Chandler, Arizona: Too Clean for Cub Scouts

About four months ago my eight-year-old son became a Cub Scout, which means that his calendar (and by extension, mine) has suddenly gotten much fuller. We’re putting together shell collections, building pinewood derby cars, and solving cryptograms. It’s a lot more than I ever remember doing when I was a Cub Scout. Really my only memories of my scouting days are eating cupcakes at the end of den meetings and being chosen to play “the mom” in a skit in which I had to don a wig and a green dress. (I think my son’s got it a little better than I did, because they still get treats at the end of pack meetings, but so far I haven’t seen any of the scouts forced to dress in drag.)

Last week my son had to go on a hike and pick up litter along the trail, so I took him and my younger son to Veterans Oasis Park in southeast Chandler. This park has 4.5 miles of hiking trails featuring desert landscape, so I figured it would give us lots of opportunity to both admire cactus and pick up discarded soda cans.

With a brand new 13-gallon drawstring garbage bag in hand we started our hike figuring by the end it would take all three of us to drag the sack back out. But apparently the good citizens of Chandler are cleaner than we banked on. Ten minutes into our hike looking both on the trail and off, we still hadn’t found any litter. On the one hand, I was glad that I live in a city with such cleanly folks, but on the other hand, I was hoping we’d have at least a few slobs to help out my kid’s project.

I had all but given up hope of finding any trash at all when my younger son shouted, “There!” and pointed to a spot about five feet to our left. The three of us slowly crept over to the spot as though we were stalking prey and then under a bush we saw it—a one-inch by one-inch clear piece of plastic that may or may not have been a food wrapper at one time in its life. While I wasn’t quite sure what it was, it was clear that it was not something that would occur naturally in the dessert and so could only be defined as litter. I had my older son put on his work gloves (the Cub Scout handbook explicitly states that for safety purposes one must always wear gloves when picking up litter) and put the miniscule piece of plastic into the trash bag. 

We all felt a great sense of accomplishment at having removed the offending trash—so much so, that we decided to reward ourselves by eating the granola bars we brought as snacks. Of course once we ate the bars we had to throw the wrappers into our 13-gallon garbage bag, giving us a great sense of accomplishment once again.

And so the morning went, with my eagle-eyed six-year-old spotting a piece of litter smaller than my thumb every ten minutes or so, my meticulous eight-year-old carefully putting on his gloves to throw it out, and all three of us generating more litter between us than we found in our entire two-hour hike.

By the end of our mission we were all exhausted. Two hours of hiking is a lot on the legs and the six times we had to bend down to pick up litter only compounded our bone-weariness. But at least my son got to check off “Requirement 7” in his Cub Scout handbook. Now if only there was a requirement in his handbook that would make him clean up his room.

Amazing Nieces

Long before I was a dad I was an uncle. It’s true. I have two older brothers and between them they popped out seven kids (well, technically their wives did the popping out part) before I had even met my wife. The youngest of their brood is nine years older than the oldest of mine, so I had years of experience as an uncle before I ever became a dad—20 years’ worth, in fact. (Note: Experience as an uncle does not, in any way, shape, or form, prepare you for being a dad. But more on that thought in a future blog post.)

These days, of course, I’m much more focused on the accomplishments of my own kids than I am on my brothers’, and my blog posts reflect that. But this time around I’ve decided it’s high time to give some props to my brothers’ kids—specifically the nieces, of which there are two (one for each brother).

My older niece, Alyssa, is a film major at Brooklyn College, specializing in sound mixing. Apparently sound mixing is distinctly different from sound editing, as my niece explained to me last September when I was in New York. At the time she gave an excellent explanation of those differences, and for about five minutes after that conversation I probably could have articulated those differences to someone else. Now, five months later, I probably have as much chance of explaining the differences between sound mixing and sound editing as I do explaining the ins and outs of particle physics. Yeah, I’m not good with technical information.

Of course, being a film major is not in and of itself an amazing thing. Anyone can major in anything. (I could have even majored in physics…for about four days before I would have flunked out.) But in my niece Alyssa’s case, the thing that verified my biased uncle opinion that she’s amazing at what she does, is that she is one of five people across the country to have been nominated for a student achievement award by the Cinema Audio Society. She has been invited to their 51^st annual award’s ceremony in Hollywood, where they give out awards for motion picture and television sound mixing. This is sort of like the Oscars for sound mixing folks. (Believe it or not, there’s an entirely different awards ceremony for sound editing people. See, I told you there was a difference.)

