Empathy is the new brand mandate. Natch.

My old friend and fellow blogger, Bob Hoffman, aka “The Ad Contrarian,” had a short piece this weekend on The Ad Contrarian Newsletter. If you don’t subscribe, you should. Here.

Bob’s piece cited an article in a magazine I usually only buy for the swimsuit issue, MarketingDive, entitled “PepsiCo Finds Empathy Is New Imperative For Marketers”. Pepsi’s CMO was quoted as saying  “I'm a firm believer that empathy has become the new brand mandate.” 

I don’t have an MBA, and I don’t really know what they teach in MBA school. But after a lifetime in this benighted business, and having labored at technology agencies that prattled on for months about this “new” technology and that “new” technology and they were going to “change everything,” and “disrupt old models,” I have to say this sort of hyperbole sickens me.

In olden times, liars by Draconian judges used to be forced to wear confessional signs. I went looking for photos of examples and shame signing seems not uncommon today.  

It would be a better world if marketers and agencies and politicians and technologists had to shame sign after making their stupid predictions. I can imagine about 20,000 digital advertising people wearing a placard reading, “I SAID TV WAS DEAD.” Or, “I SAID RETARGETING PEOPLE WAS ETHICALLY DEFENSIBLE BECAUSE IT INCREASES CTR BY 1 CLICK PER 1 MILLION.”

In the case of the Pepsi CMO mentioned above, his sign might read, “WHEN IT’S 92 DEGREES OUT, I CLAIMED PEOPLE WOULD RATHER HAVE A GLASS OF EMPATHY THAN A SODA.”

I know most of us in the reality-based community where we understand the ill-effects of social contact in the era of Coronavirus are sheltering in place right now. That said, I wonder what the CMO of Pepsi thinks goes on in his local beanery.

CUSTOMER:            

Hi, Dottie. I just mowed the Frobisher’s lawn.

WAITRESS:              

The big one? And around the willow tree?

CUSTOMER:            

Yep. Back behind the hydrangeas too.

WAITRESS:              

It’s gotta be 85-degrees out!

CUSTOMER:            

Nope. I heard on the AM radio it’s 92! I’m parched, Dottie. Do you have anything cold to drink?

WAITRESS:              

We do, or my name isn’t Dottie Leinenkugel! We have a nice homemade lemonade, the cook’s famous lime rickey…

CUSTOMER:            

The lime rickey that won a blue ribbon at the country fair?

WAITRESS:              
One and the same. And, we can getcha a nice cool glass of clean, smooth empathy!

CUSTOMER:         
You have empathy? By gum, that sounds like a brand mandate if I’ve ever heard one.

Tellya what, I’ll put on the ol’ feedbag and have a glass of empathy and a turkey burger well done on a toasted English.

WAITRESS:              

Got it, [YELLS] Tommy T on a Cockney, burn it.

And a glass of ‘I Care About You and the World as a Brand Mandate!”

CHEF:                        

OK, Dottie.

CUSTOMER:         
Thanks, Dottie.

WAITRESS:              
You got it, sport.

                                    EXEUNT

Back to my point, or lack of point. I started noticing about 15 years ago that people in advertising, or marketing, or whatever we’re calling it this week, were embarrassed to be in advertising. Not long ago there was a trend where agencies stopped calling themselves agencies. And people stopped doing ads.

No, they would create movements, or experiences, or culture, or empathy. They’d do that while they were interacting, leaning in, and having conversations about the brands that are important to their lives. You know, like Air Wick Solid.

No one knows, dear reader, least of all this world-famous blogger what will happen as the world careens through this pandemic on its way to the even more dire global warming miasma. I do know this.

We’d all be better off being ourselves and doing what we do than putting on airs and pretending we’re saving the world every time we use a paper napkin, fill our car with gasoline or buy a soda.

If you think your life is without purpose and that you can rectify that lacuna via soft-drink advertising, I have no empathy for you. Especially not in the economical two-liter size.

Flow gently.

