Thanksgiving 1971

I dreamed a dream of home and there is coffee in Dad’s cup on the dining room table.  I am prone on the living room floor with a throw pillow behind my head.  I am staring at an RCA Victor color television.  Football is on. The dinner is over and people are sprawled out in armchairs and on sofas or on the floor like me.  Belts are unbuckled. The only people moving are the really little kids. They are playing with well worn toys from an old toy chest.

The cranberry sauce cut in half circles right out of the can is gone.  The gherkins have disappeared.  The mashed potatoes didn’t completely disappear but that is okay.  Tomorrow they will be potato pancakes to go with the eggs fried in bacon grease. There will be turkey to nibble on all night and gravy for sandwiches.  The wet dish towels are wrung out and have been hung up. All the good plates and silver are gone back to the buffet’s storage compartments. The day is gray and brown, but it is not raining.

One by one each of the ten or so people in the living room give in to the tryptophan, and to  the massive amount of energy expended in making the meal and cleaning up afterwards. First one head tips back and to the side and with the blink or two the eyes shut.  Soon I am the only person in the room not snoring and/or drooling.  Life is good. Life is safe.

I get up and put on my Robert Hall dark brown corduroy jacket.  Slipping silently out the side door I walk down to the creek.  I pull out a hard pack of Marlboro reds from my pocket.  I pull a cigarette out and light it. Inhaling deeply I stand on the old iron bridge and watch the water rush by.  1971 will be over soon.

Thanksgiving 2019

28 November 2019

Right now I am sitting at the dining room table with an iPad and a keyboard.  Made breakfast of eggs bacon and toast a little bit ago.  Because it is Thanksgiving I don’t think eating breakfast at 10 am was even a little bit wrong. On Thanksgiving there is no judgment.

Long time ago I gave up on cable.  That means to watch the “parade” I would have to turn on the TV, go to the menu, mark it for antenna, and then put the rabbit ears up and wiggle them until the digital signal comes in clearly.  I am not going to go that.  Instead, I will simply remember the first time I saw Snoopy coming down the New York City avenue on an old black and white TV.  My memory of the delight of that first view carries more electricity that a high definition image of the pores on the face of today’s hotness chanteuse. 

In my memory I smell the turkey.  Also I see my family over the years with one brother or another coming in wearing a uniform, but changing into civilian clothes and heading out with my father to do manly things, like collect laurel to go around the front door of the house as part of our Christmas decorations.

I also remember all the years of being in Toronto or London Ontario for this holiday.  It isn’t Thanksgiving there and I was free to eat PEI mussels or lamb curry or elk steak.  MMM elk steak with wild mushrooms. While my youngest’s job will keep us in the States today, he has to work at 7 pm, I will NOT BE EATING TURKEY.  The local Indian restaurant will be serving a buffet of curries and other dishes that will definitely not be turkey. 

In looking at Facebook I see my niece has asked how my father met my mother.  Thing is they are both dead now and only my sister and maybe one of my cousins may have any insight.  I know that my father was stationed at a military base at the edge of my home town in the 1930s.  I know he was thick as thieves with a couple of guys, maybe two, maybe three who had interest in the daughters of Mr. Asher, my grandfather.  I have no idea how the courting went.

The version my mother told of things always ended with the note that while my father was considering re-enlisting in the U.S. Army, she indicated she would not be around when he got back. So, he left the army and they got married in the late 1930s.  She was always quick to point out that this was a good thing because his next posting would have been the Philippines, think Bataan.

My late brother, Jerry, told me a story that involved my father having a bit of a wild hare’s disposition.  In addition to the getting out of the army bit, there was a straighten up and fly right demand.  Don’t know all the details but I remember my father and my great Uncle Vance getting into some serious deep guffaws about some incident in NYC that involved a pistol and a woman who may or may not have been Warren G. Harding’s daughter.  The existence of this story and of my father’s pointing out to me the table where he and Vance would sit at the Cotton Club (as I was watching a PBS special) lead me to believe there might have been such a condition put in place before marriage.

