Hand Shake

Hand Shake

By Charles E. Kraus

         JFK and I shook hands once, or touched hands would be more accurate.  Maybe we did, would be more honest.  If this monumental moment took place at all, the year would have been 1959 or 60.  My recollection is vague, not vivid like those I have of November 22^nd .  Sometimes vague is better than vivid.

         When my kids were growing up, I tried to explain JFK – not just the handshake, not just the shots, to explain Camelot, from pre-election to the sudden end.  I never felt I’d done more than pass along facts and well established mythology.  I couldn’t get to the essence.  “You had to be there,” is a phrase or concept used by frustrated explainers upset because reality is complex and language is approximate. 

         During the 1960 election my father was an enthusiastic Kennedy supporter.  After the Bay of Pigs, he was not.  He began quoting from Victor Laski’s book, The Man and the Myth, a long, provocative, highly embellished account of everything Kennedy had done wrong.   Written before the sexy stuff surfaced, Victor must have been shocked by those revelations.   He was a precursor to Kitty Kelley, but not as much fun to read. 

Like so many people who questioned the Administration, my father was still able to appreciate Kennedy’s personal strengths.  He found the President to be a man capable of thinking on his feet, the embodiment of wit, style, and grace.  Kennedy was not afraid to test these skills and attributes, as he did during his weekly press conferences.  There was no cable television, no CNN or FOX, no all-news radio.  New York had seven newspapers and some of these published more than one edition on a busy news cycle.  There were more newspapers than television stations.  If you lived in a major media market, you were fortunate enough to have four or five channels.  We were New York, we had six.  

The President’s press conferences commanded large audiences, and being a part of that viewership had a communal feel.  John Kennedy wanted to talk to the nation, and the nation wanted to watch and listen.  People either liked what they heard or they did not.   Opinion wasn’t shaped by pundits filtering the story and telling you what to think about it.  Opinion was formed by watching John Kennedy live, fielding questions and making himself available for public scrutiny.  

On the 1960 evening of my possible contact with Mr. Kennedy, he was scheduled for a campaign stop at the Teaneck, New Jersey Armory.  He was running really late.  Inside the old brick edifice came more and more supporters.  As the hour grew, maneuvering space shrank. It felt like Time Square on New Year’s Eve, and if it wasn’t exactly a new year, politically, we were celebrating a New Frontier.  The sound that too many people make in a confined space, if they are excited and if their voices compete for rebounding with the walls and ceil, can charge a united mindset with massive energy.   And so, if you are the catalyst, and you wait just long enough, if you enter a rally as the wave of enthusiasm reaches its peak and, accompanied by your entourage, make your way onto the stage, then taking the last dozen steps, a lone man, buoyed by a rousing reception, if you are JFK, there is a roar so impossibly exquisite, only the sound of another lone man, pulling the trigger of his 6.5 mm Carcano can eventually extinguish the reverberation.

When he left the Armory, he headlined of a procession of open topped cars, creeping ever so slowly through crowds that had spilled out of the building and mingled with crowds already lining the street.  I made my way ahead of the caravan, maneuvering high and low, left and right, until I reached the curb.  Overwhelmed by the joy and excitement, I raced onto the pavement, my arm, like those of many other exuberant supporters, reaching for the man who stood in the open car.  Someone shook it.  

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Revaluation

Revaluation

By Charles E. Kraus

Two rather suspiciously clean cut young men just came to my door offering gospel literature and an invitation to get me saved at a forthcoming revival.  I declined, but reluctantly.  I do wish I had at least one religious bone, one inclination to explain existence from a heavenly perspective.  To be able to say, when a tragedy such as (here, I was going to name a tragedy, but there have been so many lately that selecting one seems preposterous).  To say, when extreme misfortune occurs, that God has a plan which I am unable to see from the Heavenly angle, but that I should trust. 

I take a certain kind of comfort in the inability of any particular religion to dominate, to be so obviously the true version of things sacred, that over time, it prevails.  Can’t we come to some spiritual consensus, people?  We’ve had millenniums to work this out.   

For many years, Mormons secretly baptized Jews, allegedly so they could get a hall pass to Heaven.  There was a rumor that in retaliation, Jews covertly bar mitzvahed Mormons so they could learn what it feels like to be overwhelmed by cufflinks and Amazon gift certificates. 

I acknowledge that most religiosity takes place with the best of intensions.  Don’t we all want to end up in High Heaven?  Well, no, actually.  I for one would like to end up completely dead.  Not transferred to another venue.  Just finished.  Not yet, of course.  I’m not advocating, nor in any way encouraging, my expedited demise. But when it’s over, I want to be completely deconstructed. 

It must be difficult for Him/Her/Jehovah/Yahweh/Wowmister to keep track of us.  I’m thinking that the earth began as a minor diversion.  Couple of million souls, little habitation, some loose energy.  It was the kind of endeavor you could manage in your spare time --  Godly-Google Calendar Notes: ‘check Harry’s bunions on Tuesday,’ ‘Wednesday, remember to put some water into the Mississippi River,’‘Thursday, see if the Johnson  family is grateful.’  But over millenniums, some little ventures become Apple – not from the tree, the Cupertino.  Earth grew into a whirling success.   Now, even God needs constantly updated software to track the stats.  You should see his source code.