It’s Sunday morning early as I type this.

I am already not looking forward to the work-week ahead. Since my release from the talons of the holding company gripping and twisting my nether areas, I have succeeded in freeing myself. But I have also failed to learn that most important lesson a mature person must learn.

I am still having a hard time saying no.

Whereas when I worked in an office, I could see others leave in the evening, I could see the skies darkening, I could practically smell dinner cooking, when you work at home, as the fortunate today are able to do, you often forget to construct barriers between home and work. That sucks. And sucks you in.

So, most mornings I’m up at five typing and typing and reading and e-ing, and I don’t unplug my Smith-Corona 5TE Electric until nine or 10 in the evening. It’s not really very convenient, by the way, to still be, in 2020, working on a typewriter. But I love the visceral quality of type-writing.

When I write something not on a computer, I have to take a photo of it with my iPhone and then mail a jpeg of my copy to the person paying for it. It’s not entirely convenient, or even very smart. But I prefer the Smith-Corona. It has a feel and intensity computer-keyboard-people will never ever understand. Even if I am down to three ribbons and I have no idea what I will do when I type through those.

Often, clients will ask me, “why can’t you use a Mac like everyone else?” I can only reply, as I’ve replied since I was knee-high to a dwarf cockroach, “I am not like everyone else.”

And that’s that.

These days my wife and I have left the piss-stained asphalt of Manhattan for the Gingham Coast of Connecticut. You might search the world and never find a more beautiful littoral setting. The sea fairly laps at our cottage and as the weather finally warms, the laughter of children and the chirping of birds float along on the gentle breezes like a Sondheim melody.

 

Our backyard.

But work, of course, doesn’t care.

My wife also chisels at the freelance boulder. She seems to divide her time between Zoom calls and a copy Iron-Maiden. Neither she nor I have time to come up for air. The clackety-clack of our dueling keyboards must irritate our distant neighbors.

Even Whiskey, our eight-year-old golden retriever is feeling the strain. Some months ago, she was contacted by the editors of “Dog Time” magazine, and has since mid-April been writing a weekly column called Portrait of the Dog as a Young Artist. It’s a bit of an homage to James Joyce and Dylan Thomas—Whiskey has always been a literate kind of a canine, and though she types badly, she too rises early and hammers away at her bone-flavored Mac—an iBone, if I’m not mistaken.

In short, as much as life has stopped, life goes on.

We work too much and work is too much with us. I believe that as more and more companies allow their employees or contractors to work from home, the ones who succeed as “best places to work,” will construct regulations around shutting down. 

They’ll provide tele-respites, and probably 20-minute on-demand counseling session as an employee perk. I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I were working from home at all times, while trying to home school an obstreperous child or two or three, not to mention temper tantrums, etc.

I think if as a nation we are going to pull out of creeping fascism and economic despair, it will not be corporate meanness and austerity that rescues us.

To quote George Packer in his great book “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America”, “Over the years, America had become like Walmart. It had gotten cheap. Prices were lower and wages were lower….”

To recover in Silicon Valley, on Madison Avenue, and everywhere else, I hope, the fight will be for talent.

Real talent. And maybe decent wages will return again. Or workers will have a slightly stronger hand than they currently hold. Though likely I’m being naïve.

But I can hope thinkers will be back in vogue, not merely stylists or imitators. Original thinkers. Not doing work in 2020 that basically rips off work that won awards in 2019. (In fact, the New York State ran a “wear a mask” TV commercial contest. The sameness of the commercials entered was staggering.)

A bit of a meander today. I’m sorry about that.

But once again, if I were a holding company or an agency chieftron, I’d wonder how to emulate Henry Ford 100 years ago. How do you give a good wage to attract special people.

I suppose that kind of thinking has vanished from our world.

But cheapism—in pandemics, politics, pollution and advertising—leads to bad things. Bad health, bad school systems, declining life-expectancy and yes, meanness. Because the prevailing belief is that our economy is a zero-sum game, and if someone else gets, you don’t.

