Another Loss

At some point in one's life--and I'm beginning to suspect it's in your mid-40s--too many of the people you associate with your youth begin to pass away. I've written about several of them already on this blog, most recently Cyd Charisse. I know that we must face the loss of icons from time to time, but it does seem to be happening with alarming frequency these days.

This morning I saw on the front page of the Los Angeles Times that George Carlin had died. I can't even begin to express how much his passing saddens me. When I was younger, a teenager, I had friends who owned all of Carlin's albums. We used to listen to them and laugh into the early morning hours. (We did the same with Richard Pryor's albums, and his passing hit me very hard too.) Once Carlin started making HBO specials, we would stay home to watch them, whatever night they were on. Not everyone had cable in those days; it was still a bit of a novelty in some parts of the world, believe it or not. But, thankfully, one friend did and we skipped everything that was going on at the time in order to watch Carlin. We'd laugh throughout the show and then spend the rest of the week retelling the jokes and stories to each other so that we could laugh again.

What most impressed me about his work was his attention to language. Here was a man who knew intricately the meanings of words and the ways that we twist the meanings of words. He could riff for what seemed like hours on a single word like "stuff." And I'll never forget the first time that I heard the "seven words you can't say on television" routine. Carlin was a wonder to behold as he dissected our national and international obsessions with language use.

Not everyone "got" Carlin, and I think that's what drew a lot of us to him. The people who didn't understand were somehow just too stupid. And that would include members of my own family, who never quite understood a lot of the things that I was interested in as a kid. A few years ago--perhaps it was the last time I went home for Thanksgiving, now that I think about it--one of my cousins asked my mother what would be an appropriate last-minute gift for me (since she had purchased Christmas presents for everyone else). My mother suggested Carlin's When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? It's a hilarious read, but my cousin asked several times if she heard my mother correctly. And when I opened it, she had to reassure me that my mother had said it was what I wanted. By the way, I don't think that story is particularly telling of a mindset of the South either. I would wager that there are lots of people throughout the United States who never understood either. Too bad.

My friend B is, no doubt, inconsolable today. I understand her sadness. She is feeling these losses the same as I am. There are too many of them around these days.