Thoughts On Turning 60

By John McDonnell

Today I turned 60 years old. There are people who would rather ignore a milestone like that, but I’m not one of them. I think it’s worth celebrating when you’ve been on this planet for 60 years, so I embrace my longevity with open arms.

Sixty is a time to stop and think about what went before. I grew up in a time before cell phones, computers, the Internet, iPods and even television (my family didn’t buy our first TV till I was seven years old). It’s a time referred to by my children as the Dark Ages.

When I think back to what life was like in the 1950s it seems like another world. Here are some random thoughts about what it was like for me to grow up 60 years ago.

Playing after school every day, with no need to be home till suppertime. . . playing tag, hide and seek, riding bikes, two-man baseball games (with the strike zone outlined in chalk on the brick wall of the school) using a broomstick and a hollow rubber ball. . . building forts out of branches and anything we found in the woods behind our house. . . swinging on a tire strung up from a high branch on a tree. . . catching grasshoppers and fireflies. . . my father reading the evening newspaper on the porch after dinner. . . the mailman walking his route with a big leather bag, and delivering the mail right to our front door. . . my grandparents spending all afternoon on Saturday visiting, with nothing else to do than just visit and talk. . . dinner at 6:00 every night, with fish on Friday and a roast on Sunday. . . bedtime at 8:00 for the little kids, and 9:00 even in high school. . . no such thing as fast food or pizza. . . saving up our change so we could buy penny candy on vacation. . . no TV watching during the week, but Friday nights were for watching shows on the black and white set in the basement, and eating bowls of ice cream. . . a big black wall phone in the kitchen was the only phone in the house. . . movie theaters that were the size of storefronts, with only one screen. . . Saturday matinees with cartoons and Westerns. . . drive-in movies. . . being taught by nuns who wore heavy black habits with stiff white headpieces even on days when the temperature was in the 90s. . . playing Army with my Dad’s GI helmet and a toy rifle, and dressing up in my Dad’s army uniform on Halloween. . . living in such a solidly Irish Catholic neighborhood that I never actually spoke to a Jew, a Protestant, or an African American till I was in college. . . playing tag at lunch recess, or keepaway. . . trying to scare pheasants in the cornfield near our house, but nervous because people said the farmer would shoot at trespassers with a shotgun filled with salt. . . no seatbelts in cars, and no child seats -- in fact, holding the baby on your lap in the passenger seat. . . my father with the hood up on a Saturday, working on the car. . . being a one-car family. . . my mother sending me on my bike to buy groceries for dinner, and me riding back with the groceries in the basket on the front of my bike. . . watching the 11:00 news on one of only three channels we could get. . . looking up the Church’s rating before we went to see a movie (was it “morally objectionable in part” or worse?). . . having a paper route. . . listening to a tinny transistor radio that faded in and out depending on how you held it. . . playing pickup football, baseball, and basketball games, with no referees and no adults anywhere to interfere. . . the May procession. . . being an altar boy, wearing a high, stiff celluloid collar and starched robes and having to memorize prayers in Latin without knowing what they meant. . . no air conditioning, nothing but a ceiling fan that just blew the hot air around while you sweated in bed. .  a milkman who delivered several times a week early in the morning. . . a bread man. . . a diaper service that  came several times a week. . . a farmer who came once a week and sold meat, eggs, and vegetables from his truck. . . walking to your friends' houses and ringing their doorbells to see if they could come out and play. . . taking piano lessons in the convent with a stern-faced nun sitting next to you on the bench and going over scales endlessly. . . priests shouting from the pulpit, giving fire and brimstone sermons that scared the kids. . . going to a barbershop and getting a crewcut for the summer.

There are lots of these memories, but the thing that strikes me about all of them is that there seemed to be more time back then. More time to spend talking, exploring, wandering around, or just doing nothing. Was it just because I was a child, and time seems to move slower for children? I don’t know if kids today have that same feeling. Most of them seem to be moving pretty fast, and they’ve got the next item on their agenda in mind at every minute during the day. There’s no denying that young people today have a lot more amazing devices in their lives than I had growing up.

I had more time, though.

I Am Not Keith Richards

By John McDonnell

So Keith Richards has written his autobiography, and he’s being interviewed everywhere. The infamous Rolling Stone guitarist with the face that looks like old shoe leather has told all in an autobiography that has lots of spicy stories about his wayward life.

Apparently there’s enough detail about his extensive drug use that Disney is rumored to be thinking of writing his character out of the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie. “Keef” doesn’t fit in with Disney’s squeaky clean image, even if he is portraying the scruffy, disreputable father of Johnny Depp’s only slightly less scruffy Captain Jack Sparrow character.

If Disney needs a replacement, they could call me. I’m the polar opposite of Keith Richards. I’m a family man, I don’t do drugs, I’ve never been arrested, I don’t interrupt when someone else is speaking, and I shave every day. I’m what’s known as a Nice Guy.

That’s what I’ve been called pretty much my whole life. As in, “Gee, you’re such a nice guy, John.” I never got into fights as a boy, preferring compromise over confrontation. I’ve always been polite, respectful, positive. A Nice Guy.

The trouble is, nice guys don’t make headlines. It’s not a popular thing these days. People don’t aspire to be a nice guy anymore. “Nice guys finish last,” isn’t that the saying? Women say they’re looking for a nice guy, but their actions betray their words because they sometimes end up with a guy that looks like he has a sketchy relationship with things like soap, water, and manners.

