Sing Me Back Home

Play this one at my funeral

How did it get to be late November, already? Last week winter hit New Jersey after a temperate autumn so fast I've got whiplash. It's getting dark before I get home, and I feel the drafts creeping through the windows at night. Now all of a sudden it's Thanksgiving this week.

Riding the train home from work today while almost passing out from exhaustion, I realized that I have not been home for Thanksgiving since 2008. I haven't seen my parents on Thanksgiving since 2010. While I am glad to have new traditions with my wife and her family, I am feeling homesick this week. Last year I was so disgusted by the election that I did not want to go home, my anger was so great at the place that raised me to despise the kind of man it embraced. After a year of insanity, my anger has been mixed with a healthy dose of despair.

The problem with holidays is that we replicate the rituals year after year, so that we maintain a kind of uniform memory of "Thanksgiving," rather than individual memories of specific Thanksgivings. When we can no longer replicate the old rituals, due to distance from family or many of the participants passing on to death, a feeling of great loss creeps in. My grandmother died four years ago this month, and she was the central figure in my mother's family's Thanksgivings. Now that she is gone that side of my family has broken apart on the rocks of resentment. Today I would not be allowed to visit my grandparents' old farm house due to these conflicts, which is my own personal banishment from the Garden of Eden. In any case, so many of my cousins and aunts and uncles I would love to see have also scattered, just like me, from Oregon to Colorado to Missouri to Alabama.

But even so, I miss Nebraska at Thanksgiving time. The landscape is awash in almost painted colors of golds and browns, and the flat stubble fields, now bereft of corn, allow one to see from horizon to horizon under a heavy, limitless sky. It is a place where you feel in thrall to nature, where Thanksgiving time often brings fearsome ice storms, surprise blizzards, and blasting winds. It is a reminder of our smallness in our universe.

Instead I spend my days working in New York City, its stone and steel having driven nature beneath the pavement, its existence a rumor. The natural world is present in Central Park of course, but that's more of a theme park, neat and tidy. I come home to New Jersey, and the dead television gray of its November sky over endless subdivisions and strip malls. Here the work of humans feels impenetrable, everlasting, and all encompassing. In Nebraska it feels transitory and frail. Beneath the skyscrapers, it is indeed frail, and we all could use a reminder of that, New Yorkers especially.

Last year I directed anger at my home state, finding its support for Trump irredeemable. This year, seeing the pathetically inadequate response in the areas where he is not popular, I've come to the correct conclusion that our entire country is at fault for this mess, either actively or passively. With that in mind, I long to be home this Thanksgiving, but I know in my heart of hearts the things I seek to find, and many of the people I associate with it, are lost and gone forever. So I will enjoy my time with my new family of my own, and make traditions for my own children to cherish.

Cranky Bear Says You Don't Need To Fight With Your Conservative Family This Thanksgiving (Or Find Common Ground, Either)

[Editor's note: my friend Cranky Bear hasn't written here in awhile. His last piece was pretty controversial, and ruffled a few feathers. Anyway, I'm too exhausted to write, so I let him say his piece.]

Cranky Bear here folks, coming at you while having some coffee and chocolate to keep my mind strong.

In the last few years I've kept seeing all these takes on the internet telling liberals and progressives who come from conservative families that they are supposed to fight with their family members at holiday gatherings, or else they are somehow cowards unworthy of the cause. The argument goes like this: if you can't challenge your conservative family members, who can you challenge? And it also goes like this: you're in their family, so you're the kind of person who can change their mind.

These takes are invariably written by people who are not the progressive minority in a conservative family. If they were, they'd know just how ridiculous their arguments are. I know, because I have been pretty openly opposed to the politics of most of my family for the past twenty-five years, and shockingly, I haven't changed anyone's mind by disagreeing with them. A lot of folks don't seem to get that we HAVE BEEN FIGHTING against long odds for a long time. Usually political "conversations" in these contexts involve getting ganged up on by everybody else in the room. Those folks also tend to blend their arguments with a healthy dose of elder condescension. It turns out that a younger family member who perhaps does not live in the same region anymore is the last kind of person able to change their mind. The discussions end with them feeling confirmed in their beliefs, rather than questioning them. In these circumstances avoiding political discussion is a perfectly fine thing to do. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Of course, I do draw the line at openly expressed racism and bigotry, I just won't let that shit slide, and neither should you.

The way I see it, my energy is best spent not getting red-faced and angry while stuffing turkey in my mouth with my beloved family members. I am not interested in "winning" arguments at the dinner table. (Or even having them in the first place. I want to enjoy their presence and be happy!) My efforts are aimed at my neighbors in my own community, and getting them to get out there and vote for the right things and the right people. I save my energy for the streets and for letters and phone calls to politicians. My objection to their malfeasance matters a lot more than getting apoplectic over a relative arguing that tax cuts for the wealthy will bring prosperity for all. In fact, our emphasis on Thanksgiving political fracases and not on the work of everyday political engagement is having a negative effect on us. I don't want to beat my family members in verbal arguments, I want to defeat the politicians and the ideas that they support.

While you should not feel any kind of obligation to fight with your conservative family members, neither should you listen to the takes that say that you need to find "common ground" or "understand where they are coming from." Yet again, the people with those takes don't actually understand the dynamics of how being progressive in a conservative family works. We have been hearing their side of things for our entire lives. In fact, we were raised in their politics, meaning that once upon a time we bought into it to a greater or lesser extent. I "understand where they are coming from" because they used to be me. I know enough to know I can love them and still absolutely despise the people they vote for.

