Living The Dream Life

 

 

 

This will be a paraphrased, sort of jumbled remembrance of an eulogy I gave for a friend I had known for 37 years. Barn died back in December but J. who is managing his estate had to cough up all the cash in advance before Xmas to get Barn prepared for his final resting place, and to top that off, hire a lawyer for $5,000 to process the whole thing through the courts. So, she waited till now to make more money to have a service at Cartmell Funeral home in Plymouth. I suspect if Barney had been dirt poor, the lawyer would've done it for far less, but that's the way things go when they found out he inherited his Dad's helicopter company and own land next door to Plymouth Plantations. Looks like the Plantations will buy it now, as they always hit him up to sell it to them and J. has no use for it now except to convert it to cash. I decided to tell a few stories of Barn's life that amazed me. I never lived that kind of life being a Pawtucket native.

**

“Good morning, for those of you who don't know me, I'm Ron M. from RI and that'll explain the accent. I met Barney back in 1985 as he walked into a student lounge at Rhode Island College. He was decked out in tennis clothing, carrying a racket, a bandanna around his forehead and was sweaty as hell. He plopped himself down to chair next to me and started talking to other students there. “I'll shouldn't play against 18 year olds!” he says. As he is talking to the others, he glances at his watch and says, “Well, better get to class, I'll be teaching Medieval peasant diets today.”

To which I turn to him and incredulously ask, “You're a professor?” Because he sure didn't look like any of the ones I had there at RIC.

He, a bit miffed responds, “Yes..I am...what are your four degrees in and are they from Holy Cross, Vanderbilt, the University of Bologna and perhaps Champagne/Urbana Illinois?”

I tell you, I never imagined a college professor like this, showing up after a tennis match, snarky and covered in sweat ready to discuss peasant cabbage recipes to history majors.

I'm good for that, getting off on the wrong foot. However, we became the best of friends in time.

**

Barney returned to the Navy after being decommissioned as a lieutenant commander to a civilian contractor. He told me of a port of call he made where he hobnobbed with some KGB officers in Russia. The ship he was on stopped at Archangel, an arctic port in Russia when the US and the Soviets were talking. They allowed the officer class to leave the ship and tour the city and since even if you're retired Navy, your rank still holds sway so he got to tool around Archangel for a bit .

Barn tells that he was walking down the Main St, looking around when he noticed a black sedan slowly following him about 50 feet back. He figured it out quickly as the ship's commander had warned them of being followed or spied upon, so watch what you say to anyone. He then ducked into a small bar and using the little Russian he knew, orders three shots of vodka. He drinks one and then tells the bartender to bring the other two out to the two men in the black sedan parked out front. He does this. Barn then stays to chuck down more shots and after thirty minutes leaves. He passes by that sedan and notices two empty shot glasses on the dashboard and he taps the fender, pointing at the glasses and says in his tourist Russian...

“Не за что” (You're welcome!)

They gave up tailing him after that.

**

Barn also was a member, for a bit in the early 70s, of a hippy commune in Berkeley California after his stint with the Navy. He had made his way from the Navy base in San Diego after being discharged (a year before he was hired back by the Navy as a civilian) up to San Francisco. Apparently he would try anything once if he was curious and the hippies intrigued him. He said the other members of the commune was this guru type of guy who would clang finger symbols all day long going “Ommmmmmmm” to himself to find and attain transcendence. There was Paula, a 16 year old runaway who made her way in life as a high priced whore to the businessmen who lived across the Golden Gate bridge in Marin county and Diana, a Massachusetts comrade who he stayed in touch with when he returned to Plymouth. Others would come and go as they could chip in for rent. His description of Diana was this: “Her whole day could be ruined if her shoelace broke in the morning, her ability to deal with stress was awful. The commune sort of helped her get through a day.”

He tells me, “Next door to our commune was another, called the Peking Man House due to a Chinese sculpture that was in front of it. It was set off a bit from the other homes and shared a courtyard with ours. I rarely saw the other members but two hippy girls, Mizz Moon Solytnik and Nancy Ling Perry who would come over and hang with us. They never ever did discuss who the others were in their home. More than a few times we'd go down to the college and the girls would sell clothing, food, beads anything for a few dollars to support their particular commune.”

“Well, one day they all disappear w/o a goodbye in the middle of the night. Several months later, the LAPD and the Symbionese Liberation Army, the ones who kidnapped Patricia Hearst, had this massive shoot out. When they published the names of the dead, I saw those two girls I knew at Peking Man, Mizz Moon and Nancy, both shot to pieces and burned up.”

“Ron, believe me, I had NO idea that the Peking commune was the SLA safe house. Those two girls I talked to just seemed like two lost young hippy girls, and there were a zillion of them in Berkeley then. But how those two carried themselves...you'd never know what they were really up to.”

I asked, “Was Patricia Hearst there?”

“I bet, probably locked in a closet before she went loony and joined the SLA. The only other safe house they had was the one in LA, the one where the shoot out occurred...and Patricia was not at that one when it went down. The FBI showed up at Peking Man afterwards to investigate and said that it was the only other hideout, Patricia had to have been there.”

