: lower black pain.

About two decades ago I got a new job, director of a large art production department in a storied New York advertising firm. I represented a demographic premiere (super young, and let’s just say: etc.) never before seen in a position like that.

Inside the ad industry, times were politically rife. Inside our building, the company was evolving as fast as mosquito blood in a Jurassic Park lab.

Thus this new job was a hornets’ nest on top of an active volcano, so with very little useable precedent, I just tried to do the best I could with who I was. In I walk, all One Good Suit and Speaks So Well, and I was The Boss.

My department was a collection of employees from different eras, over half of them nearly twice my age, and I was 35.

This wouldn’t have been a thing except many of them admitted, due to the math of when they’d been born, that they’d never really spoken to a black person.

So we talked. Progress was made. Bridges built. A few early retirements were immediately taken, but not that many.

One of my department managers cultivated an old Hollywood look, an elegant vampire; dapper and curiously alert. He and I treated each other like two head waiters from fancy restaurants meeting each other after work for a cocktail: I would ask something politely and he would answer even more politely and I would thank him even more politely than that, and then we would slowly nod in unison.

One day, I walked into his office and he was the only one there. It must have been near a holiday, not many folks were in. I had just gotten a first generation iPod, it was amazing, there must have been 200 songs on there, and I had it clipped on my belt with this fashionable leatherish case thing. He politely asked how I liked it, and I (more politely) said it was a miracle, a jukebox in my pocket.

He asked what music I was listening to.

I told him that I had just gotten a new album that was amazing, Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall, and her voice was so incredibly powerful and did he know how small she was for that huge voice to come out and the arrangements were so electric that I got goosebumps every time I heard “Come Rain or Come Shine”.

And he didn’t answer back. His face was frozen, and I MEAN frozen. One more millisecond and it would have been weird, like call an ambulance weird. He audibly inhaled.

“I was at that concert.”

I, was, starstruck. By proxy, or whatever, but wow.

“Wow! Seriously?”

“Yes.” Inhale. “I sat in the back of the balcony, at almost the very top, but you could hear every single note. I’ve heard that album many times, but if you think she sounds good there, you cannot imagine how incredible she sounded live. It was, impossible; she was this small, almost frail looking person on the stage, but when she sang…”

And for a breath or two, BOTH of us were there.

That gentleman left the agency a couple of years later: the aging parent he was caring for had passed, and so he at last retired and moved to Florida. His last words to me were, “Thank you. This has been an interesting adventure. Good luck to you.” I thanked him and we nodded, slowly, in unison.

Two years later I met with an acquaintance that knew my elegant employee, and asked after him.

“Oh, he loves Florida,” the man told me, “he’s always wanted to move there, he can really relax and let his hair down.”

“Really?” I said. “He always seemed a bit Downton Abbey for his hair to get any longer.”

“Yeah, it was really hard for him up here. But he said that you were the first supervisor who accepted that he was gay. I don’t even think his mother knew. But he felt very comfortable working for you.”

For the record, I actually didn’t know that. Our one deep conversation was when I barged into his office and went crazy about this concert that he had actually seen. I’m sure he knew I wasn’t faking all that emotion as we stood there, silent, he lost in memory and I in historical awe.

But maybe that’s when he thought I was letting him know that I knew.

It is the beginning of Black History Month here in the United States, and I write a column called Lower Black Pain, and this is the story I choose to lead with? Even given the statistical rarity of FIVE THURSDAYS THIS FEBRUARY (which won’t happen again until 2029) it does seem, on the surface, a bit of a zen arrow in terms of its subject matter.

This column is about being black, and I am not (clinically) delusional, and I do understand that all of my experiences are culturally weighted, but for me that weight is lifted through moments like the one I described with my co-worker.

In my experience, harmony has proven the key to everything, seeking it and seeking to create it. I’ve geeked out with people quite obviously culturally opposed to me about comic books, fishing with my Grandfather, dry turkey at Thanksgiving, old tv shows: each time creating a conversation that ended with two people with quote unquote nothing in common smiling and slowly nodding.

Nods mean yes. Yes is good. There is so much no. I understand the struggle from inside it, but I don’t have whatever’s necessary to be a cultural war correspondent. At best, this column attempts to chronicle peace, even on the battlefield.

Though, one of my employees did ask me to announce myself from outside of her office with three crisp knocks before entering. I did so, and by that Christmas, I got her to stop clutching her purse to her chest.

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At a young age I developed a very specific concern regarding stories: it always seemed that it was more difficult for characters to be honestly happy than to be afraid of something. Evil lurked everywhere, it could pop out of a cereal box or telephone or monkey’s paw (ok, well that one, c’mon, you had it coming), but Good always had to arrive at the last minute.

And no one seemed to have an answer for it. Good always played defense to Evil’s offense. This really bothered me when I was eleven, because I was exactly the kind of eleven year old that it would bother.

Saturday Night Fever, Smokey and the Bandit, Annie Hall, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Star Wars (the original one) all opened in the same year, 1977. This cinematic cornucopia (combined with the invention of “Twi-Lite Time” prices at the local multiplex) spawned my introduction to “grown-up” films (the previous year I’d only seen “The Bad News Bears”). That summer we went to the movies just about every weekend.

