Back to the slopes

Next week, my middle nephew, Denny, turns 40 -- a hair-raising fact for his eldest uncle, if no one else, to contemplate.  But to ease the sense of horror that perhaps many of us older relatives feel, the entire clan is getting together for a birthday celebration at Donner Lake, near the north end of Lake Tahoe, this weekend.

The event is being hosted by the Birthday Boy himself.  We're gathering at a cabin he's rented for the occasion.  Weather permitting -- and it looks like the weather will be quite favorable -- many of us will head for the ski slopes on Saturday.

I throw this plan off casually, as though skiing occupies most my winter weekends.  Actually -- and I'm astounded to realize this -- I haven't been skiing since 2008, when I posted a description of my family's ski weekend at South Lake Tahoe. 

Do I dare?

It's not that I've forgotten how to ski.  Skiing's like riding a bike.  Once you've learned, your body knows what to do.  My muscles will know exactly what to do -- the question is whether they'll be able to do it.

During the prior nine years, I've done plenty of walking and hiking, much of it up and down hill.  That's a good thing, but the muscles used for skiing aren't exactly the same as those used for hiking.  Have they atrophied?  Have they aged?  Have all my leg muscles, aside from those used for walking, become a disgusting and squishy mass of gelatin?

The answer is -- we shall soon find out.  I'm confident that, even if I do just fine, I won't be skiing all day.  There's a reason that ski areas often let seniors ski for reduced prices -- we get off the slopes early.  There are warming huts awaiting us, with hot coffee and hot buttered rum.  There will be a lodge at the bottom, filled with beautiful people dressed in the latest ski gear on whose heads, mysteriously, not a strand of hair will be misplaced.  There will be giant burgers and plates of nachos available, and various IPAs served with a smile.

There are thus many ways to spend a day "skiing."  At different phases of my life, I've enjoyed many of them.  I'll report back on this particular trip -- even if (especially if) I end up breaking a leg.  After all, I'm part Norwegian -- it's all good.

Let's hit the slopes.

Happy whatever

I still have a few relatives and acquaintances for whom exchanging Christmas cards has not yet become a charming but anachronistic custom of our historic past, a practice long since replaced by tweets and posts.  And so, about this time of year, I start casting about for suitable Christmas cards to send to these hardy old timers.

For many years, I ordered fairly arty cards by mail from museums, especially the Metropolitan in New York, and the Art Institute in Chicago.  But, as I've steadily pared names from my list, I've finally ended up simply buying a box of twenty or so cards at a local bookstore.  (Speaking of dying institutions, but let's try to stay on topic.)

And so today, I dropped by the University Bookstore on "the Ave," walking distance from my house.  Sure enough, they already had a large number of cards on display, an encouraging sign -- I thought -- that Christmas cards had not yet gone the way of calling cards and spats.

Now, maybe the Christmas card offerings of the UW bookstore are not fairly representative of card sales across America.  College crowd, liberal bubble, and all that.  But I was amazed at how much the appearance of cards had changed in the last few years.

When I first started buying my own Christmas cards, as an undergrad, about half the designs were religious in nature.  Some were rather embarrassingly literal and saccharine, but many were nicely artistic -- somewhat abstract and symbolic, as well as beautiful.  But -- being the observant lad that I am -- I realize that the demand for religious themes has been steadily declining over the decades.  But, in their place, I expected to see -- as I've seen so often in the past -- cards with Santa Claus and his elves, warm family scenes, sleigh rides across the country, presumably en route to grandmother's house, and perhaps quasi-religious scenes of deer and birds out in the woods gathering around a manger-like object with sun bursts shining about them.

But no.  I saw very little of any of this.  Nor did I see much "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year."  Nor, even more surprising, much "Happy Holidays."  What I did see was lots of scenes, often snowy, of nature, with no holiday references whatsoever.  As though we were celebrating the Winter Solstice (which at least one card expressly stated).  And I saw lots of rather attractive woodcuts of interesting objects and places, with little reference, again, to the Christmas holiday, or even to winter.  You just send one of these, I guess, and hope the recipient takes it in whatever spirit makes him least unhappy.