Damn...you KNEW two members of the SLA? How freaky is that!”

“I didn't know they were SLA! I knew two girls who really hid themselves well apparently. I never knew what was going on in that house...still amazes me to this day. Hell, they did a great job keeping themselves and Hearst quiet and then managed to convert her to their cause.”

**

There were a couple of times Barn lamented to me about not having a regular, stable typical life others had. For him it would've been a tenure track position at a Boston college, a home, perhaps kids. But instead, he spent most of his life traveling, hitting every country except Nepal, Uruguay, Paraguay and missed a few islands in the Caribbean. I had to remind him most career types would be insanely jealous of his life. I was in a way. I never traveled like that. I am amazed at times the balls he had to just take off with a backpack and say, hitch hike his way across Australia for a summer, and then get seeded at the Australian Open to try his luck at tennis, which he did.

**

So, there you have it folks, you all are now FOUR degrees of separation from Patty Hearst. You to Barn to the SLA finally to Hearst. 

 

These are the two he hobnobbed with w/o even knowing what was up. 

 

Nancy Ling Perry

Mizz Moon Solytnik

SLA Shoot Out

 

Standing On the Brake

Like no one has experienced aging before, but it's new to me. It's proof positive that anyone's self-hood, including mine, dominates. Everyone else's perception be damned. It took me a few decades to “get” Neil Young's line in Mr. Soul. “For the thought that I caught, that my head is the event of the season.” Translation? Your current view of the world is all that matters, other's are dead and do not matter. 

There once was an English college professor I had at RIC, Paul Anghinetti, who said there was only one poem that ever mattered and he wrote it. He loved saying it at the beginning of the semester of whatever class he was teaching.

I,I,I

Me,Me,Me

Now,Now,Now

Gimmie, Gimmie, Gimmie

Mine, Mine, Mine.

Ok, I've hammered the fact we're all self interested and how aging and time matter ONLY to ME. No one else has written about it! Right?

**

Remember when you were eight and you saw it was “Just only Wednesday!” You thought the weekend was decades away and during your youth, and it was. Weeks went by like months. Your next birthday where you turned nine was in the year 2402. You had so much time and the fact it crawled enabled you to complain to your parents, “I'm BORED!” Well, you would be wouldn't you if your perception of time is molasses. How are you to fill up all that time and make it entertaining?

That's why “fun” is the antidote. It makes you forget the passage of time at whatever speed it's at. Young boys, like myself, would go to heroic lengths to find or invent fun. Gary McClintock, a kid I knew then, provided lots of fun one day by setting fire to reams of old carbon paper behind the loading docks of Cherry & Webb on Armistice blvd, on a very windy day. The wind sucked the flaming paper into the open warehouse door and started a fire in there, bringing half of Pawtucket's fire apparatus to the scene. That's a hell of an accomplishment for a 7 year old. It created great amusement for us all, except Gary when the arson detective figured it out and told his Mom.

Fun is still the antidote to time and boring day to day adult life. Just don't engage in things that make 7 year olds wide eyed with amazement.

Poor Gary is gone now. An adult's leg thrombosis took him away a decade ago. In heaven, I hope he gets to burn all the Cherry & Webbs he wants and gets away scott free this time around.

About a decade ago, I was cleaning out my car of a winter's worth of filth when my neighbor, Leonard Knight, an 80 year old across the street, came over to talk and watch. It was a very warm late March day and the elderly tend to leave their hibernation caves when tempted on days like that.

I was commenting to Leonard that the past winter seemed to shoot by me, here it was, spring already. I then confessed I thought time was going “quicker” because I was in my late 40's.

“HA!” Leonard shouts. “Just wait till you're MY age, it goes by even quicker no matter what!”

I looked at him, probably with a snarky look on my face.

Ah, he was right. I'm in my very late 50's and time's speed limit is much faster.

There were times in my life where I had everything on my plate and each hour was accounted for. Was I bored? Nope, I was stressed, which isn't the preferred antidote to boredom. Weeks and months shot by me w/o noticing it. Well, I would notice it, when the calendar was flipped and I remarked to myself, “June...already?”

And there were times when I have ample freedom and could take all damn day to accomplish a small thing.

Know what the speed of time was like during those empty days? The same. It goes by just as fast.

I listen to various radio stations from around the world and and pipe them through my computer to the stereo. Weirdly enough, some station in Denmark played The Motel's Suddenly, Last Summer. I was 19 when it came out and it basically tells of massive life changes when Martha Davis, the singer, tells of a romance that forever ended her childhood and the death of her mother from suicide when she was 19.

I time warped back to 1983 with all it's fun and ugliness like every year has and then noticed that that age, 19, took forever to get to 20. In my mind at least it did then. Now, the day I turned 50 felt like a few weeks ago.

And it's going to speed up, whether I'm busy or not. And that's new to me... as I enter this new age. I'm sure I'll keep telling stories with new facts that sort of startle me as I move up into my 60's, facts I've never experienced at all when younger and couldn't have fathomed. 

