Morning in New Jersey

This morning, seemingly in the blink of an eye, the trees were already bare in my hometown.

Just one week earlier, their branches had been ablaze in contrasting shades of red, yellow and brown. But as Election Day dawned, only streams of toilet paper remained on the tree outside the polling place at the library.

This particular tree had been teepeed in the tradition of Goosey Night (or Mischief Night, if you're not from Passaic County), the night before Halloween. There's no longer any widespread evidence of Goosey Night pranks in litigious 2015, however; just neighborhoods letting their children playfully mark their own property.

Seasons change; times change -- yet inside the library I was greeted by the same group of Election Day volunteers who I see year after year. None were young more than 20 years ago, when I first moved here, but none seem to have aged in the meantime.

It's as if people who volunteer at the polls have somehow managed to suspend time -- the same way the waiting list never seems to winnow at a nearby nursing home where a relative hopes to soon reside. In New Jersey, if you want to live forever, just get your name on the waiting list for Marian Manor.

After voting, I noticed pagan and Christian images competing with each other on a nearby street. An elaborate Halloween lawn display has been set in the shadows of Ascension Church.

This is New Jersey. Nowhere else in America are so many contrasts in such close proximity to each other. My home state is a land where rural, suburban and urban extremes coexist almost side by side. It's also a land of paradox, where everything changes quickly and nothing changes at all.

On Instagram (@bvarphotos) and Tumblr, I explore and document my love for the state, and I invite you to follow me there.

Meanwhile, another morning in New Jersey has come and gone. It leaves me hopeful, because I know things can change in an instant here and there's something unexpected around the next corner.

As our poet-laureate sings, "Show a little faith, there's magic in the night."

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Let's Eat, Drink and Be Merry... and Celebrate All Souls

Two photos, years apart, on Varettoni Place, named after Dad's brother.

With apologies to my life coach, Crash Davis, I’d like to point out that All Saints’ Day, Nov. 1, is boring. Besides that, it’s fascist.

All Souls’ Day, Nov. 2, is democratic. It’s the liturgical Festivus for the rest of us.

Like people in other cultures, I believe that the spirits of my dead ancestors are always surrounding me. Which probably explains why I need a life coach.

It also explains all my odd family customs around food and drink.

For example, this past Oct. 9 – on what would have been John Lennon’s 75th birthday – my family had hot dogs and beans for dinner, with fudge marble cake for dessert.

Dessert on Oct. 9.

That’s because Oct. 9, 2015, also marked what would have been Patrick Cullinane’s 55th birthday. He’s my wife’s brother, the nicest guy I’ve ever known. He died of cancer 16 years ago, and this was his favorite meal.

On Oct. 24, 2015, on the 10th anniversary of my Dad’s death, I sat down at Dad’s favorite diner, the Tick Tock in Clifton, NJ (not far from Varettoni Place). I ordered his favorite meal: eggs over with sausage, home fries, rye toast and coffee.

The older I get, the more I can taste the past.

I can’t take a bite of black licorice without thinking of Dad’s father, whom I called Nonno. My grandfather was a great fan of the New York Mets in the 1960s, and I have fond memories of him in his easy chair while watching baseball on TV.

Breakfast on Oct. 24.

My wife is also a longtime Mets fan, and she sometimes inadvertently pantomimes him – and her own grandfather – when she gets angry while watching Mets games on TV because no ballplayer these days knows how to lay down a sacrifice bunt.

Her airing of grievances – in imitation of Nonno – proves that honoring the dead has nothing to do with heredity. Instead, it is inextricably linked to our salvation.

Let me explain.

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of my Dad’s death, my Mom had a Mass said in his name at St. James parish in Totowa, NJ. My sister took a red-eye flight from California to attend – and we had both ordered eggs over with sausage, home fries, rye toast and coffee at the Tick Tock Diner that morning.

During the homily at the memorial Mass, a priest claimed the Gospel passage contained proof of Jesus’ historical existence: The fact that the beggar who approached Jesus had a name, and even referenced his father by name, was the kind of significant detail that had the ring of truth.

Later, at the same Mass, there were more important words that brought home a larger truth to me.

The priest raised the host at the moment of consecration and said, “Take this, all of you, and eat it... Do this in memory of me.”

So let's eat and drink and celebrate to honor our dead.

With both joy and sadness in my heart, I offer an All Souls’ toast to Dad and Uncle Pat, Nonno and Nonna, my Mom’s brothers and sisters, and all the dearly departed in my life.

Although they would never presume to call themselves saints, I know that – as long as I am alive – they will never die.

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10 Poems and Passages to Learn by Heart

Here’s the full text of the poem.

I owe my love of poetry to a lawyer -- and today, National Poetry Day 2015, I'd like to thank him.

