USS Holland (AS-3) Off San Diego With Submarines Alongside (circa 1935)
As I write this two American flags hang on my wall. Both are folded into militarily tight triangles and protected by flag boxes. One contains a Purple Heart, the other the WWII Service Medal and Pacific Service Medal. One day my own flag with a Cold War Service Medal will join them.
Bill Graham Rock Impresario
As a young college lad, I worked several jobs – newspaper production manager, stringer for ABC sports, and writer for my college paper. As the paper’s Assistant Arts Editor (in a department of 2) I wrote a weekly music column named His Master’s Voice. Think RCA logo with a cute little dog named Nipper. It was a clever name lost on 18 year olds; 30 years after the dogs died and just as RCA began its long march into oblivion. I take solace in not having coined the name myself (my apologies Greg, it just wasn’t how I rolled back in the day).
No, really…true story…
My father died about a year and a half ago. He’d been in reasonably good health for an 86-year-old, but by his last year started to decline like, well, an 86-year old. Still, he had a reasonably good run and didn’t have any pain at the end. You can’t ask much more from life than that.
Note: This post is excerpted from a letter, entitled One Saturday Morning, I wrote to friends on February 22, 1999. It was originally posted several years ago, but vanished from the Poobah archives because of the incompetence of my former web host. Welcome back.
Dear Correspondents,
The sky is low and gray and the temperature, at least by California standards, is frigid. Maybe 45 or 50 degrees. I awoke early enough this morning to indulge myself with a little reading and a wonderful breakfast.
BON APPITITE - When you eat anything except rocks and calf's liver the world become one huge grocery store.
My current read is “The Man Who Ate Everything – And Other Gastronomic Feats, Disputes, and Pleasurable Pursuits”, by Jeffrey Steingarten.
Steingarten, whose original job was improbably as a lawyer was appointed food critic of Vogue magazine. (He never explains specifically how he made the jump, but it certainly seems like a move in the right direction if you ask me.) When he was appointed, he found that he had numerous food aversions – not a career-building trait in a food critic. The book is the story of how he learned to eat nearly everything. It seems a redundant tale for someone like me who never saw a food he didn’t like, but it is a good read nonetheless.
For me, the world is a gigantic grocery store. When I go to zoos I don’t think of the beauty of the animal on the hoof, but rather how it might look roasted, on a plate, and surrounded by tender baby carrots and squash. I don’t view those National Geographic travelogues about boys hunting monkey with blowguns so much as adventures as narrated serving suggestions.
I eat anything except rocks and calf’s liver – and I’ve even consumed two wonderful portions of the latter before. I am an omnivore. I’m a highly-developed example of millions of years of successful breeding, producing a specimen who can gain weight in any climate or condition on earth – so long as there is something to eat other than rocks and calf’s liver.
Darwin would be proud I’m sure.
After reading a chapter on surviving on a subsistence diet (which inexplicably included recipes for perfumed rice with lamb and lentils and Swiss chard and bean soup with ricotta toasts), I got hungry and made breakfast. I scrambled up some delicious eggs with bits of Jarlsberg cheese, a touch of cumin, a light dusting of garlic powder, and some chives. As accompaniment I prepared a small bowl of fresh cantaloupe and strawberries, some buttered whole wheat toast, and some aromatic French roast coffee (made with a pinch of salt added before brewing). I savored every bite.
Now I’m floating around on a full belly, quite content, and intensely interested in food. I think I’ll have to spend the rest of the day watching cooking shows on PBS. This, in turn, will lead to an orgy of cooking this afternoon and a full belly tonight. Satisfying, but not healthy. Oh well, better to die with a smile on my face and a full belly, than hungry and pissed because I missed a good meal.
Your Omnipotence,
Poobah
Lost somewhere in the detritus of my life is a black and white picture of my mother, sister, and 2-year old niece sitting on a couch. As close as I can remember it was taken around Christmas 1967 with the Polaroid Swinger instant camera I received that year.
In the picture my mother vacantly looks off-screen and into the far distance smoking a cigarette with a too-long ash. She’s dressed in a dowdy housecoat and her hair is slightly askew. She’s wearing the fluffy slippers I bought her a few years back. Her eyes are vacant in the way that only a schizophrenic’s can be. She’s clearly visiting a winter wonderland of her own.
My sister sits in the middle, eyes focused directly into the camera. She doesn’t look blank so much as insecure and scared. Later that day, she’ll leave her young daughter in my care, saying she will return in a few hours. She won’t return for several weeks. It’s the third time she’s done it that year.