 

 Geddy was 33 and complaining about time lost. He's 68 now and Neil Pert has gone to the Choir Invisible. That blonde chick with the rat tail is Aimee Mann, the singer of Till Tuesday's "Voices Carry." 

 

I Just Had to Let It Go, For a Bit Anyway.

This is a first draft so there is no tightening of the grammar, style, placement and flow. And I guarantee this story will wander. It may just plain suck but so what.

There used to be a commercial for a mini-van showing a very busy Mom dropping the kids off at school, going to work, picking the kids up, dropping them off at their after-school activities, grocery shopping, get the kids again and then finally getting home. She gets out of her car and happily remarks to the camera lens on how wonderful her Dodge MiniVan improves on her “full life.”

I then yelped at the TV, “Lady, your life SUCKS!”

Since when was being busy to the point you crash in bed every night from exhaustion living the full life? Getting everything done with seconds to spare isn't my idea of a life well lived. I am fully aware of those families that have to work constantly for the $ and try to give their kids a decent life, but in no way can you convince me that's a life dreamed for. For some, that trap of low pay and no prospects is an economic jail sentence. It's devilishly hard to escape from. If you had the decent job, it was probably a eye opener to you to discover you had only so many hours in a day to raise kids and try to live a larger, more expensive life than your parents did. There is a reason why the axiom "Biting off more than you can chew" was invented.

Though I'm one to bitch about this as I have done it for several times in my past. Once was in college as a full time student and working full time. That was fun. Weeks shot by w/o my realizing they were it was going so fast.  The second was again in a school getting another degree, full time, while also working, full time. It was seven days a week for two years as the school's program was twelve hours long on the weekends. I chose to do that!

The third, was due to my stupid loyalty to others. There are times I can thank my parents for instilling that Edwardian etiquette in my. It keeps me civil. Think of the English soldier throwing himself on a live grenade while storming Normandy, so the others can advance up the beach. Wow, what honor...bravery...thoughtfulness. Well, he's still dead. And any parades or Veteran's days people honor are for all of them, en masse. There is no singling out of any poor schlub who took a bullet for their nation.

Anyways, the third time. I had been working for a corp that didn't care if you lived or died, just so long as they could fill that schedule due to all the mismanagement, call outs, covid expulsions and what not. I worked and on my fewer days off I stared at the wall or did laundry. Since I was doing little else, and since my bills were small due to not having to heat the house when I was at work, not using electricity while I was at work, not eating at home...you get the point, I banked my check, again and again with that added bonus of “here's more money, please don't quit during covid!” After a year and a half of doing that, I noticed I could walk out the door and skate for months and months on the savings. Plus, I was done with the corp and it's merry go round of managers and a host of other reasons. Note that I live alone with no kids, no college tuition to pay, no expensive gambling or cocaine habits and a mean ol' witch who dropped a house on me back in 1996 (Old story, I was that last one left standing in a family of terminal cases). At the end of the day, I just have to support “me.”

The first few weeks I was out was a great relief. I just slept, ate and rolled around on the couch like some elephant seal you'd see at a beach. A giant pile of blubber barely moving on the sand, too fat and satiated to go back to sea to get more fish to stuff down it's gullet. The inactivity was necessary and I thought it was healthy, and it was.

However it's very easy to slide on that slope. I became a slug, far too quickly. Damn, it's either feast or famine for me. Though slug-life has it's advantages...for a while. The problem occurs is that inactivity makes u lose muscle mass, impairs your heart and decreases bone density. You actually feel it eventually. I'm glad I didn't turn into “My 600lb Pound Life” but I think I know something of it now. You literally have to do “nothing” to accomplish that goal.

So the trick is moderation. Christ, you'd think at my age I'd keep that in action, since I know it full well. Well, even at this older age, you still fuck up. Perhaps not as dramatically as you would when you are 22 but you still do in a classier and more mature, slower way. So, I'll keep active as I can but not insanely so to aggravate that one day dis-abling pelvic arthritis nor over pushing those hardening arteries that stresses the heart, but just enough. (Gotta love parental/grand parental genetics! Brick hard arteries coming up!) I'll be active for a bit till I become that old guy taking tickets at the movie theater. That may be coming faster than I thought. Is that a demotion? A kick to any career self esteem? Hell no, at this age, you don't give a shit about that anymore. “You're a 35 year old CEO of a start up cloud based financial firm...that's nice..can you pass the pepper please? After this lunch, I plan to nap!”

God...I really have dropped a lot of that Keeping Up with the Jones's stuff. Ah, as you age, no one expects you to put on a show of success, gleaming moral hygiene nor any other public show of how great the Golden Years are. They ain't. I've had many of that age laughingly say it was a god damn lie. Those commercials of the happy, healthy gray hairs sharing wine during sunset at Cabo San Lucas isn't what day to day life really is. What it is is just a moment. It ain't 24/7!