Some of those titles weren’t age appropriate, but I did get to visit a galaxy far, far away (13 times), race across the country in a fancy car, and play superstar DJ to a spaceship full of folks from out of town. But those weren’t the only films I saw that summer.

Larry Gelbart, the genius writer behind M*A*S*H, offered “Oh God!”, starring John Denver (“Rocky Mountain High”) as a grocery store manager from Tarzana, whom God (George Burns) chooses to spread the news that we have everything we need to make the world a better place. (I’m sorry, did I mention John Denver? The singer! Was acting in this movie. And he was very good. Oh! and Teri Garr is his wife! And it’s directed by Carl Reiner! What’s not to like?)

“Oh God!” addressed my narrative concern about good and evil; God wasn’t a distant mysterious force or a (literal) Deus Ex Machina (“suddenly her hand came upon the necklace and she brandished the cross at the oncoming vampire!”). Burns played omniscience as cool confidence, a no-nonsense omnipotent granddad with all the power his character was heir to, but with kindness and patience.

No jump scares required, no special effects, just quiet wit. I really connected to this rendering of Good; the most powerful entity in the universe shows up as a nonagenarian instead of The Rock. Ok, it probably would have been Muhammad Ali back then.

That being said, it was brought to my attention that the versatile online platform I’m currently using for this column also had a few… extremists calling it home.

I often look up words when I’m writing this column, most often in the Oxford English Dictionary because it’s the largest in my home and by mere heft seems the most authoritative resource.

There wasn’t really a grey area here; I looked up the word “extremism” and there’s no positive side. It is the antonym to the phrase “fresh baked cookies”.

Many people on this platform wanted the owners to kick off the extremists, but the right to free speech is ubiquitous, so they were initially allowed to remain. Then, the platform owners had a little look-see at the questionable content, and after a Further Think decided that the platform did need a social standard, and a couple of folks were asked to leave.

I believe in free speech, and the world doesn’t have to stop talking so I can be heard. If I’m sharing a platform with people who hate me, well - heck, I’m sharing a planet with them already. I suppose if Good was as aggressive as Evil I would seek out that which is negative and destroy it, but the very ideas of aggression and destruction seem part of that negativity.

“Oh God!” set a new standard for stories about powerful good not having to be so overt, a message that, for me, has only been bested by Craig Ferguson’s brilliant description of my favorite hero, Doctor Who: “It's all about the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism”.

We can believe not only in something beyond ourselves but in ourselves, our capacities for problem solving and compassion, our ability to love as strong as anybody else could hate. The bad guys should be afraid of us, but we don’t need to be threatening to make that happen.

We keep going, we build harmony, we stand against despair, even in the grocery store line when it’s busy and the lines kind of curve around into one another and that family right ahead of us doesn’t want to sack even one bag of their own stuff as if they all had fresh manicures and baby soft hands. We can make the world a better place by just trying not to make it any worse.

As the sage has taught us, “The power of love…is a curious thing.” For every angry scream into the endless void, there is a laugh at the other end, filling it.

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As the middle-aged father of a very New Woman, the idea that any homemade fashion I create would be enthusiastically adopted is a pipe dream, but I crocheted a snood for my daughter.

A snood is a loop scarf, big enough to double over the head and become kind of a hat, sort of the same idea as the hoody dress Princess Leia wears when saying “Help me, Obi-Wan” in the hologram. It took three weeks, but I kept at it and worked to choose the right color of yarn and not drop too many stitches.

She wore it to school. Several days this week. I saw her put it on in the morning and thought it might not make the final cut of items worn completely out the door, but then it WAS.

I was so happy. I felt like those elves that helped the cobbler make shoes.

We all just started crocheting last year. I’d knitted before, a bit, but it was always hard, seemed to take forever; the two stick thing kind of confused me and I only learned the one basic stitch.

Zoë can knit like a pro: I tried to make a 12 foot long scarf 10 years ago for the Doctor Who 50th anniversary - about seven feet into it she found the width of the piece was highly variable… one foot here, nine inches there. I found it charming. She very quietly bought more yarn and created a perfect finished version before I could get another foot done.

I should know how to knit better. My grandmother taught me when I was ten or so. My summer break had started earlier than my mother’s, so for a couple of weeks it was all bran flakes and plastic slipcovers and daytime television. To be honest, it was my fancy summer camp.

There must have been a sale, but I was allowed to pick any color from the endless aisle of scratchy ultra polyester yarn over at K-Mart, as well as a pair of green aluminum knitting needles – bright green; neon, even.  I did not have a “spoiling” grandmother, so this was really special.

Technically, I think she needed me to be busy. Apparently my pediatrician had told this to the family early on:

“He’s doing well, but you should make sure that he‘s very well occupied.”

When my mother pressed him as to the specific reason for this, he replied:

“It’s just probably for the best.”