I’m a secular-humanist.  Our core belief is that God is an atheist and we are responsible (or irresponsible) for our own destinies.  Not necessarily our own health care, but our own ethereal roads, taken or not.  I guess that means we are free to select any belief system that appeals.   Therefore: everything inside or outside this box is under the box, or over it, depending upon your perspective.  As Lenny Bruce said, the earth revolves and periodically, heaven is to the left.  On the other hand, Mort Sahl said that when he dies he wants to by buried in Chicago so he can remain politically active. 

My bag is packed and stowed under my bed.  The routing slip says, ‘Oblivion,” but it will probably get lost and end up in Detroit.   No matter, they evidently amount to the same thing.

Mark Twain dreamed he died and went to Heaven where he encountered all the people he hoped to get away from.  Grabbing his bag, he headed for the other place.  “There you have it,” he observed, “Heaven for climate, hell for society.”   

As the world spins faster, bigger, louder 

By Charles E. Kraus

Special to The Seattle Times  5-8-13

HAVE you ever watched a computer geek whip through assorted levels of code and programming, fixing, adjusting, creating technological miracles at the keyboard?

When I see this, I sometimes think, what would these guys be doing if there were no computers? It’s fascinating. Dormant superpowers were buried within their minds, just waiting for opportunities to unfold.

Then I look at the availability of guns, of twisted anthems and searchable belief systems lurking on the Internet, at the plethora of hallucinogenic and other mind distorters, at the roster of charismatic enablers.

I recall recent headlines: “Pressure-cooker bombs,” “School shooting in Newtown,” “Five dead In Federal Way.” I recall these, and wonder what latent inclinations are just waiting for an opportunity to emerge and generate more havoc.

When I was a teen, you could get a cup of coffee for a nickel. Later, I remember catching a meal at the International House of Pancakes and finding they sold coffee by the endlessly refillable pitcher. It wasn’t a nickel, but seemed like an excellent value.

Apartments were tiny. By the mid ’50s, we had moved into a house in the burbs. Compared with today’s floor plans, my childhood home was an elaborate garage. Houses have gotten much bigger these days. People seem to need more space.

Our first television had an extremely small screen with a magnifying lens in front of it that enlarged and somewhat distorted the black and white picture. There were a handful of stations; most signed off for the night around 11 p.m.

On television and in the movies, violence was insinuated. Fights were brief. Often a punch or two defeated the bad guy. Hostilities were not depicted graphically. A slam to the jaw equaled a knockout. No blood. No prolonged suffering. After the movie, we went to White Castle to enjoy 15-cent hamburgers.

Now, the hamburgers are supersized. Waiters refill your cup each time you take a sip of coffee. Or maybe you order the venti, half-soy, half-skim mocha with an extra pump of chocolate and some foam. That coffee costs about five bucks.
Movies do not only show close-ups of violent acts, they slow them down, 3-D them, HD them, cover them from every conceivable angle, exaggerate them, making sure viewers get the full-screen presentation.

We need more choices. Larger portions. More assertive, confrontational, emotional, doctrinaire talk shows and political theater.

When I was a youngster roaming the streets of New York City, there were gangs. The play and movie “West Side Story” turned the ’50s turf battles into jazz dancing.
The gangs were not companies of jazz dancers. They were pockets of alienation. Kids got beaten up, mostly with sticks, clubs and a variety of brass knuckles. There were switchblades. Later, there were pipe-guns.

Now, of course, gangs have automatic weapons. Some would call that technological progress. Apprentice sociopaths didn’t have a lot of tools back when I was in the school yard. They didn’t have an array of despicable homegrown models and attitudes, didn’t realize the range of sadistic options.
Life has speeded up. Sensation trumps. If you have enough perspective, you might think things have grown frantic. I do.


Charles E. Kraus lives and writes in Seattle.

Why write a personal essay?

OTHERTHANNOW, a blog of personal essays ........
By Charles Kraus

 

 

Why write a personal essay?

           Why write an impersonal essay?

           We who request the reader’s attention --  Attention,  Attention -  claim to have something so important to say, so urgent, so original, remarkable, essential, entertaining, or merely interesting, that folks need to pull themselves away from their own remarkable journeys  to feast on our extraordinary perceptions. 

What follows in my OtherThanNow blog is a bit of meandering well-seasoned with a dash of confusion, spots of compassion, dollops of redundancy, and just a pinch of originality. 

Attention, Attention – may I have your indulgence?   My Day, a new posting, is available below along with previous columns. 

 

My Day, with apologies to Eleanor*

My Day, with apologies to Eleanor*

By Charles Kraus

 I am trying to reacquaint myself with the concept of leisure time.  Linda is visiting in Northern California, and here I sit, no shows today, no predetermined agenda, mindless, blissfully unmoored, yet restless.  Curious, too, wondering if I can return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, those meandering, subterranean, reveries found on summer days of my unburdened youth.  Things were easier the last time I submitted to such an opportunity.

