What Fresh Hell Is This?

Advice to My 22-Year-Old Self I Won’t Dare Post on LinkedIn

With everyone offering advice to their younger selves on LinkedIn this graduation season (#IfIWere22), I find myself -- in the middle of my years -- being tormented by Dante Alighieri.

With Dad at my college graduation

He has been following me these past few weeks, as if daring me to find some meaning to it all.

I’ll take that dare, Dante. You may have journeyed to Hell and back with Virgil, but I’ve recently journeyed to New York and Minnesota and Washington DC with my cell phone. While I haven’t pretended to find eternal truths, I’ve experienced some interesting moments.

By way of background: My 22-year-old self had already given up his boyhood dream of becoming an astronomer and moving to San Francisco. In fact, after all these years, I’ve never even visited San Francisco. But I have a wonderful family; my life has been filled with productive work; and, once, I wrote a book, riddled with so many Dante references that even its last word was “stars.”

So I offer here my own mini-trilogy of life lessons.

Lesson One: Magic Exists

Just last month, late on Holy Thursday evening, I took my 22-year-old daughter to a reading of excerpts from Dante’s “Inferno” at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. As one of the perhaps dozen actual readers of my book, my daughter had always promised that someday we would go to this annual reading together.

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Maundy Thursday

I was excited. Days earlier, I brushed up by listening to an audio of John Cleese reading Robert Pinsky’s translation of excerpted cantos from the “Inferno.” None of it resonated with me, however, and at one point near the end Cleese broke into the voice of a Monty Python character. For a moment, from the depths of Hell, I thought I heard that there was a penguin on the telly.

Undaunted, I drove my daughter into the city and marveled at the grand, cavernous cathedral. We excitedly took seats on uncomfortable wooden folding chairs right in the front row, and we waited for award-winning modern-day poets to interpret one of our favorite works of literature.

More than three hours later, we were massively disappointed. There was a lot of earnestness in the readings, but no heart. Three readers recited cantos in the original Italian, but there was no rhythm or expressiveness in their language -- no discernible tercets, no rhymes. As soon as the last reader said the word “stelle,” my daughter and I were out the door and headed to a dive bar off West 110th Street.

I was by far the oldest person there, and one of the few without a tattoo. My daughter and I sat under a framed photo of a sheep, and I ordered a very cold beer from very Irish bartender.

“What the hell was that?” I said to my daughter. “I got nothing out of that, and ‘The Inferno’ used to be my favorite. Is it me? A mid-life crisis?”

“That’s OK, Dad,” she said. “My friends and I are all going through a quarter-life crisis, so I can relate. Things change.”

Then she patted my hand tenderly, and the previous three hours disappeared… like magic. It was midnight on Good Friday, and I was never happier to be anywhere else, with anyone else, in my life.


Lesson Two: All Children Are Above Average

Fast forward a few weeks:

I’m in a living room in Almost Heaven, Minnesota, visiting my college friend’s elderly parents. We’re sipping coffee while the father reminisces about his military experience during the last days of World War II. Over his shoulder, there’s a framed lithograph of Dante Alighieri in profile, watching me.

Minnesota: almost Heaven

“What’s with the Dante portrait?” I ask after we leave, expecting an involved and quirky story.

“Oh, nothing,” my friend replied. “Mom just likes the print.”

I thought: That’s my point of view, exactly. After all these years, I’ve come to realize that I really don’t enjoy reading the “Divine Comedy”; I just like the thought of being someone who enjoys reading the “Divine Comedy.” I like to pretend I’m special, but I’m really just like everyone else.

There’s a redeeming paradox to this, however, and it had hit me right between my eyes when my first child was born.

Because, and although I do appreciate Garrison Keillor’s wit, that’s precisely a moment in life when you realize that everyone is special.


Lesson Three: The Sidelines Are Not Where You Want to Live Your Life

Now fast forward to last week:

I’m in Washington DC, and walking toward the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum on the National Mall. I have the morning to myself, and I want to rekindle my boyhood wonder about space and astronomy. However, I feel invisible -- an insubstantial shade, unconnected to the present-tense people ignoring me or walking right through me, heads bowed, watching their cell phones.

Ironically, there's no space here

At the entrance to the museum, a guard directs me through one door, but once inside another man angrily says that this is not an entrance. We all must pass through metal detectors, and the government security agents slow their disinterested movements as the lines increase in length behind me. The man who yelled at me is now trying to bring a knife into the museum in a plastic shopping bag, and as the agents rustle him aside I slip past unnoticed.