So there we were, two generations of knitting neophytes and a paperback Good Housekeeping instruction manual. It took a whole afternoon just to figure out the “casting on” part, drinking big glasses of water with those strange oblong white ice cubes that never tasted like water, sitting in front of her television, watching her “stories”.

I thought it was fun. I could have all the water I could drink and I memorized the theme song to “Days Of Our Lives”. When I finally got into the rhythm of the whole thing, I’d finished about a foot of progress, and she came over to check my work.

“Hm. How’d you do that so fast?”

“I don’t know!”

I was too young, maybe, to recognize this look. I had never seen my grandmother’s competitive side. But this is what that was.

“Oh, you made a little mistake there.”

“Where?”

“Back here… you can fix it though, here, I’ll help…”

…at which point she began to pull the yarn out of the piece… three rows, seven rows, twelve rows, seventeen…

“There. Now that should be fine.”

She then sat back in her chair and picked up her own work again, which before had been about half the size of mine, but was now considerably longer than I had left on my needle.

That wasn’t trauma. That’s not what I’m saying. My spirit wasn’t broken on my quest for a lucrative knitting scholarship. I just re-made the thing quietly (at a much slower pace) and then gave it to my mom, a super heartfelt, crazy scratchy scarf; the perfect gift for the beginning of a summer.

I don’t think my Grandmother knew what to do with me. Between our generations was a great deal of societal change…I was a New Boy in a world where the rules were just being written. So the next week, my Grandmother and I also did latch hook rugs, and then after that we tried needlepoint. For a woman of a certain age with a pretty solid opinion about masculinity, she really gave me a lot of room to grow and discover the joy of creation.

Nyaa. Who am I kidding? She had completely given up on me at that point and was probably hoping I could get a little work in town as a seamstress.

Which is hilarious, but I will be taking snood orders beginning in August.

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My mother has big dreams for me. She wants me to grow up to do something significant and useful. She wants me to not quit, and to stay strong, and to hang in there, like a kitten on a motivational poster.

She won’t let me always use the calculator, because then I won’t learn how to actually solve a problem (“…what if you don’t have batteries someday?”). She teaches me to type on the manual typewriter because the added effort make my fingers “remember better”. She gives me timed tests of multiplication tables so that I know them by heart, in case there’s an emergency someday requiring swift numerical products.

But what she wants is only eclipsed by what she doesn’t want. She didn’t want me to be lazy, and she didn’t want me to be bored.

I was actually forbidden to be bored, because there was always something to be done, and once she had worked all that summer to make the extra money to buy our set of encyclopedias, there was always something to be learned as well, in alphabetical order no less.

I had to persevere, work hard, and appreciate my opportunities, because back when I got ‘em, they were all NEW. I’m in the first generation to enjoy the fruits of the civil rights movement. I CAN be an astronaut when I grow up, or the President of The United States! (well maybe not the President: that would be crazy). There are brown GI Joe dolls and news anchors and I have the right to eat at any restaurant and walk on both sides of the street and vote, as if it had always been that way.

My potential can, at last, map my actual future, rather than a societal GPS restricting me to “ a u-turn at Ambition, then merge right onto Oppression and continue forward for 100 years”.

Thus, my mother’s role models for me are Moses, Jesus, and Martin Luther King. You know, no pressure.

Moses was Charleston Heston, an American actor of English descent. I mean, the real one was super brown, but the one I saw part the Red Sea every year was this guy. He is listed in Wikipedia as an activist, which surprised me since he later in life was very much a key face of the most conservative ideas in the nation, but it is true that he was a very active supporter of the civil rights movement for decades.

Anyway, Moses was determined; he didn’t let his mean brother (Yul Brenner) stop him from standing up for what he believed in, and led a people out of bondage and into freedom, every year, right there on TV (also in the Bible: I did read the book before we saw the movie). Jesus was a hero whose superpower was love, proving that ideas and emotions were as influential as any army. And I was lucky enough to actually share the planet with Martin Luther King for almost two years.

These men worked hard to do something significant. They hung in there. But two out of three of their stories didn’t really end all that well, and I asked my mother about that when I was nine or ten.

“Why are all the heroes (you want me to be like) people that had horrible things happen to them?”

We are almost home in the car, making the last few turns before we drive up the alley to our backyard parking spot.

“I don’t know what you mean.” She does know what I mean.

“Really?”

“Well, I don’t think about it that way. I think about what they did when they were living, who they decided to be. You get a chance to be and do things I could never do, but it’s your job to take things further and keep going. They kept going. That’s all I mean. You don’t have to end up like they did if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t think they wanted to end up the way they ended up either.”

“Well, Moses did ok.”

“He was a farmer.”

“Well, you can be a farmer if you want to do that.”

When my mother begins to speak like Lewis Carroll, our conversations are over. She’ll talk about anything, give me all the advice she can, delve into subjects and philosophies most parents would never breach, but when logic pretzel-loops over itself, she’s done. I get out of the car and open the gate and let the car in and then close and lock the gate behind it. I don’t bring this up again for years, because I clearly saw the inexpressible anguish and complexity in the corner of her eye.