Back then, word processing took place in my mind, which instructed my fingers how and when to pound on the Smith Corona.   Accountable to no one, I conducted a life of free association, taking extended walks that began and ended at my desk.  Stimulated by whispers slipped into my thought process by life itself, non sequiturs would jostle about as I pursued my afternoons.  Occasionally, these would organize and become ideas.

I suspect I might attempt some writing today, or think something, or do something.   At the moment, I am looking out of a second story window.  Trees overwhelm the view, obscuring mountains, offering nature’s brand of protective sun block, trumping again and again every potential gap that might allow the sky to prevail.

A Sunday in the middle third of July, exclusively mine, uncorrupted by directives or expectations  … an aimless segment, a mishappenstance, a sector that powers failed to program, a lapse, a gaff, unregistered, unclaimed, except as revealed within my horoscopic particulars. 

Or course, it has been my intension to spend a day such as this listening to concertos while catching up on my correspondence.  Also, on my reading.  Possibly,  these worthy goals conflict with my vague plan to reorganize, or more accurately, to organize my music collection.  That is another thing I might just get to.  Or, I might not.

My dance card lists no responsibilities.  No pets, lawns, friends, foes, commercial enterprises, require my attention.  And, to advance this accounting, I’ll add that temperate sunshine compliments the view.  Out there, beyond my window, I am looking at the kind of day in which a person could get a lot accomplished.

You see my dilemma. 

Later I will know whether or not I talked myself into doing or not doing anything whatsoever.  For now, I am attempting to establish contact with the assorted components:  mind, body, soul -- a limited partnership -- that own the rights to myself.   I will take a census, conduct a survey.  Are there any serious demands?  Any immediate needs?  Any desires?  We take a vote.  The eyes have it.  The ears, feet, superstructure, the force field, unanimously in favor of absolutely nothing in particular. 

I am.  Therefore, I am.

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*  My Day was a newspaper column written by Eleanor Roosevelt six days a week from 1935 to 1962

FATHER IN THE NIGHT

FATHER IN THE NIGHT

By Charles E. Kraus

 

Before he left the house for good, which is perhaps a strange way to describe his departure, my
father left the house for extended periods.  A month, two months at a time -- no signs of dad.  Also, no calls, cards or communications of any kind.  These parental gaps were billed as vacations.

In retrospect, my father’s vaguely explained absences, remixed to include the woman he later married, make a more complete picture.  He was not, as reported, always out on remote lakes or in forests exploring, prospecting for gold or conducting geological reconnaissance.  There were assignations. 

He did go west once without Else.  When I was about ten, he drop me off for the first day of school, offered an extended hand shake signaling, see you in a few months, then meandered down the road to meet his buddy, Eddie.   The two drove from New York to Utah to search for uranium. 

They left town in an ancient panel truck with bad brakes, my collapsible Air Force paratrooper’s bike stowed away for emergencies, a geiger counter and a scintillometer - uranium detectors, on board.  They planned to use these to find the pot of radioactivity at the end of the rainbow.  About three months later, my father returned.  No bike, no truck, no Eddie.  Eddie had decided to remain in the west, sans his wife and kids, who resided in New Jersey. He was keeping my bike.

There are other grievances, but its Father’s Day, so I want to switch gears (my fold-up bike could do that).  Whenever I have doubts about my father’s love, or my love for him, I think about the following events:

I was six-years-old, and for some reason we were taking the cross-town subway.  It departed every five minutes or so.  Dad and I entered and sat down.   After what felt like a few seconds, he said, ‘ok, time to change trains.’  The doors hadn’t closed and we hadn’t gone anywhere.  But out of the car we raced, reentering from another door.  We returned to the same seats we had just vacated, but only for a moment, before we rushed out again.  This got repeated a few more times, “time to change trains!” and soon the more sedate passengers got into the spirit.  Seemed as if everyone enjoyed my father’s antics.  That was the first time I realized he had the ability to be joyful.

I think about my father taking me along to his chess games where I got to meet his ‘down-town’ friends.  No one else in our family knew them.  They were part of his other world. 

The bird-people, a husband and wife whose parrot and vast number of parakeets, had out-of-cage privileges all over their living room, were my favorite.

The fellow with books everywhere, an entire apartment of floor to ceiling shelves, walls obscured, free standing cabinets claiming any remaining floor space, an accumulation of printed matter dominating every vista.  The chess board sat on a stack of encyclopedias.

And, I recall walking down 8^th Avenue with my father when a guy coming from the opposite direction spotted him and said, “Hi Sparks.”

“Sparks?”

Dad had been a shipboard radio operator during WWII, a Morse coder.  The nickname for these communicators was “Sparks.”  This was explained to me after he spent a few minutes exchanging pleasantries with his old shipmate. 

The thought of my father having a nickname was revolutionary. 