Let me end with a quotation Yogi Berra never said. “I don’t know where we’re going, or how we’re getting there, but we’re making good time.”

And that’s what worries me.

A crepuscular meander.

It's Thursday afternoon as I write this, Friday as you read it, and I'll tell you straight out, this post will be as close to religious, or at least reverent as I get.

The world is a chilling place. Sad and scary. And worse, it seems to be falling deeper and deeper into a mean and inhuman abyss. The rich and the illiberal seem to be getting richer and more illiberal. 

"I got mine. Go fuck yourself."

That has a ring to it. 

Way catchier than "of the people, by the people and for the people."

99% seem damned to lives that, in the words of Sir Thomas Hobbes, are "nasty, brutish and short." I might add, and without healthcare. 

The historian in me has two things to say about that. One, since roughly the later part of the 18th Century, the West has philosophically been under the influence of Enlightenment thinkers. In broad strokes, people who put science, data and humanity before dogma.

Two, if you grew up around the time I did (I was born in late 1957) you grew up in the golden age of American liberalism. I'm sure I'm screwing up some details, but if I remember correctly, in the mid-1970s, CEO pay was roughly 17-times that of the average worker. Today, I believe the average is closer to 250 times.

I think what's happened in the last 30 years or so, is a societal retreat from liberalism and enlightenment to what for the purposes of glibness, I'll call Dark Ages 2.0. 

That is a period where it's ok to be anti-fact, anti-science and pro-dogma. That seems to be the approximate attitude of the entire Republican party. Climate change, evolution, the dangers of de-regulation, the dangers of Covid-19 for that matter, well, they're all inconvenient truths. Or maybe, just to go full solipsistic on you, they're not true if you don't believe them. Because, in the age of alternative facts, fair is foul and foul is fair and it's all Obama's fault.

Fine. 

But I started off this post some hundreds of words ago, by saying you were going to get me at my most reverent. Unlike most advertising writers, I'll try not to disappoint.

God, or whatever you believe in, moves in mysterious ways. 

Last night, fairly out of the blue, I got a long and eloquent email from my first boss in the advertising business. I worked for him (I'm leaving his name out of this because I haven't asked his permission) starting back in 1985. 

According to the Nielsen™ data I have on this blog, 42% of my readers were not even born in 1985, while 16% play badminton left-handed on Tuesdays and Sundays in October, weather permitting.

What I've found out about faith during my 62 years on this planet can be summed up in a sentence, a sentence you won't really get if you don't get it.

Faith usually shows up when you least expect it and most need it.

For Viktor Frankl it was noticing a sprig of green in the dust of Auschwitz. For me, it was meeting my wife. Or running into a headhunter in the park one afternoon when I had just reached the point where I thought I'd never work again. Or maybe one sad morning my long-time therapist will shiv me with something that will lighten the not inconsiderable shadow of my umber.

Last night, getting this note from my first boss, was one of those moments.

No, I wasn't having an undo crisis of confidence. Professionally, I'm working like a eight-legged dog, and all things considered, my future looks moderately incandescent. 

But you know, it's hard some days. 

Hard to find the right ingredients in your emotional pantry. I don't think it's unusual to feel--though it might be unusual to voice--that sometimes we all feel in psychic arrears. Like five cans short of a six-pack. Sometimes rather than merely feeling that the world has spun of its axis, we actually believe it.

Mostly, the note was about long ago when I was at my friend's agency. He taught me to learn to ride a bike. And how skinning your knees bloody was part to that teaching and getting back on that bike an even bigger part. Mostly the note was about something I had seldom experienced before way back in 1985. Skinning your knees with love.

Sometimes you just need to hear, especially those of us without mothers or fathers--or who maybe never had progenitors at all--that all those cuts, scrapes, bruises and abrasions were worth it.

Thanks for the hurt.

Friendship. 2.0. (Career advice for the young and old.)