It’s crowded inside. There’s no open space in the Space Museum. Unsupervised children run all around. Everywhere I walk I am seemingly in the line of sight of someone taking a photo. It’s loud, and people crowd three-deep around the exhibits. Nothing about this place seems remotely enchanting. So I leave, disappointed, and rest on a park bench a half block away.

“Hey, get off my bed!” comes an angry shout in my direction.

An imposing, disheveled man is waving his finger at me.

“You’re sitting on my bed! I’m warning you: Get off!”

I do as he says. But before I turn to leave, I make eye contact with the homeless man, and we acknowledge each other’s existence. This surprises him. “I just needed to rest,” I say, “I meant no disrespect.”

This unsettles him. He looks at me cautiously and says, “I meant no disrespect either. I just get mad sometimes.” Then he offers me his hand and says, “I’m sorry.”

I shake it and say, “Good luck,” causing his eyes to turn vacant.

“I don’t believe in luck,” he spits in reply.


So I turn back toward the Mall -- currently under renovation, resembling a pit -- and walk headlong into the nearest museum. It happens to be the National Museum of African Art, and the featured exhibit is “The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists.”

My diamante

I laugh when I see the inscription above the entrance, and channel Sheldon Cooper channeling Dorothy Parker. “What fresh Hell is this?” I ask no one, because there’s not another soul in sight.

It’s a wonderful exhibit, dramatically staged on three levels, with 40 works from some of the best known and emerging artists from Africa… all addressing the themes of Dante’s epic poem.

I wish I could show it to you here, but as soon as I raise my cell phone, a security guard runs up to me saying, “No photos! No photos!” I wonder why. With no one else around, the three security guards -- Dante’s minions -- keep following me as I wander through the gallery.

So I look but don’t touch. I don’t take photos. I don’t complain. The art itself is spell-binding.

As I leave I spot a table littered with diamond-shaped cards, inviting guests to compose a “diamante” -- an unrhymed, seven-line poem -- about the exhibit. It’s a contest for visiting school children, but I fill one out myself, using words such as “stalking,” “threatening” and “paranoia,” and comparing the circling guards to dogs.

Needless to say, I don’t think I’ll win the contest.


I’m pretty sure, though, that my diamante put a stake through Dante’s fat heart and drove him from my own bed, because I woke the next morning with everything back in focus. That’s right, Durante, I’m no longer scared of you.

Tim Cook takes an iPhone photo at the 2015 GWU commencement

It was my daughter’s graduation day, in another grand setting: a wide and gentle bluff beneath the Washington Monument, where George Washington University had set up a temporary stage, carnival tents and thousands of folding chairs (#GWCommencement).

I had wanted to leave extra early, to make sure we had seats, but there was a group of us and I didn’t insist -- so we wound up standing in a gentle rain throughout the ceremony.

The commencement speaker, Apple CEO Tim Cook, looked down at me from a large-screen video monitor, as if in parody of Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl television commercial, and said: “The sidelines are not where you want to live your life.”

And yet there I was, literally standing on the sidelines at my daughter’s graduation.

Right then and there, I typed a to-do item into my phone. The due-date is a few years away, addressed to my future 62-year-old self.

It reads simply, “Plan trip to San Francisco.”


And the Point of All This Is...

The point, 22-year-old Bob, is that I can’t give you answers when all the questions keep changing. Even Dante didn’t know what he didn’t know. So show a little faith and, as Mr. Cleese and his colleagues often reminded us, always look on the bright side of life.

Life is messy. It’s forever unfinished, often complicated and sometimes extraordinary, and it renews itself with or without you. Everything matters, because every moment is unique.

Nothing is immutable; not even the stars.

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Images From Minnesota

This past week I was able to visit one of my dearest friends, who happens to live in Minnesota. Here's a collection of photos I took in and around Minneapolis and Lake Harriet.

(PS - I was also experimenting with how to include a slideshow in a Blogger post, and I found the answer on YouTube. Thank you, Katie Diebold!)

Happy Birthday, Harper Lee

July 13, 1960, New York Times

Today marks the 89th birthday of one of my favorite writers.