The point is that in less than two weeks my niece will be in Tinsel Town rubbing elbows with the sound mixing greats. Who knows, she might even end up sitting next to Gregg Rudloff. Yes, that Greg Rudloff, who won both an Oscar and a Cinema Audio Society award for The Matrix and is nominated for both awards again this year for American Sniper. (Okay, I never heard of him until now either, but his resume is pretty impressive, including having done the sound on This is Spinal Tap, one of my favorite comedies of all time, so I’m impressed.) In summation, it looks like my niece is on a much better track to realize my dream of winning an Oscar than I am. Good for her! (Seriously, that was said with pride, not jealousy.)

My younger niece, Lauren, is in the first year of a seven-year combined college and medical school program. So clearly she’s got some smarts. Indeed, she must have a few I.Q. points on her dad (my brother) because it took him eight years to finish college and medical school. Slacker!

But not only is my niece incredibly smart, she is incredibly talented as well. This time I will magically remove my uncle bias from the equation by letting you know that she is the reigning National American Miss New York Teen. This is no joke, as the current Miss America—Kira Kazantsev—was the National American Miss New York Teen in 2012. Now I’m not saying this means my niece will be Miss America in three years, because that is a bit of a leap, but four or five years, tops.

Yes, I see lots of red carpet activity in both my nieces’ futures. Oscars. Crowns. Maybe a Nobel Prize for good measure. I’m not ruling anything out with these two. They make me proud to be an uncle.

(Note: I don’t mean to imply that my nephews are slouches—four of them became Eagle Scouts by the time they were 13 and the fifth was the 10^th grade New Jersey State Chess Champion last year.)

(Note 2: Yes, I know this blog was particularly boastful and self-serving, but hey, it’s my blog and I can write whatever the heck I want.)

(Note 3: Sorry to use strong language like “heck” on the internet, I’ll try to refrain from doing it next time.)

(Note 4: There is no Note 4.)

The Price of Guacamole

Growing up in Brooklyn in the 70s and 80s, Mexican food wasn’t really a thing. Well, I guess it was a thing, but not a thing that I had any exposure to other than through an episode of The Odd Couple when Oscar ate tacos and aggravated his ulcer. It wasn’t until the early 90s when I was living in Manhattan that I tried Mexican food for the first time. There was—and according to Google, still is—a restaurant in the Village called Caliente Cab Co. that I ate at with friends a few times. I enjoyed it and thought it was quite exotic, but considered it the kind of place one would only eat at on special occasions. I could probably count on one hand the amount of times I had Mexican food before I moved out to Arizona.

In Arizona, Mexican restaurants are ubiquitous—sort of like pizza joints in Brooklyn. “Exotic” is no longer the word I would use to describe Mexican food. We eat the stuff a couple of times a week, but only at a restaurant every other month or so. This, of course, means that Mexican food is on our regular menu at home. We do burritos, quesadillas, and of course, Oscar Madison’s favorite—tacos. We also do taco salad, which is essentially a taco in salad form. (Note: that last bit of clarification was for my New York readers, many of whom are not wise to the ways of Mexican food. I know that many of my Arizona readers likely rolled their eyes and thought, “We know what a taco salad is, you yutz!” If you’re a reader from another state, I formally apologize for not addressing your level of Mexican food awareness within this parenthetical note.)

On taco salad nights we usually include avocado in the mix. Over the past few years avocados have quietly become one of my favorite foods. I’m not a trained food critic, so I can’t quite describe the flavor of an avocado, but I’ll just put it this way—they’re freakin’ yummy. While there’s no denying that avocados by themselves are delicious, one thing you can do with them to heighten their deliciousness is combine them with salsa and sour cream to make guacamole. Finding the right combination of these three ingredients to make the perfect guacamole is tricky—the kind of thing that mystical elves in an enchanted forest might be skilled at—but somehow my 8-year-old son has a knack for getting the combo just right to make what he now calls his “famous guacamole.” So on taco salad nights my son’s “famous guacamole” has become a hot commodity.