At the very start of my agency career—this is way back in 1985—I had a very smart partner. As a matter of fact, though we stopped working together probably in 1986 or so, through our travels in and out of dozens of agencies and nearly every sizable advertising market in the United States, we’ve stayed in touch.

We don’t speak often. But we see each others triumphs and defeats on social media. We exchange the occasional email or text. And through the splendors of the modren world, we stay in touch.

Since Craig and I worked together, I’ve toiled under the aegis of literally half-a-dozen advertising Hall-of-Famers and worked at some of the world’s top agencies for some of the world’s top advertising people—creatives, account people and planners—but very little, no nothing, has ever surpassed the wisdom of what Craig said to me back when Ronald Reagan alzheimered the Oval Office and the earth was considerably cooler.

“George,” he said, “you never stop working on your book.”

Not long ago, another old-time friend from the business rang me up on my flip-phone. We started talking, as pterodactyls do, of days gone by, when agencies were a bit fatter and you could peck at a good triceratops carcass for a week or two.

My friend told me a story I hadn’t thought about for a while.

“Back when I was at ________, _________, _________ & _______,” she began, “I was, as you remember on the senior leadership team.”

“I remember,” I said. “I was more than a little bit green.”

“You’ve always been the envious sort,” she chided. “One day, the president of ________, _________, _________ & _________ told us all to come in the next day wearing something fancy—like we’d wear for a big new business presentation. We were going to have our photograph taken—a group shot of senior leadership—for our website.”

My friend has a way of milking a story like a prize-cow.

“Two months later, something happened, if you remember…”

“I do.”

“And I was out on my rosy red rectum.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said, “but I get the idea.”

“A friend from the agency pointed me in the direction of ________, _________, _________ & _________’s website. The senior leadership team photograph was on the site. But I was retouched out. I was replaced by a nice upholstered Barcelona chair.”

“At least they have good taste,” I said.

“You’re perspicacious,” my friend answered, “But as usual you’re missing the point.”

“Missing the point is what I do best.”

Because she’s known me a long time, my friend ignored my banter. Most people do.

“Here’s the thing, dimwit,” she continued using one of her many terms of endearment for me, “Stalin is the head of most agencies.”

“Is that an allusion to failed Five Year Plans?” I asked.

“No, though I suppose it could be. It’s the language agencies use. I guess most modern businesses use. ‘We’re family. We’re colleagues. We’re all in this together. We all have each other’s backs.’”

“That’s not an HR violation?”

“Backs, you idiot. Not fronts. And they spout it and spout it and spout it. You get a bottle of wine now and again, a pat on the back, a hug in the hallway.”

“Sincerity is everything. Once you can fake that, you’re home free.”

“Then one day, you’re disappeared. Where your desk used to be is a filing cabinet or a $19.99 beanbag chair, and you’re out on the street.”

“And out of the photograph.”

That children, is why you listen to my friend Craig.

“Never stop working on your book.”

On deadline.

Since I was very young in the business, I have been on deadline.

My first job—that was way back literally 40 years ago—was writing copy for the Montgomery Ward catalog. My starting salary was $11,700 and after six months, I got a thousand dollar raise, which in those two bagels for 35-cents days was not all that insignificant.

Then as now, I got up early. I got into the office around seven. A good two hours before most everyone else, and I blasted through the pages I was required to write. When I left Wards for Bloomingdale’s, my salary had risen to $18,300.

One of a thousand ads I had a paw in.

At Bloomingdale’s I also had a number of pages to write each week. The Dallas Morning News, or the Chicago Tribune, or the Boston Globe, or the Miami Herald weren’t going to wait for you. When the mismatched traffic guy stood in your doorway—yes, we had offices back then, you had to come across with your copy. I stayed at Bloomingdale’s for about two years and left making $26,000.

I took a pay cut and a pace cut to work at my first agency. And it took me a while to adjust. I like thinking as much as the next person. But too much thinking and not enough typing isn’t good for anyone in business. 