Contrary to his cross-town train performance, dad was an extremely shy man, reluctant to place himself into situations requiring contact with strangers.  Somehow he had been manipulated into becoming Treasure of my Cub Scout Pack, an assignment that surely intimated him.  It was to a Pack board meeting that the baby sitter called to report my particularly insidious migraine headache.  Sensing an opportunity to get away from the gathering, dad left my mother and came home to comfort me. 

You have to understand.  My father did not hug, ever.  I have no memories of him kissing anyone, ever.  I have no memories of him proclaiming his love of anything or anyone other than by bestowing intellectual praise.   And so, when he arrived in the night, placing his arm around me, pulling me close and rubbing my throbbing head, he provided a kind of unprecedented relief that has lasted to this day. 

He opened the window and suggested I take a few deep breaths of the cool evening air.  My headache subsided and he returned to the meeting.  I think about that night.

 

Notes on Father’s Day To A New Dad

 

[one of two Father's Day pieces written 2013]

 

Notes on Father’s Day To A New Dad

By Charles E. Kraus

              There are several ways to state the good news – my daughter had a baby, my wife and I are finally grandparents, my other daughter is finally an aunt, her partner is an aunt, my son-in-law became a father just in time to receive his first round of Father’s Day cards.

And his first round of fathering advice.

I’ll save the childrearing suggestions for another day.  The gist of this column is to offer a few thoughts about the benefits of turning parent, specifically, being a recipient of Father’s Day salutations.

I never sent my father a Father’s Day card.  Only my mother did that, and I was under the impression he found the sentiment excessive.   His generation of dads considered any expression of sentiment excessive.  When I verbalized my best wishes, he nodded and went on with life.  I’m betting he thought formal Father’s Day endorsements, the specific setting aside of time and focus for what he rationalized as just another part of life, was yet another commercial intrusion into one’s personal affairs.

My take on Father’s Day initially mirrored dad’s skeptical view –  Hallmark expanding its market.  Such proclamations were not from the heart, they were from the store.  You bought a few nice generic words and sent them, as society and custom required, to your father. 

But then, I added a new entry to my resume.  I was no longer just a son.  I became … a father.  Moving up the ladder this way can change your perspective.   Everything I’d ever thought about for-profit holidays remained a part of my Father’s Day assumptions.  But I supplemented the research and revised my conclusions.

I realized that when my kids were little, they didn’t know anything about greeting card sales or Amazon gift certificates.  They knew about terrific art projects, about hands-on gift making that involved a lot of marking pens, glitter and glue.  About using their energies to craft more than what was in the gift wrapping, to create happiness.  They used Father’s Day as an opportunity to share love.

Suddenly, receiving Father’s Day acknowledgments felt great.  And the converse was also true – just the thought about not receiving them, foretold despair.  Would the day come when the cards, or the phone calls, would cease?  When that last minute, end of the day, just under the wire, email or text would not arrive, and a rush of dismay would wrench my stoic resolve?

Stand-by Thomas.  Little Alice Zarin is going to smile at you, and you will be under her spell.   I see you looking into her eyes, and I see her looking right back.  The two of you are beginning a dialogue.   It will be comprised of happy moments.  Sad ones.  Of joy, anger, encouragement, concern, appreciation, and a feeling so deep that calling it love is barely doing it justice.  This conversation is communicated with the eyes, with the heart, in silence, with gesture, with mysterious unexplainable perceptions, with the spoken word, and with written words such as “Happy Father’s Day..”

Welcome to the club.

 

Details from Dreamland

Details from Dreamland

By Charles Kraus 

For the first many decades of my life, I didn’t dream, or at least, I woke with no recollection of having pushed imagined casts, plots and hidden agendas around in my subliminal subtext.    Slowly, over time, the wall between here-and-now and Freud’s playground diminished.  Not completely.  But gaps appeared in the bricking, and I began waking up recalling details from dreamland. 

I am a thematic dreamer.  My protagonists are circumstances. The guy who plays me puts up with a hell of a lot of frustration.  I’m certain that if Sigmund had a link to my subconscious proceedings, his interpretation would depress the hell out of me.  When wide awake, I look at my life and am pleased with what I observe. My assessment is that I’m a rather lucky and contented individual.  A great many of the items on my life-time to-do list have earned check marks.  OK, I’ve yet to produce that best seller, and only hot water flows from the hot water spigot.  No liquid gold.  At least, there is hot water.  Ultimately, I find it remarkable that the world has made room for the likes of me.  I’m thankful.

It is difficult to square the results of my self-appraisal with the dreaming that takes place in this very same head.  Therein is promoted a minority report composed of moody, disquieting sleep-time adventures.  “Lost-my-way” sensations build throughout these escapades.  When dreaming, I misread my bearings.  I don’t know where the hell I am.   Commonly, I have a goal and am experiencing difficulty achieving it.  Mostly my objective is to get somewhere.   I’m late, you see, and doing my best to reach an unspecified place by an appointed hour. 

