BBT RIP

An old friend passed on last week, a man who did so much for me. I had disappeared on him in recent years. It began one day in 1976 at the end of summer, when a girlfriend-to-be asked me if I might wish to go sailing with her over Labor Day weekend. I was supposed to go off on the three day Vineyard Race on the maxi sloop Congere that afternoon, but it was impossible for me to leave work early enough, especially when a senior editor (Karen Durbin) had a hissy fit when she heard I was planning an early exit. I called Lyn back and we ended up together after all, me taking the train to Old Lyme that night and sailing with BBT, Benjamin Brooks Thomas late the next morning at the changing of the tide. Brooks was the president of Harper & Row. Lyn worked in their children's book division with Charlotte Zolotow, while I was a junior editor working with Judith Daniels at The Village Voice. It ended that I would date Lyn for only several months through the fall, but I ended up sailing with Brooks for fifteen years, and outlast a string of his girl friends. I was a reliable crew and available. Over so long a long time there were many adventures, now long ago. And now he is dead at 78 after a fall in San Diego February 5th. Another mutual friend told me that he had not looked well recently. Perhaps he had a heart issue? Brooks had his fancy cars, BBT1 and BBT2, his custom ketch. He had his toys, especially his boats, his condominium in Vail and his house on the cove in Essex, his triplex overlooking the UN in Tudor Village. The last time I saw Brooks was at his 60th birthday held appropriately at the NYYC on 44th Street. Brooks had taken time to propose me for membership in that club, taking me around town to visit five members of the admission committee. Perhaps it was a mistake for me to join, an extravagence, but I liked it at the time. Sophie was a brand new baby, and it was the first time we left her with a babysitter. Oddly, that beautiful young mother, Kate Scott Tucci, died last year, not much more, if even in her forties. Sally thought Brooks was misogynistic, and she didn't want to spend time captive on Teal. We both wondered if Brooks figured that I was off the saiing circuit once we married and had a daughter. Come to remember it, Brooks read a lesson at our wedding at St. Stephens' chapel at Kent School, two years before in 1989. I remember all those trips up and down the coast from Essex to Maine. And once, alone on his boat, I sailed it for two weeks from Edgartown back to Essex. He was a fine friend to me; I was not much back in recent years, something to regret. Beside him, I felt inadequate and unaccomplished. In recent years, I had nothing to show him. I felt like a failure and his success reminded me of it. I think that was the extent of it, my fear of his eyes. It makes me sad to realize how I failed to stay in touch. There is nothing to do about it now. Maybe I can learn?

To Hum or Not to Hum... Part 2

Now this is perfect. I tired the uninhibited humming piece out on the wife. She doesn't like it at all. Its too contrived, too much information. Sit on it for a week. Do you like it? Well, sanguine advice, I suppose, but yes, I do like it. Not only did I write it, it comes from the heart of experience. And experience seldom fails me. More editing, perhaps. Sit on it for a week. It has the same stifling feel that being told not to sing did, and you know what that makes me want to say! "You make sounds all of the time, you know." "Yes, I do know." "It must be a way for you to release energy, or something." Amen. I fear what it would be like with any more of it inside.

To Hum or Not to Hum...

I don’t know when it was that I began to hum. I’d be in the shower, humming. Or in the car, alone—at least I thought I was—making my own music, or accompanying the best, or walking away from an argument with my wife, left with humming as the only graceful way to exit without conflagration. The weird part is that I wasn’t entirely aware of this. I mean, I knew I was tuning into a mildly eclectic array of songs from Bizet to the Beatles, from South Pacific to Janis Ian, or God Save Our Gracious Queen, to Do You Know the Way to San Jose. Usually the tunes were explicable in some opaque way, but so subterranean or tangential that it would seriously disrupt my reverie, in fact put the brakes on it to discover the origin. Naturally, I was partially cognizant of the transition from inaudible to noticeable. As often the case with deep distracted thinkers, it was my wife who brought all this to my attention.

I was doing what I’d seen many others doing on the streets, or what my mother did when I was very young, not quite singing because I seldom knew the exact words, but moving along the corridors of house and city, lips often moving, having full-blown conversations with myself. I once thought these people were all nut jobs, addled people. Now, as I stopped to consider it, so was I. Fever. Give me Fever, I’ve Got You Under My Skin, Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone. They just bubbled up and out. There was a time when I would whistle the tune, because every time I dared to sing, there was no recognition. That I had all these strings of melody and lyrics lurking in me and now coming out, intrigued me, and even liberated me from a lifelong state of inhibition. What this meant was that I could not have cared much less what others thought anymore, or might think when they saw me humming. Screw them all, each and every one was close to how I felt. Had some judgmental whippersnapper like myself have hove in sight, I could not have noticed., and this was what was strangest of all: somehow, after a lifetime of acute self-consciousness I was now uninhibited. I was like after years of furtively closing curtains so people would not look at me from outside, of feeling watched, it did not matter. I felt free to do what I wanted without nary a thought.

I recommend this, all of you who mumble words in church or singing happy birthday, as I had done for many years, a lifetime in fact. Maybe it just comes naturally—it was not anything conscious on my part. Should you be a parent, too, I hope you will never laugh at your child, as mine did when I sang to them, passing on your own shyness for another generation. Or as educators, avoid singling out and embarrassing those who are off-key or groaning, as several music directors did to me. One told me to confine my vocal efforts to yelling at the crew out on the river, whle another suggested that I mouth the words. The song was On the Road to Mandalay, the sort of song that invited enthusiasm. All of this negative feedback had the impact of making this songbird cease to sing, silencing the canary in the coal mine. It was not good. It was not right. I am thankful that I now hum, one day, I project, I may find myself singing Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Glory to the newborn king.