On our most recent taco salad night my son suddenly decided to become entrepreneurial with his guacamole. Once he finished mixing his prized concoction he offered it up to the rest of his family for a penny a serving. My wife and younger son took him up on the offer but I passed at first—not because the price was too rich for my blood, but because by the time he got around to making the guacamole I had already finished my taco salad and was full. When I politely declined my son’s offer, he apparently thought I was balking at the cost, prompting him to say, “Okay, instead of a penny you can dance for your guacamole.” I stifled a laugh and decided to have some guacamole after all, at the original price of one penny, as I didn’t feel much like dancing.

After dinner when it was time for my older son to collect the penny from his brother, I heard the younger tot try to renegotiate the deal. “Can I do a dance for you, instead?” he asked. The older boy agreed and 30 seconds of freeform dancing sans musical accompaniment ensued.

Ultimately, the price of my son’s guacamole is pretty reasonable. At all the local restaurants it costs much more than a penny and I’m pretty sure they won’t let you do a dance rather than pay for the stuff. Of course, I don’t know this for sure, because I’ve never asked. Maybe next time I’m at Rosita’s I’ll see if I can do a rumba in exchange for my guacamole. Probably won’t work, but at least it’s got a better shot than offering to do the tarantella for an order of garlic bread in Brooklyn.

The Stress of Chess

I have been a competitive Scrabble player for the past 14 years and have 177 official tournament games under my belt. Many of these games were extremely close nail-biters that went down to the last play and quite a few of them had money on the line. The difference between coming in first or second, second or third, Scrabble glory or Scrabble goatdom, often came down to a last second decision on how I placed my tiles. Sometimes I’d win some money because I bingoed out (Scrabble speak for using all seven tiles on your last play) and sometimes I’d finish just out of the money because I got stuck with a Q at the very end. It’s often a rollercoaster ride and as you might imagine, it can be quite nerve-wracking.

This past Friday night, however, I found myself in a tournament environment 50 times more stressful than any I have ever been in before…and I wasn’t even playing. I was observing as my 8-year-old son participated in his very first chess tournament, and at times my heart was beating so fast I thought it might explode.

That my son has little to no interest in Scrabble, but has developed a love for chess, is perhaps ironic, but I’m okay with it. I don’t want to be the dad that maniacally pushes his kids to do exactly what he wants them to do, so he could sculpt them in his image. I’m more of the “let them try different stuff until they find what they like” sort of dad. So when my son stumbled across chess while at school and displayed an interest, we signed him up for the school’s 12-week chess class. Lo and behold it turned out he had a bit of a knack for the game (he can already beat me without my letting him…not that that says much) so we decided to let him try a kid’s tournament.

So there I was on Friday night, looking through glass as my son and 17 other kids played in a two-hour tournament. Most of the parents just dropped off their kids and came back later, but I wanted to stick around to see how my son did. In retrospect that may have been a mistake, because had someone taken my blood pressure during this two-hour span, I’m certain I would have immediately been sent to the E.R.

I watched as my son got his opponent in check and didn’t notice; I watched as his opponent made an illegal move that my son tried to explain to the kid you can’t do, only to be ignored; and I watched as my son clearly lost interest in his third game and started making any random move just to get it over with. It took every ounce of willpower I could muster not to pound on the glass or go barging through the door to get my son’s attention and correct whatever odd injustice was taking place on the chess board. If your kid’s in a soccer match you can scream stuff from the stands, but if he’s in a chess match you have to bite your lip bloody and let the pieces fall where they may. My lips were a bloody mess by 8:30.

As it turns out, my son ended up winning two games and losing one (with two others called on account of taking too long). I was very proud of him (despite the fact that watching him almost gave me a massive coronary) and he seemed to enjoy the experience and indicated that he wanted to do it again.

A couple of hours later I spoke to my brother, whose 17-year-old son is a very high-ranked chess player and was the 10^th-grade New Jersey state chess champion last year. I told him how stressful it was watching my kid play and being powerless to help, and he chuckled knowingly and said, “You just described the last decade of my life.”