I've posted about Harper Lee before, but I was reminded of her again today when The New York Times tweeted an image of its original review of "To Kill a Mockingbird" from July 1960. It begins:

"ALL the magic and truth that might seem deceptive or exaggerated in a factual account of a small town unfold beautifully in a new first novel called 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' At a time when so many machine-tooled novels are simply documentaries disguised behind a few fictional changes, it is pleasing to recommend a book that shows what a novelist can accomplish with quite familiar situations."

This passage from the book itself has always been one of my favorites:

"Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flied in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by night fall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum."

When I first met my wife Nancy, she mentioned the teacake ladies as one of her own favorite images. I knew right then my life would never be the same.

It's a Bird; It's a Plane; It's a Miracle

“Is that Superman?” I asked, from the back seat of our car.

We were stopped at a light late last night, at the intersection of Court and River streets in Hackensack, and my question came during a lull in conversation.

My wife was driving, with our older daughter in the front passenger seat (she claims to get car sick when sitting in the back) and our younger daughter (our baby, who is over 21 years old) beside me in back.

“Yes, it is,” said my wife, matter of factly.

“Wait! What?” my younger daughter exclaimed.

“Something wrong, Maddy?” I asked, pointing to the second-story window of the office building on 60 Court St. “See, there’s a large cutout Superman near the book case in that office.”

“Oh,” Maddy said, “I just thought you had finally gone crazy.”

“Finally?”

“You have to admit, it’s a thin line,” she said. “What’s worse is that Mom wasn’t concerned at all. She simply accepted the fact that you had seen Superman.”

“Well, she’s used to me,” I said.

“I think that’s sweet,” said Cathy, the daughter who always cons me out of riding shotgun.

This had been the tone of our family conversation ever since we had retrieved Maddy from the train station in Newark a half hour earlier.

Through some quirk of fate – Maddy has a job interview in the city today, and Cathy wanted to crash somewhere closer than her apartment after an evening graduate class at Montclair State – both daughters were home last night.

So the four of us were together in the car for the first time in many, many months. Like a jazz band that resumes playing together after many years apart, it didn’t take long for our conversation to fall into the teasing, laughter-filled and jumbled rhythms of our younger selves, a dozen years ago, packed in a car and headed for vacation on the Cape.

I closed my eyes and enjoyed the music: Maddy was telling a funny story about trying to adopt a rescue Flemish Giant rabbit from an animal shelter in Canada; Cathy was talking about horses, of course, and working with autistic children; and everyone independently had somehow known about and played Google Map’s recently introduced Pacman game.

Source:Flickr Creative Commons

So it has occurred to me that during this Easter season some higher power really was in New Jersey last night. It circled the globe so fast it halted, and then reversed, the direction of Earth on its axis.

And as I have done every morning for half my life, when I left for work a few hours ago, I whispered goodbye to each daughter outside her bedroom door – and I told them I loved them.

Thank you, Superman, for turning back time for just one night. This morning, this crazy man was no longer whispering into any empty bedrooms.

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Greetings From Hackensack

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Using the new #LayoutFromInstagram app to display photos from the #NewBridgeLanding #historic site in #Hackensack #NewJersey

A post shared by Bob Varettoni (@bvarphotos) on Mar 23, 2015 at 12:51pm PDT

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Red #barn and #plough at #NewBridgeLanding this afternoon in #NewJersey. #nofilter

A post shared by Bob Varettoni (@bvarphotos) on Mar 22, 2015 at 1:41pm PDT

Counting the Cars on the New Jersey Turnpike

http://bvar.tumblr.com/post/112970027973/counting-the-cars-on-the-new-jersey-turnpike

Fractured Book Reviews

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Following are six book reviews in one... Here's the thing: I've recently neglected Goodreads, and I haven't posted any reviews here since my mild diatribe about Graham Nash's autobiography, Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life. Oh, I still stand by what I wrote, but it now seems shrouded in a distant past.

Fresher in mind are the books I've enjoyed over the past three months (and a big plug here for www.audible.com, which makes my traffic-filled commutes and gym Stairmaster sessions tolerable). There are six in all, starting with "Flash Boys," which I enjoyed greatly and would heartily recommend. Michael Lewis is a wonderful writer, and every other book here gets 4 stars just by association with him.