Even as a kid, I saw and was appalled by cards showing Santa pouring himself a whiskey and soda or otherwise disporting himself in a disgraceful manner, so I'm no longer all that easily shocked.  But now many cards, regardless of art work, come with clever and ironic captions.  I saw very little that suggested that any person was expressing a sincere hope that the card's recipient's life would be happy or joyful -- other than those expressing something of the sort in a highly ironic context ("Happy and Merry and Stuff Like That, or Whatever"). 

I guess one interpretation might be that we are now too disillusioned and/or sophisticated to hope for our own, let alone anyone else's, true happiness.   But I also think the whole issue of Christmas in America has become fraught with tension.  We know that many (most) of our friends aren't Christian -- we've always known that.  But what's new is that we now feel that raising the subject of Christmas even as a secular holiday -- "hope Santa brings you good things" -- is a form of cultural imperialism.  We're imposing Western concepts -- Santa --on non-Western citizens.  Even best wishes for the winter solstice can be tricky.  Best not to include any poignant photos of harp seals or spotted owls -- someone might take political offense.  And any attempt to make our greetings more catholic by gracing the card with Buddhist or Hindu images might be deemed a micro-aggression, an attempt at cultural appropriation.

Maybe -- except in the bosom of our nuclear families -- we should all just sit around a plain pole and exchange ironic witticisms.  Or did Seinfeld beat me to it?   Happy Festivus?

Or maybe the entire nation can coalesce around a December festival in honor of Momus, the Greek god of irony, sarcasm, and ridicule.  The last god that educated Americans have in common.

Late to the party

As we all know, in 1621, our Pilgrim fathers, thankful for a good harvest, threw a party for themselves and for neighboring Indians (who, we assume, happily attended and enjoyed the company of their new and generous neighbors, with whom they hoped to forge eternal bonds of friendship and equal partnership).  The Puritan tradition, which the pilgrims brought with them from England, often observed special days of thanksgiving -- observed by fasting. 

But the pilgrims were already Americans, and Americans don't do fasting.  God loves a full stomach, we choose to believe.  Bring on the stuffed turkey, the pilgrims might have said, although they probably actually ate mainly corn and squash.

Jumping ahead 150 years or so -- most of which were unpleasantly nonfestive, as a quick reading of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter will suggest -- we see George Washington proclaiming November 26, 1789, as a day of public thanksgiving and prayer.  The holiday was still somewhat embryonic -- the president made no mention of 18-pound turkeys with all the trimmings, followed by the celebrants' rolling around in pain on the floor, suffering the after-effects of their gluttony and barely able to attack the forthcoming mince and pumpkin pies..

Nor was any mention yet made of Black Friday sales commencing on Thursday evening.

In fact, no mention was made of Thursdays.  But, Wikipedia assures me, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, most states did observe the Thanksgiving celebration -- be it fast, feast, or exercise in gourmandism -- on the last Thursday of November.  Abe Lincoln made it official, nationally, in 1863, although the South -- as is its wont -- was a bit slow to go along.

By the twentieth century, the day after Thanksgiving had become the de facto start of the national Christmas gift-buying orgy.  Merchants were devastated whenever November had five Thursdays, meaning that the commercial bonanza couldn't begin until November 30 at the earliest.  Congress came to their rescue, and in 1943 FDR signed a resolution ensuring that the holiday would begin always on the fourth Thursday in November.

As must be apparent, the date on which Thanksgiving is celebrated is quite arbitrary.  It doesn't have the same logical basis in hallowed history as, say, Christmas, which celebrates the birth of Christ on the date of the Roman revelries of the Saturnalia, or of Easter, which celebrates the Resurrection on the first Sunday following the first full moon following the vernal equinox.

Having noted this lack of historical basis, therefore, my family feels free to celebrate this year's Thanksgiving on the last Saturday of November.  Casting the iron bonds of tradition aside and fearlessly creating our own holiday date.  Even choosing, if we so choose, a faux turkey created out of soy and wheat protein.