The thought of having to deal with an entire decade of watching my kid play chess terrified me at first, but then I realized it could be worse. How much more stress would it be on me if I had to sit by quietly while I watched my kid play competitive Scrabble?

Top 10 Things I'm Thankful For

I’ve realized that my blog entries have become ridiculously long of late—less blog, than novella. So, since I’m sure you have lots of cooking, eating, and groaning to do this Thanksgiving, I’m going to try to make this one relatively short. (I put the caveat “relatively” in there, because, let’s be honest, I’m incapable of writing a truly short blog entry.) Behold, here are the top ten things I am thankful for this Thanksgiving:

1) My Wife…who somehow still loves me despite my constant barrage of horrible puns, bizarre non-sequitors, and weird facial expressions. She is well within her rights to slap me upside the head for any of these things, yet she does not.

2) My kids…who are smart, funny, and still both young enough to be considered cute. While they try my patience at times, they are an endless source of entertainment, and I don’t think it’s scientifically possible to love them more than I do.

3) The rest of my family…who, although I see in person only rarely, I see in framed pictures on my walls every day. I would not be who I am today without my family. (Don’t roll your eyes, I mean that in a positive way.)

4) My friends…who I don’t see as much as I used to, but know much more about than I ever have, due to the miracle of Facebook. I would not be who I am today without my friends. (Hey, wait…that sounds familiar.)

5) My job…which is just the right combination of rewarding and challenging. Working for a nonprofit, I won’t become a millionaire, but at least I wake up every morning knowing I’m helping make the world a better place. That’s more than the inventor of the vuvuzela can say. (Sorry for the four year old pop culture reference.)

6) Pizza…which, when done correctly, is the most perfect food on the planet. Unfortunately, most places do not do it correctly. Fortunately, I know the exact address and operating hours of every place that does it correctly within a 20 mile radius.

7) Instant streaming video…which brings my ADD-addled brain endless entertainment…instantly.

8) Dark chocolate…which, through a variety of pseudo-scientific articles that have come out over the past decade, I can now construe as a health food.

9) Hammers…which are the perfect tools for killing scorpions. (And when I hold one and tape the cover of last week’s People magazine to my face, my wife can make believe I’m Thor.)

10) This blog…which gives me an outlet for my stupidity and allows me to make believe I’m a writer again.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Have I Accidentally Become an Arizona Cardinals Fan?

I have been a fan of the Dallas Cowboys since birth. Indeed, I think my first words were “Tom” and “Landry” in that order. Growing up in New York in the 1970s, being a Dallas Cowboys fan was not that uncommon. They were known as “America’s Team” and went to five Super Bowls during that decade, winning two of them. In fact, in those ten years they amassed more regular season wins than any other team – 105. By contrast the two New York teams—the Giants and the Jets—combined for 103 wins during the same span. So it’s easy to see how a young, impressionable lad, just learning about football, would cast off the hometown teams in favor of a more winning prospect. The “America’s Team” tag even let you rationalize that you really were rooting for the home team—just one that was national in scope.

The 1980s were not as kind to Cowboys fans. They saw their team have a few good seasons early in the decade, but never make it to a Super Bowl. Then, in 1989, the unthinkable happened—a 1-15 season. America’s Team had hit rock bottom. While I was still loyal to my team, I was also disgusted. I was in my junior year of college, so I stopped paying so much attention to football and turned my attention to what was really important to me at the time—rock music and beer.

Somehow, when I wasn’t paying attention, the Cowboys got good again. They were dominant in the mid-90s and it was in the midst of their dominance that I moved from New York to Arizona. (My move had nothing to do with the Dallas Cowboys’ dominance, so hopefully you didn’t accidentally infer that from the preceding sentence. If so, I apologize for any confusion or mental distress this may have caused.)

I moved to Arizona in July of 1995, and on Christmas night of that year I had a “bucket list” type of experience. I got to go to a Monday Night Football game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Arizona Cardinals. It was the last game of the regular season and not only did I get to see the Cowboys win 37 – 13, but I also got to see Emmitt Smith break the record for rushing touchdowns in a single season, when he scored his 25^th of the year in the fourth quarter. (FYI- his record has since been broken.)