There are no nice guys in popular music. Can you imagine a nice guy rapper? Shouting rhymes about how he opens doors for women? Don’t count on that happening any time soon.

It’s not just rap music. Keith Richards and his bandmates have a long history of writing songs that celebrate bad behavior towards women. From “Under My Thumb” to “Stupid Girl” to albums of others, there are very few Stones songs that would qualify as nice guy songs.

Maybe I feel this way because I live in the Northeast corridor of the U.S. Nobody in this part of the world aspires to be a nice guy. In fact, I think it’s actually illegal in New York city. Police are trained to take down nice guys because they’re almost as dangerous as terrorists. A cab driver who let someone switch lanes in front of him out of politeness would probably cause a massive traffic accident.

I’ve heard rumors that there are still some nice guys left in the South, but they’re a dying breed, rapidly being replaced by redneck comedians and Florida State football players.

I could get mad about it, but nice guys are non-confrontational. The most we do is get a little passive aggressive, maybe make a few wisecracks about how ridiculous it looks for a 67 year old like Keith Richards to be wearing leather pants, bandanas, and jewelry in his hair.

It’s just the way things are. Bad boys get all the headlines, while nice guys stay in the background doing all the boring little things that keep civilization from spiraling back into the Stone Age. Nobody wants to read the autobiography of a nice guy. We want to read about the crazy bad boys, the ones whose lives are filled with drama every day.

That’s okay, though. I wish Keith the best. He’s created some great music along with that bad boy image. He’s even given up drugs, or so he claims in his autobiography, and he’s devoted to his family. I hope he has many more years ahead of him.

But if my daughters ever want to marry somebody like him, it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy for me.

Should You Declutter Your Home?

By John McDonnell

I grew up in a family of eight, and we lived in a three bedroom house. These were not bedrooms as we think of them today, however. Three of my brothers shared a bedroom that was the size of a walk-in closet in a modern house. My sister actually did live in a closet -- her bedroom had been used as one by the previous owners.

Downstairs, there was a living room, dining room, a half-bathroom the size of a telephone booth, and a modest kitchen. After a few years we converted the garage into a TV room, but by today’s standards it was a tiny house for eight people.

And yet, it never seemed cluttered.

My mother liked things neat, and she trained the children to pick up after themselves. We had no multi-purpose furniture: e.g., the kitchen table had nothing on it except food. The flat surfaces in the house were always visible and uncluttered. There were no areas that looked like the back room in a junk shop.

Then why do I live in such a cluttered house?

My house has three times the space of the one I grew up in, and yet all that space is taken. There are stacks of mail on the dining room table. Sports equipment, lawn furniture, and power tools litter my garage. I haven’t seen the surface of my desk in years. And you don’t want to go down in my basement. That’s the place where old computers, toys, and furniture go to die.

How did this happen?

I like to tell myself that it’s because I’m a creative person and we creative types are not orderly or fussy about small details like having space on the kitchen table.

That could be true, but it’s also probably because my family has more of the detritus of modern life, more stuff than I had as a child.

How did I get all this stuff? I was raised in a family where my father grew up poor in the Depression, and he always acted as if he thought he was going to wake up one day and it would be 1933 again. He thought the world was crawling with people out to take his money, and by God he wasn’t going to let them have it. If my Dad spent money on something there had to be a dire need for it, and you were expected to use it till it wore out.

These days, when I’m looking for a book or a user’s manual or a gadget and I’m searching through all the clutter, I often find things that mystify me. “When did we buy this?” I ask. Or, “I didn’t know we had one of these,” or, “What is this thing?” Even, at times: “Did we actually spend money on this?”

I try not to be a sucker for every sales pitch that comes along, but my resistance breaks down more than I realize. You can’t get me to buy a pair of pants I don’t need, but for computers, gadgets, gardening tools or books I’m an easy touch. The rest of my family has different buying weaknesses, but what it all adds up to is that we play a vital part in the economic well-being of several Chinese villages. 

Combine that mentality with a reluctance to throw things out -- in my family, if we own something, it’s understood that we keep it till the sun burns itself into a cold, dark cinder and the universe implodes -- and you can see why there is so much clutter.

I know you’re saying there’s always eBay or a yard sale to get rid of the stuff, but that involves making multiple trips to the dark corners of the basement, organizing, collating, and actually looking at things like those Sesame Street sing-along videos we kept for 20 years since our kids outgrew them, and once that happens we get teary-eyed and decide we can’t part with them, so they go back in the box for another 20 years.

Maybe that’s what clutter is, the accumulation of sentiment. It’s the souvenirs we pick up along the way, and no matter how trivial they seem, they all have meaning. Even that electric bill I found in the back of my desk drawer, the one from the first apartment my wife and I lived in, is hard to throw away because it has meaning to me (“Honey, do you believe how little they charged per kilowatt hour back then?”). I can’t part with the stuff I’ve been dragging along, no matter how much it’s slowing me down.

Someday all this clutter will be thrown away, or it’s going to end up in the closets and desk drawers of my children, just like clutter has been passed down to me from my dead relatives. It goes on forever, does clutter.

Maybe that will be my ultimate legacy, my gift to future generations. My great-grandchildren will have things like restaurant receipts and old magazines and the model airplane I built in 4th grade to remember me by.

That will probably give them a more accurate picture of my life than anything else, because what is life all about anyway, if not clutter?

THE END