Ex-Mad Man
Thirty-four years on Madison Avenue. Three months off it.
Notes from the kitchen table and the boatyard.

Jump to the beginning (August 2)

Sept. 26 -- Sunday evening

I have a confession, and I'm going to make it here, where only strangers and my sister-in-law will read it.

Last night Tom and I sat in the cockpit of the boat, up on her stands in the yard, with a thermos of coffee and the biggest moon I have seen in years coming up over the Norwalk Islands. Tom is our son, 28, a finish carpenter, and the only member of this family who knows which end of a sander goes down. We'd been working on the deck all day. Nobody else in the yard. Halyards clinking on the boats still in the water.

And out of nowhere I told him I was scared. Scared of the money, scared of the phone not ringing, scared that the last good ad I will ever write is already behind me and I didn't notice it go by. Thirty years I came home at nine o'clock at night and never once told that boy I was scared of anything. He didn't say anything for a while. Then he said, "I know, Dad. You've been sanding the same spot for an hour." Then he poured me more coffee.

Today I watched the Ryder Cup. The Americans went into Sunday down ten to six and came back and won it, and grown men ran across a green in Brookline like schoolboys. I refuse to draw the parallel. I'm 57, not dead. All right. I'll draw it a little.

Sept. 17 -- Friday

What's left of Hurricane Floyd came through last night and rained on Connecticut as if it held a grudge. I lay awake listening to it and thinking about the boat, which is not in the water but is under a blue tarp that I tied myself, and I was a Boy Scout for about three weeks in 1953.

Down to the yard at six. Tom was already there, of course, in his truck with the wipers going, grinning at me. The tarp had held. Mostly. The jackstands held. There was some water in the bilge that came in through the deck around the stanchions, which is precisely the leak we've spent a month finding. So, in a sense, Floyd did our survey for us, free of charge. I've worked for worse clients.

Sept. 14 -- Tuesday

Presented to the bank today. My first freelance job: a small savings bank up the shoreline that wants a campaign for home equity loans and, I'm told, "a fresh new voice." I am fifty-seven. My voice is many things.

The brand manager is 31, a nice young woman in a pantsuit who said "going forward" eleven times. I counted on my legal pad. I showed three directions. The one I believe in is a quiet little campaign built on one line: We've been here since 1872. We'll be here Monday. She loved it. Then she said, "Can we make it more edgy?" I said a bank should be about as edgy as a bread box. She laughed and wrote something down, and I have no idea whether it said "brilliant" or "dinosaur."

They pay by the job, which is how I got paid in 1966. Everything old is new again, including me, apparently, at a day rate.

Sept. 7 -- Tuesday

Anne went back to work today.

She hasn't had a job outside this house since 1974, when she left teaching to have our daughter, Libby. She kept her certificate up, God knows why, maybe for exactly this. She's a long-term substitute in a third grade at the elementary school across town, for a teacher out on maternity leave until January. She was up at five. She changed her blouse three times. She asked me if she looked old. I said she looked like a teacher, which was the right answer, as it turned out.

I made her lunch. Turkey on rye, an apple, two of the good cookies. I put it in a brown bag and wrote ANNE on it with a marker, the way she did for the kids for fifteen years, and she laughed so hard she had to sit down. Then she cried a little. Then she went.

Here is the part I'm not proud of. After she left I stood in the kitchen and felt something that wasn't only pride. For thirty years I was the one who went out the door. I don't know what I am when I'm the one who stays and watches the car back out.

She came home at four with glitter in her hair and twenty-two drawings of "My Summer." She is exhausted and happier than I've seen her since the kids left. Both of those are true.

Sept. 2 -- Thursday

Went into the city for an interview. The headhunter called it "a very exciting interactive shop in Silicon Alley," which means a loft on lower Broadway with exposed brick, a foosball table and a refrigerator full of free soda. No one there was older than my shoes.

I was interviewed by a creative director who is 29 years old. He had very good manners and sneakers that cost more than my first car. He asked about my web experience. I told him I once wrote an ad for a spider spray. He didn't laugh. They don't do jokes about the web down there. It's all very serious, like a seminary.

Then he asked where I see myself in five years. I have been asked that question maybe four times in my life and I have asked it maybe four hundred. I found I had no answer. I said, "On a boat, with any luck." He wrote that down too.

I came into this business in 1965 because of the Volkswagen ads, "Think Small" and the rest of them. I wanted to write things that sounded like a smart friend talking. I don't think I've changed my mind about that. I think the business has changed its mind about me.

Aug. 21 -- Saturday

Introductions are in order. In July, against the advice of my wife, my accountant and my own better judgment, I bought a boat. A 1968 sloop, twenty-six feet, fiberglass, from a widow in Old Saybrook whose husband sailed her every summer until his knees gave out. She was built the year Anne and I were married, which is either a sign or a sales pitch I made up for myself. I paid less for her than for a used Buick, and she is worth every penny of that and not a penny more.

Her name is painted on the transom: Persistence. I wanted to change it. The man who runs the yard told me, dead serious, that renaming a boat without the proper ceremony is the worst luck there is. So Persistence she stays. I've written worse names for cars.

Today Tom and I scraped bottom paint for seven hours. He talks to the old gas engine as if it were a sick relative. I fetched coffee and held things. It is the happiest I've been since June.

Aug. 11 -- Wednesday

Saw the eclipse in England and France on the morning news. The sun goes out for a couple of minutes and everybody cheers when it comes back. That seems about right to me. Tired tonight. More soon.

Aug. 2 -- Monday

Our son Tom set up this computer for me, and this page, and showed me how to type things into it, and then went home and left me alone with it, the way you leave a dog with a new bone.

So. For the record. In the spring my agency merged with a bigger agency. Everyone said nothing would change. I have written that sentence myself for clients, more than once, and I should have known better. On Friday, June 11, at 4:30 in the afternoon, a man from the other agency, whom I had met twice, called me into a conference room and read to me from a piece of paper. Six months' salary. Insurance through something called COBRA, which sounds like a villain in a spy picture and costs about as much as one. A nice speech about "my legacy." I carried my box to the elevator myself. Thirty-four years fits in one box, if you don't keep the awards, and I didn't.

For thirty-four years I wrote things for other people to sign. Let's see if I can write something for myself. I don't know yet what it's about. That's never stopped me before.

If you'd like a note when there's a new installment, write and tell me, and I'll put you on my list. Keeping lists used to be a thing I had a secretary for. I am learning. Thank you to the gentleman in Chicago, also 57 and also "consulting," who wrote last week. Hang in there.

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This page has been read

times since August. More than some of my radio spots.

Last updated Sunday, September 26, 1999.
Text © 1999 C. Harrington. All rights reserved, such as they are.