Joie de Vivre

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joie_de_Vivre 

Like Wadsworth's "Evangeline" and her happy Acadian family with the beautiful black eyes living in a fertile river valley, my joy at being alive is something I can't always hide, even when it is more convenient to the people around me (or more appropriate to their customs) for me to do so. In Asian cultures, a big toothy smile is often seen as the prelude to a false act, like an overly solicitous shopkeeper trying to sell you damaged goods, or the villain dressed in black from a martial arts movie with one hand behind his back, waiting to press the button down on a bomb detonator. "Oh! Haha! You die! You die, now! Hahaha!"

Let me assure you, laughter and smiling in my culture is a sign of happiness, not deeply repressed anger or hostility. If being psycho makes you happy, you need to see a reputable doctor. Like, now. At the office it was even weirder, attracting notice wherever I went, with whomever the audience, as thinly-veiled digs that were supposed to function like so many pins popping so many balloons of mine, like the child I haven't been for quite some time. I guess when you grow up without a wailing wall at your disposable, problems are much less interesting as a showpiece for attention.

We grew up with sayings like "misery loves company" and "keep a stiff upper lip", followed by my dad's favorite "the sun comes up tomorrow" as a rip-off from the popular Broadway play "Annie". It is culturally entrenched among my people to handle problems by solving them through hard work, not worrying over them like a hangnail by "pouring salt on an open wound". There is a time to grieve, and there is a time to live, and we get to savor the richness of life through our emotions and feelings. No one is excluded from it.

Most evenings, I enjoy watching the updated version of the popular game show "Family Feud", most particularly for its inclusive representation of American families, encouraged and culled as they are by the staff of the show and their host, actor/comedian Steve Harvey. It's a lot more real than so-much genteel hand-kissing and flirting, much as I loved Rich Dawson's campy turns about the stage in the 70s and 80s. For the family that makes it to the speed round at the end of the show comes a quick sucession of answers to really hard questions, like last night's repeat episode.

The question was: on a scale of one-to-ten, how happy are you at being alive? The attractive African-American woman answered "TEN!" right away, at the same time as me. After her turn, another nicely-dressed family member came out to answer the same questions, with the extra burden of answering again if she repeated the first contestant's answers. It's a telling way to hear how families have the same mindset through their similiar answers made under the gun. Same question: how happy? And again, same lightning quick response: "TEN!"

Uh uh. Try again. "NINE!" Next best thing, right? And like that <snap!>, I felt less alone in the world, as a part of an "oppressed" people supposedly so drug down through the mud that we can't get clean. Right? Wrong! Wrong answer. I felt like we was all in the same room togetha, and we could be! That's the magic of inclusiveness, and faith, and family. You can't burn your way through it. Suddenly, I knew there were other people in the world like me, and do you know how I felt? Yup. Happy. That's the "joie de vivre" that marks our particular flavor, and you're welcome to it. That's being Acadian, y'all.

Piano Jimmy

"Piano Jimmy" and Eunice, back in the day.

By now you know that my dad is a "one of a kind" sumthin' you don't wanna mess with. It's disconcerting for newcomers and out-of-towners sometimes. White, with flava, tho?! How'd you do that? How'd that happen to y'all? Yeah, I know. It don't wash off me neither, yo.

Well, squirrel friends, it's called "Old School", and it ain't exactly learned on your particular mean street. Yeah, those streets are mine, too. No, amigo, it's way back time. You see, when I was a kid, my father didn't even know where his father was, or what name he used, because my Ole Grandad didn't just hand out info like that, not even to family people, because in my line, family might be the first fellow who do you wrong, know what I mean?

Yeah, you do. It's like that with my folk, and so it is with me, too. 
Oh, I can keep a line on 'em any time I want to, because this New York-grown girl knows how to keep a light touch on her folk without putting too much pressure on 'em (because they sure as heck can't handle that, yo), but I didn't learn my all my skills from that paternal girl you see next to big Jimmy, mes amis.

No, my Grandma checked out young, too. But what my dad did have for me growing up was a little black book, the kind that he showed me once in awhile, because he taught me where to find it in his closet. 
It was in the front pocket of one of his suit jackets that I gathered for my mom to go the dry cleaners every week for his Mad Man-style job. 

You know, the kind tailored at "Wallach's" in the old Nanuet mall, 
made just for him off them measurements cards in the leather-chaired back of the store, girl. Yeah, but that was just another one of my many, many jobs, too, along with gatherin' up the wash, takin' down them clothes pinned to the line before it storms outside...there ain't nuthin' this ole girl don't know by now, feel me on it?

'Course you do, 'cause you been through it, too. And that's how me and my people did it: sometimes poorly, but always with great heart and soul, because we managed to survive without entirely cutting the cord to the mainland, you know? 

