1940's Phone and Fans

The heavy black 1940’s rotary phone was out of place in my office, as was the GE clock from the same period, with its think orange cord and brown plastic casing, which must have been the absentee father of gorilla glass. The office was cooled by a 1940’s fan with wide spaces in its metal framing, wide enough to pass a small cat through while the fan was spinning, but still too attractive to children’s fingers. I miss that fan when the temperature is 90 degrees at night.

I picked up the phone on the third ring and recognized the bright hearted tone of a woman who had just completed her solo maiden voyage on San Francisco’s BART system. Her destination was Ohlone Community College where she was a sixty-two year old freshman. The tutorial of her son through the system had made her independent beyond her Archie Bunker temperament bearing husband’s wildest nightmares. I am the son of that woman and her husband, and brother of that successful tutor.

I alternate Cochran paratrooper boots, brown for my WW II father, and black for myself and my Vietnam era brother. My suits would be at home in a brat pack casino and a Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedy, with required vest for skinny man coolness. My six channel CD player music releases start in the 1950’s. Willie Nelson and the Doobie Brothers are permanent residents. I have managed to create a life, with the items of my parents and older sibling’s generation around me.

However, Van sneakers and straight legged, non pleated suits have become attractive as the life styles of my twenty and thirty year children, and their associate friends, become a source of curiosity, fascination, and personal enrichment.

Twenty was once an intimidating age. The spinning of Dire Straits, Sultans of Swing album on a turn table was seared into my memory; its needle and grooves scratching me into the new cool at my first college party. That song changed what Rock n Roll is, while claiming it was what Rock n Roll had always been.

The Sultans reminded me of awkward moments, of feeling out of place, too young, not smart enough, and dorky in negotiating opposite sex interactions. The gender awkwardness I experienced seems absent from so many who are twenty and thirty now. People are just more comfortable with each other. More free, meaner sometimes, but with an integrity of personality that few my age experienced when they were their age. When in their company I begin to feel young and a part of it in a manner that is leading to unexpected friendships.

I wonder if the bright hearted tone that I heard in the Mother’s voice was as much about her friendship with my brother Rene, as it was the excitement of new adventures on commuter trains and community colleges.

I was able to develop a friendship with my father in part because he graduated from Archie Bunker to Benjamin Spock. His hair was the longer than all of his sons in the 1970’s. It reached nearly to the middle of his shoulder blades, but he still put Brylcreem in it when combing it back.

Maybe this is what we are suppose to do, gather the things of those older around us while reaching for the styles and taste of those that follow us. I still like the wisdom of the formality of my father’s generation over the casualness of the sons and daughters, but that is coming from a man that did not know how to tie a Windsor knot until he was fifty and learned how to do so by watching a YouTube video.