Mr. Sullivan (he insisted his first name was “Mister”) was my first high school English teacher in Wayne, New Jersey.

To pass his one and only test one semester, you were required to stand in front of the entire class and flawlessly, and without notes, recite William Cullen Bryant’s long poem about death, “Thanatopsis.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Sullivan (a lawyer by trade, who taught only this one class) would sit behind his desk, dispassionately reading the day’s newspaper, which he had extracted from his ever-present black briefcase.

Dressed like a Blues Brother in skinny tie, white shirt and dark-colored suit, Mr. Sullivan – on non-test days – was boyishly irreverent and sharply funny. He was constantly brushing a stray shock of grey hair from his forehead, as if impersonating Alan Alda as Hawkeye Pierce.

He insisted that learning such a long poem by rote would teach us mental discipline, and that standing proverbially naked in front of our jeering peers at such a tender age would teach us confidence and presentation skills.

He claimed not to care a whit about the poem itself.

But that only made me care all the more. And the memorization – and seeing and hearing the interpretation of each of my classmates – forever changed something in my internal wiring.

To clever Mr. Sullivan… to him who in the love of nature holds communion with her visible forms… I owe undying gratitude.

So, without further ado, here's my recommended list of 10 poems and prose passages to learn by heart:

1. Sailing to Byzantium -W.B. Yeats
2. Daddy -Sylvia Plath
3. somewhere i have never travelled  -E.E. Cummings
4. I Hear an Army -James Joyce
5. Annabel Lee (with audio) -Edgar Allan Poe
6. Dover Beach -Matthew Arnold
7. To His Coy Mistress -Andrew Marvell
8. Vladimir Nabokov’s first paragraphs of “Lolita”
9. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last paragraphs of “The Great Gatsby” (video)
10. Harper Lee describing Maycomb, Alabama, in “To Kill a Mockingbird”

Keep this handy. It may someday – like Walt Whitman said about baseball – repair your losses and be a blessing to you.

Many years after high school, I used to recite “Annabel Lee” to my young daughters to get them to go to sleep. Yes, I may have subliminally altered their psyches – but, like Mr. Sullivan, I may also have imprinted on them an everlasting love of our beautiful language along the way.

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Update: in March 2019, I posted a few of my own poems to commemorate World Poetry Day and in 2021, I followed prompts to create poems throughout April. More recently, I posted "2 Poems: Experiments in Creativity for Fun, Not Profit" and updated "The Evolution of a Poem, Decades Apart."

It's the End of the World as We Know It

Today I read announcements that showed technology at its best... realtime translations on Skype.

And at its worst... the "Yelp for people" app.

My 15 Seconds of Fame

When Pope Francis was leaving St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York on September 24, 2015, I gave him a nervous, friendly wave, and he responded in kind.

He returned a small wave, for a nanosecond, before greeting a group of nuns behind and to the side of me. I had been trying not to block their view, which is how I found myself in "open field" as he walked by.

I had volunteered to help with the media during the event, but... as is the story of my life... I received much more in return than what I had given.

View on YouTube.

9/11 Memoirs of an Invisible Man

I've updated a small Pinterest site I posted several years ago about Verizon's response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York. You can view it here -- and already nearly half the photos are no longer archived on the company's website, so I'm glad I downloaded them when I did.

My Pinterest site

I had an unobstructed, panoramic view of the attacks from Verizon offices on the 32nd Floor of 1095 Avenue of the Americas, and I worked straight through for the next two days, returning home on my wedding anniversary. My job was to help represent the company in the aftermath, and I've never been prouder of every one of my co-workers, especially those -- union-represented workers and top management alike -- who rushed to the scene to begin recovery efforts.

At the time, I couldn't grasp the experience. I felt largely empty, worried about my family, but relieved to be busy just the same. I remember images -- for example, a group of machine-gun wielding soldiers standing guard around a makeshift campfire in front of the New York Public Library, in the middle of an otherwise deserted Fifth Avenue, late that evening -- but, really, there were no words.

A year later, I happened to be at a conference in Boston, and I remember 9/11/02 as a windy day, full of foreboding clouds and melancholy... fitting weather for a memorial day of sorts.

During a break a little after 10:30 a.m., I went to an indoor mall to buy Nancy an anniversary gift. I was greeted by the sight of people frozen in place on the shopping concourse... two old ladies holding hands, other shoppers simply standing still, a woman with a stroller looking like a statue. I was taken aback. I was the only one walking through this scene. I thought, for a moment, that I had stumbled across a piece of performance art. Then, I thought I was dreaming -- the way I used to when I was a boy -- and that time had stopped for everyone else except me.

Soon a voice over a loudspeaker thanked everyone, and the shoppers resumed their motions in unison. Evidently, this was a moment of silence in observance of when the second tower had collapsed. I walked into a Museum of Boston shop and fingered an Edward Hopper print of a lighthouse. But I didn't buy it, mostly because the young woman behind the sales counter was crying, and I felt as if I should leave her alone.

