Birthday wishes Dec. 27. 2023
Today is Garrick’s 74th birthday.
His is the middle birthday in a pack that had Hank on
Christmas Eve, and Pauly’s on Dec. 28.
Garrick used to kid Pauly about they being the same age on
Midnight between the two days, although with Pauly’s passing almost four years
ago, we have all caught up and passed him by, just as we passed Hank after his
passing back in the winter of 1995.
Garrick was forced to retire earlier this year when his
company finally shut down a parts manufacturer for which he worked for nearly
30 years and had hoped to stretch this to a full 30 years before officially
retiring.
Oddly enough, his company remained functioning throughout the
COVID pandemic, partly because it was seen as “essential” in an era when that
word gets misused frequently, though the parts they made apparently were
necessary in keeping certain other really essential industries operating.
The fact that we have all worked for our respective
companies for decades scares me a little bit since we all grew up when we
frowned upon the previous generation’s obsession with jobs. Our lives were
supposed to be free and easy; we were all destined to become artists, which for
the most part did not occur. Some like Jon (the most amazing guitarist I know)
sold his sold to the corporate world early on, after a decade of trying to make
it in the music industry.
Hank gave up his acting career when his day time job became
a night time job, and he was forced to choose between work and pursuit of art,
and he chose work.
Pauly scrambled most of his life, who worked odd jobs when
he could not avoid working, often making his living off the band, while the band
existed, and then fringe jobs such as Fotomat and Dunkin, before he stumbled
into a part time job at the library, which eventually became a full time job as
its director, until forced out when the new library was built and he lacked the
credentials to retain his job. He spent the last ten years of his life living the
artist’s life in a trailer, something he ached to do from the start.
I make my living writing, but not the novels, plays and
poetry I had envisioned myself selling to earn my keep. I still write them, but
journalism took over my life in the late 1980s and has become my bread and
butter.
All the birthdays this time of year only emphasizes just how
much we failed to achieve, not just as individuals, but as a generation
Pauly once said The Beatles ruined us, by setting up expectations
that we could do what they did, and by the time we realized we could not, we
could not go back.
“I would most likely have become a Wall Street executive,”
Pauly told me once, most likely thinking he might become the next John Lennon
or Andy Warhol.
I drove out to the old library where he worked on Christmas,
and then to where he lived on the lake, and then finally to site of the trailer
he spent his last decade living in. All of it sad, and yet all of it part of
our lives, our successes and failures, and the dreams we once had, never saw fulfilled,
and yet positive in that it is all part of a journey we needed to take. Pauly
would have been pathetic as an executive, and even he knew that.
Garrick, of course, has always been the glue that kept us
together, the ever present sense of normality we dreamers could not achieve for
ourselves, keeping us focused, and balanced, and in touch with common sense.
His surviving means something significant, even though he
lacked the ambition that rest of us had, he kept us from ever going too far into
dream land and kept the rest of us on a path that allowed us to keep going even
when we could not realize our dreams.
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