So great, as I age, society expects less of me and I'll give that to them! Know why? Because I'll say it again, as you grow older you really do not care what others think of you. That's the liberation of aging.

So, no minvan life for me. No desperate approval seeking from the family, friends or neighbors is needed. They can all adjudge me slothful due to not filling every minute with that seemingly good life of the overstuffed full plate. Been there, done that. I'll annoy the rest of society by driving my life at 20mph in a 30mph zone. IF I can manage it barring Russian warheads or God-Knows_What. It's what we oldies do, get in the way of your busy life. 

 

"Don't you miss the Big Time boy? You're no longer on the ball!"

 

I "get this" now after all these years. And no, I don't miss all of it.

 

 

 

 

 

In the Name of Pride

 

 

 

There are those “A-Ha” moments that grip you resolutely, cementing a disdained fact into your head you've long been ignoring. I had one last night as I tried to shovel out that embankment the city plows so graciously build at the end of my driveway, and yours. I was whacking away at it, noticing my breathing and heart rate were climbing. Well, so what. Shoveling is compared to running on a treadmill by most doctors because it's that taxing. I kept at it till that “Oh Holy Fuck!” moment arrived. I had to stop and catch my breath and get that heart rate below 130.

I know enough to do that but I had kept slugging away till my body was ORDERING me to stop, and it will get it's way whether you like it or not. The last time I ignored that was on the slope of Mt Willard, when I was trying to keep up with a kid half my age. I was huffing 'n' puffing and my pulse, I could hear in my ear. It was banging that hard. So, I hung onto a tree to calm down and tried not to get more dizzy because the trail below me was at 40 degrees and filled with 70 yards long worth of rubble. Falling down that might be a problem.

I lean against the car, cooling it when I see the 30 year old “kid” across the street shoveling his walk. He's slinging snow left and right, making good progress and not slowing down at all. He's not dizzy, huffing or doing fast math in his head about pulse rates. He's probably thinking about that girl he saw running the register at the Quickie Mart. Sooo, I get back up and into the game. I'm not being left behind by him!

As I shoveled, I was thinking about how long a rescue would take to drive through this mess to jump start my heart.

I “thought" i had things  in hand and as I attacked that pile of snow but I can hear my heart in my ears and the smarter part of my brain, which I don't always listen too, tells me to sit down for a bit.

“Sounds like a good idea.” the dummo part of me says, in agreement.

I sit there and realize that my pride was pushing me all along. “You're not pushing 60! “You can do it!” “That kid over there ain't going to show YOU up!” “Hell, you climbed rock falls not too long ago!”

And it hit me, I AM pushing 60. I am so-called “old.” Not elderly but my age now ain't about keeping up with a 30 year old, even as I try to do so and worried how I might look if I couldn't. As a younger man, if someone did something, I had to do it better, faster, higher and stronger, if I could. I'd at least fight for it and sometimes I'd win too and gain all those puffy chested bragging rights. It easily explains my humping up New Hampshire mountains not too long ago.

I sat there and further thought, “Not anymore kid...You get AARP mailings twice a week. You have to nearly turn your whole body to see over your shoulder as you drive. No more just turning my head. Now if I try that, cervical bones tell me they may snap.

I got curious, so I looked up, “Shoveling After 55” on Google and every site I came across offered this medical advice....”NO!” A blurb from Beth Israel in Boston had a doctor complaining about how many of us come across his table after a winter storm.

“Just don't. Everyone I see over 50 has some amount of heart disease, it's natural for most people even if they feel great. Accept the fact you may need to hire someone to do it or at least, get a snowblower that's self propelled.” he advised.

A friend of mine, who had no obvious symptoms of heart disease and felt his cardio was exceptional due to a life time of playing tennis and trying to get “seeded” in various tournaments (and did many times, even the Australian Open), dropped dead in his bedroom. Cause? Cardio atherosclerosis. Otherwise known as “a heart fully clogged up with fat, cholesterol and goo.”

That crept into my mind sitting there...so I go inside and peeled off the winter clothing and told myself, “You're gonna take TWO days to shovel out.”

I am surely letting go of my youth with a fight. Age gracefully? Fuck that! Well, my pride doesn't get to make certain decisions about that anymore...and being found frozen in a snow bank doesn't appeal to me, even if I'm nicely preserved by the cold.

The kid across the street will have to compete against another old fool hanging onto his pride.

I got the snow cleared, taking two days...and that's OK. I will proudly fight aging with something else, I'm sure knowing me.

13 Stages of Christmas

 

 

I'm out of Christmas stories so I'm re-posting this one.

1-5 years old

You're too young to understand the concept of Christmas. Toddlers enjoy the pretty lights, the gingerbread cookies and popcorn ball treats, the songs and carols and everything fun about the holiday but they don't quite yet understand the power of Xmas. To young kids, Christmas feels like a second birthday except the gifts are doubled, there is no blowing out of birthday candles or parties with ponies taking embarrassing dumps in the backyard. At this age the toy or the box it came in is just as fun to play with. Chewing on the Christmas light cords is fun because the dog showed you how to do it.

