I‘M SURE MOST OF YOU are familiar with Marcel Proust’s brilliant and epic work, “Remembrance Of Things Past.” That is, I’m sure you’re as familiar with it as I am, which is to say you picked it as one of your free book-club selections 14 years ago, got a few pages in, found it less convivial than “The Cardinal Of The Kremlin,” and stuck it away next to the Civil War books we all bought after the Ken Burns special and never read either.
There are many books of the last hundred years that were huge and surprising hits, surprising in the sense that I don’t know how it’s possible for a regular person to plow through any of them without Christopher Hitchens right next to you the whole time. (Then again, I guess lots of things could be accomplished without the blessing of three hundred cable channels.) I’m thinking just now of Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom,” or anything James Joyce wrote after “Portrait Of The Artist,” to name a few.
The reason I brought up Proust’s magnum opus is that it begins with a man eating a French pastry (you can make your own sexual joke here), and the taste and smell of the sweet treat catapults him back into a labyrinthine tunnel that takes him seven novellas to find his way out of. Well, the other day I experienced a lowbrow version of the same thing. I was watching a Saturday morning cartoon with my kids, and it took me back to my youth, my parents, and our home. (Unlike Proust’s protagonist–which, by the way, is fun to say several times quickly–I guarantee my own fancy will be purged after far less investment on your part. Say, just another few hundred words.)
The cartoon was 40 years old, and I remembered watching it with my parents and my sister. Forty years. Lord. It’s always fun to play with chunks of time like that. I mean, you go back another forty years, add a couple, and you get to the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the First World War, and we all know how well that worked out.
Forty years. There were paper boys and manual lawnmowers, and the only aerobic workouts were getting up and down each time to change the channel. Men in trucks came by to sell fruit and bread and potato chips. We called the mailman “Mister” and the ice cream man by his first name. We walked to the field to play baseball, sledded on still-to-be-developed lots, and there didn’t seem to be anyone in the world who didn’t go to public school. I remember reading the Bible every day in class, Jew and Christian, with no one visibly scarred from it. Maybe that had just been proscribed. Somewhere around there, wasn’t it?–’61 or 63? I remember doing it very clearly in first grade. Mrs. Milne. I told my mom she looked like Marilyn Monroe. (After my mother met her on open-school-night, she came home and wondered aloud which Marilyn Monroe I was thinking of.) And on Halloween, parents sent their kids out alone without trailing along like the Secret Service.
WE HAD a ’61 Chevy. This was back when flush suburbanites like us had just one car, unlike today when most American families have as many cars as phones. My mother took driving lessons in it. She grew up in Brooklyn at a time when even subway fare was literally a splurge, and had never learned. At first, my father promised he’d teach her, but that lasted exactly one lap around the block on a Sunday afternoon. She called a professional driving school the next day, and, so far as I know, neither of them ever spoke of it again.
My mother drove us in it to the 1964 World’s Fair on a weekday morning in summer, and as we walked back through the parking lot after a day of looking into the future, an incident occurred which was one of the formative events in my life on the consuming American issue of race; although I only know that now, looking back.
The parking lot wasn’t paved, but was surfaced with pebbles over dirt. (Do we have pebbled lots like that anymore? I can’t think of any. If we don’t, what do we do these days with pebbles?) And I had discovered a large stone on the way, golf-ball sized, no, larger, and was kicking it in front of me and catching up to it, about ten feet per kick. My mother let this go on for three or four kicks and then told me to cut it out, that I might kick it too hard and hit somebody. Like any normal 10-year-old, I ignored this, and resumed kicking. And then, of course, it hit someone.
The stone skipped in front of me at a good clip and hit the calf of an elderly black woman. She was walking with two young men in their thirties, I think, perhaps her sons or grandsons. I can see them all clearly. She was wearing a cotton print dress with flowers on it and a thin belt, a heavy woman. The men were wearing slacks and those ban-lon shirts we all used to wear, and hats, straw fedoras, I guess they would be called, with striped bands. It was a hot day.
And my mother put her hands on her hips and fixed me with her eye and said, “Well, I told you, didn’t I? Now go up to the lady and apologize.”
I was a good kid and did just that. I walked up and said, “Sorry, ma’am. I hope I didn’t hurt you. It was an accident.” And she looked at me closely and said, “No, it wasn’t.”
A few seconds passed. “Yes, it was,” I said. “I was kicking it, and my mom told me not to, and then I did it again. Sorry.”
My mother could see something was off and stepped up. “Did you apologize?” she asked me. I nodded.
“I know he did it on purpose,” the woman said. And now it was my mother’s turn to be puzzled.
“He didn’t do it on purpose. He didn’t do what I told him.”
And then the woman shook her head slowly and said, “Boys like him been throwing rocks at me my whole life. I know when it happens.”
There was a long silence. No tension, no anger, just silence. I can see the posture of the men, motionless. Watching. Unsurprised. And then my mother finally said, “Not like him. Not like us.”
Then we were back in the car, driving home, no one speaking. I was in the front seat, my sister in the back. All four windows were down. As I said, a hot day. I remember looking over at my mother. I can see her face in profile. I can see it now. I can see her glasses, and her hands on the wheel, ten-and-two, the way my father taught her, at least for a block. After a while, she looked over and reached out a hand to smooth my hair, and then put it back on the wheel.
ONE OF MY SONS leaned his head onto my shoulder, and I was back watching the cartoon. “Top Cat.” Based on “Bilko,” wasn’t it? Phil Silvers. God, he was funny. Created by the great Nat Hiken. Gone, all of them. Forty years.
Maybe 40 years from now my kids will be watching “Top Cat” with theirs, and it will send them back through a channel of time. “I watched this with your grandfather,” one of my sons will say. “That was the year our soldiers won a war that changed the world.”
And one of the little ones will look up in awe and say, “Wasn’t that just a year before Grandpa got the part that won him his first Oscar?”
“That’s right. You’ve seen the tape of Halle Berry running up and kissing him, haven’t you?”
“Boy, that was some kiss. Looked like they knew each other. Didn’t that make Grandma mad?”
“Nooooo, she understood the uncanny effect he had on women. Don’t get me wrong, she didn’t like it when he punched out Michael Moore backstage, but you know the old saying, ‘That’s Show Biz.'”
“Why don’t we call up and invite them over to watch TV with us?”
“Not a good idea, son. Grandpa’s a hundred and ten now, and people who drink that much are apt to be a little cross in the morning.”
Larry Miller is a contributing humorist to The Daily Standard and a writer, actor, and comedian living in Los Angeles.