I spent the rest of the day apparently invisible, because people ignored me -- walking right into and seemingly through me, engaging in conversations while I stood between them. I wound up buying an anniversary gift from a vendor who didn't even look up from her phone.

Feeling disoriented, I wandered into small St. Francis' Chapel, adjacent to Hynes Auditorium. A young woman wearing a red, white and blue scarf stood in front of the altar. She had a mane of blonde hair that looked like a veil, as if she were an angel. When the chapel started to fill for a 9/11 memorial service, I decided to stay.

See related post,
"How Long Until the Elmos Show Up at Ground Zero."

A bearded young priest presided over a reverent prayer service: a few readings, a few songs, a poem from a local nun. The closing song -- the funeral hymn, "You Are Mine" -- hit me hard. "I will take you home," sang the angel, and at those words I finally, after a full year, started to openly cry. It took me several minutes to compose myself to leave. When I did, the priest was waiting at the door so I shook his hand and quietly said "thank you."

I passed the Sheraton's piano bar on the way back to my own hotel. A jazz trio was playing "Autumn Breeze," and through the windows I could see the end-of-summer outside world literally being buffeted about by the tail end of a hurricane named Gustave. No one around me seemed to notice or care about the outside winds, or the music. But I was enchanted. I clapped when the song ended, and the trio looked up and smiled and waved to me to sit at the bar.

I spent the rest of the evening nursing beers while enjoying the music, and scribbling furiously on a legal pad. I was writing down everything I could recall about 9/11. Somehow -- and this is the lesson I learned that day -- in the very act of writing, I no longer felt out of place and I no longer felt invisible.

Go Set a Calendar Reminder for Sept. 21

Have you read the recently published “Go Set a Watchman”? One of my favorite writers, Harper Lee (see here), had originally submitted this novel for publication in 1957.

Her editor, Tay Hohoff, was enamored by the childhood flashbacks in the novel, and she recognized Ms. Lee’s obvious talent. But Ms. Hohoff also recognized a weak plot, and she encouraged the extensive re-write that eventually became “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

The two novels offer the same voice, many of the same characters and the same writing style (take that, Truman Capote), but they are vastly different in their appeal and impact.

Every writer needs an editor, and every great writer craves constructive criticism.

That’s why I’m excited our IABC-New Jersey chapter is sponsoring a writing workshop by none other than Ann Wylie on Sept. 21, 2015, on the Fairleigh Dickinson University campus.

Ann, who would no doubt delete the “none other than” in the previous sentence, is the author of more than a dozen learning tools that help people improve their communications skills. Her bio itself is an interesting read, including the highlight that “Ann’s popular writing workshops take her from Atlanta to Amsterdam, from Boston to Brussels, from Hollywood to Helsinki, and from Portland to Paris.”

And, on Sept. 21, she’ll bring her writing workshop to Madison, N.J.

Sign-up information and details are posted on Eventbrite, and we are offering tickets for this full-day workshop at below-market prices (especially for IABC members). It promises to be a great kickoff to another great season of professional development events sponsored by IABC-New Jersey.

The best part? This is the kind of professional development program that can benefit everyone.

Even the next Harper Lee.


This post originally appeared on the IABC-New Jersey website.

Write As If Syd Penner Were Editing

Dance like nobody's watching. Sing like nobody's listening. But write as if Syd Penner's looking over your shoulder.

Penner was a legendary copy editor for the New York Daily News in the pre-Internet era. While a Google search of my new Verizon colleague “Arianna Huffington” plus “Huffington Post” will yield about 456,000 results in 0.36 seconds, a similar search of Penner’s affiliation with the News yields just three results.

As Paul LaRosa notes, Penner wrote an internal newsletter called “The Printer’s Devil” about the craft of writing and telling stories on a deadline.

Late in his career, Penner also helped train new writers in NYNEX’s PR department – and I had my first news release drafts marked up by this unfailingly polite and obsessively thorough editor.

I should have kept souvenir copies of the handiwork of Jimmy Breslin’s editor, but instead I've salvaged only one old mimeographed copy of “The Printer’s Devil.” Read this, and you will appreciate immediately that, to Syd Penner, every word was precious.

Years later, another colleague – Steve Marcus, a former award-winning reporter for The New York Post – had the task of editing the copy produced by Verizon’s PR department. Marcus knew Penner well, and he had the same respectful touch in eviscerating all our news releases and blog posts.

I’ve seen many executives retire, and most are barely remembered the day after they leave. Such is the nature of business.

Yet Steve retired about two months ago (that's his empty office in the photo), and there’s still a gaping hole here. Such is the nature of art.