Over a decade later, I sit with my mother going through a giant scrapbook. My grandfather has just passed, and among his newspaper clippings and photos we find a church bulletin announcing Martin Luther King speaking from the auditorium of my old high school, which at that time was actually my mother’s all black high school in Kansas City, Kansas. I had no idea that Dr. King had spoken there, there should have been a plaque or something: I’d performed Pinter and Ionesco on that stage (and had my second ever kiss there), but I would have treated the room with way more reverence.

“You know, your Grandfather picked him up at the airport.”

“Martin Luther King???”

“Yes. Grandpa was chosen to go get him and take him back. I guess he volunteered.”

“Grandpa, spent one-on-one time, in a car, with Martin Luther King… and he didn’t talk about this, like, every year at Thanksgiving?”

“Why would he do that? Oh, I see.”

She puts the bulletin back in the scrapbook. “Martin Luther King was famous, but we didn’t talk about him like a celebrity. It was what he had to say that was important. He was teaching us all to fight...well, not fight, but to stand up for ourselves. Like a teacher.”

“Did you go to this?” I ask her. To me it’s like a Beatles concert that she’s just failed to ever mention.

“I must have. I didn’t ride in the car, though, that was just the two of them.”

Martin’s general dream supported my mother’s very specific ones, paving a way for me to be determined, inventive, and curious without all that being against any law. In no way am I any of the three people my mother suggested, but I am not lazy, and I am never bored, and hope that, whatever this is I’m doing, counts as “taking things further”.

“Grandpa said he was very nice, and he enjoyed speaking with him.” my mother added, super casually.

Wow. ‘Cause as you must by now recognize, I do not share my grandfather’s talent for understatement: I would have printed up a hundred t-shirts saying “I Took Dr. Martin Luther King to the Airport and Then Made This T-Shirt!!!”

Well, I guess I’d only really need the one shirt.

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I have some things I am excited to make this year, a few movies I’m anxious to see, and lots of books I’d like to read.

We have a great deal of books. One might say “too many”, but One would not be entirely accurate. I classify the measurement as “We just need one more bookshelf. And maybe a wall to put it on.”

My grandfather’s house held a library. I believe most of it was there when they moved in (back in the ‘40s), but he was the one that added all of the law books; I tried to read a couple of those but was more drawn to the antique copy of The Arabian Nights I found there.

I was given books instead of an allowance as a kid… hard work turned into a different kind of paper; I earned those copies of “The Apple Dumpling Gang” and “The Shining” (I believe I read both those books in the same year).

I always wanted to be an author. I suppose after almost two years of these columns I can say that I’m a writer, but to be an author, you need a book. So that’s on the list too this year, along with finally soldering together that guitar distortion pedal kit. And finishing the LEGO car.

The giant chain bookstore down the street from my job is closing in seven days. There used to be tons of these, competing brands, all across the country, and I remember the thrill of the endless selection and scandalous inclusion of fully sanctioned hot beverages you could just carry around.

As a bookstore fan, It made me happy to think that these literary behemoths were necessary, that there was good business sense behind opening one at the end of a mall and another only a few miles away, that a demand for reading materials in the nation necessitated such spectacular supply.

I don’t enjoy libraries. I never have. My grade school had Sisters and Misses: Sister Janet Helen, Miss Kraft, Miss Indra. The librarian was Sister Cat(herine), a fine lady, nice and not at all mean, and pretty super progressive for a midwestern nun in the 1970’s. But most of the books in the library were covered in this crinkly plastic wrap, and of course they weren’t YOUR books, so you had to be very careful with them when you read them. My favorite book was “Family Sabbatical”, a book that effected me so deeply that 40 years later I found a copy of it on eBay (from a library, of course).

But I love bookstores. I think for me it’s the difference between a zoo and a pet adoption center; zoos, even at their most humane, seem voyeuristic and separate from your own life, you are visiting the home of all the creatures who live there, while a bookstore holds the thrilling potential of bringing something home that you will love forever.

And now very few remain. The building housing the one by my work is being renovated into what’s rumored to be pickleball courts. Which is equally sad as both metaphor and literal statement.

My first job was in a bookstore; I steered a customer away from buying the expensive new Stephen King book for their ten year old (I did give her other options, but they were slightly cheaper); the manager was angry about losing the sale and sent me off the floor to clean the tiny gross employee bathroom; but since we were in a mall I bought I contact paper and brighter lights along with the cleaning materials and renovated it, and the employees loved it, and he fired me on the spot. We couldn’t even shop there anymore.

Anyway, I think I’ve figured it out. I look at the books in my home and remember not plots or stories, but feeling worried about Sherlock Holmes and those dogs, sympathetic with Holden Caufield’s malaise, uplifted by Aladdin’s bravery, strident regarding Dorothy Parker’s relationships, and so very amused by the hijinks of the Apple Dumpling Gang.

Books are where I learned empathy, even though I was alone. And when I walked through a bookstore I was not choosing adventure, but emotional alignment. And now, when the smartphone won’t give me space to catch my breath between pronouncements of disaster and tragedy, it is this empathy that sustains me, a base built on the wisdoms of both Maya Angelou and Zaphod Beeblebrox.