 

I’m unsure of the route.  Not that it matters, as trudging towards what I’m sensing is the appropriate general direction, my progress is thwarted by misunderstand and happenstance.  I end up experiencing all the acuities you might encounter if you were trying unsuccessfully to cross a busy intersection.  I mean, if you were attempting this endlessly.  Looking for openings in the traffic, waiting more and more impatiently for the light to change in your favor, searching in vain for alternative routes, underground passages, pedestrian bridges, traffic cops.   The hour grows late, then it grows later, and still I stand there, cold, tired, hungry, but more importantly, upset that I am a no-show, disappointing people who are counting on me, whoever they are, wherever they are.  They do not understand why I’ve failed to arrive.  No cell phone, no pay phone available to transmit the explanation, or relay my good intensions, bad luck, and apologies. 

Psychologists might find my subconscious meanderings symptomatic.  I see my dreams as sore losers and under appreciators.  I may just send an intervention into the depths of their origination.  Grow up!  Don’t you know there is a real world out there?  Don’t you understand that some goal posts are aspirational?

 You learn that during visits to the lucid light of day. 

 

On Not Being Interested In Sports

On Not Being Interested In Sports

By Charles Kraus

 

I don’t speak the language of sports.  Though I am not exactly shunned for my sacrilege, many consider this gap when sizing me up.  I am other.  I am incapable of appreciating athletic contests, and do not understand the fuss, the excitement, the heartache, the nuances, rules and jargon associated with tossing the old pig skin.  When such subjects are the topic of conversation, I often feel I’m a visitor to some exotic land where natives are trying to speak to me about urgent matters, only to discover I am unable to comprehend.  Pretty soon, my associates wander off, a little frustrated, somewhat bemused, often irritated.  I’m the fool who has not been capable of grasping the significance of yesterday’s player trade.

This is a life-long problem.  In school, teachers and students often discussed sporting events.  They seemed equals – 12-year olds advancing facts and opinions with conviction never displayed when class was in session.  The dumbest kid in math class might have been the smartest, or at least most compelling, when talk turned to baseball statistics.  I remained silent until the subject changed.

In the military, enlisted men and officers lived in different worlds – separate clubs, separate dining facilities, strict rules segregating swabbies from officers and gentlemen.  This firewall prevailed during war and peace, but not during sports-focused bull sessions.   I recall that during my Navy days,  a certain mess cook was encouraged to walk the golf links with the brass, speaking his mind about Monday Night Football.  I was ordered to remove cigarette butts from the field so the game could progress.

Sports are a great equalizer.  People of all ethnicities, religions, economic circumstances, sexual orientations – opposing counsel, political polar opposites – call time out from conflict to chat about Rose Bowl predictions.

“How about them Sea Hawks?” defense counsel said to plaintiff’s counsel during a short recess in what might otherwise be a contentious morning.  Overhearing the discussion, the judge offered a nonbinding non-judicial opinion.

I was going to be ironic by calling this piece Strike Five, my thought being that since there were only four strikes allowed to the fellow at bat, adding that extra one would quell any doubts regarding my noncompetitive naiveté.  My wife pointed out that four downs was the rules in football.  Baseball allowed three strikes.  We are very compatible.

There is a perverse pleasure, a snooty one, no doubt, in my aloof attitude.  I don’t participate in games – neither as a player nor a fan.  It’s a defect.  I’m baffled by the intensity of enthusiasm sparked by recreational competition. 

As we journey through our lives, we learn about a ourselves, our likes, dislikes, strengths, weaknesses, interests, fears, joys, opinions, passions.  Early on, I realized I was klutzy.  That when I intended to throw the ball to my father, it would land in the bushes.  That when Dad threw it back to me, there was a good chance it would avoid my hands, but not necessarily my head.

I anticipated liking baseball.  Little boys were supposed to like it.  Heaven knows, I tried to like it.  But I did not succeed.  The very first book I recall reading – way back in the early 1950s, was Lucky To Be A Yankee, by Joe DiMaggio.

The truth be told, I did not find Mr. DiMaggio interesting until a few years later, when he and the playwright Arthur Miller vied for the affections of Marilyn Monroe.  That was quite a game.

 

 

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SIXTY ALBUMS

 

 

SIXTY ALBUMS

By Charles Kraus

 

1980 -- We were living in LA at the time and meeting our expenses felt more like a theoretical exercise than a probability.  It often involved borrowing funds. Upon occasion, it meant selling possessions.  Even, if absolutely necessary, portions of my record collection.

Our existence was middle-class bohemia interwoven with the prospect, or at least desire of ‘making it’ in the entertainment industry. Being young, and therefore equating our circumstances with the dues-paying portion of life that one goes through at the beginning of a journey, we had the energy, optimism and fortitude to experience all this as an adventure. Still, parting with 60 albums was a big deal.