6-8 years old

This is the Christmas sweet spot. The age when anything...any gift, magical event, or wish is possible thanks to a fat man living up north in a house full of midgets making toys strangely identical to major manufacturers (yet no one seems to mind). The holiday also includes the greatest gift of all — a week off from school and the constant torture of teachers, bullies and the inability to take a dump for eight hours a day because no one would dare use a bathroom at school...under any circumstances. This is also the age where breaking your new toys can be fun too. This was hard at one time because Tonka made their toys out of real metal then. You kids have it easy today!

9-12 years old

Santa was a lie! You had an idea a few years earlier but now all signs point to your parents shoveling you bullshit for the first decade of your life. What else have they been lying about? Oh just tooth fairies, bunnies delivering chocolate and your uncle who stopped coming by the house a few Thanksgivings ago. He’s not in the Peace Corp, he’s in jail, but they won’t say exactly what for. Maybe lying to his kids about a jolly fat dude with a perverted sounding “naughty” list and a tooth collecting broad with more singles than a main stage stripper on a busy Saturday night to dole out. This is the age where you begin to play the same game back to your parents by ever so deftly manipulating them into getting the gifts you want. This is especially easy if your parents are divorced. You can really haul it in! Simply make them work against one another to compete for your love and approval.

13-20 years old

It’s not about asking for toys anymore, you're a teen, it’s about getting gifts to elevate social status. Designer clothes, expensive kicks, flashy tech gear and maybe even a car if you’re old man is willing to finally give up his beater of a ride, fork over the keys and buy something built in the 2010s. If in college, you loathe yourself for getting so excited over a Christmas gift basket filled with stuff you need at your dorm. You just kissed your parents for the thoughtful gift of bulk toilet paper and rolls of quarters to do laundry. You also realize that getting any clothing is a great gift because you didn't have to buy it yourself. That Merino sweater your GrandMom got you at a eleven years of age wasn't such a sucky gift after all.

21-25 years old

You’re out of college. You’ve got a job. It’s now your responsibility to buy gifts for your entire family. Thankfully, Jesus invented gift cards (it’s in the New Testament) so gift buying is a cinch. Unfortunately, you spend the day after Christmas in return lines because your family has no idea what clothes you wear, your actual size, what music you like, and that you haven’t read a book since Lit 101. And seriously, what the fuck is a compact disc? You also discover that the Chinese are heathens and don't celebrate Christmas and mercifully keep open their restaurants on Christmas night so you can escape your family and go get drunk with your other 20-Something friends. You won't feel like a loser alcoholic because the place will be packed with others running away from their families as well.

25-30 years old

You’re in a long term relationship and you're already spending the Xmas money you don't even have on engagement rings and first homes. The holidays start feeling really different, since you don’t spend them with your own family anymore, but with her family, her friends, and maybe if there is time you can swing by your parents house to visit your Mom who’s pissed you’re not spending the holiday with your family and an old man who has been drunk since his work Christmas party in early December. Stopping by with the right excuses may lessen the jealousy of your parents. Remember to leave the girlfriend home at her parent's place as your Mom never did like her. Realize as well that come December 26^th, Christmas never happened as you are back to your regular workaday world and have to deal with that reality.

30-40 years old

This decade sucks one massive Yule Log. You’re married, you’ve got kids, and those kids demand toys considered “hot ticket items” which oddly get released the week before Christmas by Hasbro who has been hyping the shit out of them all season. So you're traveling in circles around the state just days before Christmas, sometimes even across a couple state borders, to find one stupid Hatchanimal. As you frantically search each store hoping for a miracle (does Home Depot carry toys?) the only thought circling your head is your kid's disappointment because the toy isn't under the tree. You've failed as a parent. You SUCK. You’ve given them love, a home and attention but couldn’t deliver a fucking toy every other kid will get and then wave in the faces of your kids. Hopefully the arresting officer will go lightly on your situation after you punch a Maryknoll nun who was buying a cart full of Hatchanimals for the orphanage. It’s a Christmas miracle you didn’t knock out her two front teeth.

40-50 years old

You've got kids in their teens and early 20s. The toys turn into gadgets and the holiday morphs into an event exorbitantly more expensive than ever before. As if footing the bill for six years in college and another year “finding themselves” wasn't enough of a gift. You don't like anything about the holiday — even the songs you've heard a thousand times each December for the last four decades. Now they annoy the shit out of you on the first note. The Classic radio stations you love now play this crap 24/7. Also the decorating, the traffic, the commercials and those Charlie Brown specials you adored in your youth but now feel like PSA cartoons about the dangers of bullying in school. Seriously, if ever there was ever a cartoon kid to load up an AK-47 and then shoot up his school, it's Charlie Brown. A mindful jury would exonerate him.