Sandy, my two-year old niece, sits at the far end. Her mouth is smeared with my mother’s homemade chocolate and she’s as wild-eyed as only young children can be on Christmas. Her eyes show happiness and uncomplicated joy. She’s still mostly pristine. The constant abandonment, the tugging between parents and grandparents, and the general neglect of her estranged mother and father haven’t yet turned her into the frazzled, broken, middle aged woman she’s become – a woman I haven’t seen nor spoken with since my own 20-year old daughter was the same age as Sandy is in the photo.
Ghosts of Christmas Past
I take the picture holding the camera up as a shield to separate me from them. I try to stay upbeat as I’ve been for all the other years of my young, yet very old life. I’m smiling hopefully like I did on Sandy’s first Christmas – the Christmas my former brother-in-law lost control of his car and smashed through the outer wall of their apartment. The couch where my sister sat feeding the baby came to rest against the far wall of their living room.
I smiled weakly like I did last Christmas. That was the year the police came to break up a fight between my sister and her husband on our front lawn. I remember thanking the cop for coming out on a holiday as I held my infant niece close and the cops struggled to handcuff the two of them.
I planned to smile next Christmas as well, but didn’t feel very hopeful. That would be the one when my father and I tricked my mother out of our house and drove her to her third mental hospital. I rode in the back seat holding down the door lock so she couldn’t escape during the hour-long ride.
Shortly after checking her in – and despite the 250 lb. orderly lending a strong hand – I was in the darkened office of the Hospital Chief of Staff for Mom’s formal commitment hearing.
I told a sympathetic judge that, yes, my mother really wasn’t my mother anymore. She was a deranged stranger with a terrible torrent of malevolent fiends in her head. They didn’t like her and terrorized her night and day. I knew this because she often screamed at the television, shrieking for her tomentors to leave her alone or locked herself into her room for days at a time to escape them. At 12, I already knew the litany of schizophrenic symptoms and was able to discuss them like a clinical psychologist, even if I was only a newspaper boy.
There were many other Christmases, most equally bad. The first relatively trouble-free one came in 1977. I was in the Air Force and half a world away. That Christmas I flew from Germany to an RAF base just outside of London with a plane-load of Christmas hams. In less that 24 hours, a detachment of British troops would be eating them, also away from their families, in their tents in Kenya.
I spent the next seven holidays in various places around the world, before getting married and eventually having our beautiful daughter. I’m 54 now and can’t remember a truly enjoyable holiday. It’s a knack I’ve never quite mastered. I’ve been back “home” only once for the holiday.
Ghosts of Christmas Present
My Christmas luck holds still. My first stepmother died between Thanksgiving and Christmas 1989 and this past Thanksgiving I spent with my father for the first time in years. He was in the hospital recovering from a stroke and I sat at his bedside for almost two weeks. Delirious for much of the time, he often cried out for help, hallucinating that he was in some sort of torture camp or remembering the sudden death of my mother after she’d finally been “cured”. He was restrained to keep him from hurting himself. Thankfully, he was home before Christmas with no apparent permanent damage other than to deepen the depression he’s been in since his health began to fail.
Clearly, I’m not on good terms with the Holidays, or most other special events either. They carry along too much baggage and despite lots of expensive therapy and the help of more medications than I’d like to take, I can manage holidays now – if only just barely.
For me, the time between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day is filled with a choking feeling in my throat and a vacancy sign hung on my brain. Each time I decline a party invitation, or skip the pot luck at work, or am accused of curmudgeonly Bah Humbuggery by the eternally chipper, I have to hold my tongue. I know everyone expects joy, but I want to scream. I know people can’t be blamed for the ill it causes me. For the most part, many don’t know about it and when they do, they usually graciously leave me alone.
But now the holidays are over. I can take down the tree, strip off the lights and tinsel, and go back to my day-to-day life. I’ll be OK except for the small uptick around my birthday – another holiday that’s also a burden for me.
But for those of you who understand and give me the room I need around the holidays I’m thankful. For the rest of you, I harbor no hard feelings. I’m sure most of you wouldn’t go where I don’t want to go if you only knew. I’m glad most of you (though I’m aware holidays are a particularly hard time for many people) enjoyed your holidays. For the rest of you I sympathize. But now that it’s over for another year, I can say this:
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year…really, I mean it.