What, Me Worry?
It was 1967 at Hebron Academy in south-central Maine. This small, but respected prep school was a dead ringer for the school in Dead Poets Society and I was attending as a freshman. I had somehow lucked into a single room on the third-floor northwest corner but there were another twenty freshmen boys on the floor and one teacher/proctor, Mr. Beauchamp. He was no Robin Williams, Captain, my Captain. He was a stuffy young man with a British bearing and just enough gumption to get a low-paid job with free room and board at a remote New England private school for boys. If I think back (not that the thought ever occurred to me at the time), he was probably sexual-orientation-confused if not gender-confused. He tolerated us but mostly stayed in his rooms with his door closed. When we handed in some sort of written form or homework to him, he would move it around his desk with the eraser-end of his pencil with great disdain for the young American germs we undoubtedly carried. That all left the twenty-one of us to clique and do whatever we wanted within reason during most of our free time. Free time was very limited anyway to a few hours a day during the week, and Saturday and Sunday afternoons. All the other times including evenings and Saturday mornings were required study times and between Sunday’s church and Sunday vespers, we had precious little free time by design. What time we had, my clique was partial to spending reading and chortling about MAD Magazine.
In 1954, Harvey Kurtzman, who had started a magazine called MAD two years prior, saw a postcard of a redheaded, freckle-faced hapless kid with the legend, “Me worry?” The kid was called Melvin Coznowski or some such name. Then Al Feldstein, the next editor of MAD, put the kid on the cover with the name of Alfred E. Neuman and in 1956 ran him on the cover as a potential presidential candidate with the thought, “You could do worse, you always have!” Alfred went from presidential candidate to being on Mt. Rushmore in the next edition and has since been seen on Egyptian sarcophagi and champagne bottle corks. His face, over the years, has transcended MAD Magazine and come to be associated with political cartoons with the notion of unquestioning stupidity by most voters. Wow, that seems to hit home more than I thought during these days of the floundering of the Trump Administration.
National Lampoon, the Harvard graduate version of MAD Magazine took Alfred E. Neuman’s image to another level with him dressed like Lt. Calley and the legend, “What, My Lai?” He has gone on to grace the punch lines of cartoons from Peanuts to Beetle Bailey, the Simpsons and even Superman.
Barack Obama referenced his ears looking like those of Neuman. George W. Bush had some physical similarity, but an even greater tendency to be unworried by events. Prince Charles is a dead ringer for Neuman. Other, more recent politicians including Boris Johnson and Mayor Pete Buttigieg have been either attitudinally or physically compared to Alfred. We can’t seem to get Alfred E. Neuman unstuck from our psychic shoe. It really is a testament to MAD Magazine that they chose such a ubiquitous character with such a universally recognized shrugging sense of letting the world just wash over them rather than trying to change it.
I think the “What, Me Worry?” approach to life has lots to recommend it. The biggest plus is the fact that we all tend to sweat the small stuff way too much. It may be our Alpha, controlling, OCD way of life where we can see and hear everything on our smartphones within seconds of it happening. This barrage of information naturally makes us hyper-sensitive to the need to react. Most often, if we pause and let things take their course, we will find that we are better for not having reacted at all.
So, here I am, a mere three months from moving on to my “retirement house” in San Diego, and all I can do is worry about this and that. The big transitions in life involve leaving home for school, leaving school for work and then leaving work for retirement. There are plenty of mini-transitions we all go through over the years. To some, they may not be so mini, especially if they involve marriage, children, divorce or foreign assignments. Going off to school and work we’re exciting moves forward that everyone my age was doing. The marriage, children and divorce transitions never phased me, not to say I didn’t take them all seriously and try to pay great attention to doing the right thing. Worry was not what I would have used to characterize those events. But this transition to retirement is very much a voluntary thing that is rife with ambivalence and way more worry than I expected. There is lots to look forward to, but probably even more to be worried about. What will I do every day? Will I work a lot and just travel all the time? Who will I hang around with? Will I stay close with my children or will they drift away? Will they visit us? How often will we visit them? Will we keep our old friends or get new friends? Will we like San Diego full-time? I can’t stand it. Retirement is supposed to be a carefree time of life, isn’t it? Who says so. anyway?
Maybe I’m supposed to be worried. While I’ve always enjoyed MAD Magazine and have nothing but fun good thoughts about it and good old Alfred E. Neuman, I can’t say I ever appreciated or adopted the “What, Me Worry?” attitude in anything I ever did. I enjoyed it from afar the way people laugh at physical comedy. Because I have always eschewed regrets as a matter of policy, I think I assumed that worries did not plague me. I’m beginning to think maybe I had them all along, but I just handled them better than most. I remember thinking that my adventurous, world-traveling, high-performance mother never worried about anything. Maybe I inherited some of that, but what I suspect I did was just inherit the grin and bear it, always finding the silver lining way of survival. It may be the first thing I wish I could ask her. Mom, how did you gear down for retirement and how did you deal with the angst of that big final change? I suspect she might have said something like, “What, me worry?”