            I owned several thousand, but thought of them as components forming a single thing, a collection. A collection is what you get after you’ve sifted through the prospects, rejected undesirable candidates, sought out and filled in key elements so you owned Oscar Peterson’s first album as well as his latest album. Plus, the original cast recordings of every Broadway show you’d been taken to as a New York child, but not the scratched copies, those had been replaced by pristine pressings as they were discovered in various swap meets and second hand shops.  A collection included Ella’s Decca, Verve and Pablo sides.

Did you know that Del-Fi records and its sibling, Keene Records, originated in a basement in Van Nuys, California, pretty much around the block from where we lived when I sold my early Sam Cooke (Keene) and Richie Valens (Del-Fi), part of the 60, to raise the $800 we needed to pay our rent?

The dealer perused the stacks I’d designated as expendable, selecting just the albums I would have chosen, the cream, the best of the best, had I been at the purchasing end of this transaction.  Mostly he pulled from the $25 piles. A few from the $15.  Each time he claimed a record, my exasperation grew.  How could I allow this fellow to dismantle my collection?

Then came the trick.  To the fifty or so sides he’d selected, he made a show of adding a number of less desirable titles from my $2 offering -- Mel Carter, Cher, Mantovani -

albums I couldn’t actually explain or justify owning.   Finally, he reached into the  “PRICELESS – MAKE ME AN OFFER’ display, plucked a gem, in this case, the VJ No. 1001, sealed, never played, album, the El Dorados “Crazy Little Mama,” thrust it into the center of his stack trying to make the selection look like an afterthought.  It was, of course, the one album he truly desired, and to some theoretical upscale collector, worth more than the combined value of the other 59 records.

“I’ll give you $800, 60 albums, take it or leave it.”

Contrary to the prices in the Record Album Price Guide, the true value of a record is what someone is willing to pay for it.  This was easily the best offer I would be getting prior to our potential eviction notice.  It honored the music and the artists, if not the collector.  Me, the dealer dismissed as naïve.  Didn’t I didn’t know that VJ 1001 was worth a fortune?  Yep, but only to buyers offering a fortune, and they didn’t happen to be in the room

Then again, I’d paid a dollar fifty for the VJ.   I was not exactly getting a poor return on my investment.  Yea, ok, all right, you win, give me the cash and leave as quickly as possible.

We finished our transaction.   My buyer took a moment to browse through the remainder of my collect, the albums laying neatly against a neutral wall, the ones with the sign affixed reading, NOT FOR SALE. 

And then came what amounted to my real payoff.  More than the $800.  More than the comfort taken in having raised the rent by selling 60 albums that cost me about $50 to a guy who would probably pass them along to wealthy collectors for prices I didn’t want to know about.  The record dealer looked up from my NOT FOR SALE albums and said, ‘wow.’  

Wow is not a multisyllabic word.  It is not complex.

This particular ‘wow’ meant that finally, someone -- not my wife, not my neighbors, not my friends, none of whom took a particular interest in record collecting, could ever offer.  It meant finally, someone understood that the vinyl disks resting against the neutral wall were not just refugees from Goodwill stores; they formed a genuine representation of the jazz and pop essentials, a virtual history of recorded music, so far.  Wow meant I knew what I was doing.

His smile contained a certain respect.  

You could not pay the rent with a smile, but you could live on this one for a long long time.  I’m still getting residuals.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why I Decided To Turn 65

[2011]

Why I Decided To Turn 65

By Charles Kraus

 

They are about to express birthday wishes to me again. Early on in my earthly

rounds, such salutations could not come often enough, especially if accompanied by gift-
wrapping. Back then it seemed to take forever to get from one birthday to the next, and I
was quite anxious to do so. I wished to accumulate a series of hallmarks, thereby
qualifying me as an established member of the adult class.
            A reassessment of my fondness for birthdays came shortly after turning 30. Our
two daughters had captured my complete attention. One day I realized they would grow
up and move away. Perhaps we could slow down the clock, savor the family process.
Why all the rush?
            At this point in what is left of my life, I do my best to deflect birthday greetings,
trying not to cringe when these are offered. There is a certain responsibility that comes
with turning the big Six - Five. A certain plateauing.  People want to know if my aspirations have been achieved, and I don’t necessarily care to discuss the topic.

Am I not supposed to have attained something? Wealth? Stature? Wisdom? Or, how about solvency, shouldn't I have that by now? I have or should have achieved a reasonable level of maturity. I must have learned important things, things worth knowing and passing along before I become senile and misplace my findings.