I know that they think their way and I think mine and we aren't going to convince each other otherwise. What I can do is fight hard for the things I believe in, in a variety of contexts. I can teach my students this country's real history. I can organize my neighbors. I can knock on doors for candidates. I can call and put pressure on elected officials. I can get my body in the street and protest. I don't want you to "call out" your reactionary uncle. I want to you to join the general strike when the shit goes down. Because trust me folks, that's the call we are going to be asked to answer pretty soon.

A Christmas Eve Epiphany

My rate of postings has slowed down here in the last week due to the holiday and my good fortune at having my parents here to visit. This has actually allowed my mind to work and wander more, generating more and more ideas that I don't have the time to write about. Such is life.

One of those ideas hit me very strong on Christmas Eve. I went with my family and my parents to Christmas Eve mass, and despite my status as a lapsed Catholic agnostic Episcopalian, I felt something very, very strong, even if it was not what I was supposed to feel. Being with my parents at Christmas Eve mass again reminded me of my childhood, when my beliefs were pure and simple. The joy expressed at the coming of the Savior felt very real to me back than. My heart exulted, my spirits lifted, and my soul felt warm.

As I got a little twinge of that long absent feeling, I also began to feel extremely melancholy. For a believer, Christmas holds the prospect that this awful, corrupt, wretched world can in fact be saved. That belief has echoed in so many ways in the intellectual history of the West, even in the thought of those who were non-believers. Marx dreamed of the revolution that would end history and destroy alienation. Nietzsche foresaw humanity moving into a higher stage of being.

Standing there singing the old hymns of salvation I realized that I could only go half way. I do not think that this world can be saved, nor do I believe that there is any moral arc to the universe, as badly as I want to believe the famous words of Dr. King. I think that, as Werner Herzog has said, the universe is indifferent to our existence.

The election of Donald Trump has only confirmed the darker thoughts I've been having in recent years. I am beginning to think that all of the bad historical trends that I have been noticing for decades now have actually converged to create a new, much worse historical reality. Like the Soviet citizens of the Brezhnev era, I've noticed the rot but never thought this meant that the current political reality was going to undergo a revolutionary overhaul. I doubt that the international order will survive the next four years, and I doubt that the remains of the shredded social safety net will either. The police will be allowed to be even more murderous, and the strides made by gay and trans people will face setbacks.

The center will not hold, as the poet said, and no one will come to save us. We will have to somehow find a way to save ourselves.

A Season In Five Games

The baseball regular season is winding down to an end, and today my team, the New York Mets, clinched a playoff spot despite an imposing number of injuries. On this cool, wet afternoon with damp, newly fallen leaves on the ground, I feel a million miles away from the April thaw and spring breeze. The baseball season is a long one, and with 162 games, it can feel like a journey of sorts. You remember the good times and bad, certain random games out of the 162 sticking in your mind. Right now I am thinking back at the five Met games I was able to attend, and how they tell a story of this improbable season.

April 30, 2016
Mets 6 - Giants 5
Mets record: 15-7

Every year my friend Jim gets a bunch of people to together for Metsgate, which involves intense tailgating in the furthest, least policed corner of the parking lot. I brought a small, behind the liquor store bottle of Maker's Mark with me on the Long Island Railroad wrapped up in the Saturday New York Times. This year, to save money, our group of tickets were in the top rows behind home plate. This was a sign of the Mets' resurgence the season before, which meant that they were actually a hot ticket again for the first time in years. The April winds blew hard that day, and I was freezing my butt off, despite the warmth of the bourbon in my blood. Going to games in April is a real roll of the dice. Jacob deGrom gave up three runs, but none of them were earned. Youngster Michael Conforto was hitting his stroke, and knocked in three runs in that game with three hits, including a homer. To avoid the wind we went down to the area behind the bullpen at the end of the game, and watched Jeurys Familia warm up, throwing hard with a satisfying *pow* sound every time his pitches hit the catcher's glove. The Mets hit 15-7 and I thought that they were on their way to a dominant season. Ah, the hubris of April!

June 21, 2016
Mets 2 - Royals 1
Mets record: 37-32

April's chill had more than faded by this time. It was a bright sunny day, and my last day of school for the year. Ending that blessed day at the ballpark was like a dream come true. I met my friend Guy at the stadium, and we got there so early that we had to wait in line for half an hour before they would let us in. He is a a great baseball companion who likes being at the park early, and is good at striking up interesting conversations with other fans. We went straight to the outfield bleachers for batting practice, and Guy even brought his glove. I really do love getting to the park early, drinking it in and attuning myself to the subtle rhythms of baseball. We actually got about seven feet from catching a ball hit in the seats during BP, but we weren't big enough losers to muscle out the kids scrambling for it. We had great seats for the game, on the first base line, although this meant the sun blasting our faces for the first three innings. This ended up being one of the most memorable games I'd ever been to. Bartolo Colon was pitching, and the first batter hit a line drive right off his wrist, driving Colon from the game. It was up to the Mets' bullpen to win an entire game without any time to warm up, and they actually did it. The fact that they managed to do it against the team that beat the Mets in the World Series made it all the more sweet. The Mets were faltering at this point in the season, with Duda on the DL and Conforto hitting a big slump. The guts they showed in this game made me think that they still had a chance.

July 1, 2016
Mets 10 - Cubs 2
Mets record: 42-37

I went to this game with my Dad, visiting from Nebraska, and my friend Matt, visiting from Georgia to root on his beloved Cubs. The Mets had been maintaining a holding pattern, a winning but not dominant theme. We almost didn't go, since the weather forecast looked pretty grim. There was a rain delay, but that afforded the perfect opportunity to get some spicy sausage sandwiches and beers in the concourse. That experience also showed the wisdom of Citi Field's architects, who designed concourses wide enough to hold fans during a rain delay without becoming as crowded as rush hour on the subway. As always, it was great to go to a game with my father. He has not stayed up on the current players, but has an amazing eye for the game itself. He notices the defensive shifts and predicts what kind of pitch the pitcher will throw next, and going to a game with him always reminds me that statistical analysis is only a one part of how to understand baseball. My father marveled at Jacob deGrom's dominating pitches, especially a high heater that tempted the opposing to swing and miss many times. The Mets looked really sharp, and they ended up taking all four games in this series. I actually felt bad for Matt, since he had made such a long trip to see his team in what is supposed to be a year of destiny for the Cubs. Little did I know that after sweeping the Cubs the Mets would began a long, slow decline, and the Cubs would prove themselves to be the most dominant team in the National League. Such are the twists and turns of the wide river that is a baseball season.