We do not so choose, of course.  And our break with the traditional holiday date results not from a frenzied sense of bohemian anarchy, but from logistical difficulties experienced by some of our family in reaching Sonoma, California, where the turkey -- once an actual living bird with hopes and dreams of its own, all too unfortunately ended in an untimely fashion -- will be gleefully consumed.

Next year, however, we will rejoin the rest of the United States.  Fourth Thursday in November it shall be.

Post-election blues

Whether by coincidence or by some subconscious craving for understanding, at the same time that Trump has been doing whatever it is he's doing -- does he really know? -- I've been reading a highly readable history of the Roman republic.¹  

The world has changed mightily from the first century B.C. to the 21st century A.D.  But the urges that often motivate humans -- avarice, fear, ambition -- have changed little.  I see more parallels between the final year of the Roman republic and today's America than I find comfortable.

Forty-two years ago, my graduation from law school coincided with another event involving avarice, fear, and ambition -- Watergate and the ultimate resignation of Richard M. Nixon from the presidency.  I wrote an "epilogue" to the year's final issue of my school's law review, finding another parallel between America and Rome, this time Imperial Rome.  I at least professed optimism, in this excerpt from the epilogue:

[O]ur civilization happily retains a measure of vitality.  It was said of Rome that, even while the state remained militarily potent:

The greatest political events passed over the heads of the people like black or golden clouds.  Later it was to watch even the ruin of the Empire and the coming of the barbarians with indifference.  it was a worn-out body whose fibres no longer reacted to any stimulus.²

That Americans still are capable of outrage, still avidly debate the issues of the day, demonstrates that the fibers of our civilization remain healthy.  But the shocks which have buffeted us in the decade since President Kennedy's assassination undoubtedly have exerted a dulling impact on our ability to recognize and respond to moral problems.

49 Wash.L.Rev. 1199 (1974).

The epilogue was dated August 9, 1974 -- a red-letter date in American history. 

I believed, guardedly, with the hopeful optimism of youth, that Watergate was a shock that would knock some sense into America, that politicians of both parties would lean over backward to avoid another convulsion that might further weaken Americans' confidence in their leaders, in themselves, and, indeed, in their nation itself.  And for a while, my optimism seemed justified.

Then -- just as in the days of the Roman republic, about which I'm now reading -- politicians belonging to one of the political parties apparently felt that America was drifting away from their own rigid ideology.  They apparently saw no way to persuade the voters -- in the long run, at least -- to return to their fold.  And thus began a couple of decades of political tactics that would have been unthinkable during, say, the Eisenhower years -- impeachment without constitutional basis, use of the Supreme Court to halt recounts of votes, dark claims that a sitting president was not eligible by birth for his position, that he was a secret Muslim, that he was not "one of us."  We heard a Congressman shouting "liar" during the president's State of the Union address.  And more.  We all know the sad history of the past eight years.

And then Trump comes along.  He has suggested some odd policy promises, but that's normal politics.  More troubling has been his apparent lack of serious interest in the less spectacular but more critical demands of the office.  His language has been crude and uncivil. He has threatened to jail his opponent.  He has insulted -- not criticized but insulted -- the sitting president.  He has appeared intellectually lazy and ignorant, and he seems to trust that the voters would find laziness and ignorance attractive. Proof that he was "one of us."

But he won the election, having mobilized a winning 49 percent of the voters by promises he knew were impossible to keep, and that he had no intention of keeping.  By lying without batting an eye, while calling his opponent a liar.  By -- in other words -- sheer demagoguery, by playing on emotions and deflecting attention from facts.

We've had demagogues before.  I suppose William Jennings Bryan qualified.  But we have not had true demagogues run for president since the United States became a superpower, a nation whose every move is watched worldwide, whose every move may make the difference between nuclear war and peace.

Are we still capable of outrage?  Obviously, the losing Democrats are outraged.  But approximately one half of the country voted for a demagogue, with full knowledge of every point I've made above.  Unlike Nixon and Watergate, Mr. Trump has not hidden behind masked men working in the dead of night.  His outrages have been right out in the open, for all to see.  But the voters saw, and they weren't outraged.

