Only Hoop-dee-doo Songs

All of the events in this piece appeared in Hell on Earth, a love story but showed up only as contributing parts of the ongoing story. This piece looks back on that story and one event in particular that was casually mentioned in passing. At the time this event only served to move the story forward—it was an important piece but not the most important piece because in Hell on Earth, a renegade angel is portrayed as the big mover and shaker. That was then. Looking back at the events in the novel from today’s vantage point I am able to recognize some of the more key situations—situations about which one could say… 

 

From That Moment On…

 

Girl Singer, Rosemary Clooney once sang:

“From this moment on, you for me, dear, only two for tea, dear… from this happy day, no more blue songs, only hoop-dee-doo songs...”

She was expressing the historically long running sentiment that not only can things change on a dime but that we’ll know it when it happens.

Confucius, or Lao Tzu, or possibly Mao Tse Tung said that, “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with one step,” which seems to also imply that the one step in question will be the next one and you will know it when you take it.

I overheard my father once pass on to a golfing buddy that old adage, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” which also sounds very Chinese but is generally attributed to Synanon founder Charles Dederich. I thought it sort of strange because my father was a strong believer in routine and not a proponent of the sweeping changes in one’s life that this saying might imply.

But whether it is a popular song lyric, an old Chinese saying or an alcoholic’s recovery program slogan I have strong doubts that anyone can ever precisely and with accuracy predict that a single event will be the event that changes everything. We’re just not that good at fortune telling and we’re not nearly as objective as we’d like to think.

Oh we’d like to be able to say if I do this or that, or move to here or there, or acquire some or choose none that the decision will be a significant one—a life changing one but to quote another song lyric, it ain’t necessarily so.

I decided to go to college to become an electrical engineer, then a physicist, and finally an industrial manager. I joined the Army to become a journalist and when I left the Army and couldn’t hook up with a newspaper, I returned to college.

It would have been foolhardy to have attached any significance to whatever day I selected a major for college, or the several occasions when I altered that selection, or January 19 when I joined the Army or the day I returned to college. But that didn’t stop me from doing so at the time and predictably none of them stood the test of time to become “from that moment on, I’d be singing hoop-dee-doo songs” events.

Predicting the significance of a specific event in the moment is usually nothing more than wishful thinking at best because we really have no way of knowing for sure.

It is only through hindsight that true turning points can be recognized. The good news is that re-examining a particular event or circumstance and recognizing it’s importance after some time has passed can be as exciting or even more so than the moment itself by introducing and allowing you to confront the questions,  “What if I hadn’t of done that?” or “What if the car broke down that day?” or “What if there was a bomb scare that day and we were all sent home early?”

Events take on added significance only when we realize all the situations that could have prevented them from happening in the first place.

While looking to the future is always risky at best, it is entirely feasible for a person, someone like myself say, to look back at a single day, I dunno, say a day in 1976 for instance, and recognize it as the day everything changed. In fact, I can look back at March 5, 1976—it was a Friday—and even at a specific event on that day and conclude unequivocally that from that moment on nothing was ever the same—and believe me it didn’t start out that way and I certainly didn’t know it at the time.

For the first 18 years my life appeared to be on the right road heading in the right direction and preceding at the right speed. And then, as I’ve pointed out, everything started to go haywire. Five years of college was fun and enlightening but hardly productive. Three years in the Army was—well it was three years in the Army. It had pointed me in some new directions—directions I even thought were turning points but alas, when I left the Army I was in much the same boat as when I left college—adrift again with no plan on the horizon.

So I returned to school, Cal State University - Long Beach, this time with a better understanding of who I was, what I wanted to do, where I wanted to do it—or so I thought. I had decided to become a teacher who wrote on the side or a writer who taught on the side. It didn’t matter because what I didn’t know and should have known was that I was still on that same twisting, dead end, dusty bumpy road I had been riding for the last decade—still chugging aimlessly along with no destination in sight and no road map in the glove compartment.

I began my student teaching semester on February 2 at Millikan High School teaching three classes, Creative Writing, Third-year English and Understanding the News—a newspaper reading class for students with only a basic understanding of and interest in the English language. For a student teacher they represented the best and brightest, the fair to middling, and the really not interested cases.

The funny thing is I did pretty well with the two extremes but had trouble with the basic Third-year English because, truth be told, I was never a big fan of all the rules that went into writing and found myself an even lesser fan of teaching the rules. For four weeks, though, I struggled on, thinking, hoping that at some point it would all fall into place. But things fell apart long before they ever fell in place.

As much as I hoped my decision to become a teacher would be my Rubicon, my turning point leading in a different direction, a better direction, it was not to be—and I knew it.

At the beginning of my fifth week I made the decision to drop out of the teaching program. I didn’t have a Plan B, and to be honest I was more than likely working on Plan M, N, O or P by this time; and really, leaving something without having something else to fill the gap was keeping well within my modus operandi. What I was pretty sure of was that I would be moving back home in New York until I could figure out my next move. This decision certainly was not a turning point because this is exactly what I had been doing for the past dozen years.

I notified my counselor at the university, the teachers of my three classes and even the teacher’s aide from my Understanding the News class, a fellow student in the Teaching Credential Program. I didn’t tell the students because the teachers liked to keep things positive for them and quitting always has a negative connotation.

I finished the week and after my last class on Friday the teacher’s aide surprised me with a chocolate cake she had baked, a going away gesture that I’m sure was meant to put a positive spin on the whole experience. We had our little going away party and I invited her to lunch at Pizza Hut and because we seemed to be hitting it off, that evening we took in a movie, “Dog Day Afternoon,” about two guys who were also gaining a lot of experience with plans going awry.

It turned out to be a really good day considering I had begun it without a clue what my next move would be. In fact, it was such a good day that we agreed to get together the next day and visit San Pedro, where I had been stationed in the Army.

When I woke up that Saturday morning I was still a man without a plan but one thing I knew for sure, I wouldn’t be returning to New York any time soon. Hardly a day went by the rest of the year that we weren’t together.  I still needed a job because my G.I. bill shut down the day I left the teacher’s program but I was able to find one selling vacuum cleaners. Actually you don’t find those jobs, they find you—in a moment of weakness when you least expect it.

Later that year Kath and I were married in San Pedro, which had become our favorite place and two months later we moved to the Outer Banks of North Carolina and eventually to Virginia. We had three children together; all of who now have children of their own and all of whom have taken a much more direct path to success than their father.

Did things change immediately that day in the teacher’s aide office? No, there was still a lot of scraping around and rough times to maneuver through. But after that going away party I was definitely heading in a different direction than before and without that going away party I probably would have just gone back to my apartment and started packing for my return to New York.

But because of that one gesture I never had to do it alone again and that has made all the difference in the world. That cake was the significant step, the first day, the this moment and as Girl Singer, Rosemary Clooney sang, “From this moment on…no more blue songs…only hoop-dee-doo songs.