350.5.  Take Five, check that, Take TEN

I’m not much of a joiner, but I recently ran across a worldwide movement I have to join, the “For God’s Sake Slow Down Movement.”  No, really, there is such a thing though as far as I know it doesn’t have an actual name and doesn’t collect dues.  But it does exist.

My whole life has been an exercise in slowing down, in taking a big breath, in sitting silently, and in refusing to rush.  Whether the issue is speeding on the highways, racing through supermarket aisles, or complaining about long lines at the DMV, or the bank, or the lineup of golf carts on the first tee, I take a deep breath—and wait.   I wasn’t born that way, mind you, I’ve got a normal metabolism, so I had to work to achieve it until at last it became second nature, a way of life. I am, in the language of the movement, a "rehabilitated speedaholic."

Actually, I have been laboring, falsely it turns out, under the impression that I am simply one of the oddballs bucking the multi-tasking, speed-up lifestyle that has overrun the globe over the last forty years, the lightning-fast years of the computer age.  But come to find out, I am right smack in a worldwide cultural revolution that is sweeping the nation.  There are people around the world in formal and informal groups that praise “downshifting” and actually use the word “deceleration.”  My kind of people.

There’s even a book called In Praise of Slowness (2004) by Carl Honoré that carries this subtitle:  How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed.  There are chapters on eating, working, parenting, vacationing, and abandoning speed reading for slow reading.  Of course everyone is in favor of slow sex—though I’m not sure how many practice it.

The idea behind the movement is to restructure your life to achieve more meaning and fulfillment.  They call it “voluntary simplicity.”  Take pleasure in the processes of everyday life, from brushing your teeth in the morning to preparing for bed in the evening.  Slow down to enjoy it all.

It’s a whole “community of slow” we’re talking about here.

Makes sense to me.   

350.4.  A Normal Life

My simple goal in life has been the same for as long as I can remember:  try to live out a “normal” life span.  I didn’t have grand dreams, just wanted what I took to be the normal things of the average man’s life.  That would be perfect I thought, a family man  And happily, in the twilight of my life, as I prepare for my 78^th birthday on April 28, 2020, I can report on my “normalcy,” to use a famous word coined by Warren Harding in the 1920 presidential election.  For me, normal has looked something like this.

 

1.      First, I got to become Bobbi Brunson’s husband. 

2.      I got to be the father of two perfect daughters.                          

3.      I got to be a working man and kept the same job for 32 years.

4.      I got to travel with Miss Bobbi all over the world.

5.      I got to be a pretty fair golfer, a very good shooter on the basketball court, and a steady but slow long distance runner.

6.      I got to live in three very nice houses, about 15 years each.

7.      I got a college education at Rutgers.

8.      I got a Ph.D. at NYU.

9.      I got to study with brilliant professors.

10.  I got to write the biography of John Ciardi in 1998.

11.  I got a CHOICE magazine award for it:  Best Academic Book of the Year.

12.  I got to write movie reviews for a NJ daily newspaper for 12 years.

13.  I got around to writing my autobiography Random Miracles in 2011.

14.  I got to publish Longfellow in Love in 2018, my venture into popular history on an unpopular writer.

15.  I got to retire and collect Social Security and a pension.

16.  I and Miss Bobbi got to celebrate our 50^th wedding anniversary on the Nile River.

17.  I got to live long enough to know and like six really neat grandchildren, now ages 12-23.

18.  I got to be friends with more people than I ever thought possible.  Way more.  And almost a total surprise to me.

There were misfires and mistakes along the way, but there were so many blessings to be grateful for that I hardly know how to begin counting them.  Normal?  Ah well, probably not.   

350.3. The Tipping Point

Everyone knows to tip a waitress.  There will always be disagreements about the amount, but not the need.  We know that waitresses' salaries are deliberately depressed because they can earn so much more by smiling and being efficient, that is, being happily servile.  We provide their compensation, for better or worse, and regardless of what we may privately think about the system.

But the rest of the tipping rules and regulations is surprisingly hard to figure out.  There is general agreement about tipping barbers and hair dressers, masseuses and taxi drivers, miscellaneous tour directors, the hotel housekeeping staff, and pizza delivery guys.  And don’t forget bell hops and sky caps.  Oh, and the fellows who deliver your furniture and appliances.  We collectively agree on all these—and a host of others.