50-60 years old

You didn't care about Christmas till a week ago. Your wife (if you're still married) does all of the shopping, you only have to buy for her, and yet you still manage to screw that up. Your kids visit for a couple hours, just to collect their gift cards and eat, and then shuttle out the door to visit their future in-laws because they are “splitting time” between families this year. You’d all celebrate together but your in-laws are fucking bragging loudmouths. Do you really need to hear about their three-week vacation in Italy? You know they'll rub your face in it. You're also not allowed to eat half the food on the Christmas table because of high cholesterol or that just-starting heart failure you've been diagnosed with. You sneak to the buffet table in the other room alone where you can to shove all that wonderful salami into your mouth. As long as no one sees this, it can't hurt, right? You end the day in a drunken sleep.

60-70 years old

The holiday is slightly more enjoyable. You're older now, semi-retired, and living off a smaller salary so no one expects absurdly expensive gifts from you. There are also grandchildren. It's fun to watch them open gifts, get excited for Santa and get wrapped up in the festivities like your kid's did — and you — did so many decades ago. It's also enjoyable to witness your own children, now grown, slowly lose faith in the holiday while chasing down the newest piece of crap toy for their kids. You're laughing your ass off, chugging spiked eggnog and grinning “Welcome to the Club” with a warmth that’s probably thanks to the brandy spiked chocolates and double rum cakes. If there is one thing to celebrate during the holidays, it’s booze-infused baked goods. What's neat at this age, you can complain of feeling too cold or tired and your kids will drive you home and you get to avoid all the ugly family drama.

70-80 years old  

 You don't notice, or care, it's Christmas time. Many of your friends are dead, all your kids are gone during the holiday, visiting your grandkids or just refusing to spend time with a miserable old bastard like you. The good news is no one expects shit from you as far as presents because you're living off a pension or meager social security benefits. Retirement? Ha! Bigger bullshit than Old Saint Nick. Your family would rather you not buy them gifts anyway since you're terrible at buying them. It's because you always left it up to your wife. You on the other hand buy gifts that have no relevance to the recipient at all. “Ohhhh, a compendium of Persian history, three volumes....uh...thanks..” Where is your wife? Well, it depends which wife you're talking about. Also, you spend at least five minutes Christmas day thinking about your impending death. You're really old now, how much time do you honestly have left? It's enough to kill your mood at the Christmas dinner table.

80-90 years old — Christmas? You call this shit Christmas?!? When I was a kid, THAT was Christmas! You refuse to be present at the Christmas that's going on now and prefer to speak of ones that occurred right after WW2, like from 1945-49. Each Christmas you manage to live to see keenly reminds you of the next one you, by probability, won't see. The Social Security mortality tables sure shores this truth up.

The Cemetery Ahh! Finally Linus's speech in Charlie Brown's Christmas Special has come true! “Glory to God in the highest, and on Earth peace, good will toward men. That's what Christmas is all about Charlie Brown.” Except the last Christmas your kids visited your grave was over five years ago and when they did, they both yelled at the ground below their feet about how you fucked up raising them. Oh well, perhaps that sparrow that likes to visit you by landing on your headstone will come by or maybe that homeless guy will lean against your stone, to sleep off his holiday drunk again. 

 

 

 

Big Frog, Little Pond

 

“I didn't go to college and I turned out fine!” said a short, grizzled co-worker I once knew. She betrayed her envy easily with that comment. I had gone to college knew it's worth and was trying to explain that to her before a particular nerve in her was rubbed the wrong way. I didn't feel like pursuing our argument as it was going to annoy me eventually. There are molehills and there are mountains and fighting over molehills I thought a waste of time. I let her plant her flag of victory on it and she stoked her pride for a few. “Fine...you win.” It costs me nothing to do that and avoid twenty minutes of misery over basically nothing. You know what I'm speaking of. It's called...”It's Not Worth It.”

Though her raising the issue gave me a thought in one way. Not one of the people I knew was in the same occupation they chose when they were in college. Each one, either through economic changes or individual decisions, had gotten out of their chosen career and moved onto onto some pretty different occupations.

**

Frank B I knew in high school. He was affable enough, though a bit too eager to show you how smart he was at times. That wasn't deniable, he was intelligent. It's when someone rubs your face in it for his own personal joy is what's annoying. “OK, you win too” But that didn't happen often enough for you to dislike him.

As teens, you mercilessly judge each other's appearance via gossip and behind their backs. It's par for the course and still happens to this day. Frank, unfortunately for him via dumb genetic luck, was born with a sixth finger on his left hand and it wasn't a workable one either. It sort of hung there, useless. His face was sort of...lizard like. In that his eyes seemed to have that perpetual “I'm high as shit” squinty-slit look. It didn't help that his glasses magnified that either and if you met him, you'd try not to stare too much out of etiquette. I never understood it but there are people who have “flat” hair. You could wash it with an industrial de-greaser, blow dry it and still it wouldn't poof up. Poor Frank had that hair.

On the nicer side, he was socially apt. He could move through the various cliques in school and was open hearted without any motive for duplicity, vs many of the kids we all have known in high school. In short, he was trustworthy and had little desire for back stabbing that teens do to move up the ladder. A kind heart.