Despite all the modern proclivities, marketing—or advertising, or sales, or whatever you want to call it, isn’t really theoretical. Not when it’s done right anyway. There’s really no better way to get a sense of the efficacy of an ad or a campaign than running something and seeing the reaction. Anything else is like trying to learn to ride a bicycle out of a book. You can get some general ideas. But the truth is, you’ll never really grasp it until you skin your knees a couple dozen times.

I wrote about 37 million ads like this.

When I was about five years in the business, I got a job at a prestigious ad agency called Ally & Gargano. I worked on a financial services account.

Even back then, I was barely 30, I figured if I could handle something with a high degree of difficulty I’d be well-suited to keep working through the sundry recessions and depressions which are a fact of American economic life.

So once again, I got in early and probably conceived, wrote and sold two ads a week for five years. I also grabbed with a certain amount of Sammy Glick aggressiveness, every stray assignment I could get my hands on.

By the time I was 33, I was a senior vice president and group creative director. I had never missed a deadline.

In the ensuing years, on automotive, technology and financial accounts mainly, I always gave myself something to do, even when nothing was due.

For instance, when I worked on Mercedes-Benz I had this notion that most people who test drive expensive cars really feel a little intimidated by the whole process. It’s like being a fat guy and buying an Armani suit. You feel out of place.

So I researched and wrote a “how-to guide” on test-driving a car. My thesis is that most people look under the hood, for instance, but they don’t really know what they’re looking at or for. Likewise they slam shut the doors. But what are they listening for. I figured it couldn’t hurt to tell people.

This wasn’t an assignment that was given to me. It was something I made up on my own. Because it was something that puzzled me. It also gave me something to do, to keep my synapses busier than most creative resource managers know how to do.

I did the same sort of thing when I worked on high-tech brands. I guess I have a very inquisitive bearing. I don’t believe spending $60,000 on a car or $1,000,000 on a mainframe computer is a purely emotional decision. And even if it is, I want some rational ballast in the back of my head just in case someone pokes me and calls me a nitwit.

I mean, is all artificial intelligence alike? Or all clouds? Or all servers? In today's advertising eccch-o-system I'd be hard-pressed to make a rational decision on buying one, even if I wanted to be rational. Sometimes it seems to me you can find more information on bubble gum than you can on multi-million dollar technologies.

Now, of course, I am no longer working for a giant, faceless and insensitive holding company.

I am working for giant, faceless and insensitive me.

Today, I have three or four accounts circling around my head like gnats on a summer’s day. Before they get too pesky, I swat them away by sitting at my Smith-Corona.

It’s not profound but after all these years or singing for my supper or writing for my livelihood, I’ve discovered something.

The best way to do something is to do it.

Just about every day, I get an email or four from someone in the business or on its nearby periphery. How do you post every day, they ask. Have you written something longer and you’re excerpting from it?

No.

Life is pressure. It’s being backed up against the wall. It’s facing grim visages and doubters. It’s like being a giant osprey at the beach. There are hungry little ospreys way up high in that nest you built. And Seamless or Doordash or BestNest ain’t delivering. You’ve got to bring home the hormone-free, non-GMO, kosher bacon. Or a fish. Whatevs.

For about the past two weeks, though to be honest I just noticed it yesterday, LinkedIn, in an act of algorithmic kindness, has started appending a measure to articles I post on their site. Tuesday’s said, “5 min read”. Monday’s said, “4 min read”.

That’s interesting, I said to myself. I suppose they’re giving the viewer some gauge of the readability of the articles posted on their site. For a minute, I thought “that’s nice. That’s helpful.”

But then I sat down to write this piece.

It probably took you three or four or five minutes to read. I suppose that’s what LinkedIn will say.

What they didn’t mention is this: It took me a lifetime to write.

And a lifetime of writing.

Advertising. Bullshit.

If you grew up when I did—I came of advertising age in the early 1980s—the best automotive advertising in the United States was done not by Volkswagen and DDB but on BMW at Ammirati & Puris and on Volvo at Scali McCabe Sloves.