We are also used to Tip Jars near cash registers on store counters:  “Never expected, always appreciated.”  They’re in convenience stores, pizzerias, Chinese takeout restaurants, some semi-fast-food restaurants (our Panera’s has one, but not Culver’s), Jersey Mike’s subs, “Five Guys” burgers, the dry cleaners—just to mention a few. 

Tip Jars represent a compromise between real tipping and a sort of last-minute, after-thought tipping.  It’s a place where we can drop our nickels and dimes, maybe even a dollar bill or two, when we get our change.  At McDonald’s the money goes to the Ronald McDonald House, a charity for children.
 

The list of those getting tips directly (or a portion of what’s in the Tip Jar) is long, but it doesn’t include everyone, which has always made me wonder why some workers never get tips.

Why for example don’t we tip bank tellers or butchers?  How about the check-out person at your local supermarket?  What about teachers and mail carriers, although they usually do get Christmas gifts?  Or the nurses who care for you night and day in the hospital and send you home hale and hearty?  What about the diligent office staff at doctors’ offices, the ones who collect your co-pay and set up your next appointment?  None of them and dozens of others just like them ever get a nickel.  Why is that?

350.2. "Pretty Woman" and "La Traviata"--wait, what?

Grazing through the channels in the wee hours when the pickings are slim, I found “Pretty Woman” (commercials and all) on the Bravo channel.  You know the one.  It’s about a rich business man who hires a hooker for a week when he needs a pretty woman on his arm.  Of course, they fall in love.  Of all the thin concepts to build a movie around, this may be the all-time thinnest.

So for me anyway, it has always been way too hard to be a fan of this 1990  movie starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, and directed by television’s Garry Marshall (“Happy Days” and “The Odd Couple”).  But I am a sucker for romantic comedies, which I will deny if you ever ask me in public, and this one has become a beloved classic of the genre.  So what the hey, I watched the rest of it.  

But surprise, surprise!  This time around I became a fan.  

What turned me around was the music--not Roy Orbison’s wobbly “Pretty Woman,” but Giuseppe Verdi’s “La Traviata,” the story of a prostitute who falls in love, one of the great romantic stories of opera and one of the most frequently staged of all operas.  Verdi’s glorious music ushers us into an emotionally-wrenching tragedy, not a feel-good comedy.  It’s a key distinction worth remembering.

In the movie Edward the Rich Business Man whisks Vivian the Hooker into his private jet to San Francisco to see her first opera.  He explains in his private box before the curtain that some people will get the opera experience at once and become changed by it forever.  Others can learn about it and learn to enjoy it, but they will not have their lives changed by it.

Then the glories of  the first scene of “La Traviata” begin, Verdi at his most impossible-not-to-love best.  Miss Vivian the hooker is hooked.  And so was I on the movie, on Miss Julia Roberts, even on the annoyingly good-looking Richard Gere.

I think I’ll watch it one more time.  Without commercials.

350.1: The Orlando Rays

There are about a billion Chinese who couldn’t care less, but along the I-4 corridor between Tampa and Orlando, a gathering storm seems to be taking shape over where the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team will be playing its games after 2027.

That’s the last year the Rays are obligated to play all their games at a mausoleum called Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg.  Team owners, discouraged by low attendance that is keeping them from becoming multi-billionaires, have floated the idea that the Rays might consider sharing each season with a “sister” city, Montreal.  Despite the mayhem associated with players needing two homes, dentists, pharmacies, pediatricians, currencies, car repairmen, etc., the crazy idea seems attractive to Rays’ ownership that is so perilously close to the poverty line.
      

In the midst of this brewing international intrigue has stepped one Pat Williams, who has got it into his head that the team should relocate completely (no split-season, sister-city nonsense) to his hometown, Orlando, which he says, is enjoying a growth spurt that neither Tampa nor St. Pete can compete with.  And it would be easier, he points out, to raise stadium-building money in a city that generates three times the tourist taxes than Tampa-St. Pete combined.

Tampa Bay would not be losing their team, Williams says, because it would just be moving a little to the east, that’s all.  No big deal.

Right now it’s nothing more than idle talk, so the Chinese really shouldn’t be worrying too much about how this will play out.  Williams hasn’t spoken to Orlando city officials, to Rays’ principal owner Stuart Sternberg—not even to Disney.

However, if the conversation ever got serious, it might be a good idea for Tampa mayor Jane Castor to point out that the team could move east—to the State Fairgrounds—and still be in the Tampa Bay region.  It’s half an hour east of Tropicana Field, and best of all, it’s only an hour or so west of Orlando, a short ride for Mr. Pat Williams.  No big deal.