Gavin DeGraw -- "I Don't Want to Be" (2003)

I'm tired of looking 'round rooms

Wondering what I gotta do

Or who I'm supposed to be

I'm currently reading a very interesting book: Louis Begley's 1996 novel, About Schmidt.

Begley (who was born Ludwik Begleiter in Poland in 1933) is a holocaust survivor whose family moved to New York City in 1947. Begley graduated from Harvard College (summa cum laude) and Harvard Law School (magna cum laude), and then went to work for a prestigious Wall Street law firm, eventually heading up the firm's international practice.

Louis Begley (and friend)

Begley surprised his law partners and friends when he published a highly-praised first novel in 1991 -- he was 57 years old -- and he's gone on to write nine more.

The protagonist of About Schmidt, Albert Schmidt, is a sixtyish partner at a white-shoe New York law firm who takes early retirement to care for his dying wife. When the book opens, he is living in comfort in a lovely home (left to his wife by her maiden aunt) in an affluent beach community on Long Island.

He dotes on his only child, a beautiful, brilliant (i.e., Harvard summa cum laude) daughter, Charlotte, even though she has gone into public relations, a career that he views as beneath her.

Even worse, Charlotte has decided to marry a young partner at her father's old firm -- a talented lawyer whom Schmidt mentored and supported for partnership, but never really liked.  Schmidt is unhappy about the match in part because the prospective groom is Jewish.

Schmidt is also worried about what to do with his home.  His wife has left him a life estate, so the house will go to his daughter when he dies.  But he feels he should move out and give her and her new husband the house now even though there would be a sizeable tax bill to pay as a result.

Complicating the situation further is the fact that his former law firm has decided to amend its retirement plan so retired partners get less and the working partners get more. 

Given the looming tax obligation, the need to buy a new house to live in, and the upcoming reduction in his pension, Schmidt is facing not only a life without female companionship, but also a much more modest standard of living.

Then something completely unanticipated happens: Schmidt falls in love (in lust?) with a friendly waitress from the local bar and grill -- a waitress who just happens to be younger than his daughter.  And for no apparent reason, the waitress -- a smart, attractive, and non-gold-digging young woman -- is physically attracted to the rather dull, sixty-something Schmidt.  

I am sufficiently narcissistic to find parallels between myself and the protagonists of many of the novels I read.  But any objective observer would have to admit that there are a number of similarities between Schmidt and myself.

To wit. We are both lawyers, and both the same age. Schmidt is recently retired, and I expect to be retired soon.  Each of us has a recently-engaged daughter.

Schmidt's wife's family's house on Long Island is something like my mother-in-law's Cape Cod house.  (The photographs that illustrate this post are daylilies that were blooming at that house when I was vacationing there last month.  They were planted by a man who rented our house many years ago.  He was a devoted daylily hybridizer, and for all I know, these are unique cultivars that are found nowhere else on earth.)

Here's where Schmidt's fictional life diverges sharply from mine: my wife is not only alive, but perfectly healthy.

That places a rather large obstacle squarely in the way of my shacking up with a lissome, twenty-something waitress like that lucky bastard Schmidt.

Actually, I can't really imagine having much of a relationship with a woman who is younger than my daughters.  But someone closer to my age would be very nice.  (Not too old, of course -- I'd have to draw the line at 59.  Most of the women I know really hit the wall at 60.)

By the way, I not only have some things in common with the protagonist of About Schmidt, but also with its author.  For example, we are both graduates of Harvard Law School.  Also, neither of us wrote a novel before turning 57.

Begley has written two sequels to About Schmidt -- I have all three novels, thanks to the public library, and I expect to read them back to back to back. 

I also expect to start eating out more.  (You never know . . .)

About Schmidt was made into a 2002 movie starring Jack Nicholson and directed by Alexander Payne (who also directed Election, Sideways, and The Descendants).

In the movie, Schmidt lives in Omaha instead of New York City, is an insurance actuary instead of a lawyer, and has an RV instead of a house in the Hamptons.

The movie Schmidt does have a daughter who is marrying a man he doesn't like, but there's no young waitress.  That's because his wife is still alive.

A New Yorker article about the movie was titled "Not Really About Schmidt."  The trailer for the movie proves that as far as the book and movie are concerned, never the twain shall meet:

Our featured song, Gavin DeGraw's "I Don't Want to Be," sounded vaguely familiar to me when I heard it on the radio while driving to the Kream 'n' Kone in South Dennis for a big plate of fried clams (with bellies, of course) and onion rings. It was the theme to the long-running TV teen drama, One Tree Hill, and has been performed by at least six American Idol contestants.

DeGraw said that "I Don't Want to Be" enabled him to pay off his college debt.

Here's "I Don't Want to Be":

Use this link to buy the song from Amazon:

Madness -- "Our House" (1983)

Our house, it has a crowd

There's always something happening

And it's usually quite loud

Our Cape Cod house didn't have as big a crowd as usual when I was there last month.  (Our youngest son was there for the duration, and one of my daughters came for a few days -- she will get married here next fall, and is already interviewing photographers and DJs.  But my other two kids had work to do, so we didn't see them this vacation.)

My in-laws gave their Cape Cod house a name when they bought it in the early fifties: Beach Run.  Here's a picture of Beach Run from the front:

Here's a picture from the back.  (The house was built not quite a hundred years ago.  The one-story wing to the left is a master bedroom suite that was added on to the house about 20 years ago.)

Here's a picture of the backyard, where Caroline's wedding will be held: 

See the little outbuilding to the right?  That's a garage and storage shed with a small room with a TV and a daybed we call "The Study."  The garage used to be as far in front of the main house as it is behind the house now -- that's because the erosion of the cliff at the edge of the property got so bad that the house was only about 10 feet from the cliff's edge.  My in-laws had to build a new foundation and move the house about 100 feet inland.  Fortunately, their lot was big enough that they could do it.  But stabilizing that cliff has been a struggle.

We have a small deck (or "belvedere," which means "beautiful sight" in Italian) overlooking Massachusetts Bay.  Here's the view looking down the stairs from the belvedere to the beach at low tide:

Here's the view about an hour before high tide:

Here's a picture Caroline took on the beach with her iPhone, which puts all my photos to shame:

(I'm getting a new Blackberry 10 at work in a few days, so hopefully you'll notice a dramatic improvement in the quality of my 2 or 3 lines photos very soon.)

Caroline's reception will be held at the Dennis Inn, which is only one-third of a mile from our house:

Most Americans will remember Madness as a one-hit wonder (assuming they remember the group at all).  This was that hit -- "Our House" reached #7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1983. 

But Madness was a big deal in the UK.  Between 1979 and 1983, they released 16 singles in the UK, ten of which made the top five.  (None of those 16 singles failed to reach the UK top 20.)

Madness is a ska band.  "Ska" is the name given to a musical genre that originated in Jamaica in the late fifties -- it is a predecessor to reggae.

Ska was much more popular in the UK than in the United States.  I have to admit that I've never been a big fan of ska (or reggae).  But "Our House" isn't a very ska-ish ska record -- it's more of a straight pop song.   

I was reminded of "Our House" today while listening to Girl Talk's All Day, which is a mashup album.  You'll hear a sample of "Our House" beginning at 2:36 of the "Down for the Count" track from that album, which contains samples from some 20 recording artists -- most of them are rappers (e.g., B.o.B., LL Cool J, Young MC, and 2 Live Crew), but this mashup also samples Derek and the Dominoes, Michael Jackson, T. Rex, and Billy Idol.

Here's "Down for the Count":

And here's the official music video for "Our House":

Click here to buy the song from Amazon: