Dinner at Mom's

“The oldest form of theater is the dinner table. It's got five or six people, new show every night, same players. Good ensemble; the people have worked together a lot.”  ~ Michael J. Fox

San Mateo, circa 1960s.  Dinner was the required event at our house and in most American households.  In our home it was straight up six, every night right after mom and dad had drained their martinis.  About five, dad would shake up some gin with a whisper of vermouth in a gray metal cocktail shaker and the parents would savor a couple of cocktails until dinner time.  The gin was cheap stuff, probably Seagram’s.  I doubt the existence of snooty boutique gin in 1960 and mom and dad wouldn't have it if it did exist. It was after I’d moved back home after college that dad included me in the ritual and I developed a taste for martinis.  I still had the cocktail shaker and used it up until a few years ago when the doc took alcohol off my menu.  I recently gave it to my son in law for his home bar. In sixties America you didn't entertain the thought of skipping dinner for work or an “activity.”  Yeah, dinner was the activity; not soccer or dance class or karate.  And certainly not work.  You worked your 8 hour day and then came home.  Those leashes known as cell phones and laptops were fantasies in the minds of a few dreamers.  Dinnertime was sacred.

Easter; Memories of Eggs, Dogs, Cold Cuts and Japanese Tourists

“New Rule: Someone must x-ray my stomach to see if the Peeps I ate on Easter are still in there, intact and completely undigested. And I'm not talking about this past Easter. I'm talking about the last time I celebrated Easter, in 1962.”  ~ Bill Maher

“And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split. The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus' resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many people.” ~ Gospel according to Matthew 27:50-53.

It’s Easter; the time to celebrate eggs, chocolate, hard boiled and jelly bean; pastels; bunnies; baby chicks; horrid marshmallows called Peeps; bright flowers and spring.  Oh yeah, it also celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ three days after he was crucified, which is celebrated as Good Friday.  That’s the Christian (read; original) version of the holiday and I’m not here to refute it or ratify it.  I’m not feeling a religious debate today. 

On Rainy Days and Childhood

The wife and I are babysitting the grandchildren, “tending kids” as my Uncle Al used to say, on a rainy Saturday morning.  Rain has been a rarity in California this drought year but in the last couple days it’s been nonstop torrential.  The pool which was on the verge of disturbingly low is getting scarily close to the brim.  I've been expecting this rain.  I know to expect a soaker every year about this time.  You can keep your cloud seeding and your rain prayers and novenas and rosaries.  Here in the San Francisco Bay Area we have a much more reliable rain maker – the annual Chinese New Year Parade in San Francisco’s Chinatown.  You don’t got to show me no stinking rain dances here in San Francisco.  Just trot out a dragon, some lion dancers and light up a string of firecrackers and an old bearded boat builder carrying a staff and gathering pairs of animals can't be far behind.  The parade is next weekend and I have a feeling that, as per tradition, this Saturday’s storm is just a prequel to the gully washer that’s going to flood the parade route next Saturday night. 

Christmas Potpourri 2013: Bikes and Turkey Soda and "Twains" (Err Trains)

"Christmas isn't a season.  It's a feeling."  ~Edna Ferber

Many of us in America start the countdown to Christmas as soon as the Thanksgiving leftovers have been stuffed into the fridge.  And so Christmas seemed to arrive early this year because just when we were waking up from the turkey and stuffing stupor and erupting cranberry flavored belches November was already rolling into December.

Tall Tales of Trimming Trees

Never worry about the size of your Christmas tree. In the eyes of children, they are all 30 feet tall.”

~ Larry Wilde

“I have been looking on, this evening, at a merry company of children assembled round that pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree. The tree was planted in the middle of a great round table, and towered high above their heads. It was brilliantly lighted by a multitude of little tapers; and everywhere sparkled and glittered with bright objects.”   ~ Charles Dickens

“You know,” I said to Cora, “I've been thinking more and more about getting an artificial tree.” 

“Yeah, we aren't getting any younger and a real tree is a lot of work.”

“Wanna stop by Home Depot and just look?” 

This was our conversation as we pulled out of our street headed for the local Christmas tree lot. 

When I was a kid my parents held artificial trees in contempt.  Easy enough to do back then, when artificial trees were strange looking aluminum structures in ghastly, garish colors; pink, silver and blue.  Christmas tree shopping is one of the few things that's not seen much change since I was a kid.  We took the half hour or so drive to one of the lots on El Camino Real near downtown San Mateo.  A fellow with a 10 foot ruler followed a few steps behind us as we tiptoed through the mud created by the rain that we always got then and never seem to get now.  We followed the ritual that every family has followed since the 1840s when the tannebaum became a saleable commodity.  Dad would grab a likely candidate by the trunk and tilt it and turn it as we inspected it for any flaws that might disqualify it from adorning our living room.  The tree had to be full and without any conspicuous gaps in the branches and it had to stand straight.  Size didn't really matter.  Six foot was just fine because in the 60s cathedral ceilings were something that only the folks in nearby, ritzy Hillsborough had.  Our plebian ceiling topped out at 8 feet.  Once we found a likely candidate the fellow with the ruler stepped up and measured the tree, my mom watching carefully to make sure he didn't add phantom inches.  He wrote the tree's height and price on a slip of paper for my parents to take to the cashier.  Once the tree was ours dad stuffed it in the back of our big, clunky Mercury station wagon. 

TV; Episode One. Buying a Set.

 “If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.”  ~ John Lennon.

“People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.”  ~ Jess C. Scott

With Black Friday looming and all the pre and post-holiday sales yet to come, the wife and I have resurrected the, “should we get a new TV” discussion.  It happens about this time every year.  We don’t really exchange gifts so the idea is to get the big gift for the household (which is just the two of us now).  This year the idea got a little more impetus by a short stay at the Atlantis in Reno.  The room’s 55” flat panel made us realize that our circa 2000 tube television could be improved on. 

Trick or Treat; And Make It a Double

I've been a bad blogger.  I don’t mean in the sense that this blog as a whole is trash; although that in itself might be a problem.  I've been lax and lazy.  When I published my last post the Halloween candy hadn't yet hit the store shelves.  Now the big wide seasonal aisle in the local super is well stocked with bags of mini candy bars and little boxes of candies.  I've noticed over the years that the bags of candy keep getting smaller and smaller as do the bars inside the bags.  It used to be that two or three bags of Snickers might handle the Halloween crowd.  Now you need at least six or seven.  Well you actually need less than that to feed the little monsters but that wouldn't allow for the proper snacking between the time you buy the candy and Halloween night. 

A Recollection of Fishing

I got up that Sunday morning a little after 5 o'clock.  During these long summer days it’s more or less my usual time.  Has to be early.  It’s the only time I can take my dog Rainey for a run.  Rainey is day blind; can’t see the paw in front of her nose once the sun starts to peek out so we have to hit it while it’s still dark.  And so when I staggered out of bed Rainey jumped out of her's, did her happy laps around the bedroom while I shushed her lest she wake the little woman and then she rumbled down the stairs. 

“Sorry Rainey, I’ll let you out to do your business but then it’s back to bed."  She wasn't getting it yet.  While she was outside I crawled into my clothes and threw the camp chairs into the truck.  Rainey came back inside, wagging her hind quarters expecting me to grab the leash until I sent her up the stairs.  “Back to bed girl,” as she sulked up the stairs

Defining Mom

Under her pillow she keeps rosary beads and a life guard’s tank top.  In the darkness before drifting off  I can sometimes hear the clicking of the beads.  Her prayers include petitions for her children and grandchildren.  Not because they're wayward lambs.  She simply asks for God to guide and protect them.  For her, channeling God's love to her children and grandchildren is the best way that she can care for them.  The tank top is her daughter’s.  It found its way under the pillow when our daughter left home for college in San Diego.  Jessica long ago graduated and is now living a short 15 minute drive away with two children of her own, but the shirt remains.  I suppose it’s her way of staying close to her daughter and a reminder of the days when Jessica lived here and filled the home with the ever alternating joys and maddening drama of a teenaged girl.

Glove Story

Donning a glove for a backyard toss, or watching a ball game, we are players again, forever young.~ John Thorn; baseball historian.

Its baseball season again.  Time to dig into the closet and pull out the glove.  I did that last year about this time and went through some moments of panic when I couldn’t find it, tearing the closet apart, shouting at my wife, "Cora, Where in hell is my glove?" 

"I don't know. I don't play baseball." she yelled back. 

Then I remembered that I’d loaned it to my son.  I asked him to give it back which gave me an idea for a present for his upcoming birthday. 

What's Happened Here?

When did it all change?  Why did it all change?  How did it all change so much?  I grew up in the suburbs of San Mateo.  It was a middle class neighborhood in the hills above the town, on the San Francisco Bay Peninsula, about 30 minutes south of San Francisco itself.  It was the fifties and sixties; a time when we boomers lived the American Dream defined by well-manicured lawns, ranch style homes and the notion that we, the children, would live in a better America. 

The Oak Desk

I recently made the decision that it’s past time to get rid of the roll top desk that sits under the window in our bedroom.  A roll top was something I’d always wanted.  I suppose I pictured myself sitting at that desk like some latter day Mark Twain; sipping expensive bourbon from a heavy crystal rocks glass, dipping pen in inkwell and writing the next great American novel.

Reflecting on Tragedy

Shifting emotions on Friday evening’s drive home; grief, rage, confusion.  Trying to digest the news out of Newtown, Connecticut.  Looking for sense in a landscape of senselessness. 

I’d been in meetings during much of the day.  Getting back to my office a co-worker told me of the news; she’d been at her desk bawling as she read the news.  I took a quick look at a report and didn’t realize the severity of what had unfolded.  Another killing - back to work.

Thanksgiving Leftovers

Sitting amongst the wreckage of Thanksgiving at the kitchen table – some dinner rolls in a zip lock, a cranberry cake (deliciously baked by my daughter I might add), some cornbread and God knows what’s in the fridge.  I’m almost afraid to open the door for fear of being buried by an avalanche of leftover feast.

Black Thanksgiving: A Real Turkey - 2012 Edition

“CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.” ~ Ambrose Bierce.

“The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.” ~ Confucius

“There is one day that is ours. Thanksgiving Day is the one day that is purely American.”  ~ O Henry

Inching through Berkeley in rush hour traffic (Why in the hell do they call it rush hour when it takes that hour to go 5 miles? Where exactly is the rush part?) NPR brought the impending holiday season into stark blinding reality.  It reported that this year Wal-Mart will be kicking off the holiday shopping season by opening its doors at 8 PM on Thanksgiving night. 

Last year, in this very space I published a post titled Black Thanksgiving: A Real Turkey in which I criticized the marginalizing of our great American holiday, Thanksgiving, in favor of a new ritual; that of bundling up and leaving the holiday festivities for a round of bargain hunting hysteria.  I protested, vehemently I might add, the decision by Wal-Mart to open at 10 PM on Thanksgiving night.  In its audacity, Wal-Mart not only didn’t take my beef with them seriously, it upped the ante and decided to open its doors two hours earlier than last year.  The very effrontery of it all.  Obviously Walmart doesn’t know who it’s dealing with.  No, really, they don’t.  They don’t have the foggiest idea who I am and even if they did they wouldn’t care.  I’m that gnat on the ass of an elephant (or more properly the ass of an ass). Nonetheless I feel compelled to play David to Sam’s Goliath. 

Albert, Carrie and Carl

On this publication date, it’s Albert’s birthday.  He would be 66 today. Coincidentally I’m participating in the Relay for Life in Pinole, California to benefit the American Cancer Association. 

Don't wait to make your son a great man - make him a great boy. 

  

This is a positive story.  But like so many good stories this one has its own gloomy side.  I would completely leave out the tragedy in this story but for the fact that it’s necessary to the telling of the whole; and so we’ll dispense with it at the start. 

Dad; Reconnecting

 "For many years fathers who have said or done things that may not always have made sense to their children have found themselves saying or thinking just as their fathers had, "Someday you'll thank me."  From Wisdom of our Fathers by Tim Russert.

I spent last evening reading some blogs from 1949.  That’s ridiculous, you say, there were no blogs in 1949.  Of course there were; they just weren’t called blogs.  They were called opinion pieces and they were columns in print; newspapers and magazines.  Not everyone could do that sort of thing in those days.  You actually had to be employed by the journal that your work appeared in or be invited as a guest columnist.  Today through blogs and various social media on the internet anyone can be a writer or even pose as one; I’m living proof.  But I’ve digressed. 

Last night I looked through a scrapbook of columns written by one Richard O. Anderson, columnist and news editor for the Kaysville Weekly Reflex; and my father.  Dad had a regular column called Cabbages and Kings.  The Reflex was published on Thursdays in little Kaysville, Utah; population in 1949 less than 2,000.  I’d come across the scrapbook some years back while doing one of those house cleanings that exhumed everything from some of my college report cards to the kids grade school drawings to letters from old girlfriends, to yes, a scrapbook of dad’s newspaper columns. When I first found it I took a quick peak then relegated it to a box with some other artifacts and forgot about it until just recently.  Somewhere in that cobwebbed cave called my memory I had recalled that dad did write for a newspaper a few years before I was born.  I’d just never been interested enough to go into the details.  A few months back I once again rummaged through the box and skimmed over a column or two.  On this Friday night I pulled it out and read for hours. 

                On deciding where to go on vacation: “If you’re a married man don’t fret about this problem at all.  Let your wife do the deciding.  She will anyway.  If you don’t belong in this category it’s possible to get all the general effects of a vacation by staying right at home.”

As I read through his works I found that I was discovering a connection.  Right there before me on fragile, yellowing newsprint was my style of expression, my, yes, sarcasm and my sense of humor; and it was 63 years old.  But I also realized that I was seeing an even more far reaching connection.  It was that biting humor, the irony and sarcasm that often show up in my son and daughter especially in those verbal sparring matches of theirs; the grandson that he barely knew and the granddaughter that due to the ravages of dementia he really never knew.  I read through his columns, smiling, chuckling, and laughing out loud.  I’m writing this the next morning through a mist of tears. 

In recent years, late, much too late I’ve gained a great appreciation for my dad; more so than when I was a kid and much more so than in those last few years when he was plagued by Alzheimer’s.  I remember in the years leading up to his dementia how flustered he got when he would forget those things that he knew he should be remembering.  I didn’t have the empathy at the time to realize how frightening, how devastating it must have been for him to realize the dulling of his once sharp wit.  My mom in some prescience that she would pass before my father admonished me that I would probably be looking out for him.  When she did pass suddenly he plunged deep into dementia and the remaining years were not pretty.  They don’t inspire any pride in the way I handled the situation and in fact they revealed many personal imperfections.  Suffering from pneumonia he took his last labored breath in March of 1999 and the most sage comment of that evening came from his then 16 year old grandson; “He’s free.”

                My wife and I just watched the movie J. Edgar, which briefly touched on those popular movies in the forties and fifties that were advertised as being “from the secret files of the FBI.” From November 1949; “Are we to believe that a movie scout walked into the FBI office in Washington, announced that he would like to borrow a little secret material to make a movie and then rummaged around through the files until he found the type of material that would appeal to the moviegoer.”

Sadly the memory of his confused years had been the clearest when all this while they should have been banished to obscurity.  I know those years weren’t dad even though I never knew a lot of the details of his life.  I know he was born in Toeele, Utah and grew up in the Salt Lake City area.  He graduated high school and that’s where his formal education stopped.  He spent some time in the Civilian Conservation Corps (C.C.C.) working in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho and then served in the Army-Air Corps (The precursor to the Air Force) in World War Two.  He came home with an Italian war bride and they kicked around between Utah, West Virginia, and California until finally settling in San Mateo, California in 1956.  He held a variety of jobs; he repaired radios and televisions, was a writer and news editor, a radio operator at San Francisco International Airport and finally an engineering writer at GTE in San Carlos, California.  Much of what he knew for his job at GTE he taught himself.  His writing skills came from his voracious reading and appreciation of the power of the written word.  He was self-taught in geometry, trigonometry and calculus.  Beyond these linear facts there’s very little that I know about the events of his life.

I’m aware of those things that he held dear because he passed them on to me.  He fancied books and classic literature.  When I was a young boy he would read to me before turning out the lights.  Not fairy tales but classics like Treasure Island, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, War of the Worlds and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.  Probably the most memorable of those bedtime stories was Jack London’s, The Call of the Wild.  I was captivated by that book and I still remember its blue binding with an image of an Alaskan Husky on the front cover. That copy is long gone but I’ve reread the story a number of times.  When I was older, he would often go to the bookshelf, scan the titles, pull out a book and suggest, “This one’s pretty good.”  And so it was with Willi Heinrich’s Cross of Iron, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, a book that I would one day suggest to my own son. 

                On the impending nuclear arms race and the term “the atomic age”:  “Go ahead and call it the atomic era if you want but leave off the age business.  When two nations take up for the conversational peace; “My atom bomb can lick your atom bomb,” the only age likely to ensue is the stone age for a return in one of the swiftest transitions from one age to another, on record.”

Rummaging through another box of relics some months back I found something else that he held dear; his books.  Some I donated to the library but others, the older leather bound collections I kept.  Guy de Maupassant, Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens have all been rescued from a dusty garage, their faded bindings and yellowed pages now resting comfortably on our bookshelves.  I kept Ernie Pyle’s Here is Your War, remembering that dad very much admired the famous journalist.  I’ve boxes and files yet to go through.

Dad gave me his values.  I was reminded of that as I read some of his columns that took to task the bigoted, the narrow minded and those who would stifle personal freedoms.  I imagine that if the Reflex hadn’t been a small town weekly, dad might have found himself on Joe McCarthy’s radar.  Many years later dad would take days off from his work at GTE, a defense contractor, to march in the streets against America’s misguided military adventure in Southeast Asia.  I recall his fear that his picture might chance to appear in the news at one of those rallies and that his employer might see him figuratively biting the hand that was feeding him.  Like me he was a student of war, found it fascinating, read about it voraciously but hated it nonetheless.  He never spoke of his service in World War Two.  He often talked to me about history and its relevance, stopping to explain about the historic sites we passed on our many road trips.  Dad didn’t suffer bigots, the muzzling of free speech, incursions of religion into politics or those who would generally seek to stifle progressivism.  He saw the rampant fear of Communism that characterized the fifties and the sixties as so much irrational paranoia.  And living in Utah he harbored a rather untenable dislike for the LDS (Mormons) or more properly that organization’s ability to insert itself into the lives of everyday heathens like himself. 

                On a neighborhood protest against the opening of a local package store (liquor store); “I would suggest that all liquor stores be moved to some isolated and little accessible spot outside the city.  Also make it a law that (liquor) can be purchased only on dark moonless nights”…”The words whiskey, gin, rum and even vodka are all in the dictionary.  You can either tear out the offensive pages and burn them or destroy the entire book”…”Well kids, keep up the valiant crusade.  I’m going to the ice box and if nobody is looking I’ll mix myself another (cocktail).” 

I’ve finally managed to put aside his last years and recall the times when we were buddies.  Like the Friday afternoons when he would come home from work and pack the station wagon for one of our weekend camping trips in nearby Memorial Park; just him and me.  We fished, shared camp duties, lounged during the day and played chess in the evenings under the light of a Coleman lantern.  On warm summer nights, dad would pull out a couple of fold out cots and we would sleep in sleeping bags on the back patio, looking up at the stars and talking until one of us fell asleep.  In what my mom might term our less dignified moments we would spend a Saturday afternoon in front of the television watching Laurel and Hardy or The Three Stooges.  I recall one afternoon when the two of us were literally howling with nonstop laughter and tears running down our cheeks while my mom looked at the two of us shaking her head with uncomprehending scorn.

                On the free spending of taxpayer dollars by legislators; “As taxpayers it is our role to be meekly generous with our dough and remain stoically silent while the boys in Washington romp around with it at will.”

And so 13 years after my father’s death, I come to realize that we had the same passion for writing.  We just didn’t have it at the same time and so we never got the chance to share it.  Many years after he had quit writing for that little newspaper dad would continue to write.  He would sit up late of an evening, pipe clenched between his teeth; maybe a bourbon and rocks off to the side, and hammer away on an old Smith Corona typewriter.  That late night tapping of the keys drove mom nuts; quiet computer keyboards came much too late.  I don’t know what became of any of that work.  As for my own work, I’d not yet developed an interest for writing.  That would manifest itself years after he was gone. 

Walking the dog early on this chilly morning I thought about what it might be like if he was still around, still writing.  Would we critique each other’s work?  Would we share ideas?  Maybe even collaborate?  I can but imagine the long, late into the evening conversations that might have been.  I’d like to think he would favor my writing and maybe recognize some of his influence in my work.  But I suppose that even if he found it to be outright trash he would be proud and happy to see me plug away and to know that his love and respect for expression through writing had been passed on to his only son. 

So what comes of all this?  Before you think that this is a lament, remember the title; this is about a reconnection, a discovery.  The bleak years are gone.  And I guess looking back at my dad and then to my son and daughter I see that the good things span generations.  My kids are both, in the end, reasonable and logical; two virtues that were at the core of their grandfather. I’d like to think that I was the conduit.  Both are clever, witty and when they need to, can turn a clever phrase. Is there something of the writer in each of them?  Happily and with some measure of surprise (No offense meant Jess) I often see my daughter on the social networks deploring the decline and abuse of the English language.  Somewhere her granddad is looking at her with pride and flashing a knowing smirk.  And of course when I look at my son the physical resemblance is unmistakable.  I still don’t know that much about my dad.  He was inscrutable and my feeling is that was largely by choice.  Not that he had something to hide; he was just introverted by nature.  The scrapbook was a small window into the man before I was a “glint in the eye.” 

A Christmas Potpourri

“Mail your packages early so the post office can lose them in time for Christmas.”

                                                                                              Johnny Carson

Every holiday season the stores offer up Christmas potpourri a fragrance that mixes spices, citrus, berries, evergreen, apples and probably a variety of chemicals.  My daughter loves the stuff.  Loves it to the point that she bought some potpourri spray.  I know this because a few weeks ago she brought over her son Jackson.  I was untangling Christmas lights in the garage and as he waddled in I took a sniff, “What in the hell smells like Christmas?”  Turns out Jackson had got hold of the spray and anointed himself with it.  He smelt like Christmas half a block away.

So what follows is my own Christmas potpourri.  You the reader might find it has a pleasant Christmassy air about it.  Others of you might just think it stinks.  This Christmas offering is a stocking stuffed with historical vignettes and some personal stories and observations.  Or maybe it’s not so much a stocking as a ratty gym sock.  I suppose the reader will be the judge.

(Sources for this post include the books, Christmas in America by Penne Restad and Silent Night by Stanley Weintraub)

A tannenbaum by any other name..:
       An evergreen in the home wasn’t always a symbol of a Christian celebration.  The Romans decorated their homes with evergreens as pagan symbols of fertility and regeneration.  In the early 19^th century the Pennsylvania Dutch introduced Christmas trees to America but there was resistance usually owing to the influence of Calvinism.  That no fun bunch couldn’t stem the popularity of the Christmas evergreen and by the 1830s the tradition of Christmas trees had spread beyond the German community.  

       By the 1840’s Christmas commercialism began in earnest.  In 1840 a woman from New Jersey schlepped some pine trees to New York City to sell along with some hogs and chickens.  By 1843 newspapers in New York were advertising Christmas trees and ornaments for sale.

The hideous aluminum tree

       Franklin Pierce introduced the first White House tree in 1856.
       In the 1950’s and 60’s aluminum Christmas trees were all the rage.  And they were hideous.  I still recall them in all their ugly glory.  The classic A Charlie Brown Christmas alludes to them when Charlie Brown and Linus go tree shopping.  Most of them were silver but pink and blue were not uncommon.

On the American Frontier Christmas was a Spartan holiday.  In 1805 William Clark described Christmas dinner at the mouth of the Columbia River with Meriwether Lewis as consisting of “pore elk so much spoiled that we eat it thro’ mear necessity, some spoiled pounded roots and a fiew fish.”  Fur trader Francis Chardon and his men celebrated Christmas 1836 with a “feast of eatables but no drinkables” and the firing of a few gunshots.

What would Christmas be without Christmas lights?
       One of my personal favorite things to do at Christmastime is to go for a run through the neighborhoods in the early evening; a sort of harrier’s Christmas light tour.
       When my children were younger we would drive through various neighborhoods to see light displays.  We drove through San Francisco, around Union Square, up Nob Hill, along the Marina and into the rich enclave of Seacliff.
       In local El Cerrito a gentleman who hailed from India, Sundar Shadi put up a Nativity display on the hillside grounds of his home.  He would begin working on the figures for his display in September which would be ready for viewing two weeks before Christmas.  It was one of the most popular displays in the Bay Area, a traditional holiday attraction dating back to the 1950s.  Mr. Shadi passed away in 2002 at the age of 101.  For some years the Soroptomist Club, the El Cerrito Fire Department and other dedicated volunteers have maintained the exhibit which is up again this Christmas season.

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol presents empathy for the poor and working class.  Was this inspired by Dickens’ own life experiences of his father serving time in a London debtor’s prison and Charles himself having to leave school to work in a factory?

Christmas in the slave south while hardly benign was at least a time when slaves would be afforded a break from their labors.  Sara Crocker told of holidays in which the slaves would be able to rest and sleep into the day and eat a big dinner prepared by the whites, with roasted pigs and chickens and demijohns of whiskey.  Solomon Northrup who wrote of his experiences in the book Twelve Years a Slave, told of an open air feast of roasted chickens, ducks, turkeys, pigs, vegetables, biscuits and pies.  A slave in Texas, Charley Hurt recalled that on Christmas the master “puts out a tub of whiskey or brandy in the yard and colored folks helped themselves.”  It was also a time when slaves were given valued gifts of extra provisions or clothing.  Former slave Levi Pollard recalled that slaves received extra flour and rice, a whole ham, 5 pounds of cane sugar and winter clothes.

But for all of those who got a break from the cruelty of everyday life there were those for whom Christmas was just another back breaking day of labor.  One slave recalled that “Christmas was just like any other time with the slaves.  We never had anything extra.” 

It just wouldn't be Christmas without company parties.  You know, those events that spawn everlasting anecdotes about someone who got as lit as a Christmas display and created a ruckus of historic proportions. Over the years my Christmas party experiences have run the gamut from none at all to pretty extravagant (at least by my standards).
       A company that I worked for some years ago, owned by a tight old skinflint, went for years without a party.  He was a rich fellow who squeezed a penny so tight that poor old Abe suffocated.  One year the old bastard came up with the brilliant idea of having a Christmas luncheon….in the conference room.  The meal came complete with turkey…a warmed, pressed turkey breast.  It was a depressing affair in which everyone left their desks, stood in the buffet line, ate at the conference table and made desultory small talk.  After lunch we all shuffled back to our desks.
       There was consolation in the fact that my wife works for Clif Bar which throws lavish parties.  There were two years in which we had dinner and overnight accommodations in the Napa Valley.  One year dinner was served in the aging caves beneath a winery.
       I have a faint recollection of some parties in the 70s when I worked a retail job at a Downtown San Francisco hardware store.  These parties were for the most part pot luck.  Everyone brought a dish and the owners would throw for a turkey or a ham neither of which was the main course.  The main course was alcohol.  One of the more memorable ones was at the store manager’s swank Russian Hill flat.  He had a beautiful white couch right up until the moment that Dan Alonso, the lecherous old locksmith, added some color by vomiting potluck all over it.  It was a Christmas classic.
      Shortly after old Alonso’s historic hurl the store suspended Christmas parties so my housemate Scott and I decided to fill the breach.  I do recall making eggnog which was mostly brandy, or whiskey, or both; I don’t know, I can’t remember.  That was the year that I came up with the brilliant idea of inviting both my just still barely girlfriend Linda and Cora (now my wife) who I had just started taking an interest in.  Luckily neither showed up; it was not my finest hour.  If memory serves this was the party in which our other housemate got out of the trolley down the block and followed the blaring music to our home (this during the wee hours) and opened the door to find Scott and I passed out blissfully oblivious to Led Zeppelin at jackhammer decibel levels.

A yummy holiday treat

I’m one of the few people I know who likes fruitcake.  The trouble with fruitcake is its reputation precedes it.  I’d be willing to bet a big tin of fruitcake that most people who say they hate it and make those slanderous remarks have never sampled the moist, nutty goodness of fruitcake.  But then again I like black licorice too.

Santa Claus has traveled a long way and I don’t mean from the North Pole.  His beginnings go back to St. Nicholas, a monk born around 280 AD who lived in what is now present day Turkey.  Nicholas’ reputation was as a pious fellow who gave away much of his inherited wealth and gave comfort to the sick and the poor.  The name of Santa Claus is a derivation of the nickname Sinter Klass which was a shortened version of Sinter Nikolaas, Dutch for St Nicholas.

Thomas Nast's Santa

After going through several iterations, Thomas Nast a cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly drew the prototype for today’s “jolly old elf.”  Nast’s Santa, one of my favorite versions, might not be entirely PC these days.  Amongst the gifts under his arm the rotund one has a sabre and a belt with a U.S. buckle.  Worst of all Nast’s Santa carries a pipe.  He’s seriously overweight as well; probably too much fast food so he can’t be a suitable role model for children.

It seems that everyone has a list of best ever Christmas films so just for the hell of it here are my top five.

1.       A Christmas Carol (the George C. Scott version)

2.       Home Alone

3.       A Charlie Brown Christmas

4.       It’s a Wonderful Life

5.    Joyeux Noel (about the WWI Christmas truce).

I’m awarding honorable mention to Lethal Weapon which isn’t a Christmas movie per se but has a sort of Christmas subplot.

Finally, it would be hard to find a better of example of the power of the Christmas spirit than the events of 1914 along the Western Front of World War I.  To understand the events of Christmas 1914 it is necessary to understand the circumstances of the soldiers occupying the lines of trenches that stretched from the English Channel to the Alps.  It was a war that was fought with an insane and deadly combination of outdated tactics and modern weaponry.  Life in the trenches was horrific, described by a German as, “lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, shells, bombs, underground caves, corpses, blood, liquor, mice, cats, artillery, filth, bullets, mortars, fire, steel…the work of the devil.”  In the winter of 1914 the trenches were filled with water and mud, and the area between the trenches, no man’s land, was a barren muddy moonscape littered with the dead and the debris of war. 

        As December 25^th approached the soldiers discovered that they had a commonality; Christmas.  For a short time an unofficial truce took place; a truce unauthorized by high command.  Commanders ordered a cessation of the truce but the commands went, in most cases, unheeded.

       The truce often started on a quiet night when soldiers of one side heard soldiers of the other singing Christmas songs.  Those on the other side often responded with cheers or joined in the singing.  There were shouts of holiday felicitations between the two sides.  The Germans adorned the parapets with candlelit tannenbaums and signs that read, "you no shoot, we no shoot"  Finally a brave soul would stand up on the parapet and approach the other side to work out a Christmas truce.

       In some instances the soldiers traded souvenirs such as uniform buttons and patches.  They also traded food, tobacco and other items of comfort.  Soldiers shared drink such as in one section in which the German side rolled two barrels of beer to the British on the other side.  In another section the two sides met to celebrate mass led by priests from both sides.  Soccer games were held in no man’s land with the trenches on each side serving as sidelines. 

       Wrote British soldier Charles Smith, “We ate their sauerkraut and they our chocolate, cakes, etc.  We had killed a pig just behind our lines.  We cooked the pig in no man’s land sharing it with the Boche (Germans).

       Following a soccer match between the Germans and the British in no man’s land Bob Lowell of the 3^rd London Rifles wrote, “Even as I write, I can scarcely credit what I have seen and done.  It has indeed been a wonderful day.”

       William Dawkins, another British soldier recalled a soccer match in no man's land and an angry lieutenant colonel, "the Germans came out of their protective holes, fetched a football and invited our boys out for a little game. Our boys joined them and together they quickly had great fun till they had to return to their posts.  I cannot guarantee it but it was told to me that our lieutenant colonel threatened our soldiers with machine guns.  Had just one of those big mouths gathered together ten thousand footballs what a happy solution that would have been, without bloodshed."  The big mouths didn't learn then and they haven't learned now.

Merry Christmas and peace on Earth. 

.

My Old Baseball Friend

     Welcome back baseball.  Welcome back to the friend I knew and loved.  For a while there you were going through a rough patch. You fell in with a bad crowd, started messing with substance abuse and got addicted to some really bad stuff. Your personality changed, you lost your charm and became a big, brutish lout. You lost the respect that you had for your rich and storied ancestry, forsook your forefathers and got infatuated with a fake, fleeting here and now. When you lost your self-respect you got pretty sleazy and slept around with a bunch of self-absorbed phonies. You stopped being the baseball that I knew, that we all knew, a subtle, strategic game with all those nuances like double switches, the hit and run and the suicide squeeze. You started resembling a “D” level, beer league softball game.  And what about your caretakers, those guys who were supposed to look out for you? They just became a bunch of greedy enablers turning a blind eye, letting your addiction run rampant while they raked in their ill-gotten gains.

     The home nine is in first place and playing some exciting ball. No bombastic displays of tape measure home runs with footballesque final scores. The Giants are winning low scoring, one run affairs. They're doing it with pitching; a solid rotation and a stalwart bullpen. The offense is pure punch and judy, with an occasional long ball and some sort of smoke and mirrors magic woven by manager Bruce Bochy.  Last year we christened the season "torture" and the one run, walk off torment is back for a delicious second course. 

     In recent years I sat out that bastardization of baseball called “the steroid era.” I walked out on the freakish thing it had become, figuring I wouldn't return.  Sometime during the 2009 season my interest started piquing again.  Barry Bonds, the man who had so arrogantly soiled one of sport’s most hallowed records was not invited back for 2008 and when I was satisfied that his stink had left the yard I was ready to come back. While a recession driven belt tightening kept me away from the stadium last year, I watched on TV with renewed joy the game being played as it should.  And listening to the radio broadcast while working in the yard or tending the barbecue has brought back baseball memories of my childhood.

     Yes, I love baseball and I’m not ashamed to say that I love it in a naïve way; in the tradition rich, storybook, peanuts and Cracker Jack, smell of the green, green grass, baseball cards, hotdogs and beer, all-American way.  I love it because unlike professional basketball and football, baseball unabashedly honors its past. It’s a game that’s spanned decades has gone through little change to the game itself yet continues to captivate its fans.

      Professional basketball has gone from a patient team game to an up and down the court race punctuated by in your face slam dunks tossed down by petulant, chest thumping, preening players who’ve physically outgrown their field of play.  For the most part I find NBA players to be dislikable. There is no reverence for the past in the NBA. Today’s players wouldn’t know Jerry West or Oscar Robertson if they smacked into them at the foul line and most fans probably don’t know of an NBA past that goes beyond MJ.

     And what can you say about the NFL? It’s the consummate sport become business. And while it keeps some tenuous ties to its past it has become something unrecognizable from what it was a mere 10 years ago. Never satisfied to be what it is, the NFL seems to be in an insatiable quest to get bigger, brasher and glitzier. There is no charm to its championship game. The Super Bowl is an event which every year has to outdo its predecessor.  It’s an uncharismatic happening of a game that falls victim every year to its own hype; a hype which it inevitably fails to live up to. With its ostentatious overpriced arenas and personal seat licenses it has become a Romanesque orgy for gamblers, rich guys and corporations that’s thrown the common fan to the curb. Unlike professional basketball and football, baseball has maintained some affordability.

How many of these did I lose?

     Baseball has always had an intimate connection with the fans.  The Brooklyn Dodgers not only played in that borough but lived there and mingled with their neighbors and fans, shopping in the local stores, going to the local barbershop, and playing with local kids.  In his book Bums, Peter Golenbock writes about the memory of a Brooklyn fan who said of Duke Snyder, “We would be playing stick ball and he would come home….and the kids knew who he was. ‘Hey Duke, want to take a few cuts?  It was like he was one of the boys. He’d take a few cuts."  When I was a kid, after games we would go to the player’s entrance and wait for our heroes to emerge, offering a glove, ball, baseball cards, or scraps of paper for them to autograph.  Most would graciously sign, while admonishing the kids to be patient and polite.  I recall Sandy Koufax taking my ball as he stepped onto the team bus.  I thought for a moment that he had stolen my baseball until he dropped it out a window to me with his autograph and those of some of his teammates.  I lost that ball.  In fact I must have got the great left hander’s autograph a half dozen times, losing all but the one I still treasure.  While the player’s entrance is now off limits, a ball player will still stop and sign some autographs before and during BP (batting practice).  I recall Dave Stewart kindly signing autographs for my son and his friend before a playoff game against Toronto.

     I can’t remember the first game that I went to. I know it was at windy, frigid, Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Probably in 1961 or 1962 (I would have been 8 or 9 years old), the details escape me , might have been against the Cards, but I clearly remember walking out of the concourse and into the seating area to stare in awe at that field; so vast and so green.  It seemed bigger than anything I’d ever seen.