I don't know what the country will be like four years from now.  But the history of the Roman republic suggests that you can strain the bounds of decency and custom only so many times before those bounds no longer bind.  We may be reaching that point.  We may have reached and passed that point.

I read again what I wrote in 1974, and I'm touched by my optimism.  I wish could still share it.
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¹ T. Holland, Rubicon, The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (2003)

² F. Lot, The End of the Ancient World and the Beginning of the Middle Ages (Harper paperback ed. 1961) at p. 181.

Roll up your sleeve

I dropped by my local Safeway early this morning, planning to get my annual flu shot.  I was too early, in fact, as the pharmacy counter hadn't yet opened.  But I'll get it tomorrow.

Getting a flu shot seems so routine now -- a lot of the time I'm thinking about my next chore, rather than the needle that's being inserted in my arm.  The pain is minimal, of course.  I'd far rather receive a routine inoculation in my arm than a shot of novocaine in my gum from my friendly dentist. 

And yet facing similar shots was so traumatic in my childhood.  And we seemed to receive them so frequently.  Our school teacher would drop the bombshell on us -- at such and such time, we would be lining up and filing down to the nurse's office where we would be receiving shots of one kind or another.  She might as well have announced that the boxcars bound for Auschwitz were awaiting us. Terror swept the classroom.  The faces of half the class would be ashen.  Boys would begin nervously giggling and warning each other of the humongous size of the needles with which we were to be jabbed.  By the time we had reached the nurse's office and were lined up for our shots, a few kids would be crying -- their cries adding to the rapidly increasing stress and horror all the rest of us felt.

I hardly remember the actual pain of those many shots I received in childhood -- only the stress and fear experienced in the hours and minutes preceding them.  If smarter, I would have seen in this fact an allegory for much of life itself.

Housemates

Loki and Muldoon
Quickly adapting to a new home 

It's hard to believe, but it was twelve years ago this month that I adopted my two cats.  Time passes quickly when you're cleaning up hair balls.

It was a day or two after Thanksgiving.  My brother and sister and their families were visiting for the holidays, as well as Pascal, a family friend and hiking companion who was attending U.B.C. in Vancouver at the time.  They persuaded me that I had grieved long enough for my two earlier cats, the latest of whom had passed on to Catnip Heaven 18 months earlier.  Duly persuaded, I descended, joined by all my guests, on the Seattle Animal Shelter.

I understand how the admissions office at Harvard feels. So many worthy candidates, but a limited number of places to fill.  I finally settled on a perky all-black kitten, and a quieter adolescent -- both males.  Loki and Muldoon, respectively.  Loki had been picked up on the street -- one of Seattle's many homeless and hungry.  Muldoon, several months older, had been surrendered following the death of his short-time owner, a victim of cancer -- and something about that experience had left Muldoon timid and chronically anxious.

Twelve years later, they have created frequent headaches, but have proved more than worth every cranial pain I've suffeed.  Loki is still kittenish, although now more cuddly.  Muldoon, after many years, has learned to both crave and demand the affection that he at first resisted with panic.  They are well into middle age, but who knows how many years they still have left?  My last two cats had long lives:  Lyta lived well past her 19th birthday; Theseus disappeared early one morning at the age of 16, shortly after being diagnosed with a possibly operable tumor.

No one is immortal, not even those of us with nine lives, and parting with a pet is always painful.  Some people avoid the pain of a pet's death by refusing to accept the joys of a pet's life.  Carried to its logical extreme, one would wish that he himself had never been born.

Happy anniversary, Loki and Muldoon.  Hey!  I've told you NOT to scratch your claws on that chair!

To be a writer

Donald Trump, President of the United States of America.  What a surprise!  What an unexpected and unpleasant surprise! 

How did it happen?  Political scientists will be arguing about it for years, but certainly there were factors of racism, misogyny, class rivalries, and dwindling job opportunities that played a factor.  But, above all and tying many of the above together -- in my estimation -- was nostalgia for a mythical past.  A past somewhere between the end of World War II and the height of the Vietnam conflict, a period some consider the Golden Age of America.