I keep these books around to remind me that I know how to feel, to remind me to keep feeling, no matter the circumstances the world throws at me, because I’ve already survived a long cold winter at the Overlook hotel.

And if I made it through seven years at Hogwarts, I’ll probably be able to get through another election year.

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Covid in Our Christmas Stockings was not the name of a new holiday movie, but instead the elevator pitch plot of my actual life this week.

Exchanging yuletide pleasantries for “Hark! The Herald Angels Sneeze!” has left me weak,  my head still spinning…

…thus this brief poem, for year’s beginning.

Dear Baby New Year,

you can’t read this yetyou’re just an infant butI worked outyou must ageat leasta quarter-year a day,

which is the reasonthough I’ve thought to writeI never did.

I knew that until March 15th or soyou were a kid

so why send youa boring noteabout my mid-life health?you don’t need that.you’re young;won’t be my age til… August 12th.

but maybe August 13thyou can drop me a quick line?let me know how September looks?and if October’s fine?

I understand all we are guaranteedis to get olderwe start out babesand rockettowards our prime

then seem to gain momentumrolling reckless as a boulderjust like you are

kind of… bundled up in time. what lies ahead? your walking stick.we can’t deny that fact, butif you don’t mind,I think we’ll just keep wearing your top hat.amazing it still fits, I know.It brings a sense of styleto innocence, experience,to wisdom, bravery, guile…It kind of goes with everything.so when I get that chanceto have your canebe fairly warned,I’m using it to dance.

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Ice and Snow

I was convinced that every yuletide of my youth was a frosty winter wonderland. As previously mentioned, I am absolutely a product of the American midwest, born and mostly raised where annual weather patterns were defined by cut out cardboard schoolroom decorations atop the blackboards: a pretty spring flower, a yellow summer sun, a bright orange autumn leaf, and either a giant crystalline flake or a Classic Snowman with top hat, red scarf and carrot nose.

So though I did remember nearly ALL of the Christmases from my childhood as snow-covered Norman Rockwell paintings, I recently found a chart showing the actual weather in Kansas City for the last seventy Christmases. Out of my first 18, only 4 of them actually had snow on the ground on that day.

My wife is a Northern Californian. She never knew snow as a child, on Christmas or nearly any other winter’s day.  My cousins in Texas could go swimming after Christmas dinner (ok: well, an hour after Christmas dinner).

But I grew up with an annual anticipation of a White Christmas. This extremely hummable meterologic aspiration taunts us every year, and is so connected with the holiday that it necessitates movies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on snow effects to make the scenes “convincing”.

Because whether or not it’s true for us personally, Christmas, in general, is snowy. It snows at the North Pole, it snowed in Southtown (for one day), it snowed in Bedford Falls (thanks to Clarence). Halloween is pumpkins. Thanksgiving is turkey, Fourth of July is fireworks. Easter’s a colored egg, New Year’s is… well, also fireworks, but Christmas lights shine brightest either out of the darkness of night or the smooth blank canvas of a winter’s snowfall.

Snow is only weather, but at the right time and in the right dosage, it’s also kind of a miracle. I don’t know why I thought it snowed every Christmas. Perhaps my head is a snow globe, and when I bring up memories of Christmases I just kind of shake it a bit. That would explain quite a lot about me, actually.

Pico and Sepulveda

The true gift of gifting Is what it means inside We can show we care Spreading love far and wide.

– My Little Pony : Best Gift Ever

My extended family is small but precious, a priceless collection of exceptional individuals whom I feel deeply connected to, no matter how long it’s been since we’ve seen one another. It is such a rare collection that I wonder how, mathematically, I was lucky enough to run across each one of them in a world of…

[…hey Siri: how many people are in the world right now?]

…7 billion 846 million people.

One of these wonderful people is getting married next year, to a wonderful man who is kind and tall and smart and good looking: they’re very well matched. She brought him over for dinner before they were officially engaged, and I’m not ashamed to admit we tried to size him up, which didn’t take that long because he’s entirely delightful.

She brought him back for dinner a few weeks ago, but now that they were “official” I found the situation reversed: I wanted to make a good impression, I was someone he was gonna have to be around now, a number in his phone he was gonna have to pick up ‘cause it was gonna be on that list that your phone lets ring even when you’re not taking calls just in case or whatever.

We spoke about politics, employment, government, real grown up stuff. I was visibly sweating, but felt confident, a little nervous the conversation might veer into sports and my eyes would show True Fear as I vamped about the Chiefs for 30 seconds until I could make a sharp left at Taylor Swift™ and talk about music.

But the most amazing thing happened. He mentioned his favorite Christmas album, which happened to be a collection of vintage novelty holiday songs collected by the madcap radio host Dr. Demento, and said he hadn’t heard it in years. I got up from the table while he was still talking and pulled out my copy. And it was a moment, folks, a real moment, one of those two people in sync beats where you understand them and they understand you and it’s all gonna be ok – Twilight Sparkle was right, friendship IS the greatest gift, and my friend had not only shared the person she loved, but brought over somebody I could play with, which for an only child is just about the coolest thing ever. Maybe we’ll build a fort.