In the last few months before graduation, those of us who applied were accepted to various colleges and I was off to RIC. Others, with better scores and much more money than my family had were off to Harvard, Yale or wherever their Dad's attended for easy, legacy approved short-tracked acceptance.

One day in class, Frank mentions to me he got into MIT.

I was astounded. I knew MIT had an acceptance rate of less than 10%, perhaps lower. He had told me his SATs and other test scores, plus his high school record was sharp enough to get him in. I sat there, still amazed by this as I had never known anyone in my life that had gone, or was going to MIT.

“You smart, brainy little fuck” I thought to myself.

I think all teachers, administrative types and schools do the following. They always praise that particular year's graduating class as “The best class we've ever seen!” Why do I think that? Because I've attended other graduations and you hear it mentioned each time.

One time in a stairwell at school I came upon Frank, the assistant principal and a biology teacher who were all gushing over the Frank's successful admission to MIT. I also noticed Frank's face as it beamed with the praise he was getting. Ah, why not beam? MIT said they wanted him. He had demonstrable talents and did the work to attain this. I on the other hand was happily satisfied with my A- or B+ grades. I could have done much better but I never saw the payoff of knocking myself out each time for “school,” so most times, I did “well enough” but never had that motivation to do it all the God Damn time.

“Does not fully apply himself though is easily capable” was written on my report cards over the years. Yeah, want to know why? I never saw the payoff worth the effort. I did those profit/loss statements in my head and found that the loss was a bit too much. Struggling to “win” all the time in the Pawtucket school system didn't seem like much fun to me. Add to that I wasn't getting much praise for wins anyway. The simple behavioral reward system didn't pay out much in my mind.

I digress.

So, we all graduate and disperse into the Four Winds. I had not met many of my high school crowd after that.

Two years later, at my favorite Quickie Mart, I was gassing up my car and thought I had recognized the person on the other side of the island.

“Frank? “ I said.

He acknowledged me but was very cool to me as well. In that he was not very forthcoming about what he was up to in life. You do that to me and I go into detective mode, I will get it out of you somehow.

After a few pointed questions he confesses. He was booted out of MIT for academic failure. It wasn't due to partying nor personal problems, he just couldn't hack it. MIT throws a world wide net for applicants and the Best of the Best come. So, instead of competing and winning in a small high school, he was now competing with the world's smartest kids. The competition is ruthless there as the kids pit everything on graduating in the Top 10. Against that, he didn't last long apparently. He told me he was working at a BlockBuster video store now with no idea on what to do next. It's a heavy blow to take really, being washed out of the Best Technical School on the Planet when you were promised by others you were a Golden Boy.

**

I haven't seen him since but have Googled him and I was astonished what profession he took up.

He's a Unitarian Universalist minister in Reno, Nevada. Wow, how the hell did that happen? I have no idea really. How does a MIT wash out with an obvious brain end up in religion? There's a deeper story there that I am not privy too. But still, it's a marked change. People's lives sure can take some very different paths and their decisions make perfect sense to them at the time.

Did my life end up where I envisioned it when I was eight teen? Not by a long shot. My idea was that I'd be a bio major, end up in the applied science business world somewhere, married with 2.4 kids. However, I had no idea at eight-teen of the changes that were to come that effected the path I'd take. Life course corrections, outside pressures and plain ol' “I don't like this anymore and I'm changing” happens. Oh, add to that my own damn personality, how I view the world and how that effected my decisions, for better or worse. Did I and others “just wing it?” No, it's more of playing it by ear as you can never tell what the future brings.

As we were asked in kindergarten, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Kids answered, “A fireman! A policeman! A nurse! An astronaut! A mommy!”

Too bad there isn't a Hogwarts “Future Occupation/Life Sorting Hat” that tells you what you will be.

“Arrrghh...hmmm...Tommy...you're gonna be an “environmental” supervisor at a landfill!”

“Little Nicole, you'll be a principal in the Chicago school system, but your married life and youngest child will be joke!”

“And who do we have here...Bobby! Well, you'll be in the Job of the Month club and an aspiring alcoholic!”

Had they placed the Sorting Hat on me...”Hmmm...HA! You sure ain't gonna be no biochemist! You're too dumb with math and everyone close in your life is gonna suck the time right out of you! You're gonna be a in home nurse for over a decade!”

And had they put that hat on Frank in May of 1982...I'm sure he'd be astonished at what it had to tell him as well. 

 

 

 

 

 

Ein Deutsches Erntedankfest

 

 

It says: A German Thanksgiving

My Thanksgivings are held about 100 yards from the original one in Plymouth due to a friend living right next door the the Plantation. It's close enough to hear the farm animals make their noises. The cow goes “moo!” We even could have wild turkey for dinner as they are numerous as pigeons there. I once saw a line of turkeys walk through his yard and I tried to get up close for a better look when he warned me not to.

“Donnnn't do that!” he says. “That one's a male, the rest are females, it's his harem!”

He tells me turkeys can fly about ten feet up and some yards laterally. Usually to get into low tree branches to escape predators. In other situations they fly at a threat and use their feet as weapons.