August 13, 2016
Mets 3 - Padres 2
Mets record: 58-58

When this game started, the Mets had a losing record. Guy and I managed to get tickets dirt cheap for a Saturday night game due to the Mets' decline. We went on what must've been the hottest day of the year, the sun just blasting down and waves of heat rising from the concrete of the parking lot as we each slammed an Old Milwaukee tallboy, more to quench our thirst than to get a buzz on. It was the kind of heat so intense that my usually profuse sweating no longer caused me embarrassment because everyone there was drenched. DeGrom was on the hill again, and yet again he pitched a gem, not giving up a hit until the fifth inning. However, the Mets' anemic offense could not give him the necessary run support. The Padres were down 2-1 when the ninth inning began, with the Mets' imposing closer Jeurys Familia there to close it out. After putting down the first two batters, he gave up a big blast of a home run that felt like a massive punch to the gut. It was a metaphor for a season when the Mets showed promise, and then managed to screw things up. I might've left the game in disgust at that point, but Guy and I attended this game in large part because Styx (remember them?) was giving a free concert afterward. Finally, in the eleventh inning, the Mets put together a string of hits, and won the game on that most anticlimactic of plays, a fielder's choice. Perhaps this game was another metaphor, the Mets as a team with its back against the wall that managed to scratch and fight its way forward. Gabriel Ynoa, just called up from the minors, managed to get the win in relief, just one of many players who would come out of nowhere to bolster the Mets as they contended with injury. We left the stadium feeling just a little bit of hope that the Mets could turn things around.

September 25, 2016
Mets 17 - Phillies 0
Mets record: 83-73

This game was my birthday present, and I attended it with my wife and my two girls, who were at their first Mets game. It was also the last home game of the season, and I'd always wanted to go to a last home game, since they can be such wistful moments. When we got the tickets a month before I assumed that the Mets would be out of contention at this point. It was right then that the Mets started catching fire, hitting the ball and scoring runs in torrents after the drought of the summer. Their starting staff was decimated worse than a regiment of North Caroliners at the bloody angle at Gettysburg. Harvey, deGrom, and Matz all went down, and Wheeler was unable to come back. The pitchers they called up from the minors, like Seth Lugo and Robert Gsellman (who started this game) somehow excelled. It reminded me of the third part of the Lord of the Rings, when the dead kings rise to joint the battle and win the day for the heroes. The weather at this game was damn near perfect, sunny, a little breezy, and exactly what you want out of a September afternoon. I also had the good luck to find out that an old friend from college was in town for business and attending the game, and so we got to have a beer and catch up on the concourse while my daughters dashed around our feet. I took it as a sign that this was not just going to be an ordinary baseball game. The Mets themselves seemed hellbent on giving their home fans a great sendoff in a game that was the team's biggest blowout of the season. We left in the eighth inning to get in line behind the stadium for the Sunday special promotion where kids get to run the bases after the game. It took forever, because the Mets tacked on six runs that inning. Running the bases was a special treat, and not just for the girls. We stood out on the warning track, waiting for our turn, and I looked out giddily at the lush green field where so many of my hopes and wishes had been directed through the long, long season. I felt a little silly for investing so much in a boys' game played by grown men, but on the way home, when my daughters said they wanted to go back to the ballpark again, I felt so happy that I can barely describe it.

The giveaway that last home game was a magnetic 2017 schedule. The cycles repeat. Winter will come, but soon spring, and then baseball again, and with any luck, more trips with my family to the ballpark.

On Watching The Wizard Of Oz With My Daughters

About a month ago my mother-in-law got us a copy of The Wizard of Oz on blu-ray, and my wife and I decided to show it to our four year old twin daughters, but with some trepidation. What if they didn't like it?

For my wife and I this is a magical movie. Its magic is related to its scarcity in our youth, which made viewing The Wizard of Oz a special thing. In our pre-VCR early childhoods she actually had it on 8 track, and watching it can still locate the moments where the tracks ended and the tape had to be flipped. Like so many others of my generation, I made sure each year to catch the one time annually that it was shown on television. My sisters and I would gather in front of the television to repeat a ritual that began around the time of my first firm memories. (I probably saw the movie for the first time at the same age as my daughters did.) One year they showed a little documentary afterward, and it was amazing to see Margaret Hamilton as a sweet old woman talking about her characterization of the witch. Instead of ruining my suspension of disbelief, it made me love the film that much more.

Luckily for us, my daughters love it too, and they even jump in a big basket and pretend that they are taking a hot air balloon to Oz. We've already had a repeat viewing, rare for a full length feature film for my daughters.

While it makes me so happy to share the film with my daughters, I have not been prepared for the other emotions that it stirs up. The first time we saw it together, I lost it when Dorothy started singing "Somewhere Over The Rainbow." It is a real tear jerking song, and Judy Garland invests it with such emotion, but it had never made me cry before. Sitting there on the couch with my wife and daughters I was reminded of growing up lonely on the plains of Nebraska (as opposed to Kansas), my many years in the romantic wilderness, and those years spent wandering the academic landscape for a job warding off depression the whole while. For decades I had spent my time looking to be somewhere else, whether because I was in school preparing to fly, or I was in a crummy job or a place I liked but only employed temporarily. It took a long time for me to finally land, and the precariousness of my good fortune is something  I remind myself of each day. My daughters fill me with wonder every day, the greatest reason for living I've ever had. Coming to the realization there on that couch was overwhelming.