I've been considering this Golden Age, because, purely by coincidence, I've been reading Robert R. McCammon's best selling novel of small town Alabama in 1964, Boy's Life.  A lengthy novel, apparently heavily autobiographical, narrated by 12-year-old Cory Mackenson, describing life in fictional Zephyr, Alabama, a wide place in the road southeast of Birmingham.  McCammon is known for his writing of horror stories, and there certainly are fantasy/paranormal aspects to the events related in Boy's Life.  But, in general, McCammon lovingly recreates the actual world of his boyhood, describing it in exquisite detail.

I found myself constantly exclaiming to myself, "yes, I remember that, it was like that exactly," even up here in the Northwest Corner.   And I also was reminded of a little book that I'd picked up one day in my college bookstore for reading during spring break -- Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine.  Another book, less dark, about the joys and terrors of being a 12-year-old boy in small town America, a book that also had some mystical aspects but ones that simply enhanced the magical quality of the story.  I wasn't surprised when McCammon listed Bradbury, in his acknowledgments at the end of the book, as one of many influences on his life and writing.

But Cory lived in Alabama, not the Illinois of Dandelion Wine, and in 1964, not 1927.  The relationship between the races isn't the focus of the book, but it's always prominently in the background.  A strong, black woman in her 90s, something of a town shaman, tells Cory:

My great granddaddy pulled a plow by the strength of his back.  He worked from sunup to sundown, heat and cold.  ...  Worked hard, and was sometimes whipped hard.  Sweated blood and kept goin', when he wanted to drop.  Took the brand and answered Yes, massa, when his heart was breakin' and his pride was belly-down..

Cory listens with his heart in his throat.  The blacks were segregated in Zephyr, and often derided, but Cory was a compassionate kid, and his folks were kind and respectful to blacks, within the context of their time and place.

The plot begins with a murder, a vicious killing by an unknown person, of an unknown man who had been severely beaten and who had quickly sunk with his car into the depths of the town's deep lake.  It ends with a solving of the murder, a twist involving international affairs, affairs that feel unlikely -- but not impossible -- to have ended up playing themselves out in a tiny town in Alabama. Between the murder and its resolution, Cory learns about kindness and irrational cruelty, about corruption and bravery, about tolerance and hatred and terrorism.  He learns that even a small town milkman -- like his father -- has it within himself to be a hero. 

This is all a lot for a 12-year-old kid to learn in a summer.  But, as I mentioned, McCammon writes horror stories, and this is a coming of age story, but a coming of age story in the Southern Gothic tradition.  When an author writes horror stories, he asks his readers to suspend disbelief.  And when he does it successfully, they do.  

I did. I was too mesmerized to do otherwise.

Corey also meets a young woman far from town, out in the country, whom he not only develops a crush on, but whom he worships.  Only later does he learn that she works at the local whorehouse.  He learns from this, too.  He learns not to judge others, because he has no way of looking into their hearts and seeing what makes them who they are.

Like Gordie Lachance in the movie Stand By Me, Cory has three close friends with diverse personalities, kids with whom he is inseparable.  Unlike Gordie, Cory learns the sorrow, the incomprehensible sorrow, of losing one of those friends in an accident --  the boy who was perhaps the kindest and most gentle of his friends.  He sits beside the grave, telling his friend about how life up on the surface has been going.  His friend doesn't reply, but Cory never expected him to.

I remember hearing this somewhere: when an old man dies, a library burns down.

As he recalls his friend, and compares his memories with the dry obituary of his friend in the local newspaper, he realizes that it's not only "old men" who are "libraries."  He ponders the hundreds of stories represented by the tombstones in the cemetary.

I wished there was a place you could go, and sit in a room like a movie theater and look through a catalogue of a zillion names and then you could press a button and a face would appear on the screen to tell you about the life that it had been.

Near the beginning of the book, his dad asks him if he wants to be a milkman like his father -- "The world'll always need milkmen," his dad reminds him.  Maybe, Cory replies.

I'd like to be everybody in the world," I said.  "I'd like to live a million times."