Maury Wills steals third

      A rabid Giants booster, my mom was the head fan of the family.  I was, and for the life of me I don’t know why, a Los Angeles Dodgers fan.   I think that maybe I was just attracted to that Dodger blue color.   Now you have to understand that a Giants fan and a Dodgers fan under the same roof do not make for a peaceful household between the months of April and October.  There was plenty of yelling and screaming during the many great games that we watched and listened to while “hating” each other and each other’s teams.  Those Giants-Dodgers games of the sixties defined the game that I grew up with and love to this day.  The Dodgers were a punchless team with plenty of speed.  Maury Wills would bunt himself to first and then the drama began.  No secret he would steal.  In the first act of the drama he would take his lead, the pitcher would throw to first and Willie McCovey would smack a leaden glove onto the diving Wills.  Time and again this scene repeated itself with Wills extending that lead by mere inches each time.   Wills wore out the pitcher and McCovey’s heavy paw wore out Wills.  The first act would usually end with the Dodger shortstop dusting himself off, standing on a freshly robbed second base.  Act two had Wills, dancing off second, racking the pitcher’s nerves until he pilfered third.  Act three ended with Wills either crossing the plate or being stranded at third.  Mom hated Wills, I hated Willie Mac but we both reveled in the rivalry.

Russ Hodges, Lon Simmons, Bill Thompson

     The sounds of spring, summer and fall were the voices of Russ Hodges and Lon Simmons calling the games while my mom worked in the garden or did her housework.   It seemed that everywhere you went there was a radio tuned to KSFO; “And there’s the pitch. Mays swings. And you can tell it BYE, BYE, BABY!”   Radio was king and baseball was the game of great voices; Hodges, Simmons, Vin Scully, Mel Allen, Jack Buck, Ernie Harwell and Harry Caray.   For a kid a transistor radio was an indispensible piece of equipment.   It was the only way you could you catch the last few innings of a night game, under the covers with the radio just loud enough to hear the game and just low enough that mom and dad wouldn’t hear.  How else could you catch bits of a weekday World Series game, trying to tune out the teacher yet keep an eye and half an ear on her so as not to get caught.   And every now and then there was that rare, cool teacher who would let us watch some of the game on TV.

     Baseball was the game that we could always play even if we didn’t have a team.  Any kid with a tennis ball and the side of house could play a ball game all by himself.   I was that kid and many were the afternoons when I would throw a tennis ball at the house and as shortstop field the grounders coming off the wall, throw it back against the wall and as first baseman field the rebound always just nipping the phantom runner.  On warm evenings dads in the neighborhood would go out with us kids to a local field and hit us some flies.  Even into my twenties and thirties I would go out to a local ball field with my friend Scott and we would take turns hitting and shagging grounders.  Now nearing 60, I do miss hearing that crack, ranging over and snagging a backhander right in the sweet spot.  I even miss that sting of the ball when it smacks into the palm.

     Baseball is a game for the senses. It’s the green of the field, the blue of the sky, chatter of the players, crack of the bat, ball skittering on grass and the pop of the glove.  It’s the smell of a dog and a beer, oil on a leather glove and a sweaty old cap.

     Baseball is nicknames on the back of a card (does anybody really collect football and basketball cards?).  It’s The Mick, Jocko, The Say Hey Kid, The  Baby Bull, Big D, Slick, Biscuit Pants, Willie Mac, Rube, Smokey, The Splendid Splinter, Buck, The Kid, Killer and Stan the Man.  Baseball is kids tearing open the wrapper on a pack of cards, shoving a stick of stale bubble gum in the mouth, thumbing through the cards and negotiating multiple “humpties” for a star.  

     Baseball is a colorful language of its own.  Its a can o’ corn, hard cheese, gopher ball, around the horn, chin music, tools of ignorance, bases juiced, fungo, heater, hot corner, on deck, on the screws, seeing eye single, skip, southpaw, small ball, scroogie, slider, slurve and of course, the Mendoza line.  C'mon, who needs the Romance Languages when you have baseball lingo.

      So welcome back baseball.  You’ve gone through some changes over the years and I haven’t been a fan of many of them.  I like interleague play about as much as I like eating liver.  And do you really need another level of playoffs, as if a 162 game season can’t decide the best teams?  I can’t say that I like the uniform changes.  How come you got rid of the stirrups and long socks and started sporting those pajama bottoms?  You know, I didn’t like the DH when you first introduced him to me and I don’t like him now.  If he’s fat, slow, out of shape and not able to play in the field anymore maybe he should just retire to the coach’s box or the broadcast booth.   And did you really have to silence the chin music? I miss those days when some of the game’s toughest hitters would come nervously to the plate to face an angry Bob Gibson.  Some Drysdale heat to the ribs kept that batter out of the pitcher's office.  And where did the jawboning between managers and umpires go?  It was always great fun to see two paunchy guys go nose to nose and belly to belly screaming whatever it was they were screaming with the crowd in full boo, ending with the umpire heaving his fist in the air and the manager out of the game.   

     But, you do have a problem.  How are you going to deal with the guys who cheated you; who cheated us and who stole from the greats of the past?  Those guys who arrogantly thought they were bigger than the game.  They screwed up all of your record books and they did it with no regard to the forefathers they disrespected.   Barry Bonds says that when it comes to the record books and the hall of fame there are no asterisks.   Well that’s fine with me; just keep him and his injected ass-terisk out of both the books and the hall.  And while you’re at it keep the sniveler McGwire and the arrogant Clemens out too.

     There are some fans who aren’t thrilled that you’ve gone back to your old self. They liked the barrage of long range shells, travelling implausible distances, launched by chiseled fakes.  They’re bored by the bunt, the butcher boy, a drawn in outfield and the sac. fly.  My feeling is you should tell those fans that if they’re looking for an exhibition generated by muscle bound fakery there is a “sport” just for them. It’s called the WWE.  

Baseball is a game of memories. I hope those who read this will share some of their memories, either as players or as fans.