If you believe, as I do, that great advertising is most often built on solving a big problem, then you’ll appreciate this quotation I found from Marty Puris, one of the founders of Ammirati & Puris and the writer on some of the best ads ever on BMW and my favorite car commercial of all time, this one for Fiat, that he wrote way back in the early 1970s.

“These guys (at BMW) were racing guys. So, they build a car. It looked like an old Corvair. And cost the same as a Cadillac or a Lincoln, which were Americans’ idea of what a luxury car was. When we got the business the very first day out BMW was ‘the Ultimate Driving Machine.’

I wind up writing a fair amount about BMW because the ads were so good, so intelligent and displayed such an understanding of their audience. Ammirati, the agency and the man, could have created one of those police composite drawings of what their customer looked like, their work ethic, their hobbies and their passions, without ever falling to the level of cliché or condescension.

In short, the people at Ammirati and BMW understood the car they built—its reason for being, its place in the gigantic US auto market. And even more important, they understood who was buying them and who aspired to.

I’ve always regarded this Volkswagen ad as one of the great ads of the long-running campaign, though I have to believe, it’s not nearly as well known as so many other more famous ones. But if you believe, as I do, that great creative whether you’re writing a blog post, a novel, a banner ad or a website, or a sonnet, or writing a song, or painting en plein air, knowing your subject is about 98.7 percent of the game.

It’s knowing whereof you speak.

And frankly, that’s what’s most distressing to me about the current agency/holding company modus operandi. People are “scoped” for enough time to write and layout the requisite words and pictures that make up a “message.” Clients, in their infinite clientastic MBA’d-wisdom, and agencies in their infinite caving to their clients’ demand for “agility,” no longer abide by Proverbs, at least the King James translation of the Hebrew: “with all thy getting get understanding.” Understanding, naw. Why bother?

Back about twenty years ago when I was helping to run a high-tech account, I’d occasionally ask for help.

“I need a writer on a storage project,” I’d say.

“Joann has some downtime.”

“She usually works on adult diapers doesn’t she?”

“Yeah, but she’s really smart.”

That’s when I got myself into the habit of doing too much myself. It’s not a question of being really smart. Or even being really hard-working.

I would try to explain, “Most opera singers have to learn Italian before they sing in Italian. Otherwise they’re just mouthing the words without meaning. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a really good actor play Hamlet. I saw Oscar Isaac in the role down at the Public. You understood early 1600s English, because he understood early 1600s English.”

At that point the staffing person would usually turn on her heels and depart with words like, “Joann has four hours with a hard-stop Tuesday at one.”

Dig.

At some point clients are going to realize that there’s a difference between letters and images skillfully arranged versus letters and images that are merely scoped. And that it makes sense to have someone who understands the satisfaction that comes from baking for you family to work on a food ad. Or someone who’s juggling paying for a mortgage, a retirement, an older parent and maybe their kids’ college to write an ad for a financial services company so every ad isn’t about sailing in the Greek isles or opening a clam shake on the eastern shore of Brooklyn or walking a pig through their retirement.

Dunno if it’s apocryphal or not, but the story I heard about cake-mix is provides a good example. Apparently in the 1950s, General Mills launched a line of cake mixes under the Betty Crocker brand. All you needed to do was add water, mix and bake.

Though it saved time, it did not sell well. The marketing people at General Mills brought in a team of psychologists. They concluded that the average American housewives felt bad using the product despite its convenience. It saved so much time and effort when compared with the traditional cake baking routine that they felt they were deceiving their husbands and guests. Women using the product felt guilty.

That feeling wasn’t initially understood. I’d betcha no one at General Mills or their agencies was a mom. They didn’t understand the pride that came from baking.

Instead of addressing the problem of guilt through an ad campaign, General Mills reformulated the product. They made it less convenient. Under the new formulation the baker had to crack an egg into the mix. Semiotically cracking an egg added up to cooking. The product took off because someone took the time to understand the target.

Anyway, below are the ads that set me off this morning.

