A Thanksgiving game with Sisto.

On Thursday morning early, Thanksgiving, I woke up and walked out onto the broad porch that ran along the front of Teresa’s concrete block house. Sisto was there already. He was sitting on a white rocking chair and had a colorful Serape covering his legs. 

Serapes were what had made Saltillo famous. No wonder the ball club I joined back in 1975 was the Seraperos--the serape-makers. Saltillo was also known for Saltillo tiles. You've likely never heard of anything called that by name, but you've probably walked on them at every Mexican restaurant you've ever been to.

Alongside the rocking chair Sisto had placed a small brown paper bag full of loose change he had accumulated through the year. There were maybe one-hundred centavos, various denominations of pesos and sundry slugs in the bag. He had also brought a small enameled bowl with a cracked blue and white design. It was the same bowl we had used the last time we played.

I gave the man a hug, an awkward hug because we are hand-shakers not huggers. But somehow a hug seemed called for.

“Coffee?”

He nodded and I returned to Teresa’s kitchen and prepared a large mug, sweet, for Sisto and an equally large one, black, for myself. I rested those on the small dining room table and crept into the bedroom I had shared with Karmen, my inamorata so many years ago and I now shared with my wife.

From my worn duffle I brought out a small paper bag like Sisto’s, also filled with one-hundred coins or so, mostly quarters, a habit from my laundromat days so many decades ago when I resided in various run-down Upper West Side tenement buildings without laundry facilities.

I went back out to the porch and sat alongside Sisto.

“This is a fight to the finish,” Sisto said. “The greatest game of coin in a bowl since the sport began so many eons ago.”

“Your father played the game,” I agreed, “And his father. And his father. And mine too. With long beards and hunched backs, mine played with kopeks from their small shetls in the Pale of Settlement. Kopeks the Cossacks had thrown their way after raping our cattle and our women. In that order.”

“And mine played when they had no coins. When all the coins were stolen by the Church and the landowners. We had no land, land that had been in our families since Axayacatl ruled these lands before the bearded ones came. We had no land and we were forced to play with invisible coins.”

“But,” I said solemnly, “still we played.”

“And still we play today,” Sisto said, removing a silver centavo from his bag. "Still we will play when we hear the last ding-dong of doom. We will not only play, we will prevail."

"Senor Faulkner," I said with deference. Then I took the enameled bowl and placed it on the green of Teresa’s small yard. It was about fifteen feet from each of us.

“Que empiecen los juegos,” Sisto said.

“Let the games begin.”

Sisto tossed first and his centavo hit the center of the old bowl and richocheted out.

“A nice shot. You have been practicing.”

“You know me, Jorge. What I lack in talent I have always made up in practice. And I am 87. I must practice.”

I tossed a quarter that was wide left a good three feet.

“There are no strong men in the city,” Sisto mocked. “But pretty women go there.”

He tossed again and nicked the bowl, short.

I tossed and missed again but closer this time.

We went on for fifteen minutes until Teresa’s yard was covered in Mexican centavos and pesos and various American coins. Our bags were nearly empty.

“The stakes now are high,” Sisto said.

I heard some noise behind me in the kitchen. Teresa and my wife, Laura, had begun preparing our meal for that afternoon. They cooked in the kitchen like old friends, like sisters, like family. After a short while my wife came out with Teresa's sweet lemonade and removed our coffee cups. She kissed us each then left quickly. Coin in a bowl is not something generally enjoyed by the uninitiated. 

Sisto ringed one around the bowl and it rested on the bottom.

I got up slowly, grabbed Sisto’s paper bag and began collecting all the hundreds of coins we had tossed.

“There is something wrong with Teresa’s yard,” I stage-whispered to Sisto. “It is lower than the last time we played. The coins are harder to pick up.”

“I noticed too when I put on my shoes in the morning, my feet are further from my hands and my floor is lower from my bed. It is harder to reach.”

I picked up the last of the coins and brought the bag back to Sisto.

“By the bush there there are two,” Sisto said. He wore no glasses but he could see.

I got them then sat down again.

“I have 12 coins left, or 15. Give me the honor of a rematch.”

“We play,” said Sisto, “until one of us is wiped out or Teresa and Laura are serving us their famous chicken.”

I tossed and rimmed the bowl. Sisto did the same.

In short order there were twenty coins on the field of battle and with my last, I landed one plop in the middle of the bowl.

“This time, the winner picks up the coins,” Sisto said. And I did, with a moan each time I bent.

“You are no obrero, my friend.”