            The paperwork says “year of birth 1946,” but I am actually a person of many ages. Upon waking, I am 18. By noon, I have reached 50. After dinner, I hover over the line of scrimmage, feeling 65 to perfection. On nights requiring me to remain coherent past 10 p.m., I glimpse 75, and have by then lost track of my comprehension and my glasses.
            I would like to sum up all that I've concluded during 65 years of trial and error. This will be short. I have two items.
            Researching this project, I reviewed many of the things I once thought I knew for sure:
That tattoos were for sailors. For a while, I was sure the planet was heading to a peaceful resolution of its differences. And anyway, wars of any sort didn't much matter because we lived in the USA – an ocean beyond the consequences of harms way. I supposed that, what with science, and literature, and advances in education, people would grow more logical, more reasonable. I even knew that because my father had his hair when he was 65, I would have mine. Myth, myth, myth, all theories and suppositions that I have subsequently discarded.
            Here is what I now know for sure:
Randomness rules. This is not necessarily a pessimistic assessment. Random
comes in good as well as awful. One reason I wish to continue having birthdays is
because, from around many a blind corner has come a pleasant surprise. Who would have
guessed that being a husband and a parent could be so wonderful? That the advent of spellcheck would change my life?
            Rumor has it I'll be receiving an I-Pad for my birthday. Once I learn to use it,
I am told, I can input my schedule, my plan for tomorrow and beyond. Fun thought. However,
the other thing I learned is:
            You can schedule anything you please, but tomorrow doesn’t necessarily work
from your notes.
            
                                                                    ////
Seattle resident Charles Kraus is a writer and performer.

Shelf life: confessions of an unrepentant book collector

Shelf life: confessions of an unrepentant book collector

By Charles Kraus. Baltimore Sun, 5/13/08

Books collect dust. People collect books. At least, some people do.

I've been one of them for about 45 years. Of course, if my wife has anything to do with it, I've squeezed my last volume onto a shelf. "One more book, and I'll call the folks in the white coats and tell 'em we have a case of bibliomania on our hands," she is fond of saying.

We are just about out of shelf space. It has become necessary for me to cram new acquisitions horizontally into those little spaces between the vertically arranged books and the shelves above. Last year, I lobbied for an additional bookcase. My wife took a slow, theatrical glance around the room, a gesture designed to say, "Where the hell would you put it?"

She'd made her point, yet we both knew I would continue buying books.

They say that parents who enjoy books end up with kids who enjoy books, so it is possible to fix much of the blame on good old father for my attempt to re-create New York City's 42nd Street library right here in my house. His was an impressive - albeit more manageable - collection, an assortment of science, pseudoscience, history and literature. It was primarily acquired from the Lower East Side secondhand bookshops that flourished from the 1940s through the 1960s.

About the only form of gambling in which my father would participate was the clearance table crapshoot. A table full of discards would be offered for $3 apiece. Next week, the remaining volumes went for $2, and on week three, a dollar. Should you purchase a book immediately, before someone realized what an incredible treasure the bookseller had mistakenly placed on the table? Or should you wait, hoping to pick it up at next week's reduced price?

From time to time, as I accompanied Dad on his book-buying rounds, I'd spot like-minded devotees rummaging through the stacks, calmly at first, but with increased measures of desperation and resignation, while trying to locate the book they now knew they should have purchased the previous week.

I own more books than my dad did at the height of his collecting days - more than I will ever read. Some, though relatively few, are investments: perfect first editions, signed, rare, ancient volumes that may eventually be transformed into part of my retirement fund. The rest, given enough time and decent lighting, I would love to read.

If you enjoy an author and happen to come across more of his work, at prices too good to ignore, or books about the author, given away on Sunday afternoons by flea market proprietors who don't care to lug them home - aren't you obligated to acquire them? If you happen to be perusing stacks of books heaped in the corner of a cluttered, marginal thrift shop, stacks not alphabetically arranged but perhaps organized there by the level of mildew implanted in the binding, should you not rescue the worthiest of the lot? Are you not required to keep one of the last copies of the 1927 first edition of Daniel W. Streeter's Camels! from reaching oblivion? And what about Treadmill to Oblivion by Fred Allen? You going to let them find their way to the trash bin?

A Fowl Deed

The LA Times published this story way back in 1980.  Might be the only rooster obituary they ever ran. 

 

 

 

A Fowl Deed

By Charles Kraus

 

     It was one of life’s tragic moments – Brewster being lowered into the ground, my young daughter clinging to my pants leg, sobbing goodbye to her dear, dear friend.  And in the distance, the phantom cheers of local residents, delighted by the prospect of peaceful dawns, uninterrupted by the bugling of the departed rooster.

     Brewster was gone, and except for my wife and 4-year-old Rebecca, who worried that Farmer-God might not feed him well enough in rooster heaven, people seemed downright pleased by his departure.

     I am, by nature, not a rooster booster.  Back in New York City, mama tried to raise me proper, and the only barnyard creatures we got to see were of the plucked variety, hanging grotesquely by their naked kosher necks.

     Even in Oregon, where my wife and daughter and I had recently spent 18 months waiting for the sun to come out, roosters stayed clear of my path.  There were cow-Oregonians, sheep-Oregonians, pig-Oregonians. In  Eugene, one of our country’s old-age homes for surviving hippies, we actually met a guy with a pet gefilte fish.  Yet, I encountered not a rooster.

     The world is an odd oval, and evidently it was written somewhere that my footsteps would cross rooster droppings.  This came to pass upon our return to Los Angeles.

     If the census taker had a question on his page that read, “What do you think of when you hear the name Los Angeles?” you could bet your two-bedroom, $400,000 shanty that not a single individual would respond: “Roosters.”  But it was not in the wilds of the Northwest that Brewster entered my life.  It was a few blocks south of Los Feliz Boulevard.