As hard as "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" hit me, that was a light shower compared to the hurricane at the end of the movie. The scene when Dorothy has to say good-bye to her new friends used to really get me even when I was a child. Now? Positively deadly. She has to go home, but that means leaving behind the best friends she's ever had. This time around the crying started, and it was so intense that I started to get a sharp, stabbing pain in my forehead, which only happens when I am trying to keep from becoming a sobbing mess, a sensation I've had on maybe half a dozen occasions in my adult life.

In my years spent learning to fly or in my wanderings through the academic wilderness, I met a lot of truly amazing people. They're pretty much the reason I was able to survive. Between graduating college in 1998 and landing in New Jersey in 2011, I moved five times, and in each place met so many people who I still hold close to my heart. All those moves meant saying good-bye to all of them. As happy as my family makes me, I've yet to meet anyone like those people here. So I cried, weeping for the all the people I wish were near me but now live so far away. Like Dorothy, I was able to come home, but it meant abandoning my friends. It has not been easy, but I look into the eyes of my daughters, and I remind myself there's no place like home.

When I Get Old Let Me Die During Baseball Season

This week I had the sad occasion to attend to funeral of a very closer friend of my wife's family. He was one of those people who was not related by blood, but as much or more a member of the family as any of my wife's blood relatives.  He'd been ailing for a long time, but never wavered in his love of the New York Yankees.  In fact, it was one of the first things mentioned by the priest in his funeral homily.  Although I am a Yankees hater in long standing, he was the kind of Yankees fan I respect: humble and committed. Whenever I saw him (which was often, since he lived next door to my in-laws) I knew that six months out of the year we'd have an easy topic of conversation: baseball. Even if his body was in bad shape and he needed a scooter to get around, he stayed up on his team.

In that respect he reminded me a lot of my dad's grandfather. Living in Nebraska, his connection to the game was more about the game itself, rather than major league team fandom.  Back in his day every small town in Nebraska like his (with only 250 people) had a town team, and he evidently played on it well into his 40s, and batted with a unique cross-handed style. He was also instrumental in the moment when my enjoyment of baseball in the abstract became an obsession.  In the spring of 1986 when I was 10 he stayed at our house for a couple of weeks while getting some treatments at the hospital. At first I resented this, since my parents gave him my bed and I had to sleep on the living room couch. Very quickly I got over it, and I enjoyed hearing his stories of growing up in rural Missouri in a time when cars were new (he was born in 1903) and life moved at a more deliberate pace.

It seemed every day when I came home from school he would be sitting in the recliner, watching a Cubs game on WGN. (Back then all of the Cubs' home games were still during the day.) He didn't watch because he was a Cubs fan, he watched because he just loved baseball so much. His habit then got me into the habit of watching Cubs games when I came home from school, and soon enough, I was hooked. During the next season I was buried under baseball cards and I would go to my sister's softball games and "call" them in a Harry Caray voice. (Oddly enough I never became a Cubs fan, and stuck with the Royals until my later betrayal.)

Like my wife's family friend, my grandfather died in April, just as baseball was returning. (I have a distinct memory of being sad at my grandfather's passing, then seeing in the paper that Bo Jackson had struck out five times in a game, and wondering why everything in life had to be so terrible.) At the funeral last week I had an odd but intense revelation: if I am so lucky to live to old age, I want to die during baseball season. The rituals of each game will be a calming balm to soothe me as I ready myself for the end. The memories wrapped up in the game, from my walk-off hit in Little League to taking my infant daughters to the ballpark, will be there with each pitch.

A Letter From Nebraska

I arrived back in the Cornhusker State on Saturday, and so far have really been enjoying my time here. Spending day after day commuting to New York City and enduring its crush and push then coming home to parent two amazing yet rambunctious three year olds with my equally exhausted spouse can get really tiring. Last week I got to spend a day just exploring the city, which was helpful, since I could exult in New York's energy without feeling like a rat in a maze. Nevertheless, I needed to get some peace and quiet.

That exists in abundance in my home state. Getting off of the plane I was struck, as always, by the immense expanse of the sky, a sky so huge to seem threatening. When you are in Nebraska you get the feeling that the towns and cities are a middle finger to nature, which obviously never intended such things to exist here. That ever-present tension is responsible in large part for the humility of people who live here. You know full well that the wind and sky are permanent, and you are simply a temporary occupant of their space, and are there at their discretion. Occasionally a tornado comes around to remind you of that fact.

We landed in Omaha about 6:30, and that feeling of smallness got much more intense after the sun came down and we were driving west of Lincoln. It had been an overcast day, and the clouds blotted out the moon and the stars. Miles from any city the darkness was positively primeval, a kind of darkness that I had forgot could even exist in the world. It was so dark I couldn't see my daughters in the back seat, despite being on the one and only major interstate highway in the state. Under that huge dark sky you can feel as if the world outside of your car has simply disappeared. It felt good to be so isolated, the polar opposite of being packed cheek to jowl on the 2 train with someone's elbow in my kidney.

Easter morning I walked outside and smelled an old smell I had almost forgotten about: cow manure. My parents' house is near the edge of town, and just a few miles southwest there's a big feedlot. On the rare days the wind comes out of that direction, the smell saturates everything. As a child I hated it, but now I have to admit I exult in it a little. It is a wonderfully earthy smell, without the sickening burn of the ammonia in pig manure. And it was a welcome change from the unnatural chemical smells of New Jersey or the fuggy miasma of Penn Station. More old smells awaited, from the incense at Easter mass (used perhaps overzealously by a young priest) to my mother's ham baking in the oven.