That night was a Cowboys fan’s dream. And I was certainly not the only Cowboys fan who got to experience that live at Sun Devil Stadium. I would estimate that Cowboys fans outnumbered Cardinals fans on a scale of 8 to 1 at that game. My section was particularly blue. In fact there was only one (not exaggerating) person in the entire section wearing Cardinals red. He was sitting about ten rows in front of me and after the Cowboys scored their first touchdown and the crowd erupted, he turned around and looked at the sea of blue behind him and sadly shook his head like a little boy who lost his puppy. It wasn’t a Cowboys home game, but it sure felt that way.

About a month later the Cowboys were back at Sun Devil Stadium where they won their third Super Bowl in a span of four years. That 27 – 17 victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers was the last great moment for the Cowboys, with lots of mediocrity and occasional okay-ness ever since.

***

When I first moved to Arizona, I hated the Cardinals. I didn’t hate them as much as I hated the Giants, Redskins, Eagles, Steelers, or 49ers, but I hated them nonetheless. This irrational animosity was borne of the fact that at that time, in 1995, the Cardinals and the Cowboys were in the same division, and diehard football fans are conditioned to hate their team’s division rivals. (Side note: Whenever I say I hate a particular sports team, my eight-year-old son says, “Dad, you shouldn’t hate them. They’re just doing their job.” Rational little bugger.)

Then, in 2002, the NFL realigned the league and the Cardinals and the Cowboys were no longer in the same division. I didn’t have a specific reason to hate the Cardinals anymore, but I still did so out of habit. Mostly I just ignored them, though, since they were just as irrelevant as the Cowboys during that timeframe.

Four years later a sequence of events began that would cause my fan loyalties to evolve in unexpected and unsettling ways. Late in 2006 my wife and I became parents. While the arrival of a child is a major life change, it brings with it a thousand different smaller life changes. One seemingly innocuous, but ultimately crucial, thing that changed was how I occupied my time during my daily commute.

For several years prior to the birth of our son, my wife and I carpooled to work every day. While driving we would either talk or listen to music on the radio. But a few months after our son was born, my wife and I figured out a way to work it out so she could be a stay-at-home mom and I was now driving to work alone. This meant: 1) I could no longer use the carpool lane, which practically drove me to tears as I watched the carpoolers whizzing past in the diamond lane while I sat in gridlock traffic; and 2) I could listen to whatever ever I wanted to on the radio.

After years of listening to the same two or three music stations, I started to turn the dial. I still listened to music, but sometimes I would listen to NPR instead. Soon enough, I started to prefer listening to talk radio instead of music in the mornings. Then one day NPR had a pledge drive. As those of you who listen to NPR know, their pledge drives, while well-intentioned, are about as exciting as listening to paint dry. And listening to paint dry is infinitely less exciting than watching paint dry. So I started to turn the dial again and I soon stumbled upon a sports show called the Doug & Wolf show.

Up until that moment I had never listened to sports radio. Even though I am an avid sports fan, I always wrote off sports radio as nothing more than mindless jocks shilling for the hometown teams. But somehow the gravelly voice of Ron Wolfley (a former Pro Bowl fullback for the Cardinals) quickly wormed its way into my consciousness and I couldn’t seem to turn the dial. The banter seemed more intelligent than I would have expected and they were talking about a topic I enjoyed, so I kept on listening. The only problem was 90% of their chatter was about Arizona sports teams, which I didn’t have a specific interest in at the time.

Once I stumbled across Doug & Wolf I began to listen to them occasionally, when I had my fill of NPR in the morning. During football season I would chuckle to myself while they talked about the woes of the Cardinals and hope they would mention the Cowboys, which they would from time to time. Then, in 2008, the Cardinals got good enough to win their division and shockingly, win all their playoff games to make it to the Super Bowl. I started to listen to Doug & Wolf much more frequently during that season and soon knew way more about the Cardinals than I did about the Cowboys. When the Cardinals made it to the Super Bowl I didn’t know how to feel or who to root for. I intrinsically hated them, but they were playing the Pittsburgh Steelers who I intrinsically hated even more. So I ended up rooting for the Cardinals, and was genuinely upset when the Steelers took the lead and won in the final minute of the game.

