An Old Train Chugs On.

When I was a little boy, the development my parents ascended to the middle-class in was plopped down with forty other houses in garish colors in the middle of what had been a field, or a copse not so many years earlier.

Each house was the same or the reverse of the same and each, smack dab in the middle of the little plot of sod it was centered within, had a single, spindly Charlie Brown tree struggling to grow against the vicissitudes of Cold War suburbia. I was eight before I ever saw a tree taller than me.

Despite having hundreds of Soviet missiles aimed at us and aiming hundreds back from a nearby Nike missile installation, I was free to run around, like a bindlestiff or hobo. Though I was just four or five, I ran as free as a bearcub, and as free from natural enemies as a human could be.

Though most of suburbia was fully suburbia-ized by 1962, there was, about half a mile from my parents' 1500 square of linoleum, the abandoned railroad tracks of the New York, Westchester and Boston Railway Company which ran straight and rusty to nowhere. That line was put out of business during the Depression by the New Haven line, leaving me a great place to wander and throw rocks. To this day, two of my favorite past-times.

There's a bit of dialogue in the classic Frank Capra movie, "It's a Wonderful Life," that is too-often overlooked. Ever since I first heard it, it's rattled in my head. Maybe it's my burning bush.

In the anodyne 1960s, I used my imagination to conjure those sounds and those abandoned tracks were like something out of an industrial-age Poe. Haunting. They beat for me like a telltale heart.

Coming into my mother's house, of course, was always a trial. Seeing me cut and scraped and sweaty and filthy, one article or another of clothing torn, and probably just wearing a t-shirt during a more-decorous era, brought out the virago in her. To be precise, the virago was never very far from the surface.

I think if I walked through the door to her home 3,000 times during the fifteen bipedal years I lived with her, I heard 2,997 times, "curiosity killed the cat."

I never understood that statement then, and today, so many years later, I understand it less-than-ever. 

In today's modern world--especially the Fall of the House of Usher world of Holding-Company-Advertising, curiosity--the very foundation of discovery and human advancement--seems to have vaporized. 

We hear (since I went out on my own, I don't hear it any longer) about "best practices," the antithesis of finding a better way. We follow do's and don'ts and most advertising practitioners know exactly how narrow the aperture of acceptable client-buying work is and exactly how to get their spot through the eye of that ever-constricting needle.

Challenging ourselves and our clients has become too challenging.

Even the current mania for project-management--in my last job there seemed to be more people managing the projects than people creating them--puts limits on curiosity. You have a set amount of time to "think." There's a briefing at 10 and a first tissue session at five and so it goes. There's no time to be silly, dumb, counter-intuitive and curious.

So many years ago when I toiled under the desert sun in Mexico, playing baseball for the Seraperos de Saltillo, my manager, Hector Quetzacoatl Padilla, aka Hector Quesadilla, said to me "pay attention to what you pay attention to." 

I've taken that phrase along with me since I first heard it when I was 17. I am 65 now and I rarely don't pay attention to it.

Sorry, Mom. Curiosity has killed not half as many felines as tired acceptance of best-practices and 'that's the way we do it’ have.

I'm lucky, I guess, or cursed. Sometimes they’re the same thing.

I'm reading now "Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America" by Pekka Hamalainen." So around every corner, whether I'm in the concrete of Manhattan or the littoral of my little corner of Connecticut, I try to imagine the life of the people who were here first, how they lived, how they died, how they fought back and were ultimately cast-aside.

There's no advertising point in doing that. Except for one. 

An important one.

Whether wandering down abandoned train tracks at five years of age, or seeing on the turbid waters of the Long Island sound a small fleet of Pequot canoes spearing cod, my imagination is working. I am seeing things, hearing things, piecing together shards and slips of information and trying to form what happened--back then or never, it doesn't much matter.

What matters is thinking.

Seeing.

Walking through life like an old waiter with your head up, scanning the horizon for a hungry diner or for a tip. That's how to go through business, too. With your head up.

And paying attention to what you're paying attention to.

That keeps this old train chugging.