Jean Shepherd in “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash”, wrote a long passage about his father’s passion for a cooking turkey.  It is a memorable scene in a Christmas Story, you know the one where the Bumpus’s dogs make off with the turkey and the family has to eat Christmas dinner at a Chinese restaurant. The description of the smell of the bird and the old man’s longing for the bird written by Mr. Shepherd are as true of my experience relative to the Todd family Thanksgiving meal as any written. Only for me the whole meal was about the crescent rolls.  Just keep those fancy Pillsbury rolls coming folks.

I wish you all the best this Thanksgiving.  I believe I have a great many things to be thankful for including, but not limited to what appears to have been successful cancer surgery and a son about to graduate university. To the Asher family I offer this.  Remember the holidays were always our best season.  From Thanksgiving to the New Year we were as close as any family could be.  Gobble, gobble. 

For the benefit of my niece, here is a picture of your Grandfather and Grandmother Todd’s wedding.

Screw It. From Here On Out I Am Just Going to Make Stuff Up.

Memories are tricky things.  Remembrance washes away the moles and freckles on the faces of the women I remember.  My recollections purge the halitosis, body odor and noxious flatulence of the men I knew and and counted as my buddies.  If  I didn’t like you your memory to me is a picture of a reeking, belching gas bag of troubled complexion.   Gone are any of the good acts or qualities of those that crossed me.  Their bad had become evil, an evil as hard as the marble of a cenotaph.  Much the same is true for the good I remember in people I like. In those I have liked or loved, their positive qualities have risen to the level of almost saintly perfection.  Their vacillation in decision making, the suspect motives of any particular action of their’s have been washed away. I am acutely aware that the  foibles of those we love drop off the organic record our brain keeps as the years pass.

But the realities of moments in our past are always much different then our memories of them. In each person cataloged in the back of our minds there is much more to  their motivations then our minds allow us to remember.  These people were carrying burdens, facing their own hard choices, were dealing with things we never saw.  We don’t know what occurred before they did whatever they did that has stuck with us through the years for good or ill. We will never know what nervous tick made them sneer so as to precipitate that punch we threw. We might not remember we were that person’s second choice as a date to the dance. 

Because memories are so tricky I kind of throw in with the magic realists.  I am more that happy to interject things that are impossible into my memories. A thrown punch becomes the tossing of rose petals that turn into brightly colored butterflies that melt off leaving only ethereal music. What does it really matter if in my memory of a high school brawl  I place a saint with white robes, a glowing aura and a halo seated at a cafeteria lunch table into the scene?  It does not even matter that in my revised memory he is eating a banana when he says, “You guys know this won’t turn out well, right?” . What does it matter if I make everyone more handsome and beautiful and two dimensional, either good actors or bad actors but give them white and black Stetson hats to differentiate their roles in my past?  And the cherubim and seraphim that are always at the edges of the scene offering commentary, well they are okay too.

Okay, okay I can’t do this with every memory, some are just too important to screw around with.  But hell, as I get older I am going to interject magic into more and more of my stories.  Clearly my dull life can use a few flourishes.  Instead of, “…and after he went to college he went directly into law school,” wouldn’t it be better if I went and studied with a sect of levitating monks in the Himalayan Mountains? Anyhow, embellishment of the truth is a long standing and time honored family tradition.  Life is better with magical realism.

It All Leads to Now - An Update of an Older Post

In recent day, on Facebook, some of my friends have been commenting back and forth on a picture posted from one of our old yearbooks.  My photo was on the page along with some very dear friends.  It was from at least 46 years ago. Time flies.

In response to the picture’s posting, someone asked where are they now? In response I asked wouldn’t the more interesting questions be, how have they lived and do they have peace? 

In addition, I began to engage in some photo terrorism.  I have been cleaning up some of the shots from my yearbook and posting them.  Some of the people whose photos I would like to post I can’t.  Seems one of my friends back then, an erstwhile humorist at 15, drew cartoon penises on people’s faces.  Ah, the acts of the young and goofy.

Trying to rest in bed after posting the how have they lived and are that at peace with themselves and the world questions I keep ruminating on those queries.  Once my mind goes down a rabbit hole so expansive, it is hard to let it rest.  Like a dog with a rawhide chew toy, I just keep going at it.  Do I have peace?  How have I lived? Have the choices I have made had any positive consequence?