Even better than the smells were the sounds of my daughters playing enthusiastically with their cousins. It made me feel a bit guilty that they only ever see them about once a year. I was lucky enough to have lots of great cousins, which made going to family events something to look forward to, rather than dread. I feel like out in New Jersey, where they don't have any cousins, that they are missing out on something important. My wife and my parents and I are currently plotting ways to get them out to Jersey this summer. Maybe we can introduce them to what real pizza tastes like before it is too late.

The smells of manure, incense and ham are all memory triggers, and coming home can be difficult for me sometimes because it reminds me too much of the person I once was. My home life was great growing up and I was lucky to have such caring parents and siblings and a tight extended family. However, much of what happened outside of that cocoon was shit. We walked all the cousins over to my old elementary school on Sunday to use the playground, and as I walked past the brick wall outside of the cafeteria I vividly remembered the time a kid shoved me, causing the skin on the tops of my knuckles to rip apart. I saw the kickball field where the other boys in the sixth grade banned me from playing with them during recess. I saw the spot in the schoolyard that very year where a bully literally spat on me and I finally cracked and started going after him. I wish I'd had the nerve to do that more growing up. I was a passive child, probably somewhere on the spectrum, and thought ignoring the bullies would make them go away. That passivity in my youth held me back so much in so many ways, from an inability to ask girls out to an inability to stick with student journalism because I was mortified at asking people questions. In my time growing up outside of my family I was as lonely and lacking in confidence as someone could be.

My dad showed me an old videotape of us playing a game of touch football with some of my relatives in my grandparents' farmyard when I was 16. I was a bit horrified by the gangly dork I saw before me, but watching it made my father really happy. I saw on the video that I managed to throw a pretty wicked bomb to my cousin for a touchdown, and started to feel a little bit better about myself. After all, I spent years and years pushing to not be that gangly, withdrawn dork. I'd like to think I've been largely successful. Coming home has been so relaxing as an escape from the stress of my daily life, but also an uneasy reminder that it took getting away from it for me to have any chance of coming into my own as a human being.

Crowded House "Don't Dream It's Over"

New Year's Eve has long been one of my favorite holidays, and and New Year's Day one of my least favorite.  It's the day I realize that the holiday season is over, and that I am about to go back to work with the worst months of the year stretched out before me.  In recent years it has become even more difficult because of the deaths of those close to me, and the changing in the calendar reminds me of their loss.  The years keep rolling on, and fewer and fewer people are there with me, either due to distance or dying.

I've tried to take time this new year's season to remember those that I've lost.  The song I choose for this reflection is always "Don't Dream It's Over" by Crowded House.  This might sound like a strange choice, since it's apparently a minor key love song, but I have my reasons.  The first person close to me I ever lost was my dad's father, in April of 1987, on Good Friday after a long illness.  He and my grandmother lived in a tiny town half an hour away, and I swear every time we drove there over the days after my grandfather's death this song was on the radio.  I cannot hear it without thinking about that moment in my life.

I often think about the fact that I was just really getting to know my grandfather as a real person right at the moment he died.  The prior year he had stayed at our house for a couple of weeks while getting treatments at the hospital.  I was at first resentful of the fact that he was sleeping in my bed, and I was now confined to the couch.  I got over that pretty quickly, thankfully.  My grandfather would tell me stories, and as a budding history nerd, they blew my mind. He was born in rural Missouri in 1903, and could thus tell me of a time when he surprised to see cars, not just horse drawn carriages, on the roads.  He was actually in the train station in Kansas City during an infamous 1933 shootout there between gangsters and the police.  More crucially, he wanted to watch baseball every day, and that habit drew me away from the after-school episodes of GI Joe and towards Cubs games on WGN.  My life would never be the same again.

But I never really had the chance to talk baseball with him, even though he lit the spark for my more serious interest in the game.  I watched the '86 World Series intently, and when the 1987 season began I was buying Topps cards like a maniac and checking the daily baseball scores, but he was already in the hospital for good.  I still remember a day, maybe the day of his funeral or the day after, sitting disconsolately on my grandparents' couch in their always underlit, cramped and cluttered living room while looking at the sports page of the Omaha World-Herald and seeing that Bo Jackson, the Royals' great new hope, had struck out five times in his last game.  (Based on my research, this was apparently on April 18, 1987.)  That made a truly rotten day feel even worse.  As I sat on the couch, despondent, my sweet Aunt S. came over to ask if I was all right, and I think I talked about Bo Jackson as a way to deflect the depths of my sadness over my grandfather's passing.

I was talking to my parents on the phone tonight, and my dad retold the story of how my grandfather loved baseball so much that he played on the town team (back when every little town had its own amateur teams) well into middle age, and used an unorthodox cross-handed hitting style to great effect.  For some reason my hands instinctually want to grip a baseball bat that way.  It's my grandfather's blood talking to me.

What I would give to be able to talk to him again.  Listening to this song is the closest I can get.

You Can't Go Home Again (For Christmas)

The holiday season does strange things to me.  I tend to get hyper emotional, in good ways and bad.  This evening my daughters wanted to watch the Garfield Christmas special (don't ask), and I started getting a little misty-eyed over a piece of supremely cheesy entertainment.

In case you haven't seen it (and why would you), Jon takes Garfield and Odie back to his parents' farm for Christmas.  His grandmother is also there, and she talks of the lonely nights petting her cats thinking about the past, now that her husband has been gone.  This about had me lose it, since my own grandmother, who had spent sixteen years alone, died not too long ago.  And yes, when we would get together for my mother's family Christmas, it was at my grandparents' farm.