(Oh! I gotta find my Hot Wheels!)

Merry and Bright

My favorite Christmas album is The Partridge Family Christmas Card. My mother bought it in 1971. I listened to it every single year, and treated it with pristine respect, so I never actually removed the outside plastic. So I never actually understood that the envelope pattern on the front of the album cover was an actual envelope, and INSIDE that envelope was an actual Christmas card, signed by all the Partridge Family. I didn’t find that out until 1983, right before I went to college. It was a pretty magical day.

If I could send you all a card to thank you for your time, it would be this one: maybe not the card itself, but that feeling of discovering something wonderful in something you’ve seen a million times before. May your holiday bring surprise and delight, warmth and laughter, and may peace and love surround you at Christmastime, and all the whole year through.

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I was 12 years old, it was 1978, beginning of November, a Saturday morning. I know it was a Saturday morning because that’s when the cartoons came on, and I was probably watching Bugs Bunny when the commercial played for the first time.

TCR Total Control Racing was a slot racing set with little cars on an electrified track with voltage controlled by plastic trigger devices, except this one had NO SLOT to keep the cars on the track, instead it used a switch on the trigger to shift the electric feed from one set of contacts underneath the car to a second that powered an alternate driveshaft…

…meaning the cars could CHANGE LANES. Whenever you wanted. Pass each other on the turns then fire into the straightaways. The set included a jam car that just slowly went around the track as an additional obstacle. The whole thing was an absolute miracle of engineering and design, and here it was…just seven weeks until Christmas.

There had never been one Christmas morning where I’d stood, pajama-clad and be-slippered, facing a holiday hearth with the slightest anticipation of a lump of raw petroleum as a gift. I had never been naughty, and you have to be naughty to get coal in your stocking, very naughty according to all the songs and relevant literature. Sporting a childhood demeanor more Pollyanna than Katzenjammer, I was a more than decade-long honoree of The Nice List.

But household standards were more stringent than traditional North Pole rules; not being naughty was in no way the same as being nice, and nice on it’s own wasn’t nearly enough, too low a bar, as evidenced by the fact that the phrase “that’s nice.” has never really indicated high praise. What I was supposed to be, in a general sense, was a good person.

Good was also canon, per “…he knows if you’ve been bad or good…”, and was considered more weighty than the traditional naughty/nice gambit. Good and bad indicated commitment to a specific behavioral path, not just dabbling in decency or mischief. As we grow older, the opposite of good evolves to evil, but that’s way beyond what we can handle at Christmas. Surely an evil kid wouldn’t even get coal; their stocking would be missing altogether as if The Grinch had dropped by.

It didn’t matter how good I was, I wasn’t getting the TCR because we couldn’t afford it. But as a treat, my mom drove to the really nice toy store way across town at 95th street, in the nice neighborhood where they had it assembled and on interactive display so kids could play with it.

It was important to my mother to let me know that I had been good that year, and that it was appreciated by her, and if we had the money she would have definitely gotten it. (If it had been in any way available, I might have asked Santa for it, but the set had instantly sold out nationwide.)

On Christmas Eve, my mother got a check in the mail, a miracle check of some kind, entirely unexpected. She stood kind of frozen in the middle of the living room, backlit with afternoon sun and the lights of our Christmas tree, and just stared at it for a long time, not saying anything, then looked at me.

“Let’s go get your racetrack.”

“It’s sold out, Mama.” I reminded her.

“Call around and see.”

“I don't need it, Mama.” I told her, and I didn’t. KPRS was on the radio playing soul holiday hits and we were gonna make a gingerbread house. Christmas was on.

“See if you can find it.” she insisted.

So, outside, while gentle late afternoon snow tripled in volume to a full blizzard, I worked my way through the Yellow Pages, checking every K-Mart and toy store in the immediate area, gathering a pretty healthy range of sarcastic responses from harried salespeople.

“It’s ok, Mama. There’s none around here.”

“Keep trying.” My mother obviously considered that check a sign of some sort.

So I called that toy store where we first saw it. They took forever to answer, but when they did they said, like everyone else had, it had been sold out for weeks…

…however, someone had placed one on hold and was supposed to pick it up by five but they never did, and store policy was to put it back on the floor but there wasn’t anyone in the store because it had snowed an inch and a half in the last hour with four more inches on the way; it was now six o’clock, and they closed for the holiday at seven. If we came by, by seven o’clock, we could have that one.

I relayed the shopkeeper’s message to her with a “well, we tried” shrug and a smile. But my mother wasn’t smiling.

She called them right back. “Are you SURE you have the exact thing we’re looking for? The exact one? And you’ll keep it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Ok, we’re on our way.”

I may never get the opportunity to ride on Santa’s sleigh, snow everywhere, wind buffeting my coat, near zero visibility, but this Christmas Eve ride was twice that. I’ve seen my mother drive a great deal, she is always a safe and prudent driver, but never one to back down from an automotive challenge: it was impossible, roads not yet cleared, and only 40 minutes to compete a 45 minute trip (in good weather).