I got up this morning and went looking for thoughts I might have had on these topics that I might have set down in writing.   I searched my blog for the key phrase “high school”.  God, what weirdness was found. 

Funny thing though, I found a kind of summary of how I have lived.  My thoughts were contained in a piece where I listed stories I should write about. The things listed aren’t PC and are in some cases probably defamatory, or at the bare minimum an invasion of privacy.  But with a little editing here is a that summary. These vignettes are so intregal to my life, but so inconsequential to the world at large. 

These are the things I had noted to talk about in future blog postings:

·       Eating in an old chrome style diner. My girlfriend (now wife of 34 years) and I discovered an odd restaurant somewhere in the western mountains of Pennsylvania. The shinny metal rectangle that just said EAT in neon, appeared to us on one of those nonstop runs we made between South Jersey and Michigan to see family. This was pre-kids, a period when a weekend turnaround was possible.  The apparition that was this greasy spoon had giant model airplanes hanging from the ceiling. Imagine eating a plate of eggs, bacon and hash browns served with hot steaming joe under an intricately detailed B-17 with an eight-foot wingspan. It was hanging four feet above our heads. We have tried on several occasions to find this place again, but we never, ever found it again.  It is our phantom diner. It was our Brigadoon. If you have ever been there, tell me what exit it is located at.

·       A night so clear in Teddy Roosevelt National Park North (i.e. that is somewhere in North Dakota) where the stars were so brilliant that I felt I could touch the sky. On that night I lay out on the warm summer ground staring up at the stars. Those tiny burning orbs just went on and on to every boundary of my field of vision.  I remained still on the ground for an hour before I crawled into the tent. With no light pollution you could, if you wanted to, could see forever. Looking far beyond the gravitational bounds of this finite and limited world, on that night, and really not since, I knew the immensity of the universe.

·       There was that time I ate a pot stuffed brownie, went to a Jefferson Starship concert at Munn Ice Arena in East Lansing and woke up the next day 600 miles away in Philadelphia. When chasing love while really, really high one tends to listen to voices carried upon the cosmic wind. If you follow your heart, you do insane things. Thinking about that incident I get a clear understanding of the lyric from that old Chris Smither song about crying and drinking beer over the stupid stuff because living life means you do a great deal of stupid stuff.

·       The time when my old car blew up. An engine needs oil.  If that oil lust is not fed your basic eight cylinders throw a rod. Yeah good ole Thunder Road gave up the ghost in Corvallis, WA. The towing company made us inventory all of that three door Chevrolet’s contents. We listed of course “miscellaneous sex toys” as part of the contents within the old behemoth.  We didn’t actually have any but in 1978 this notation was found to be very amusing by the tow truck owner.

·       An afternoon at a middle school debate tournament when my youngest son ripped apart an opposing argument with ferocity at a debate match. Loren just left his body and became a logical, intensely focused voice. With his body shaking, his passion just irradiated the room around him and charged up his team.  It also pissed off the judge so much that he/she gave him a zero.  Despite the begging and pleading of the other judges the bastard refused to move off that nil point. The boy still won best debater for that day. Bite us judge, just bite us.

·       A gentle soul who led me home when I wandered lost in the riverside garden captured by the spell of a verdant evening and unsure of my next step. I was too far gone for sure that night.

·       There is my high school heart throb, not my girlfriend just my heart throb. She was the Kosmic Kid and how we would riff on the meaning of Grateful Dead lyrics. Oh yeah and there was that drunken stupor where while we were riding about with Jim Thomas and Bob Perlmutter searching for the ever-elusive Chanukah bush one cold mid-December night in 1973. Boone’s farm and weed made the drive loose, so very loose. She let me grope her nipple.  Then, at that moment, the experience was like climbing to the top of Mount Everest. I know its juvenile but the things that form us happen early on.

·       A. bright sunny day when I was staring into Victor Hugo’s apartment in Paris In a city on a three day stay we wandered about. This was before I had read Les Misérables and viewing that room actually motivated me to wade into the waters of that book.  Reading Les Miz was one of my greatest joys ever. Reading his masterpiece in translation led me to his take on the Hunchback.  Again, a joy of words so beautiful.