With that Super Bowl I let my hatred for the Cardinals fade away. I found it easier than I imagined to root for them, especially with the exceedingly likeable Larry Fitzgerald and Kurt Warner leading the way. I was still a Cowboys fan first and foremost, but I didn’t mind if the Cardinals did well. And I started listening to Doug & Wolf more regularly and learned more and more about the hometown football team.

In the meantime, the Cowboys have been mediocrity personified. Prior to this year they went 8 – 8 for three straight seasons and bungled their chances to make the playoffs in the final game of the season each of those years. I’ve still rooted for them, but they certainly haven’t made it easy or particularly fun. That is until this year.

This year has seriously tested my loyalties. Both the Cowboys and Cardinals have been very good and in Week 9, they faced off. My son asked me who I was rooting for and I said the Cowboys, but as I watched the game I wasn’t even sure myself. Instead of cheering for either team, I found myself staring at the screen blankly, feeling lost and confused. Who did I really want to win? It was tough to say. But at the end of the game I found myself both upset that the Cowboys lost and pleased that the Cardinals won. That sort of made my head hurt.

A few days later my friend Mike contacted me and said he had an extra ticket to the Cardinals – Rams game if I wanted to go with him. I gladly took him up on it. So last Sunday I found myself at the first regular season football game I’ve been to since Christmas Night 1995. And things had changed a bit over the course of 19 years. No longer were Cardinals fans in the minority. Indeed, the place was a sea of red. Every time the Cardinals scored, the place exploded, and I was right in the thick of it, screaming myself hoarse by the end of the game.

As we left the stadium, with the Cardinals victorious and in possession of the best record in football, I felt something that I hadn’t felt for a football team in a very long time—proud. And then I suddenly got scared, because I realized I may have become an Arizona Cardinals fan when I wasn’t looking. Sorry, Tom Landry.

Pieces Of My Past

A couple of weeks after my mom passed away three large boxes arrived at my front door. I had been expecting these boxes—two of them I’d packed myself while I was back in New York and the third was packed by my brother and sister-in-law after I’d left. When my sons saw the large boxes they thought that Chanukah and Christmas had miraculously conspired to arrive three months early, but I knew the truth—these boxes were really time capsules; windows into my former life.

In the days following my mom’s passing I spent a great deal of time cleaning out her apartment with my two brothers. Somehow it seemed her three-bedroom apartment contained six bedrooms worth of stuff. A lot of things got thrown out, a lot of things got boxed up, and a lot of things simply went untouched. Although I never lived in this particular apartment, it was on the same block as the apartment that I occupied from about ages seven through 22 in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. About a year after I moved out on my own, my mom moved two doors down and all the stuff I’d left behind moved with her. Now, two decades and 2,500 miles removed from my childhood haunts, I found myself sifting through the minutia that made me “me.”

After opening up all the boxes, my Chandler, Arizona living room was awash with paraphernalia from Brooklyn, New York. As I surveyed the items before me, I noticed that one section of the living room happened to have a particularly interesting assortment of nostalgia, which prompted me to snap the photo that you see above. Shall we take a walk down memory lane?

The oldest item in the photo is my bronzed baby shoe (circa 1969-1970). You don’t really hear about people bronzing baby shoes anymore—at least it’s not something we ever did with our kids’ shoes. In fact, when I showed the shoe to my boys and told them it was by first baby shoe, they were equal parts amused and perplexed. “How did you get it on?” “It seems like it would be really heavy for a baby to walk around in.” “That’s an ugly color for a shoe.” I had to explain the concept of bronzing to them.  Personally, I think there’s something vaguely creepy about bronzing a shoe. I grew up with the shoe in my room and while I wasn’t actively scared of it, I always looked at it a bit askance. I think in my mind shoe-bronzing is not that far removed from taxidermy, which is not one of my favorite arts.

The next oldest item in the photo is the blue baseball card album. While there are certainly cards within the album that are actually older than my bronzed baby shoe, I was actively collecting cards from about 1980 to 1986. Indeed, the vast majority of my allowance during my junior high and early high school years went to the purchase of baseball cards. The album in this photo is only one of many I used to neatly store the hundreds of 2-1/2” by 3-1/2” pieces of cardboard that I coveted. The very first card in this particular album is a 1978 Don Sutton Topps card. I was curious about how much it might be worth, so I looked it up on eBay and saw that sellers were generally asking anywhere between $1 and $20. I noticed that one seller was asking $154.99. Why the huge difference? Perhaps it was autographed (or maybe even bronzed!), but it just turns out that the seller is insane.