How to dispatch the rest? Well, I've picked the titles at random, in pairs beginning with "Flash Boys," to post three short observations about each set and point out a common denominator. It's my new parlor trick… fractured book reviews:

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt / Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back

Both these books are about time. One is measured in microseconds; the other in eternity. Reading “Heaven Is for Real” was an easy sprint… and the movie adaptation happened to be playing on cable at the same time. So I listened to the book one day and watched the movie the next. The movie is much better; it's not great, but it could have been a disaster, and it made me cut the book some slack… given the childish/childlike descriptions of Heaven. “Flash Boys,” on the other hand, was a delight to savor. The moral of both? Salvation, in this world, is unobtainable in any form. And everything, ultimately, is just a matter of faith.

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride / Yes Please

These two books remind me how hard people work to get to the top of their professions. “The Princess Bride” is one of my favorite movies, but I had no idea how much care, time, effort, planning and talent went into its making until reading this tribute by actor Cary Elwes. Meanwhile, Amy Poehler, it seems, didn't spring up fully formed on “Saturday Night Live.” She spent thousands of hours perfecting improv and comedy -- the way Steve Martin in “Born Standing Up” described playing thousands of club dates before he became an “overnight success.” Or the way the Beatles played hour after hour on stage for years to develop their distinctive sound. Both books also benefit from the audio format, since both include entertaining cameos from guest voices. My kids may well someday read versions of these books featuring holograms.

The Girl on the Train / The Bell Jar

Both, it turns out, are first-time novels. “The Girl on the Train” has become a respectable current commercial success, and “The Bell Jar” is a well-respected literary success from 50 years ago. Both (despite the new technology evident in “Train”) have a timeless quality too – a mark of their two talented writers. Both books, however, are filled with what I found to be not very likeable characters… main and otherwise… so it was hard for me to care much about them all in the end. It's true, Sylvia, and there's nothing you can do. I couldn't relate to you. Yes, even you.



View all my reviews

My Bloody Valentine

How does anyone survive Valentine’s Day?

I still have scars from second grade, in the days before political correctness when school kids didn’t have to bring a Valentine for everyone in the class. I can still see painfully shy, ridiculously crew-cutted Bobby Varettoni with only two cards at my desk while all my classmates had dozens.

And thank you, Annemarie Shapiola and Maureen Dunn, wherever you are. I think you saved my life.

My mother – who, all her life, has been popular and outgoing – has no doubt received thousands of Valentine’s Day cards over the course of her lifetime. At 83, she still gets excited about the holiday, and she has always sent cards to me and my wife, Nancy, and to our daughters.

However, at 83, my mother is no longer steady on her feet, and she slipped and fell (it’s icy in New Jersey) when trying to mail this year’s batch of cards.

She’s fine. Just a bruise on her hip.

Still, it led to an interesting phone call with my daughter who’s away at college. She said she had been shopping for Valentine cards, but was afraid to buy one for Grandma precisely because “with my luck, she’ll trip and fall while going out to the mailbox.”

She was joking, of course – so, of course, I egged her on.

“And then you’d be responsible for her death, right?”

“Well, knowing Grandma, first she’d sop up the blood with the envelope of my card, and then she’d crawl back inside the house, display the card next to her chair, then phone to thank me.”

“You know, even if you don’t get her a card, she’s still going to go out to the mailbox every day to look for a Valentine from you. And then you’d disappoint her.”

“So I’m guilty no matter what?”

“Exactly!” I replied. “Welcome to my life.”

It’s a vicious cycle – and here it is, Friday the 13th, and I didn't even buy a card for my wife. Instead, I’ve made her a card that references Brian Williams. Hopefully, she’ll think it’s romantic and cute.

It’s certainly not as slick as the card my daughter bought for my mother. She called last night to say, “Bobby, your daughter just sent me the most beautiful, beautiful Valentine’s Day card ever!”

My daughter is a survivor.

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Lessons From 7 Careers With 1 Company

Did you ever feel like Crash Davis, the fictional baseball player in “Bull Durham” who breaks the lifetime minor league home run record without anyone noticing?

Last week I set my own quiet milestone – 30 years working at Verizon and its predecessor companies – without any fanfare.

Why the secrecy? When you’ve been with “the same company” for so long these days, you are more likely to get condolences, or curious stares, than congratulations.

So I want to out myself here to dispel a huge myth.

The truth is, it’s NEVER the same company after so many years. You may not change companies, but the company changes around you.

I can count at least seven different career lessons with seven different companies over these past 30 years.