I haven't been in Nebraska for Christmas since 2012.  We were going to go this year, then an unexpected financial burden put an end to it.  With two three year olds it is a difficult undertaking, involving four pricey plane tickets and renting a car to drive the 150 miles from the airport to my isolated hometown.  Wrangling toddlers in the airport and getting them to not act like insane monsters on an airplane for over three hours is a task too difficult for the labors of Hercules.  The treacherous and unpredictable winter weather on the plains also makes the venture especially risky.  Back when I used to drive home from Illinois and Michigan I would hit blizzards, even getting my car blown into a ditch near Council Bluffs one time.

I've also come to realize that the Christmas of my youth can't be recaptured, which is cold comfort when I'm feeling down about being so far from home on Christmas.  We used to gather around noon at my grandparents' house, their farm about an hour's drive west.  The best part was the trees surrounding the farm yard, where I would play with my cousins and build forts out of junk.  We handled so much old rusty barbed wire that I am surprised that none of us got tetanus.  I also loved playing with the many farm cats, who we gave eccentric names to.  After a bit we'd be called in for Christmas dinner, which usually involved both ham and turkey. That was usually just a prelude to the pies.  My grandmother made so many of them, from banana cream to pumpkin to cherry, seemingly never-ending.

 I usually brought the toys I just got for Christmas, so my afternoons were occupied in a state of concentrated playing in my grandparents' living room at the foot of the aged fold out couch and massive picture window that claimed a few confused birds in its time.  When I got older I might be reading the books I got, which also fit with my teenage antisocial tendencies.  The adults would play pitch (a four handed card game rarely played outside of Nebraska) while drinking pop and snacking on Christmas cookies.  The supply of food was pretty much never ending, and for some reason around 5 they would reheat lunch and I would still manage to cram some more of my grandmother's mashed potatoes in my mouth.  (They were truly amazing.)  On our way out the door my grandma would usually give all of us cousins (and there were a lot of us) a bag of her homemade kettle corn, and sometimes a hand-knitted blanket or afghan.  (I still have them today, and they somehow still carry the slight whiff of the farmhouse smell.)  In my head I can still hear the quiet cacophony of car wheels on a gravel road underneath an impossibly black winter solstice sky as my family departed, my grandparents waving good-bye from the yard.

The thing about holiday rituals is that they provide comfort in their repetition, the comfort of memory.  By doing the same thing you did the year before and the ten years before that you revive the memories of all the Christmases past and simultaneously live them out.  Losing these rituals completely throws off the equilibrium of holidays, and is why I am desperate to go home for Christmas.

The more I think about it, however, the more I realize that the ideal Christmases of my memory ended much longer ago than I first realized.  At some point some members of my family insisted on renting a banquet room at a nearby Holiday Inn rather than doing the traditional farm house Christmas.  This, I believe, was due to the sour nature of some of my family members, who simply wanted to cut the time with their extended family short.  I found these Christmas gatherings to be positively miserable.  There were no trees to go exploring in, no yard cats to play with, and no dusty basement to go poking around in.  It was a lot of adults talking and tepid hotel buffet food. If I was lucky I could cadge some quarters from my dad and go to the hotel arcade (remember those?) and play some games of Operation Wolf.

Later on, after my grandfather passed, we started getting together sometimes at my aunt and uncle's house, which while fun, wasn't the same.  These days there's no gatherings there, or anywhere, for that matter.  The submerged tensions and antipathies that had been festering for years between my mother and some of her siblings have broken out into open warfare.  I'd rather not get into the details, but things have been said that cannot be unsaid, things so odious that I can't and won't ever forgive them.  My cousins and I are still on good terms, but we have been flung far and wide to the four corners of America, from Portland to Mobile to Denver to New Jersey.  The farm where so many of my childhood memories are located is now owned by someone who out of spite would probably never let me visit it again.

It would be great for my immediate family to make our own new traditions, so my daughters and nephews and niece could have their own memories together, but being so far away means that this won't happen.  The land of my birth is probably destined to be a distant and strange place to them. I wish so badly I could share my grandparents' farm with them at least, but that will likely never happen.  At least my wife's family has some good traditions.  We eat Cuban food from a venerable place in Union City on Christmas Eve, then feast of roast pork the next day after my father in law makes a delicious garlic shrimp brunch.  It's great, but it does not have the comfort and resonance of the rituals I grew up with.

This Christmas I am going to try to do it a little more Nebraska style.  I am planning on replicating my Mom's delectable Christmas treats, from nut clusters to Ritz crackers filled with peanut butter and dipped in almond bark.  Maybe I will try to teach my New Jersey relatives how to play pitch, too.

Of course, it's not all bad.

The Thanksgiving Table Wars

I saw this tweet yesterday and chuckled, but also thought a lot about it:

So do conservatives agonize over dealing with their liberal relatives or are they just too mad about other stuff to care?

— Bobby Big Wheel (@BobbyBigWheel) November 24, 2015

There seems to be a lot more discussion in the last few years by progressives online who write about "how to win arguments with you conservative relatives" and generally more agony that usual over the inevitable holiday fights over politics.  I think that this agony speaks to something deeper, namely the widening political divide in this country and the higher stakes involved.

I understand it, since I come from a very conservative family, as does my wife.  Luckily for us, our parents are reasonable and loving people, and so we all are pretty much party to an unspoken truce not to drag politics into our family time. With my parents the breaking point came fifteen years ago, when the 2000 election between Bush and Gore was still up in the air.  After a couple of angry disputes we pretty much decided we'd had enough of that.  For all of you out there in the same position, I would recommend a similar course of action.  I would just warn you I've had to deflect political discussions initiated by them from time to time.