·       There was my oldest son playing bass with perfect time and being congratulated by the judge of a regional music competition on his sight reading and skill. No one judged him because he was autistic. They judged him for his fucking talent. Years later I met his student teacher from the time and she told me how the head music teacher pulled her aside and pointed out the two bass players.  He asked her what she noticed.  Her response was that they were perfect time keepers.  It was only then that he told her that they both had Asperger’s and that they were about the most passionate bass players he knew.

·       Several evenings making out with a sandy haired lass in the high sea grass that covered the sand dunes down at the end of the island where Ocean City sits while. We talked about the Jefferson Starship, the waves and life. I think there were mosquitoes but with a memory like that, I.e. cheap wine, Mexican pot and passionate kisses who cares about the mosquitoes?

·       Inviting my now wife, then dorm acquaintance to my room to listen to some John Klemmer records.  What I did not know was that another friend of mine had earlier in the evening shown her the disks and stated, “Oh those, they are Jay’s fuck records.  I have to return them to him.”

·       There was the high school performance of “Anything Goes” where on the last night of performance they put hard liquor in my prop liquor bottle instead of iced tea. This was the joy of being loved as part of a team not put together by arbitrary gym coaches. The energy level was so high I didn’t even notice the burn of that old Schenley’s.

·       And then one day I was calling my gym teacher a cocksucker in front of the whole class. On that October morning in 1973, I kicked open the gym doors and walked down the hall to the “Office” to await my punishment and then getting none.  Using the word cocksucker even in private cursing in 1973 was still not that far removed its impact back in the mid-1960s when Lenny Bruce was jailed for saying it on stage. Also, great fun was hearing my physican yell so loud over the phone that the school administration was a bunch of idiots for trying to make me play ball sports with my compromised vision.  I didn’t think docotor’s used those kinds of words.

·       There was standing in the rain singing “Ohio” together with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young on the night that Nixon resigned. How much I thought had changed. How little it had. I go back to those dreams of change often.  I sigh when I feel the pain of what we have become.

·       A tale of the absolute delight that attending the Olympics in Norway brought me. Reindeer is the other white meat, really. And the Swede-Canada gold medal game in hockey, well does it get much better than double overtime and a shoot-out?

·       There were so many people over the years that offered help, or guidance, or support to me in little ways. I have to especially note that guy in Oregon who saved me as I was hanging between a rock and a hard spot and then said, “I helped you, now you make sure to help someone else.”

·       There was the loneliness of standing on the shore of the old Outer Banks (the one that existed before the crowded summer metropolis it has now become) and staring at nothing but sand and Atlantic Ocean on a grey evening. I was alone as alone could be. I was empty both physically and spiritually.

·       There was the first time I heard Annie Haslam sing “Carpet of the Sun”. The hair stood up on my neck. Her voice was beautiful and stunning. Of course, my apartment was scattered with beer bottles everywhere and also sleeping bodies. I had to step over prone unconscious people as I began the clean-up from the first law school party I have ever held.

·       There was the notoriety of high school expulsion. I guess I was at the forefront of the “Free the gherkin” movement.

·       There was the puking my guts out in a motor hotel somewhere outside of Ann Arbor the night before I got to Michigan State.  As the sun went down that night, I was realizing how far away from everyone I ever knew I was going to be.

·       There was that person who sent me Snoopy card after Snoopy card as we danced a dance about what we really were.  Were we a “we”?  Were we just friends? She was a golden beauty in the summer sun of early life. We crashed and burned. There were the long silences in those calls where I got blown off and a relationship withered.

·       There was the joy of being alive after a horrific accident. Two semis hit us and we lived. But the feeling of being alive was electric.  I don’t think I have ever, at any moment since that accident, felt so alive. Air tasted sweet and every birdsong was a symphony.

·       There was the gut-wrenching call telling me my nephew was dead after he had left my home just a few hours earlier.

·       There was the day the doctor confirmed Francie was pregnant with John Lee.  Who cared about that elderly first time mother nonsense.

