Dive into... HAPPY AS
In this exclusive extract from The Morning Show host's new memoir, Larry recalls the moment he found what would become his most prized possession...
It was my twenty-first birthday. Some of my work colleagues took me out for drinks and presented me with a beautiful new suit. They’d all chipped in for this special birthday present. It was a fancy suit – well, fancier than what I’d been wearing up to that point.
I was a reporter on TV, but I had a terrible wardrobe. I had a network clothing allowance these days, but I’d sneakily concluded that if I borrowed Dad’s clothes for work, I could use it to buy surfboards instead. Clothes weren’t important to me, surfboards were.
I think buying me the suit was like a fashion intervention. I was wearing Dad’s doublebreasted, wide-lapelled jacket and triple-pleated slacks that day, and I saw my friends look me up and down as they handed over the gift.
Maybe I dressed like an old man, but I had a carport full of the best surfboards in Bondi, so technically I was the winner.
My new suit was grey and shiny – not classy-expensive shiny but cheap-synthetic shiny. But all my socks were black, and everyone knows only losers wear black socks with a grey suit. It’s highly unlikely any man wearing a grey suit with black socks has ever managed to convince a woman to sleep with him. Like a guy wearing socks with Crocs, you know he’s not getting any sex anytime soon.
I got home late that night and went straight to bed. Next morning, I set off on the Great Grey Sock Hunt.
My sock drawer was a dark and dangerous place – I would never let Mum or those guys from CSI with the blue lights within a mile of it. I desperately rummaged around but couldn’t find anything suitable. Sure, there were some white socks that had accidentally been washed with black socks, but they were smudgy, blotchy grey, not that special “shiny TV suit” shade of grey.
So, next stop: Dad’s sock drawer. Mum and Dad had already left for work. I moved all Dad’s white, black and blue socks around – and then I saw them, curled up in the back corner: a pair of lonely, lost, unloved grey socks.
This was a huge fashion victory. A grey suit and grey socks! Could this day get any better?
Well, given you’re only a few hundred words into this story and nothing’s really happened yet, you can take it for granted this day got a whole lot better. Because the socks were actually hiding an even greater treasure, something that would change my life forever.
A dusty old wristwatch. It looked cheap, plain and pretty unimpressive, which was how my last girlfriend had described me. The inner part of the face was blotchy and
off-white – perhaps it had once been shiny white but not now. The gold-coloured hands had tiny green segments that glowed in the dark.
The band was red, black and grey striped, one of those really cheap ones you used to buy in a barber shop.
It might have been ordinary, but it did the job, which was exactly how my current girlfriend described me. I thought it was beautiful.
I picked it up and turned it over. Inscribed on the back was “To David from Mother, 8/2/56”.
Dad was into his modern, flashy watches, so I couldn’t picture this antique-looking thing on his tanned, hairy wrist.
I phoned him at his office and told him I’d just found a curious old watch. He said he hadn’t seen it or even thought about it in many, many years, and couldn’t have found it if he’d wanted to.
Then came the moment
I’ll never forget. He said, “That was my twenty-first birthday present.”
Neither of us spoke for the next few seconds as we came to terms with the very strange coincidence in front of us.
“Wait, wait, hang on,” I said, “You got this watch for your twenty-first birthday, you’d completely forgotten it even existed, and then I find it at the back of your sock drawer the day after my twenty-first birthday?”
Was this an incredible coincidence, or – as I would ask myself hundreds of times over the ensuing decades – had I somehow been divinely guided here to find this?
This is an edited extract from HAPPY AS by Larry Emdur. Out Wednesday (Harpercollins, $34.99)