Of course, relatives in our extended families are not parties to the truce, and so when they come in all bets are off.  Since my wife's extended family is so far-flung, this isn't a problem, but when my whole family gets together there will be people trying to bait me.  Since I am greatly outnumbered it's also extremely exhausted.  We will probably never have a family-wide truce, but I see my extended family so seldom that I am usually just happy to be with them and can let the political stuff slide.

This brings me back to the tweet I quoted above, though.  I've realized why in the Thanksgiving Table Wars it's progressives, specifically white progressives, who tend to get the most emotionally wound up about it. Any conservative white family is going to have its share of vocal racists.  Sometimes it's just on the level of petty resentment, sometimes on the level of "jokes," and sometimes on the level of boldly-stated bigotry.  About twenty years ago one of my cousins basically let it be known that the n-word was not be used in her presence or the presence of her children, and that toned things down, but only a little.  It's one thing to have an argument with someone over tax policy, another to talk to someone spewing hate against African Americans, immigrants, gays, and Muslims (this has been a recent favorite). One uncle of mine once made a veiled (but racist in intent) comment about my then Asian girlfriend (who wasn't present.) If we hadn't been in a public place I would have broken his jaw.

As our politics have become more heated, they have become even more racialized than before.  With a Right wing that wants to "take our country back" for the "real Americans" there's no question that the color line is a crucial element, if not the most crucial element, to the current political divide.  White progressives wringing their hands about having to deal with their white conservative relatives aren't just being effete or solipsistic, they are responding to the very real issue of the mainstreaming of racist resentment in American politics.  Like our broader politics, the Thanksgiving Table Wars have escalated. For those of you who haven't managed to broker a truce, I wish you the best of luck.

A Nebraska November Memory

This morning as I got in the car to go to the gym and run some errands, I had such a powerful flashback that it was like some kind of out of body experience. Even though I was driving the suburban streets of New Jersey, the sky was like a Nebraska November sky.  The wind was blowing so fast that I could watch the clouds moving from horizon to horizon, like cattle ambling across the plains. I was suddenly and quite violently thrown back two years ago this month when I was back in my home state of Nebraska for my grandmother's funeral.

Although she lived the vast majority of her life on farms near Elm Creek, she was to be buried in Kearney, the place she referred to when she discussed "going to town." Every Sunday she and my grandfather used to drive 18 miles down highway 30 (never the interstate, which my grandfather abhorred), go to service at a Lutheran church, then hit the supermarket to stock up for the week.  For that reason I'd been in the church where her funeral took place on several occasions, mostly in my childhood summers where I would spend a week or two on the farm.

The day of the funeral something struck me hard that I had never really noticed before: my homeland is a strange, harsh, and forbidding place when it comes to climate and landscape.  Growing up there I assumed the insane temperature swings and endless skies were just normal.  Now it seemed that Kearney, a bustling little city of 25,000, was like a gnat on the prodigious rump of the Great Plains.  The gusting winds that morning as my wife and I went before the funeral to the Wal-Mart on the edge of town to get some baby supplies felt as if they could rip the town from its moorings and scatter its debris all over the prairie. The Wal-Mart there is on top of a hill, and I felt exposed and fearful, looking north to the barren land north of the Platte River Valley, where fields of corn give way to endless range.

A large murder of crows had made the roof of the church their home, a forbidding sight against the massive, roiling Plains sky, clouds darting across.  They crows would suddenly fly in the air, then after a flurry of hovering, rest back down on the church's roof. The church was near the edge of town, and in Nebraska towns that borderline feels creepy, making you realize that human habitation in such a place is almost an affront to nature.  On the edge of town you can feel as if the ground could open up and the earth could swallow the town whole.  When you grow up there you don't really notice it, but after spending some years in the New York area, where nature feels as if it has been wiped from existence, Nebraska in November was quite a contrast.

Nevertheless, Nebraska in November is a beautiful place, and fearsomely beautiful at that.  With the harvest in the fields are a humble stubble that allows an even more expansive view of the far-flung horizons.  Green, fragile as it is on the prairie, has drained out, but what remains is a stunning mix of hues of brown and yellow like spread Van Gogh brushstrokes across the canvas of the wide, flat plains.  The naked cottonwood trees are sublimely gnarled and twisted, like broken skeletons.  The fearsomeness comes from the feeling that the earth and sky are squashing whatever puny people happen to be stuck between them.  The sudden ice storms and blizzards don't make November's beauty feel safe or comforting.  It is more stunning and unsettling.  On this blustery New Jersey day, I am glad of the reminder of a place I see much too seldom these days.

What I Learned By Taking My Dad To A Baseball Game

In July of 1984 my father took me to my first major league baseball game, the second half of a day-night double-header between the Royals and As in Kansas City.  That was also, until yesterday, the last time he'd been to a baseball game.  With my parents in town this week, I decided it would be fun for us to venture to Citi Field and watch the Mets, partly out of my own selfish desire to get back to the ballpark, but also out of his interest in seeing a game again.

The Mets lost 3-1 and stranded nine men on base in a game that lacked home runs and dazzlingly defensive play.  However, it was a deeply enjoyable experience, and not just because I got to spend some time with my father.  Last night my dad showed me, in a very subtle way, how to better experience and appreciate baseball.

This came as a bit of a surprise, since he has not followed the sport for decades.  He can reel off all of the great players of the 1950s and 1960s, and has very strong memories of important moments, like the Braves winning the World Series in 1957 and Willie Mays' catch in 1954.  However, he did not know the name of a single player in the game last night, knows nothing of sabremetrics, and is pretty much unaware of what teams are good and bad nowadays.  These are all things we expect baseball fans to know, and he is definitely not a fan of professional baseball.  He is something else: an appreciator of the game of baseball itself, divorced from the big leagues.

