Where have you gone Tom Terrific?

I saw something very disturbing today.  My favorite all-time athlete, the great Tom Seaver just turned 70.  It seems just like yesterday I was watching him on my black and white television in my room.  That great delivery where his right knee would scrape the ground and be all brown by the end of the game made him one of the most recognizable sports stars in history.   Seaver was the all-American boy, and he was to Met fans what Mickey Mantle had been to a generation of Yankee fans, someone to aspire to.  It was Seaver who changed the Mets culture from that of lovable losers to a competitive team that would one day win the World Series.


Maybe that's whyit's more than a little depressing when our heroes get old.  In fact, it's a little depressing when anybody gets old.  It's even worse when a beautiful actress gets old.  I know that sounds horribly sexist, but the way I see it, if Linda Carter or Raquel Welch can "hit the wall", what chance do I have?  When the famous from our youth get old, it reminds us all too painfully of our own mortality.  Whenever we see someone who used to be beautiful suddenly get old, we always think the same thing, "what the hell happened to them"?  But what we're really thinking is, "What the hell happened to me"?  Watching our heroes age marks the passing of time in our own lives.  It also reminds us of simpler times as well.

I'm not sure why, but there was something calming and reassuring knowing that you could always find the Mets on WOR,  Channel 9 in New York City.  The "Meet the Mets" jingle would cue up, and then, filled with enthusiasm and endless childlike optimism, Bob Murphy, Lindsay Nelson, and Ralph Kiner would let you know that it was a "Beautiful day for Baseball"!  Then the Mets would go on to lose 3-2 pretty much every night.

Fashionistas, all of them!

WOR was a step above a College Television station.  They had the crappiest cartoons, reruns of shows like "Ironside", bad horror movies, and one of the worst programs ever produced, "Bowling for Dollars".  Bob Murphy hosted bowling for dollars, (It must have been some sort of Community Service requirement) and he would proceed to bring on the contestant,  usually some office troll or factory worker  who would appear with his wife and co-workers cheering him on.  Before bowling he would pull a letter out of a fishbowl, and that person selected would be his "Pin-Pal".  They would then split his earnings.  So for example, if he bowled a "9", it would be $4.50 for the bowler, and $4.50 for his "Pin Pal".  The jackpot was usually around $2000, and they had to bowl a strike to get that, and the person almost never got one.  (I often thought that they really didn't have the money to pay them, sort of like a menu in a diner where they claim to have 5000 items on the available, but in reality, they  only have breakfast and burgers, the rest is a giant game of bluff, daring you to order the Twin Lobster tails at market price).



Check out the production values!

As lame as all this sounds, there is something about simplifying our lives that seems to have some appeal on some level.  For most of the past 200 years, Americans have been attempting to escape the hustle and bustle of the modern world with all of its technological advancements.  As far back as the 1830s, people like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau spoke of going back to a simpler time.  It appears the constant buzzing of the Telegraph and the rushed pace of life brought on by the "Iron-Horse" which traveled at breakneck speeds up to and exceeding 30 mph was causing them to stress out.  Emerson would be at his kitchen table, his wife and he trying to enjoy some quality time, perhaps discussing that hussy who Andrew Jackson married who wasn't even legally divorced, and then, you guessed it, the incessant rat-a-tat-tat of the Telegraph causing Emerson to be distracted from his beautiful wife, Mrs. Emerson, who would then, sigh in exasperation, turning to Ralphie, finally saying, "go ahead, see who it is".  "Thanks baby, you're the greatest!"


If people thought life was too fast-paced in 1835, what does that say about our modern world?  One group who seems to have found a way to beat the modern world blues are the Amish.  For those of you who are not familiar with the ways and means of the Amish, let's look back at a simpler time, a time when all a man needed was a loving wife, a jar of pickled corn relish, a beard without a mustache, and a good barn-raising.  Ah, the life of the Amish.  It's not just their rejection of all modern conveniences that I respect, it's the fact that their women are married and buried in the same dress.  There's something metaphoric about that, but I'm not sure what.

We don't need to live amongst the Amish to know what it is to recapture a simpler time.  Whenever the power in the house goes out, we are thrust into the days of yore.  The quiet stillness of a house with no power surging though it is a type of silence that is rarely heard in the modern home.  It gives us a chance to get in touch with our inner being, a chance to sit around with the family for the type of quality time that doesn't exist in our modern bustling world.  No television, phones, computers, video games.  Sometimes, after only three or four minutes, one can begin to feel the stress and strain of the modern world fade away, as they consider a good way to kill themselves.  Ugh, I've considered getting a generator, not because of medical needs, not for heat, not to keep the food fresh, just to make sure the kids can play video games so I don't have to hear how bored they are.  So my hat or bonnet is tipped to the Amish, may all of their barn-raisings be filled with lots of firm wood.