     We had just moved into our house, the truck had gone off taking the cord to our television, and we’d settled in for a good night’s rest.  Brewster let us sleep until about 6 a.m.  That was the hour he had selected for a few pre-dawn vocal warm-ups.

     Having not been schooled in the art of adapting rooster calls to the written page, I will merely say that the rooster’s pitch was somewhere below that of a tone-deaf bull elephant, and that his repertoire resembled a whirling garbage disposal filled with tin cans.

     “When I took this place,” I explained to my wife, “they didn’t tell me it came with a warm-blooded alarm cock.”

     “That’s OK, dear,” she replied.  “Where did you say we packed the ax?”

     I wasn’t about to resort to butchery, and so turned to sticks and stones.  Not that they helped much.  This was no stewing hen, but what I later learned to identify as a bantam.  A bantam is a rooster that can fly!  Fly into the trees, fly into the hills and fly into your early morning sleep.

     Rebecca took an immediate fancy to the barnyard character.  She’s the one who named him.  And rumor has it that when I wasn’t looking, she even brought him his dinner.

     As the days passed, I formed a kind of adversary’s admiration for our feathered siren.  He was clever and quite handsome.  He marched about our back yard and the slopping hill beyond it with a demeanor so assured and commanding that our three cats and Gabby, our dog, refused to question his credentials.

     Thought Rebecca enjoyed telling her new chums that Brewster was our personal property, the truth was that we were his personal property.  He strutted up and down in front, as well as in back, of our house, coming and going as he pleased.  The area kids staged several rooster hunts, but the bantam, with a  verbal assist from our daughter, always managed to secure himself in a nearby tree, a smirk on his beak and a “cock-a-doodle-doo” on the tip of his tongue.

     About a week into this activity, there was an early-morning knock on our door.   Was it Brewster, with a request for pancakes?  No, it was a greeting from a gentleman who turned out to be our neighbor.

     “Hello,” he said, shaking my hand.

     “I’m your neighbor.  Welcome to Los Angeles.  I can see from your license plate that you’re down from Oregon.  Didn’t happen too bring a rooster with you?”

     Oh no, could it be true?  Had the rooster arrived the same day we’d reached town?  If that were the case, then every resident within a rooster’s striek was of the opinion that the damn fowl was ours.

     I assured the fellow that Brewster and I had never met, that he wasn’t connected to our family, that I’d assumed he come with the house, and that, in fact, I’d done everything short of calling the authorities to get him the hell out of our yard.

     “Don’t worry about the authorities,” he said, “I’ve already called the Department of Animal Regulation.”

     He shook my hand again, and then as an afterthought, told me it was against the law to bring a rooster across a state line.

     I couldn’t’ blame the guy for being upset, but at the same time, I was beginning to see Brewster’s side.  They were ganging up on him, and I’ave always rooted for the underdog – or in this case, the underrooster.

     My wife, who seemed to be growing resigned to bantam eccentricities, suggested we catch Brewster and donates him to a nursery school.  That sounded a whole lot more reasonable than donating him to a pot of soup, and so I set out to capture our friend as quickly as possible.

     Rooster hunting, never one of my strong points – I don’t even have a license – required tree climbing ability, also one of my inadequacies.  And just as I’d figured out how to get from limb A to limb C, Brewster flew past me.

     “Pretty good view,” a voice said, and for a moment I was willing to believe that the bird could articulate when well-motivated.

     “You see any roosters around here?” the speaker continued.

     Looking down, I spotted a uniformed individual, field glasses in hand and dandruff on her shoulders.

     “We’ve had a complaint about your rooster,” she told me as I made my way to the ground floor.

     “It’s not mine,” I explained.

     “That’s not the way we heard it.”

     “Circumstantal evidence.”

     Just then, Brewster came walking up the drive.

     “Tell her you don’t belong to us,” I shouted, but he refused to confirm this fact.

     “I was just trying to catch him and cart him off to a nursery school.”

     She nodded, jotting a few notes down on her pad, and explaining she had only come to investigate. Someone else, an authorized deputy, would be by to assure Brewster’s incarceration.  The rooster didn’t’ seem nearly as frightened by this information as I did.  Maybe he knew a good lawyer.  Anyhow, he marched to within a foot of our dog, teased Gabby just enough to create an interest, and then flew back to the tree.

     The city bird catcher never showed.   Unfortunately, his presence became moot.  For that evening, Brewster attempted to repeat his little game with our dog.  It was a plain case of ‘once too often.”  I will say only that even a handsome, cunning, and intelligent rooster can miscalculate.  This time, the results were feather-raising.

     Rebecca cried.  My wife did her best to hold back her tears.  I felt a little sick to my stomach. Even the dog looked remorseful. 

     And so we came to bury the bird.

     I won’t say I miss him, but every time I open a can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle, I get a lump in my throat that’s not a stuck piece of celery. 

////