1. The Entrepreneurs. Cutting short a career in journalism, I excitedly joined a small company in 1985 that sold the first generation of personal computers to consumers. I’ve always loved technology – and this was a skunkworks project for NYNEX, a Baby Bell, that needed PR support. My colleagues there were tech evangelists and wonderful teammates. The business model failed, but not for lack of effort or creativity – or fun.

The lesson: You’re never truly failing when you’re doing something you love.

2. The Phone Company. The NYNEX mothership then offered me a job as a writer and editor for its phone company subsidiary, New York Telephone, which produced internal newsletters and magazines. I was again surrounded by great colleagues – talented writers and in-house graphic artists – but the company itself was mired in the past. In the elevators, middle-aged men wearing suits with white athletic socks would talk incessantly about their retirement plans. This drove me crazy. Even an attempt to streamline my magazine’s production by using a “modem” was denied because it would have meant attaching a “foreign device” to the public network.

Lesson: In the short-term, you can find work you love even in a company you don’t.

3. Media Relations. Long-term, the phone company wasn’t the place for me. Luckily, I was able to transfer to New York Telephone’s press office. It was led by a smart, funny, urbane, chain-smoking phone-company anomaly who was welcomed as family in the Daily News newsroom and in dozens of New York City bars and restaurants. He rescued me because he liked to collect writers on his staff and, as a former journalist, I admired and valued the work of current journalists.

Lesson: Everyone needs a mentor.

4. No Job Description. By the mid '90s, I had earned promotions and was raising a new family. My career was poised, I thought, for great things. Then my mentor retired, and the new department head was not a fan of the old ways of doing things. He developed a complicated, matrixed chart of his new organization. Without a box on the chart for me. When I questioned this, he shrugged and gave me a New Age explanation that boxes on an org chart weren’t what was important. When he realized it was important to me, he finally owned up and gave me the following advice:

Lesson: “People will judge you by the way you handle adversity.”

5. The Job I Created. To shake things up, the new VP had brought in two outsiders – a well-know political figure to run NY regulatory affairs and a successful Media Relations VP from a competitor. Neither knew much about NYNEX, however, and I had worked for the company more than 10 years by then, knew it inside and out by virtue of my previous jobs, and wasn’t on anyone else’s payroll. So I helped them both – and learned so much from both in return. One of the executives was female.

Lesson: After witnessing the double standard in the way women are treated in the workplace, I will never tolerate it and, for the sake of my daughters, I will do everything I can to eradicate it.

6. The Mergers. NYNEX merged with Bell Atlantic. Bell Atlantic merged with GTE. The company, and the respective PR organizations, underwent massive changes in the late 1990s. I was a corporate spokesperson, and I directed the staff functions for two PR VPs. Now when new org charts were being developed, I was creating the boxes. A big reason for the mergers was to gain scale and scope for our wireless business. The first merger was valued at $24 billion; the second at $52 billion. Bets don’t get any bigger than that, and our plan was to create a new market for any-time communication, on any device, in any place.

Lesson: The best job in the world is to work for a company that’s doing something to change the world for the better.

7. Financial Communications. Since 2001, I’ve been a spokesperson for a huge and growing corporation. I like the bird’s eye view I get from headquarters, and I specialize in financial communications. Even if I’m not Crash Davis, I can claim to be the Cal Ripken of Verizon’s earnings press releases. More importantly, I have the privilege of working with journalists who are at the top of their profession. I do my best work when I can bring the outside-in perspective of journalists – and the way their work reflects marketplace sentiment – to help continuously change my company for the better. At this time last year, I was working on a $130 billion deal related to our wireless business... so it seems the bets DO get bigger after all.

Lesson: It’s all a matter of perspective, and perspective changes over time.

Ha! That’s a pretty vacuous statement. I can illustrate this a little more concretely.

Early in the morning of my 30th service anniversary with “Verizon,” I shared an elevator from the parking lot with three other people. One man was on his cell phone, conducting business in Spanish. Meanwhile, a woman and another man were in animated discussion about a new Verizon Wireless pricing plan, and the need to make it simpler for customers to understand. It was as different as could be from any entitlement-laced chatter about retirement.

I was on my way to the company’s gym before going to the office, so I had thrown on my suit over my workout clothes. After I stepped aside to let the others off so they could begin their workdays, I looked down at my feet.

I was wearing white socks.

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