Later, his favorite teacher --a teacher who was dying, unknown to him -- gives him her advice:

I have seen plenty of boys grow into men, Cory, and I want to say one word to you.  Remember."
"Remember?  Remember what?"
"Everything," she said.  "And anything.  Don't you go through a day without remembering something of it, and tucking that memory away like a treasure.  Because it is.  And memories are sweet doors, Cory.  They're teachers and friends and disciplinarians.  When you look at something, don't just look.  See it.  Really, really see it.  See it so when you write it down, somebody else can see it, too.  ...  You can live a thousand lifetimes if you want to.  You can talk to people you'll never set eyes on, in lands you'll never visit."  She nodded, watching my face.  "And if you're good and you're lucky and you have something worth saying, then you might have the chance to live on long after --"  she paused, measuring her words.  "Long after," she finished.

We realize, early in the book, that McCammon is showing us not only the world of his boyhood, but the early signs of his vocation as a writer.

We are all nostalgic, nostalgic for our youth.  Nostalgia can be good or bad.  Trump has evoked a nostalgia twisted by a longing for a time when men were men, when blacks lived apart from whites, and when to be a white man was to rule.  McCammon shows us a true picture of that Golden Age in the Alabama of 1964. But he also shows us, through Cory's narration, that -- even in the Alabama of the 1960s -- not everyone surrendered to racial bigotry and hatred. He also shows us that far from all hatred and cruelty in the South was racial in nature.  

Robert McCammon shows us Cory -- he shows us himself, as he remembers himself through the filter of time -- struggling to understand the world he lives in, to know and to appreciate townspeople of all classes and races, to be brave when it would have been easy to run, to be curious and to follow through on that curiosity when it would have been simpler and safer to "leave well enough alone." 

Cory at 12 was already, in other words, developing those traits that led him -- and his alter ego, his creator -- to a journalism degree at the University of Alabama, and later to becoming a best selling author.  And the nostalgia that Boy's Life evokes is the simple nostalgia we all feel for the age when life was new and every day was exciting -- not nostalgia for a time when some folks had unlimited power over others.

World champs

Wrigley Field, Chicago.  Where I saw my first major league baseball game.  I was still just a boy, barely in my teens, visiting a friend in the north Chicago suburb of Wilmette. 

As I recall, we two kids went to the game on our own, by rapid transit.  Back when kids did things like that.  Before parents managed their children's daily lives, even their college lives, and ventured on campus to debate their offsprings' low grades with their professors.

But I digress.

The Cubs played the Giants that afternoon.  The Giants, then calling the New York Polo Grounds their home, won.  Of course.  They went on to win the pennant, and to sweep the World Series.  Against whom?  Against the Cleveland Indians.

The Cubs hadn't won a World Series in 46 years.  They were already considered lovable losers.  I bought a Cubs pennant on a stick that I flew at half mast whenever the Cubs lost.  It was usually at half mast.  But I doubt that even Chicago pessimists realized that another 62 years would pass before the Cubs redeemed themselves.  Young men of 25, attending that game with my friend and me, lamenting the past 46 years of futility, would become feeble elders of 87 before their team was once more crowned World Champions. 

Last night the Cubs won -- against Cleveland -- despite themselves and despite a couple of questionable pitching changes.  I had already composed the announcement "Cubs Coug It" for my Facebook page.  But the Cubbies ultimately pulled through.  Only in the tenth inning, and only by one run, but none of that matters now. 

My early enthusiasm for the Cubs faded, especially after the Giants became the San Francisco Giants.  It was miraculous to have major league baseball -- always an eastern phenomenon -- anywhere on the West Coast.  The Northwest Corner -- home to no major league team, and still considered Indian-infested wilderness by the rest of the nation -- happily adopted the Giants as their own.  Until the Mariners came to town.

The Mariners.  While they can't compete with the pre-2016 Cubs in the antiquity of their futility, they perhaps approach the Cubs in its intensity.  But hey, give us another hundred years, and who knows what may happen?

But somewhere deep inside, like much of the nation, I've always retained a soft spot in my heart for the Cubbies. Congratulations, Chicago!