“As we used to say, ‘I move like a rusty gate.’ Every hinge in my body aches like Prometheus.”

“I know that pain. We have all grown rusty from too many innings. But I will tell you something, Jorge. I am doing nothing now that I have not done from the moment I began playing ball as a professional in 1946. I played for teams that had no names and no uniforms, in towns that had no electricity and are no longer in the mountains, the buildings having blown away like dreams when you wake too soon.

“But even then, when I would get paid ten centavos or a peso or like you with a meal, a chicken or a plate of tortillas, I learned something. I played for 50 teams in a dozen Mexican leagues. I started when I was 15 and stopped coaching when I was 71. For 56 years and until today I have done the same thing.”

We began slowly tossing our coins. The clattering in the kitchen was growing louder. My wife subscribes to the notion that to cook well is to cook noisily.

“If I made eight, I would spend four. I never had need for many things. I never wanted things that I wished I had. I never saw a big car or a man in a fine suit with a tall woman and said, ‘that, I wish I had.’ I was happier making eight and spending four.”

Once again, I was almost out of coins. Sisto’s bag was still 3/4ths full.

“Watch this.”

He took a centavo and landed it in the bowl. Then another. Then another. Five in a row in all.

“I study everything. Like you when you played ball. Like you, I know every angle, every pitch, every weakness, every strength. More important I know what I can do and what I can’t do. So I do what I do and hide what I can’t. No one but me knows what I can't do."

"It's a good strategy for life. Hide your weaknesses, show off your strengths."

“Making eight and spending only four is what I do. And now I own a piece of a factory that makes the tile Saltillo is famous for. Two owl wagons down by the Chrysler plant where the men get their lunches. A piece of property over by estadio Francesco I. Maduro and a dozen or twenty other businesses.”

I gathered the coins. His coins.

“I use Marty in Chicago, the man who handles your money," Sisto said.

"He handled my mother's money, too. He is a good man."

"He is a good man, and a loyal fan. To be a loyal fan of the Cubs is to be a good man."

"They went 108 years without having won a championship. Still, he cheered them. I admire his stamina," I added. 

"That is the kind of man who should watch over one's money. He is not interested in the quick win. He believes instead in the long road.

"He tells me I have two point seven American dollars mostly in equities. I don’t even care. I have more than I could spend in 100 lifetimes.”

I returned with the coins to my rocking chair.

Teresa yelled through the screen door that we should come in and set the table.

“Do you know what matters, my old friend. Making eight, spending four. Helping friends. Having Teresa’s arroz con pollo and Laura’s helping her.”

I hugged the old man again. This time without feeling awkward.

“And beating you at coin in bowl like no one…”

“Like no one has ever been beaten since time itself began.”

This time, Sisto hugged me. Then shook his bag of coins. Then hugged me again.

Worries. And more.

This is going to be fairly heavy. So either buckle up or click somewhere else.

I worry about a lot in the world today: the dislocation of billions of people due to climate change. The end of democracy and the rise of totalitarianism. The pernicious effects of an unblinking surveillance capitalism.

I worry about never-ending wars that people aren't even aware are being fought. I worry that a mere 26 people have as much wealth as 3.5 billion people at the bottom of the economic pyramid. I worry about our inability to provide reliable electricity, clean water, smooth roads, decent educations. 

I worry about all those things. But what I worry most about is our inability as a culture, as a species to distinguish any longer between reality and fantasy.

I worry that as a culture and a species we are so distracted by the every day that we no longer notice what is happening in the world.

If you're watching and listening, you see this in small ways and large ways.

There's a photo of Trump pasted onto "Rocky's" body. People believe it. People deny the efficacy of life-saving vaccines. They deny climate change as a hoax. A staggering number of people deny that the earth is round and that Americans landed on the moon. People deny evolution. They deny gender equality. Racial equality.

Taken separately such things are scary. Taken as a whole, and a trend, they mark humanity's gallop to the end of rational thought. Or, the equal-time-ization of irrational and rational.

Some of the normalization of the irrational, the legitimizing of kooks is due to how language is being used today. Even the most benign messages we receive are so laden with sloppiness and deception that we have grown used to being brutalized by words.

This morning, before 7AM, I heard or read all this:

"Alternate side of the street parking is suspended for snow operations." (We're shoveling.)

"By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. You can learn more about how we use cookies by reviewing our Privacy Policy." (We're slicing and dicing and selling your data to anyone and everyone who will pay for it. You can't really learn more unless you have a law degree and about 20 hours to spare.")