·       There was the day of the Asperger’s diagnosis. There were the years of being an advocate for my son.  There were the moments of defusing situations between my son and neurotypicals.  There were moments of rage at teachers who refused to stop the bullying. There were the notes that said “There has been a problem” from people who just don’t get what it means to be on the spectrum.

·       There was the quiet of a lake in Northern Ontario on a group road trip around Lake Huron. We were friends standing about in as dark a night as I can remember listening to loons on a lake drinking good cold beer.

·       There was that out of the blue telephone call to my Dad the day before he died. For no reason I got the chance to say something I don’t remember saying before, “I love you Dad.” I had gotten a call from my late brother and I assumed it was to tell me that Dad had died. I immediately called home and my Dad answered. We talked midday for 15 minutes on the old Bell system long distance rates.  He even asked why I called and I told him that I had thought something had happened to him.  He laughed.  The massive heart attack that killed him came the next day.

·       There was the moment we realized that the house was too small with two boys. A crib in the living room and the prospect of having to build a third bedroom was not appealing. 

·       There were those moments of staring down teachers both on my own behalf and then later on the behalf of my children.

·       There was the joy of rocketing down a mountain on a luge in Norway. Two inches off the ground with just a couple pieces of metal beneath you hurtling down a kilometer plus old bobsled run in Oslo was a peak experience.  It was joy personified.

·       There was telling my best baristas Darrin and Jason about the filthiest true story I had ever amassed and realizing that friendships were being made. You cannot tell someone a story like that and not find out their personal limits of taste. I have boundaries or I would share the rest.

·       There was the moment I quit driving altogether. Migraines, racing heart, meh vision.  I am much better as a passenger than a driver.

·       There was the first Grateful Dead show I ever attended in July 1976 at the Tower Theatre in Philadelphia; they played Wharf Rat. It was an invite only Dead Head’s appreciation show. At the time Wharf Rat was my favorite. I was sitting behind the local Hell’s Angels and they had a beef with someone.  Never pick a fight with the Hell’s Angels. I also learned never drink out of someone else’s wine sack.

·       There was that first joint I smoked. Still funny to me how I got high and walked into a closest thinking it was the door out of the house and then I just couldn’t I mean I really couldn’t figure out what the malfunction was.

·       There was that night of sex in the showers at the dorm. She was a grand woman of free spirit.

·       There was the doctor’s disembodied voice on the telephone saying, “Mr. Todd, I am afraid it is cancer.”

·       There was the plaster of Paris two of the guys on the floor at Mayo hall had applied under Doug Mason’s sheets. He was our resident assistant. When he came in drunk and flopped upon his now rock-solid bed there was groaning. The mattress did not give him any quarter.

·       There was the dinner at Goodrich’s before our wedding; shrimp and clams and picnic benches wrapped up in a wonderful fading night. It was old Florida; it was old coastal cuisine.  It tied to the wonderous feasts of my childhood involving hush puppies and oyster roasts.  

·       There was the long fast drive from Lansing to Peoria to say good bye to the good woman that was Lucy, my children’s surrogate grandmother. After Francie’s Dad died Loren and Lucy made us family.  They loved us.  They incorporated us into the warmth of their lives.  John Lee learned to go up and down stairs at their house in Peoria Heights. 

·       There were the late-night calls to hear that there had been accidents and deaths. Back when I had a land line the only reason the phone rang at two a.m. was to tell you bad, bad news.  And those call did come. Too many.  Now they come by text, well at least that is how I learned of one of my brother’s deaths. 

·       There was my dearest friend Terry on my roof at 1 a.m. He was asking to come in because he didn’t realize how high the roof was because he was drunk. As good an idea as it seemed at the time to harass me from atop the shingles he now wanted down. But I was not alone. It took some explaining to my partially clothed date that things like this did not happen to me very often. I was lying of course.

·       There were endless nights of long, long walks just to clear my head. From the time I was growing up in Pedericktown, NJ, to now as I live here in the middle of the Michigan mitten, I walk most every day of the year.  I don’t use headphones or earbuds for the most part.  When I walk it is as an act of meditation. It leaves me time to be empty and to let all of it float away before returning to be addressed one item at a time. Beats sitting on the mat, but I do that too.

