2023 Year in Review — Gimme Shelter: January
This column appeared in January 2023.
One of America’s favorite flowers is the forget-me-not, with the tiny, delicate blossoms all showing their faces in a bunch, like happy school kids beaming together over some classroom accomplishment.
The Latin for the flower is myosotis, which means “mouse’s ear.” Perfect for the virtue of not forgetting, because no matter how small the ear, it hears the voices of the past as well as any other.
Not forgetting means reunions, and it’s been a bumper crop for me.
“Meet you at the Apple,” I texted Jimmy one day last May, and he knew exactly where I meant. The plaza outside Citi Field in Queens is centered around the big red structure that once rose slowly beyond the centerfield fence of Shea when a Met hit a home run.
We met for a night game in the middle of the week. Not just an average game for two friends; we hadn’t seen each other for more than 30 years. Was that possible? Yes. We didn’t have a falling out, we just, as so often happens, lost touch.
Work, moving, who knows? Carelessness, maybe, neither a fault nor a vice. Just life. But it was time to resume our friendship, one that took in college years and a cross-country car trip crossing 40 states, a journey with no purpose except to just get up, get out and go.
We met again in September at the Apple for a late afternoon game. We were back in touch.
I met a group of friends one September when we were all 14 years old at a high school in St. Louis, and we’ve stayed in touch over the (many) years. The guys come east, or I go west, where we have family.
The last several years, the guys have come in summer to reunite, and we’ve chartered a boat out of Orient and fished for blues and stayed up late. It’s good to be 16 again.
And then, this past September, I had one of the times of my life, when I was reunited with fellow staff members of a startup newspaper, The North Shore Sun, part of the Times Review chain, which was born that month in 2002.
I’ve stayed close to a couple of the staffers over the years, working with one at another paper after The Sun closed, but some people I hadn’t seen in two decades.
To give you an idea of the connection and love that existed on that staff of hilarious, brilliant, indefatigable people, I’ll quote a journalist from another Times Review paper who worked at the main office in Mattituck (we called it “the Mother Ship”) while our newsroom was in Wading River. She used an arcane, but dead-on description: “You people have a ‘scene’ there. We don’t have a ‘scene’ here.”
And what a scene. But we weren’t unique. Almost all startups are like that.
The original cast all left after a few years, and like I said, some of us stayed in touch. Years after we all left the paper, I was working at Long Island Business News in Ronkonkoma. One early morning, I was driving in to work from the East End, and stopped at the deli in Wading River for a roll and coffee and to pick up a copy of The Sun.
I must have been staring at the newspaper rack at the front of the deli for more than a few moments, because a woman tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I was all right. There was The Sun — our creation — with a totally black front page and the only text was the date the paper came to life, and the date it died, the week before.
At the reunion, a backyard barbecue on a long, lingering late summer night, we were all a bit stunned to see each other. It was because, I think, we hadn’t changed, not really. We were still a scene.
We were those beaming schoolkids, proud of what we had done, proud of each other and where we were now, remembering what it was like to love something enough to put all you had into it.
In the Roman religion, Janus is a spirit portrayed as a man facing forward and back and his image can be seen in ruins in Italy, marking ceremonial gates and doorways. This month is named for him.
The ancients believed that while passing through, remember to look for what’s ahead, but don’t forget who you have traveled with.
