre was one particular sound. A sound that reminds me of one night in fall of 1969.
My family didn't live in a house or apartment. Until I was 16, we lived on the campus of Leake and Watts Children's Home in Yonkers, N.Y., a home for troubled youth. When I was there, it was a way station for youth transitioning from any number of public governances: Bellevue Mental Hospital, Spofford Home for Boys. I was a staff kid, and, until about sixth grade, thought everybody had to take pills every morning, went outside in pajama bottoms and flip flops, and agreed that three rodent-laced rooms was perfectly fine for a family of four.
I went to P.S. 27 - less than three block of campus. To get home, I had to walk about three or four minutes down Valentine Lane, hang a left on Hawthorne Ave and go on for about 100 yards to he campus entrance. From there I had to walk about anohter 75 yards up a winding pavement path, flanked on the right by an enormous recreation field, and on the left by the a series of 1,500 square foot residence cottages, and, as you made your way up the hill an expanse of grass.
It was dark. I had just come back from a school movie (or play, I don't remember). It was windy, and it was one of those rare, 'skin temperature" days. when you can't tell whether it is cold or hot - the air is, well. just there. At the bottom of the pavement hill, I decided to take detour up the grass hill. A running detour. I'lmember why when I die. At any rate when I reached th top of the hill, I flung my school bookbag of to the side, and flopped down on my back. That was when I noticed the sky.
The night was clear, and I could see every star in the sky, which seemed to me to be huge black blanket that lay just out of arm's reach. I stared into the sky, listening to the wind whip past my ears. That was when I became aware of every sound below me. Kids arguing on the porch of the cottages, parents in the apartments across Hawthorne Ave. calling their kids, cars starting, radios playing. Distant sounds, darting around the range of my hearing like fireflies. The wind blew harder, kicking up dead leaves above me. Now the sounds were different - truncated, delayed extended. The wind died, and the sounds returned to normal. I lay staring up int o space, as the cycle repeated itself more than 10 times over the next fifteen minutes. After that, I got up, walked out into the middle of the grass hill, tilted my head back, and stared straight up into space, feeling for all the world like the nexus of the entire universe.