Instead of discussing the Mets' winning streak or who they called up from the minors, he noticed the deeper facets of the game of baseball on the diamond in front of us.  He noted the ways the defense shifted, the bad angles taken by outfielders, the opposing hurler's pitch selection, the batting stances of the hitters, and the quirks of the pitchers' wind-ups.  It reminded me that while he never taught me to root for a particular team or watch baseball on TV with me, he enjoyed teaching me how to swing a bat and catch fly balls.  Raised on sandlot ball in a home too poor for television, baseball was and still is for him a living, breathing sport, not an entertainment spectacle to be dissected on blogs and talk radio.

As the game went on I ignored the scoreboard more and more, resisted the temptations of my smart-phone, and jabbered less, all so I could appreciate the deeper game being played before my eyes.  They say that baseball is a "thinking man's game," but that's only if you give yourself over to it when you watch it.  I am just as prone as anyone else in our current cultural moment to live in a state of endless distraction and rush, it was great (and a little sad) for one night to realize what I've lost, and now hope to get back.

Two Tactics For Dealing With Your Reactionary Relatives Tomorrow

I come from a very large extended family where the vast majority of folks are very conservative, which means political conversations end up with me being ganged up on.  The election of 2000 pretty much ruined Thanksgiving that year because the topic kept coming up in conversation, and I kept getting into fights about it.  After that I learned two tactics that have led to more peace and enjoyable holidays.  Perhaps they can help you, too.

Tactic #1: Pacifism
This is the stance I tend to use the most.  There is actually an informal truce between my parents and I when it comes to talking about politics, but my other relatives are not as mindful.  When they start bringing this stuff up I usually first tell them "I don't want to talk about it."  If that doesn't work, I say "I disagree with you, but I'd rather not get into it."  In the very rare cases where that does not bring an end to it, I just get up and leave the room.  It can be very difficult to take this course, since it means holding one's tongue in the face of outrageous or even offensive statements,  Over the years I've learned I can't change their minds, that they take any political arguments personally, and that deep down we love each other and just want to have a pleasant time together.  Why destroy that trying to reason with someone who spews Fox News talking points?

Tactic #2: Massive Retaliation
Sometimes I resort to this tactic, usually when someone brings up something political apropos of nothing, and in a way that is offensive or a personal affront.  For example, one of my cousins responded to the use of racial slurs by one of our uncles by yelling at him to knock it off and never use those words in front of her children again.  (It actually worked!)  This summer another uncle was goading me about how great Chris Christie is, and after refusing to relent when I tried to change the subject, I just unloaded about how insensitive he was to the fact that my wife is a New Jersey teacher and that he has been scapegoating people like her with his blustering rhetoric and that his policies had actually taken money out of my family's pockets.  He was pretty taken aback at my passion, and just dropped it.  This tactic doesn't work well with things like the Affordable Care Act, but sometimes is necessary when confronted by birthers, Christian dominionists, or Trayvon haters.  You shouldn't even have to listen to that kind of bullshit.

Ready to Go Home

I am listening to "I'm Ready to Go Home" by the Louvin Brothers tonight after talking to my grandmother, who's living and soon to be dying a half a continent away back in Nebraska.  She hadn't been doing well, but things have taken a turn for the worse.  She told my mother today that she's ready to go to heaven.  So tonight, I sit in my city apartment "back East" above a busy street, police sirens and car stereos blasting and think of the deathly quiet, Bible-black skies of my Great Plains homeland looking over my grandmother, and wish there was some way I could be there with her.

Do We Ever Stop Having Awkward Conversations With Our Parents?

I was raised in an extremely Catholic family, and was a fervent believer as a child.  That included five years as an altar boy, and a period of time, around the age of 13, when I seriously considered a career in the priesthood.  My parents are anti-abortion activists, and when I was younger, I came along to "life day" protests with them.  During my teen years, that faith began to wane, especially after I learned more about the history of the Church and developed an interest in the ideas of other religions.  Even though I went to a Jesuit university as an undergraduate, I came in as a doubting agnostic, and ended my time there as a self-avowed atheist.

The whole time I kept these beliefs a secret from my family.  One of my gay friends used to tease me about this, urging me to "come out" as he had done with his parents (with something much more stigmatized) and that I was being chickenshit.  I wanted to, but never could, since I felt that they would think I was somehow rejecting them or putting them down.

As time went on, I dropped my atheism for my former agnosticism, and would still occasionally attend mass.  I got a great deal of enjoyment out of this during my time in Germany, with its gorgeous medieval churches and dedicated parishioners who acted like they really wanted to be there.  I regained my old appreciation for my the mystical and the power of ritual.  In recent years, after going to a close friend's church, I began attending Episcopal services, and felt something important inside of me rekindled.  I am still not a completely committed believer, but I feel something stir in my soul again, and I enjoy being around good-hearted people who really care about making the world a better place.

This is all background to a phone conversation this evening, when I told my parents that the reason we haven't baptized the girls is that I do not wish to remain affiliated with the Catholic church.  I framed it in positive terms, in that I felt more comfortable in a different faith community, rather than going negative and cataloging my many deep frustrations and critiques of the Catholic church.  However, there were still some awkward moments, to say the least.  I'm thirty-seven, but I felt fifteen again.  As I grow further and further apart from the person I used to be, I wonder if these moments will ever go away.

I always fear that the decisions I've made with my life are interpreted by them to be rejections and repudiations of their love.  I went into an unorthodox career, married late, left Catholicism, and settled down in the dreaded land "back East."  As they get more set in their ways, and I get to be more confident in revealing my true self to them, I wonder what kinds of strain our relationship will face.  I guess dealing with the ensuing awkwardness is a worthy price to be paid for living in the truth rather than hiding behind twenty years of lies.