Synkroniciti is stoked to welcome back writer and poet Shelly Lowenkopf of California with “Kids in Car Windows, Giving Him the Finger,” a delightfully irreverent and hilarious short story about the irritability that often occurs at mid-life. There comes a point when we realize that many of the things promised us for following the corporate game plan are not going to appear and we are never going to reach a point where we feel respected, successful, and secure–at least not by following conventional wisdom. We will simply be replaced by younger folks who can work harder and longer hours, despite the value of our experience. For Harry Lang, it starts when he begins noticing little boys in cars flipping him the bird.
“Best he could remember how it got started between him and the kids, the time he stood in line one afternoon at Tio Taco truck, parked in the gas station lot opposite the Santa Barbara Bowl. Not a thought in his head except whether to order two of Tio Taco’s famed birria specials. Shaved cabbage. Cilantro. Sauce to die for. In the rear seat of a car, stopped for the traffic, a boy, from the look of him not yet a teen. Nine, maybe ten. A baseball cap, bill twisted to the rear. The kid spotted him, scowled, stuck his tongue out, flipped the bird before the car sped off.
The entire transaction less than five seconds, made Lang check at the guy in line in front of him, turn to the guy behind him. No way the kid meant Lang for his target. Right?”
This irritability comes to a head at work at a manager’s meeting when his performance is called in to question by a younger colleague. Despite his manager’s assertion that Harry produces results, the effrontery gets to Harry. When the upstart gets up out of his seat, ready to fight, Harry throws his chair and punches the guy in the jaw.
Shelly gives us a wonderful character in Harry: honest, hard-working, in love with his wife (even when she replaces his Sierra Nevada with Michelob), and foul-mouthed. We feel empathy and sympathy for his grumpiness and the lack of interest the world has in his happiness–probably because we see in him a bit of ourselves, and because he has enough guts to fight the system. We want him to break free and land on his feet.
Read “Kids in Car Windows, Giving Him the Finger,” a wonderful, sassy story about the patterns of a mid-life crisis, in Synkroniciti’s “Patterns” issue, Vol. 7, No. 4, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Shelly Lowenkopf no longer does many of the things he used to, not so much because he has in any way mellowed, but rather because living in Santa Barbara, reading and writing like crazy seem the sanest alternative. His novel, Santa Barbara Dreams, is forthcoming in 2026. Please visit his website, https://shellylowenkopf.com/.