Without Penner and Marcus, we’re all on our own – and we’re scrambling. Many folks here have turned to our colleague Harry Mitchell for editing help in the interim, but Harry too is retiring from Verizon at the end of this week.

With the prospect of losing even Harry as a sanity check, another colleague, Libby Jacobson, recently sent me an email about a Techdirt article, “Comcast Really Wants Me To Stop Calling Their Top Lobbyist A ‘Top Lobbyist’.”

She bet I could come up with some tips based on that post, wherein a PR person parses the legal definition of the word “lobbyist” in defiance of common sense – and, in the process, generates much more unwanted attention.

I’ll take that bet, Libby.

Here are five tips to help writers in PR departments survive without a Syd Penner at their side:

1. Respect the Word.

A duck is a duck is a duck. A crash landing isn’t an anomaly. A lobbyist isn’t a chief diversity officer.

PR should simplify. That’s hardly ever the case, I know, because I’m also the author of Verizon’s earnings releases – but at least that should be the goal.

2. Keep Reading.

Even worse than PR is the Orwellian doublespeak of politics, and I highly recommend books such as Barton Swaim’s recent “The Speechwriter.” It’s interesting, and entertaining, to read about how politicians communicate – and politics is a field that, by its nature, is always on the leading edge of new communications and PR practices.

3. Keep Reading, Without Prejudice.

Still, it isn’t helpful to only read about things that could help you on the job. My wife is the most educated person I know – largely because she loves reading newspapers from cover to cover. She discovers new ideas because she isn’t only reading about things she thinks she wants to read about.

Recently, I read a marvelous memoir, “Another Little Piece of My Heart,” by the writer Richard Goldstein. His career path and point of view on many topics are seemingly the exact opposite of mine. Yet I was thrilled to read about his own Syd Penner – the legendary, and Google-famous, Clay Felker. Through the magic of the Internet, I even sent Richard a note about the book. He politely replied, and the universe didn’t implode.

4. Love Your Editor.

Everyone needs an editor. You should jump at any opportunity to work with someone to improve your writing. One organization I’m involved with – IABC’s New Jersey chapter – is hosting a day-long writing workshop with Ann Wylie, a talented editor who is well-known in PR circles. If you can be in Madison, NJ, on Sept. 21, there probably isn’t a better use of your time.

5. Handle Words With Care.

This has never been more important. Another magical side of the Internet is that every word you write now lives forever.

One of my favorite books (well, at least it had been a favorite before my wife and I raised two daughters) ends by evoking the secret of durable pigments.

One reason we all want to write and post and share is that we want to leave our mark on the world. Social media is the new durable pigment, and if we want to communicate something that has lasting value, we should choose our words wisely.

The only known photo of me and Harry Mitchell.

That’s why, in this very sentence, I’ll simply mention the names of Harry Mitchell and Syd Penner.

Goodbye, Harry. We’ll miss you. I hope to be seeing you soon, forever linked with Mr. Penner, on Google.

---

This post originally appeared on LinkedIn.

Re-reading "Lolita" in Middle Age

I was half the age of Nabokov’s protagonist when I first read “Lolita” – and it enthralled me. As of my last reading, just a few weeks ago, I’m about the age of Nabokov himself when he wrote his love letter to the English language. And it repelled me. (You can always count on a Goodreads review for a fancy prose style.)

I guess I’m a grownup now. I’ve helped raise two daughters in the meantime. And, over time, I’ve come to understand that people aren't as smart as they think they are. Even the genius Vladimir.

“Genius” is a word that appears many times in this book, by the way – the author seems quite enamored with it. Odd that there are very few words relating to the impact of the nearly world-immolating warfare that had ended just a few years prior. Or, say, any description of how Humbert and Lolita might have managed to spend Christmas Eve together.

That would be too prosaic. And this, this book, is a work of Art. The real-life horror in “Lolita” is masked by language -- the demeaning and beating of women, deaths by childbirth and cancer, Humbert’s monumental callousness and narcissism, poor Charlotte… As for the great poetic love, it’s really nothing more than pedophilia played out in prostitution, threats and manipulation, as Lolita cried herself to sleep every night.

There’s nothing wrong with artifice and pretty words. Every Memorial Day weekend, I find myself re-reading “The Great Gatsby,” and it never ceases to enchant me. It’s become a favorite of one of my daughters too.

I actually enjoy life as a sentimental wretch. It’s just that I now realize that Humbert Humbert isn’t a kindred spirit. Instead, Humbert is really just Vladimir’s comical Gaston Godin character with a better haircut.

And, about that haircut, Vladimir... I mean, about that parenthetical scene in “Lolita” where a barber in Kasbeam cuts Humbert’s hair while telling stories of his long-dead son as if he were still alive…

I wonder if perhaps his story would have been the more poetic one to tell.

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