By whoever BMW’s agency is this week.

They show both a startling lack of originality and a startling absence of what getting your car serviced really feels like or what makes a BMW different. In an age where the word authenticity rings hollow through the once-hallowed halls of agency-ville, I’d betcha fifty cents no one involved in the creation of these ads owns or drives a car. And I can imagine the hundreds of meetings where they agency creatives prattle on about the skinny and sallow 27-year-old models (the people, not the cars) are aspirational.

And that, my friends, is example 9,659,239,332 of getting what you paid for

Mom. I hardly knew ye.

When I left home at the age of 17 and left the country to play baseball in the Mexican Baseball League for the Saraperos de Saltillo in the small industrial city of Saltillo in Coahuila state, one of my main motivations was to escape the hardened glare and the calloused knuckles of my virago of a mother.

In the roughly 6,000 days that we had lived together since I sprung eagerly from her grudging loins, she probably stared me down and swatted at my noggin with the back of her giant paw 5,900 of those days. There’s was always something I was doing or not doing to displease her or disappoint her or disillusion her. So she swatted and swatted and swatted.

And when, as a result of all those swattings I told she and my father, who was rarely my not-absent father, that I delaying my matriculation into college for a year and instead was heading south as a boy to play a boy’s game, she swatted at me again, this time with a bionic hand the size of a Nova Scotia salmon. Or a Chevy Nova.

“I am a year younger than my classmates anyhow,” I said, having skipped a decade earlier from fourth to sixth.

Swat!

“But college,” they said. “You’re going to kill your father,” she said. “You’re going to hurt your mother,” he said.

Swat!

Even so I left their empty house for the world’s epicenter of public urination and homeless puking, that is, New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal one year after New York all-but went bankrupt and belly-up in a heroin haze.  Once there, I spent $27.50 for a one-way ticket to Corpus Christi, Texas, for a 34-hour trip through 29 cities, most of which I had never heard of and would never hear of again.

Once in Corpus Christi, I found a room for the night in a tilted hotel and then spent $14.40 more on a ticket on a Mexican Greyhound bus the remaining five hours to Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico. 

Nevertheless, despite having backhanded me away, the old lady couldn’t for a second understand why I had flown the coop, everything was so nice there, and I was going to kill my old man who, after all, had a heart condition.

That was my escape from the home I never had so many years ago. The last, really, that I ever saw of my old lady, may she, seriously, rest in peace, and not rise from the sea like stop-motion special effect.

I’ve tried to be a better father to my kids, and I probably did ok about 51 percent of the time and my wife, as a mother, being more even-tempered than I, probably had a slightly higher batting average.

But the wounds, and cuts, and scars of families don’t heal after four generations or even five or maybe even after ten. 

My old lady, well, who knows? Her mother, too, was a harridan, and her father was a drunk and an itinerant, as well
--he carved gravestones for (not much of) a living. So maybe, in retrospect, now that it’s almost a decade since she went ungently into that good-night, maybe by her standards and her judgment and her best efforts, she did ok.

And maybe when I’m fully charbroiled by Plaza Memorial (it's half the price of Riverside) and my kids look back on the indelicacies of life and their thwarted dreams and their sadnesses and their disappointments and, almost invariably, their own kids’ judgments of them, maybe they’ll say about me, like sometimes I think about her, she was a mean old fuck, but she gave me some things that not many people have and I’m glad I do.

She gave me my love of words and I guess my love of books. She gave me my memory I think, and my stubbornness, too. And maybe a few dozen or a hundred other things I'm almost embarrassed to own up to.

But that's life.

We get swatted around--shoved and pushed--folded, spindled and yes, mutilated and with ever watchful eyes and bearing scars, visible and invisible, we head through the cockeyed caravan of life--full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity, that the personalities of others should not be violated, that all should be able to confront others without fear or shame, and that if we were lucky in our living on earth we might win some redeeming meaning for  having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars.

So in all, thanks, Mom. You were a mean old fuck. But you were my mean old fuck.