·       There was winning an election. What a two-edged sword that turned out to be. Civic duty be damned.  Never get elected to a school board. You might as well put a sign on your back that says, “Pick me next.  I am ready to be crucified.”

·       There was becoming Lutheran. Still can’t remember how to make the sign of the cross, probably because I keep my spare specs in a case in my purse and I wear my watch on the wrong wrist, when I wear a watch. But I can tell you in 1978 when I first started attended, I had a thing for zaftig Germanic girls.

·       There was the pastor dropping me in the baptismal pool back when I was a Baptist.  Being a portly child Pastor Martin lost his grip on me as I was going under.  Luckily for all I did not drown.   

·       There was the smoking dope in the church basement. Of course, because of the venting the clouds of burnt weed filled the sanctuary during the Sunday school assembly. I can remember Grant Lindell giving me the hairy eye look, because I am pretty sure he knew it was me that caused the problem.  Thank goodness there were no smoke detectors back then in 1972.

·       There was the joy of discovering Toronto for the first time. Francie had thrown me out and I was trying to win her back. I went for the grand gesture, a trip to the big city in a foreign country.  It did not work, at least not then. We took the train to TO on the old Key Tours package.  On that October weekend, I think it was Thanksgiving, there was a show on at the science center called something like 5000 years of China.  In 1981 we watched Chinese craftsman make paper, do block printing, smelt bells and weave silk into the finest of garments.

·       There was the year of loss with my mother, my nephew and my father in law passing all within 8 months. The ache and loss were insurmountable.  I still wake up with nightmares from that year. In my life there are two eras, 1994 and before and 1995 and after.  My world that year was storn askew that Francie and I refused to celebrate Christmas and instead went and hid in a hotel room in Toronto. No celebrations, just tears, and staring out a fancy hotel window at a quiet town. Nine months later John Lee was born.

·       There was a sunset somewhere in Montana that seemed to me to be the best sunset ever. In an old beat of Chevrolet, in “search of America” as so many were in the 1970s, sleeping in a pup tent and cooking on a Coleman stove, I saw the sunset by which all others are measured. Going down that road headed west my life changed. On those miles of blacktop through little towns marked with nothing more than a few trees and a water tower, I saw what people were willing to do to be free.

·       There was a night when I had to stare at a street light so my molecules would not come unstrung and float away into nothingness because we had decided to see if we could smoke a quarter pound of pot. Didn’t get anywhere close.

·       There was the joy of love. Make no mistake I appreciate the fact that I have been loved, I have loved and I still love. I have been blessed to have felt love more than once in my life.  I have been blessed to have long lasting love.

·       There was the first real awareness that you don’t get out of this alive. I think I was 11 or 12 and I lay awake all night.  Through the years with the loss of one person after another whom I have loved, respected or shared deep personal bonds with, the real nature of the finite existence of our flesh and the immense nature of permanent loss has grown.  Now it hangs large over so much of what I do, but I refuse to let it render me unable to act.

·       There was the first real awareness that life is so much shorter than we ever imagined. There was the reading of the phrase “Be here, be now” in Aldous Huxley’s island and having it sink in and mean something.

·       There was wonder of Chris Smither singing “Visions of Johanna” live. Don Biggs, Linda, Francie and I just loved what he was selling that night from “Link of Chain” to “Lola” to “Leave the Light On”, he firing on all eight cylinders.

·       There was being told I didn’t need a stent.  This led to a flight to Lisbon. Landing in that country I discovered a people who were just amazing.  I discovered food that was to my liking.  And there was a December twilight boat ride on the Douro river that showed me the golden light that permeates the place.

·       There was the diagnosis with kidney cancer.  Unexpected.  Out of the blue.  Painful and with a degree of long term uncertainty.  However, it has acted as a catalyst to move me forward to do the hard thing of retiring from work.  Being a househusband has suited me for the past 1 ½ months.

Yeah, I have written some of this stuff down already in prior posts. Yes, I will get around to some of the rest. Of course, some of these things will be memorialized by nothing more than the lines in this post. 

This is life my friend, sand and impermanence, a Buddhist mandala just waiting to be shaken. 

Does it matter? Yes.