Please note that support for the TEM application is provided by your nominated mobile administrators. (I can't believe that one person in five-thousand knows their "nominated mobile administrator." Or what a TEM application is. Or, frankly what support is.)

Nearly everything we see, hear, buy and interact with today is mean, demeaning and meaningless. We have stopped using words and images effectively because we have allowed ourselves to become desensitized to them. We no longer think about what we're writing and reading and shooting and cutting, we just string together platitudes, half-truths and tautologies that we then sand down to an anodyne nub.

I don't care what you do for a living. I don't care if you're an art-director or a writer or an anything else. We are allowing darkness to prevail because we have accepted the absence of light.

Communications should be bold. Interesting. Human. Unique. Thoughtful. And real.

That's our job.

Not as ad people.

As human people.

--

By the way, if you're interested in the power of the aliveness of good writing, try something by Joseph Mitchell now and again. 

You can buy his great book "Bottom of the Harbor," used for $1.83 plus shipping. If you care about words if will make you care more. If you just like a good story, it will hand you one-hundred, if you just want a sober look at sadness, it will brighten your day.

Here's a Forshpeiz, for the six of you who made it this far.

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A Century of Magical Thinking.

I've spent virtually all of my 62 years on this dying planet in the advertising industry, or close to it.

My Uncle Sid formed an ad agency in Philadelphia in the 1940s called Weightman that grew to be Philadelphia's largest. And my old man started his career in-house across the river from Philadelphia, at RCA's in-house agency in Camden, New Jersey. From there he made it to a New York agency called Kenyon & Eckhardt. He joined there in 1954 and stayed there for 24 years. At that point, he was tossed out but landed a job teaching "marketing communications"  at Northwestern University in Chicago. He stayed there until he died in 2001.

I began my career writing catalog copy for the Montgomery Ward catalog in 1980. Then I went to work for Bloomingdale's in-house agency. In 1984, I landed my first agency job for an agency called Marschalk. Later it became Lowe-Marschalk. Then Lowe SMS. Then Lowe & Partners. Then Lowe-Lintas. But all that to-ing and Lowe-ing is besides the point.

For much of my last 20 years in the ad business, I have worked on technology accounts.

Through my life in advertising and my association with technology, I have learned some things that people might not like to hear because it's so much more convenient to ignore them.

1. There's a huge gap between promise and performance. 

2. People buy promise because they essentially want to believe in modern-day alchemy. That science--whether it's artificial intelligence, quantum computing or big data--can produce magic. 

3. The promise of technology is pumped up and promulgated by true believers.

4. True believers, whether they're in technology, advertising or even investing, never really look under the hood of what they're promulgating. It's much more exciting to sell magic, and it's easier, too.

I have a simple test for the trumped-up claims of most technologies. I'm sure smarter people than I can shoot holes through it and that's fine. My test makes sense to me and I'm sticking to it.

I call it the EZ-Pass test. Will your new technology change my life as much as EZ-Pass has? I've yet to see my life change for the better through AI. If it has, no one's told me how. To me the world seems to be getting worse, not better. And programmatic advertising--driven ostensibly by AI and big data, sucks. I've yet, not even once, gotten the right offer at the right time. And seldom have I found an ad insightful and propitious. 99.999% are annoying.

You can't spit without hearing something about 5G. I guarantee you, when 5G arrives, 2/3rds of Manhattan will still be a dead-zone as well at 9/10ths of New Jersey. Maybe YouTube videos with Cardi B will download faster, but I hardly think of that as an advance on the order of indoor plumbing.

The other test I have is The New York Times test. The market cap of the world's most important and influential newspaper is about $5 billion. Rovio, the company that makes the kids' game Angry Birds has a market cap of $325 billion. Does anyone really think Angry Birds is 65-times as important and valuable as The Times?

People want to believe in magic.

They always have.

Our hairy ancestors thought they could speak to the gods by cooking the entrails of white bulls. Our high-collared forerunners thought we'd have unlimited freedom thanks to the gasoline engine. Our black-turtlenecked age-peers promised a flowering of democracy via email and the world wide web.

Just as every action has an equal and opposite reaction, every advance, it seems to me, has an almost equal and almost opposite setback.

Nothing is magic. 

And nothing is without a price.

There's only one thing that advances your fortunes or the fortunes of the companies we work for.

Work.

Whatever you're selling, even if it's only a new ad campaign, it's much more honest to say, "this will cost money and it will take work."

Anyone who promises anything other than that is a scoundrel at best and a liar at worst.