“That 20 lb bird will try to land on your head and he'll tear your scalp and eyes up with his talons!”

So I back off. City boy learns a lesson about cute, cuddly, real wild turkeys.

Not that it matters, we won't eat wild nor store bought turkey. Either he buys a mess of Chinese food or I'll pre-order a pile of various BBQ meats, beans and cornbread from Wes's Rib House and take it out there for T Day. Sometimes we do both.

After which, feeling like bloated pigs, we sit in the living room drinking the nicer stuff. I like bringing Grand Marnier and he always has a case of Asbach Urlat Brandy available. So we sip our drinks like snobbish gentry, burping and farting and acting like the swinish men that we really are. There are times when I can be well scrubbed, dressed up nicely and usually get through a finer event w/o picking my nose if I have too. But if with just “the guys,” different story there.

Asbach is a high quality German brandy and he'll special order it out of a local liquor store. It's OK I guess, I'm not a big brandy drinker. Though I am assured by the fact it does not sear your throat as you drink it down as most cheap alcohols will. The stuff is “smooth” as they say. I had asked him why this kind of brandy? Why go though all that effort?

“When I was in Bremmerharven, Germany, just after the war, WW2 mind you.”

“Yeah, I know which one...I'm not an idiot! Germany was a tip off!” I tell him.

He goes on.

“Bremmerharven was one of the major U-Boat ports and the Allies bombed the shit out of it. When we were docked there, most of the city was smashed...square mile after square mile of busted brick and dust.”

“On leave from the ship, you could find some places open for business, even if half the building was busted and burnt. The city was smashed but even so, people still scraped a life out of it still. One place was a great restaurant missing it's north facade and roof, but the family refused to leave, they kept it open as well as they could.”

“And what was great? The US dollar went sooo far in the German economy then! God! I lived like a king there for a while! I could get a four course dinner, dessert, beer all night and a glass of Asbach brandy...my bill came too...$1.25 in US currency! It was THAT lopsided! The owner's eye's bugged out when you paid in US dollars and not Deutschmarks. They wanted the dollars soo bad!”

“Then I get an idea. Since I could speak some German, I ask the owner if he has contacts in the city for the real good liquors, the high quality stuff and I tell him I, and the other officers of the ship, including the captain, were willing to pay him extra, in dollars, if he can get his hands on as much of the stuff he can find.”

He tells me he and the officers stuffed the ward room and other spaces on the ship with case after case of German liquors. brandies, cordials, wines, schnapps and more Jagermeister than you would ever care to drink.

“It cost us nothing...really...compared if we had to buy that stuff in London or Paris.”

I say to him, “And that's where you got the taste for Asbach brandy.”

“Yep, I was a young man then, an ensign, unrestricted surface warfare officer, having the time of my life in post war Germany...spending nothing and getting it all.”

The brandy was a happy memory for him.

**

On a Thanksgiving day in Bremmerharven, the ship's men wanted to do something for the orphans of that city, as there were more than a few of them. B. tells me they had a small PX onboard the ship, selling cigarettes, candies and...ice cream. So the men piled their change together to buy ice cream for all the kids at one of the Catholic orphanages there. They brought them to the ship and herded the kids to the mess hall, along with them was the young son of that restaurant owner who scrounged up all that liquor.

“You should've seen their eyes when we plopped the dishes of ice cream in front of them. They hadn't seen that stuff in years! We then went back and bought out all the candy and bagged it up for them to take home to the orphanage.”

A couple of days later, when the ship was due to leave, the owner of the restaurant comes to the dock with his son and manages to get B. to come down to speak with him.

“Ron, the guy begged me in German and broken English to take his son, to take him to America, get him out of the wasteland that Germany had become. He then started to shove the dollars we gave him for the booze at me. I had to tell him we could not take children on a 'ship of the line,' a warship.”

“God, the guy had tears running down his face, but still, there was no way I could put a German stowaway child onboard. How the hell am I going to explain that? I was the lowest junior officer on board then.”

“That day bugged me for the rest of the trip till we got back to New York you know.”

“That next Thanksgiving, I was stationed in Norfolk, and I decided to mail that Dad four $10 bills. It was a good chunk of money back then, even to us Americans. I had remembered the address of the restaurant luckily.”

“A few months later I get a letter from the Dad, thanking me profusely for it. His son was nine years old then and told me he spent the money on clothing, shoes for his son and other things the family needed.”

I asked, because I suspected, “How many years you do that for?”

“Till the kid was 18, so nine years.”

“What happened to the kid?” I ask.

“He's a optics technician, for Zeiss International last I heard. The kid made it.”

**

Later on I ask, “What were you paying that guy for the brandy then?”

“$10 a case. A lousy eighty-three cents a bottle.” he says.

“I now pay $400 a case. Twelve bottles...it's suits me for a year abouts.”

“You spend $400 on brandy?” I'm surprised because he's a worse skinflint than I am.

“No...I spend $400 on memories and that's worth it to me. Like I said, I was a young man then living like a King and I celebrate it still.”