The parking lot was under two inches of unbroken snow when we arrived. My mother drove right up to the front door. It was 7:10 on our car clock. We jumped out and walked to the front door, the lights were still on, and the manager saw us. We identified ourselves, and he looked very surprised… it was clear we had driven a very long way. He led us inside to the one open cash register, checked us out, and wished us both a Merry Christmas.

My mother put the track in the trunk of the car, as not to ruin the Christmas surprise, and we started the even more exciting and dangerous trip back home, this time racing not time, but Santa himself, since we only had a couple of hours to make that gingerbread house and get to bed.

There was no way on Earth I could have been “nice” enough to have deserved all that. I did try to be kind, and fair, and not a little jerk or whatever, but that was some Torreto Family level driving.

I’m sure that every time my mother saw me play with that track for the next five years she hoped that I would remember where it came from: well, here it is, forty-five years later, and I definitely do. The experience outlasted the toy. Which makes sense, because the story was the real gift.

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Babies leak. They’re not really waterproof – I mean they are on the outside, but not exactly from the Inside.

As soon to be parents we were told that there were two types of leaks in children: let’s just say chimneys and basements.

We had a chimney baby, and took it in stride that we were responsible for maneuvering a soft uncovered pint glass filled with delicious formula. Every so often it might tip over, or we’d squeeze it a little and then gravity and physics took over and we were but peasants in the line of Pompeii.

Then we met a basement person. They were so much calmer than we would have been in their situation…if our life was volcanic then theirs was… well, worse. We approached our challenge with a splendid array of darling little kitchen towels in our kit bag, but theirs was no simple salvation.

I have a Christmas Day photo holding a happy three month old… she has an adhesive and staple free bow on the top of her head. It is from a series of photographs, the first one dry, the rest not nearly as dry. It is among my all-time favorite photos of the holidays.

It is not just in comparison that I remember those times so very fondly: that plane ride home when my daughter was only 1 and she “burped” as we were descending into JFK, and I only had the one shirt and undershirt so I had to take that off and wear only my suit coat like Grace Jones.

Zoe decided it would be better if I held the baby on the way through customs, as it would soften my “Chocolate Hotness” image and legitimize me in some way as a loving parent rather than a sketchy semi-nudist landing from Europe.

I strapped her into the little kangaroo holster, hiking it up as far as I could. She looked like a very extravagant vest. I remember telling her “Now, play it cool… we have to get past this nice man in the pseudo military outfit or you’ll be visiting me every six weeks bringing gluten-free cakes with long metal files baked into them”. She seemed to understand.

The customs guard barely raised his head; he took my document and scanned it and glanced at it, then scanned it in the other machine (one horizontal and one vertical), then glanced at me and then back at the document…

…and then glanced at me again,and the passport again,and then just straight up looked.

“They’re with me, we’re all together!” said my completely unsuspicious wife. It became immediately evident that her reputation was now tainted by the company she kept, as now he looked at us all.

“Were you traveling for business or pleasure?” he asked with slightly narrowed eyes.

I was two seconds away from saying “…mmm, beeznooz.” in a proto-European accent and letting it ride to see if I could get away with it, but the baby felt this foolishness rising and answered the man herself. It wasn’t in English, but it was definitely a direct answer to the man’s question. Even he recognized that, though he did not take the bait.

“And your final destination?” he added.

“Home. We’re home! We live in Brooklyn!” My wife excitedly replied. I’m sure she thought I might begin to wax lyrical about where any of us are truly headed, which was ridiculous (yet entirely accurate).

“Hmn.” He didn’t say it, but that was the look on his face…Hmn. Then with a shrug that said “Do I really need this today? No, I don’t.” The Nice Man gave us our passports back, mumbled a dismissive “Welcome Home.” over his left shoulder and we were on our way.

Now I was a free American, wearing a baby. My walk took on a more fashion runway sass. My daughter kept on talking and Zoë was happy it was all over. We got our bags and got in the cab and I remember that ride home… it was hot, and the windows were open to get what we delusionally refer to as “fresh air” in New York. I remember the BQE, and the buildings in Williamsburg, and here I was, a part of this city, and that moment, THAT moment, was glorious.

That’s what I think about when the Christmas carol goes “comfort and joy”. 

You might think that moment was anything but comfortable and joyous, but the relief of heading back to our own tiny apartment with our chatty and entirely empty child brought me happiness, a moment I can still vividly remember. A taxi ride from one concern to the next, where things were OK, after it seemed like they might not be, and we didn’t know what to do – but things had worked out. Ah.

Christmas, as Hans Gruber reminds us, is the time of miracles, but the best ones last longer than the holiday; a decade old memory is impossible to wrap, but it never gets old and goes great with everything I wear. We each have our own stories to share, and we should share them as much as we can with the people we love this month. Call somebody, write it down, or pull them over to the quieter corner of a holiday party and tell them about that time that thing happened. Share your own tidings!

Ok, I did have to look that word up.And don’t take off your shirt at the airport…that’s more of a summer look.

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I took the class because it the name of it was “The History Of Film Comedy” and I thought that it might be fun, because I was a freshman and it was the only course available to me in the giant blue book of offerings that didn’t sound either impossible or overwhelming.

