Ever wake up to find something you love trapped in the past? Part 3

Paul Solman from Newshour’s business desk designed a quiz that asked, “Do You Live in a Bubble?” It aimed to chart par- ticipants’ connections to white and blue collar worlds.

“Did you grow up in a family in which the chief breadwinner was not in a managerial job or a high-prestige profession (defined as attorney, physician, dentist, architect, engineer, scientist, or college professor)?”

Thanks to their fathers, most of the men in my family of my father’s generation climbed an economic rung and became eng.neers. I clicked “No.”

“Have you ever held a job that caused something to hurt at the end of the day?”

“Yes.”

“During the last month have you voluntarily hung out with people who were smoking ciga- rettes?”

“Nope.”

“During the last year, have you ever purchased domestic mass- market beer to stock your own fridge?”

“Yes.”

And so the quiz went. I scored dead center in between blue and white collar preferences. It was no surprise, but there it was. My angst was tabulated perfectly illustrating just how much I was hanging between two worlds.

My desires were evenly spread across the two. My reality, however, is another story. Besides the Coors Light that I stock wheneverer my dad comes over, few vestiges from my childhood remain.

The large parties that went late into the night, along with the voices that ushered them in, I never meant to leave them in the past.

I got lost in my own world, thinking about what was easiest for me and almost missed what was going on right before me, to my own family.

Ever make a choice without realize you’re making it? This is a concept that our politicians understand all too well. Our desires can trick us, leave us stranded, looking through our white picket fences without realizing what is happening in our own backyards.

Ever wake up to find something you love trapped in the past? Part 2

When I turned 17 and started driving, I preferred my New York friends to come to me in New Jersey because it was easier than driving to their neighborhoods.

In my teenage years, I might have called this the insidiousness of the suburbs. (Although I’ve grown to treasure New Jersey since those days, at that time I railed against the kind of comfort provided by the buffer of well-manicured lawns.)

I was taking the easy path and didn’t notice the problem it would create until I started my own family. One day, I was thinking about how I wanted to offer my son all of the magic that filled my childhood. That’s when I realized it had slowly slipped away.

I worried about how it might affect him as he climbed into our Land Rover to go to school. Will his world-view be big enough?

Will he have any kind of street smarts? Will he have access to the life from which we came?

Ever wake up to find something you love trapped in the past?

My Uncle Bill was a fireman. My dad’s dad was a mailman. My mom’s dad was a mechanic. They are all gone and with them, the stoops of Astoria, the basement bars and beach bungalows have disappeared from my life.

My immediate family moved from Astoria while I was still a baby. I grew up in Wayne, but that wasn’t the sum of my expireences.

In younger days, my parents loved to party and the New York accents of their friends and relatives filled the house throughout my childhood.

Whenever the New York contingent came out for a party, they blew away the more subdued Jersey neighbors. The New Yorkers stayed late and their voices boomed across the yard. Ever wake up to find something you love trapped in the past?