When we wanted to get a bead on our old Acadian boy, the one who knew how to play a reel or two for you at midnight on the "piana", drunk but still way betta than you'd ever be, we knew what to do. 

You'd go get lil' Jimmy's black book and look for "J", because that's where it was written for me to see: Piano Jimmy, under the letter "J" in my dad's old black phone book.

Come on down and see me when you want to, mes gens. I ain't forgot them old ways any day of the week we got, at any time that's good. "Happy Father's Day" to you, as well.

Bunny Ears

Baby Jimmy in Maine, with his dog "Ranger".

My Dad's first job was as a shoeshine boy*, and I knew that because he kept the old wooden box in the back of his closet. I used to take it out to play with the polishes and rags, which made my Dad laugh: "Here. (sticks foot out) You want a shoe to shine? Do mine, and if it's any good, I'll pay you." Acadian papas like do that to kids. You ain't never seen anyone pinch a penny harder than my dad and his people. It's how we survive the hard times, becoming so ingrained as a philosophy as to make it's way into a "Mainerism" (http://www.asmainegoes.com/content/youll-only-hear-these-sayings-maine); these folksy sayings that my Dad likes to see carved into wooden plaques, or stitched onto embroidered pillows. 

It's crafts-y and also really annoying, because almost everything is some saying, but like so much of his parenting, I may not like the feel of it as his kid, but those sayings are the things that stick with me in good times or bad. One of his famous "Mainer's" (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mainer) about money is that he can "...pinch a penny so hard, Abraham Lincoln's head yells out loud." Oh (http://webpages.charter.net/lorilady/glossary.html). So, I guess you will now judge my work subpar so as to not pay me for this shoeshine? Yeah. Now go away, kid.

And so it went. His quips learned as a child, the ones so easy any child could understand, quickly became a very young and rather inexperienced fathers' lifelines that he reached for whenever he tried hard to parent, so much so that it hurt me to watch him struggle to do it right. I passed over all the normal checkpoints any smart child would have, including making the move from using his shoe shine as finger-paints to tying my own shoes, a barrier he never jumped over. 

My dad was raised mostly by my grandmother, in a large extended family that was spread out between Rhode Island, Maine, New York, and Canada. At times, he had needed someone to "show him the ropes" besides his working mother, a sharp-tongued Jones girl of hardy British Colonial and early Dutch descent. There wasn't much room for bullshit, and so my dad was often troubled as a boy. He often told me as an excuse that he never had a real father, especially when he screwed up really bad.

I vividly remember one afternoon with him in summertime, as I sat on the top stair of our house in New City. I asked my dad (in desperation) to help me with my shoes, because the front door was open to our yard filled with my yelling, playing brothers and shrieking neighborhood kids. I'd already figured out that he didn't know much about helping me, because he became angrily defensive and impatient like my oft-troubled mother did. 

After they gruelingly purchased a door-to door set of Encyclopedia Britannica's on layaway one year (they only sent the next volume with the next payment received), my mom used it as a constant "out" whenever she could, snapping "Go look it up!" in frustration of our interruption to her much-beloved dish-washing chore. My parents couldn't help us with most of our homework in our highly educated Rockland County public school system.

And so it was with my little kid's shoe. My dad, eager to earn money outside the home with his shoeshine kit, couldn't tie his own shoes very well. He tied my sneakers with the childish "bunny ear" method. When I pointed out that I was learning the harder "bow tie" knot, he sheepishly looked down at my feet, as he so often looks at his shoes with his bottom lip pouting in embarrassment, like a scared child who's been caught stealing candy, and then he looked up at me full in the face (which was rare) from the stair below me, and sheepishly admitted that he never learned how to tie his own shoes properly. 

I asked him about that on his last visit here in Pearl River, in a car ride over to Louie's for Sunday brunch: how had he got around that, with his clients not knowing about it? I was also raised to sweat over each and every dollar, and I wondered how a kid could do it without an adult catching on. Did he not untie them? 

I asked him about it from the backseat of his rental car, his wife in the front seat next to him. He nodded "yes" and said "yeah", inclining his head slightly towards me in the back seat as he read a copy of RISDxyz that I'd given to him to peruse during our wait, as we sat in the parking lot and in the pouring rain, waiting for the doors to the old house to open for business. Of course I already knew that, because I know him so very well, and now I know all about kids, too. I'd become a parent way before my time, just like he had.

This one's for you "Cashflow", on this day that begins your birthday weekend. I figured you were worth at least one good story, after all that money thrown my way. Let's keep this "Midas Touch" thing going that we are so famous for. Bon anniversaire.


* https://www.google.com/search?q=shoeshine&biw=1280&bih=872&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CDwQsARqFQoTCK_RhpnOisYCFdEvjAodTZsCmQ

Green Day (April 2015)

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