First class; the professor introduces himself and goes straight into the life of Buster Keaton, who as a baby was part of his family’s vaudeville act by having two of his relatives each hold one arm and one leg and then swing swing TOSS him into the balcony of the theatre, where other relatives caught him and tossed him back on to the stage. They lived out of a suitcase, tragically poor, disaster and ruin, tragedy and mayhem…

This really wasn’t funny at all. I mean, the movie was, but the class really wasn’t.

…and then the professor asked the class, “How many of you have ever gone to bed, not sure where your next meal would come from?”

I raised my hand. Don’t get me wrong, I was protected and provided for every day of my life, but for a while there we were really poor, and sometimes had to stretch food and the very concept of it and just have faith that we’d make it. Honestly, I thought everyone had that same experience at least once, because I was from Kansas City and it was the early eighties and it was the second week of school and I was a really long way from home.

Two other students also raised their hands. Then time kind of stopped, because we looked at each other, and all of us were of some sort of color, and NO ONE ELSE had raised their hand, and the three of us had the exact same expression on our faces: surprise that we were the only people with our hands raised. Whatever classrooms we had been in last year, maybe most of that class might have had their hands in the air, so there was this beat where we were just acknowledging each other, and by then it was too late.

“Keep your hands up, keep your hands in the air.” the professor said. “Stand up, you three.”

First class, long way from home, sure Mister, I’ll stand up.

“These three know comedy. They’re the only three of you that understand it. They have had to face the world without certainty, and find something good where the rest of you wouldn’t have seen anything. They know what comedy means.” Then to us he added, “Everyone else may laugh, but you three will be able to understand. Ok, class dismissed.”

Now everyone stood up. A random girl patted me tenderly on the back, her head lowered. I picked up my bag and went outside, where the three of us, apparently blessed by the Goddess of Comedy, introduced ourselves.

“I don’t think my life is all that bad…” one of them said, “I don’t really feel like I’ve suffered or anything.”

We each agreed.

“At least we’re not afraid of being poor or anything.” I added.

“Yeah...” said the third. “though I get the feeling that if some of them grew up where we did, they might not have enjoyed it as much as we did.”

I think I got a B in that class.

I don’t want to become a curmudgeon, mostly because it’s so difficult to spell, so I’m continually reaching out to learn something new. But the modern world is awash with infinite amounts of fresh images, sounds, and information, and I am not infinite, I am maybe 12 hours a day of fairly drowsy middle aged black man. I can only do so much, eat so much, see so much, pay so much attention.

But I appreciate that I can appreciate things. I’ve met people who can’t, who, no matter where they are, are forever in a state of “oh gosh I’m super bored right now.”, always seeking something more.

My goal has always been to have enough, because you can actually have enough of something. More is by definition unattainable: it’s infinity plus one, the elusive parabola.

Three TV networks? Just fine. Cable? Wow, that’s… a lot of stations. A VHS player? Amazing. And now? Netflix has 36,000 hours of available programming at any given time. According to SIRI, who I politely asked to do the math for me, that’s 4 years of 24 hour a day programming, yet what I inevitably end up watching the most is trailers. I am lucky enough to live where food is abundant, but I can’t eat most stuff due to allergies.  And Hamilton is right; history is happening in Manhattan and I just happen to be in The Greatest City In The World, but I’m too tired to go out at night, thank you very much, I’m just gonna go back home and not eat stuff in front of some Netflix trailers and hit the sack.

But that’ still fun to me. It’s important to be able to be satisfied, to truly have a sense of recognizing something you might like wherever you happen to be.

Auntie Mame, a 1955 novel by Patrick Dennis, was later turned into a Broadway play, and then a very successful movie, and then a musical (also on Broadway), and then a movie of that, though don’t watch that movie because it’s not very good.

In the original (non-musical) film, the altogether fabulous Rosalind Russell is giving her diminutive wallflower of a secretary a “total makeover.”

She convinces her to step out for the evening, saying “Live! Live! Live! Life’s a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!”

At this point in the film, Mame’s character has been rich, poor, single, married, single again, rich again, employed, various types of unemployed, somewhat famous, and somewhat infamous. She has, by any measure, lived, seeing the opportunities in every situation and circumstance, and passing this perspective on to her young nephew, who is, somewhat, in her care.

The author of Auntie Mame seems to have taken his own literary advice; he was an ambulance driver, a very famous author, and then a butler for the man who founded McDonalds. Apparently he loved that job.

I’ve tried to eat at the banquet, even when it seemed more like foraging in the wilderness with a paper napkin. Every experience doesn’t have to be a good one, goodness no; some of the best ones are awful until they’re over and then they become stories to tell.

But my professor was wrong; misfortune doesn’t make you understand comedy or life any better than anyone else. At most, it probably does make you appreciate it a little more.

Besides, I don’t have a fear of missing out anymore, I clearly know I’m missing out and it excites and delights me. The smiling evenings I sit at home wearing pajamas and thinking of all the places that I am not – are gloriously legion.

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