The next item chronologically is my Bar Mitzvah portrait from 1982. While I wasn’t raised in the most religious of families, my Bar Mitzvah was something I’d been looking forward to pretty much my whole life. It was a lavish affair with hundreds of guests all there to celebrate my becoming a man in the eyes of Judaism (although in the eyes of biology it would be almost another year before I technically became a man). The framed portrait of me that you see above is probably the most serious, somber photo of me that exists. This is quite a juxtaposition from the rest of the pictures in my Bar Mitzvah photo album, which includes shots of me dancing like Robert Hayes in Airplane!, lying across the laps of my female guests, and using a fake cigar handed to me by the photographer to strike a Groucho Marx pose. Yes, I remember my Bar Mitzvah fondly.

Moving forward two years to 1984, we have my Lafayette H.S. v-neck sweater. I was given the sweater because I was a member of my high school’s Academic Olympics team. It was the only team I ever belonged to throughout my entire scholastic career, so that sweater was the closest thing I ever had to a uniform. It made me feel like hot stuff. I thought if the school’s jocks could impress girls by scoring touchdowns and hitting homeruns, maybe I could impress girls by saying, “James Joyce” when someone asked, “Who wrote A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?” I thought wrong.

The next item in the nostalgia parade is the Dallas Cowboys jacket (circa 1986) at the top of the photo, which I got as a present from my parents on my 17^th birthday. While the Cowboys are my favorite football team (and I can finally admit that again this year), the jacket’s real value to me is that it’s the last present my dad got me before he passed away. He actually passed away a little over a month before my birthday, but my mom had told me they had already picked it out together prior to that.  Okay, take a deep breath, wipe your eyes, and let’s move on.

Do you see the gold pouch leaning against the MAD Magazine? (Don’t worry we’ll get to the MAD stuff in a minute.) That gold pouch was a souvenir purchased in Alaska in the summer of 1987. You probably can’t see it, but the writing says “I Struck Gold in Alaska.” Inside the pouch were a few rocks painted gold, to appear like gold nuggets. I went to Alaska with my mom, “Uncle” Murray and “Aunt” Sally. They weren’t actually my uncle and aunt, but they were my parents’ best friends so I often referred to them as such. The trip was a high school graduation gift from my mom. She had told me six months earlier that she would take me anywhere I wanted to go for my graduation. At 17 years old the prospect of traveling with my middle-aged mom and her middle-aged friends was not high on my wish list, so I told her I wanted to go to Alaska, because, although I really did want to go there, I assumed she’d have no interest and the trip wouldn’t actually happen. Well the trip did happen. The majority of the pictures from that trip show me as the quintessential brooding, dissatisfied teen, but the truth is I really did have a good time.

Okay, now to the MAD stuff. As a kid, I was an avid collector of MAD magazines, as were my brothers before me, but the two items here are from my work life at MAD. At some point I’ll write a separate piece about my time as a MAD staffer from 1990 to 1995, but for now I’ll just point out that one of the great perks of working there was all the free magazines and paraphernalia I got. (I gave my kids a couple of Spy vs. Spy pens out of one of the boxes, which they seemed to enjoy even though they were no longer working.) Not sure what year the watch is from, but it’s fun because Alfred E. Neuman is wearing a straightjacket and the hands of the watch go backwards. As for the magazine, it’s from January 1996, which was about six months after I moved to Arizona. My guess is I mailed a copy to my mom, because I had an article in there (“You Know America’s Been Nuked When…”) and I always sent her my published works. (Like how I use the phrase “my published works” as though I’m Ernest Hemingway? The most literary line I had in the aforementioned article was “You know America’s been nuked when the weatherman is drawing little cartoon mushroom clouds on the weather map.” Send me a freaking Pulitzer!)

Well, that’s pretty much it for the nostalgia tour. Although if I start taking pictures of the thousands of old photos I took from my mom’s apartment and blogging about them, the Nostalgia Tour Part 2 might be coming to a blog near you. Stay tuned!