Who Gets the Life Preserver?

OK, if you know anything about me, you know I’m all about my wonderful wife and kids. Many of you are that way too. But when it comes to live crawfish, boiled in Old Bay, with the tail-meat taking one last dip in organic butter with chopped garlic? 

Fogetaboutit...

Where do I throw the life preserver when they’re both going down? 

I’ve got to think the crawfish tails are warm and you don’t want to let them cool off…the wife and kids are good swimmers anyway. 

I'm sure they'll be fine.

Cocktail Parties...

With a nod to Jackie and JFK (as well as Lerner and Lowe), the early 1960’s has often been referred to as the “Camelot” years.  The greatest generation was reaping the much-deserved bounty of a flourishing job market as well as almost unlimited opportunities for urban living and home ownership.  Suburbia was thriving. WWII had taken boys fresh off the farm and brought them back home, several years later, as hardened men.  The country was more than ready to celebrate the successful end of the big war and was eager for the veterans and everyone who worked so tirelessly in the war effort, to have their own car, a freshly mown lawn, a facade brick house, a pretty wife who became mother hen to her brood, a white & tan spotted Beagle. By the 1960's, many added a color TV so they could watch the "Bonanza" map consumed by flames that looked real enough to warm the screen.

Recently, as often happens on the electronic highway, Facebook paths crossed, and common ground rediscovered for two people who never really knew each other but whose parents were the best of friends back then.

Just hearing the name of my new Facebook buddy resurrected memories of her parents, my parents, and all of their group that gathered at the lavish cocktail parties which alternated house to house, week to week. Everything was very respectable and well deserved, but the burbs often became party central on Saturday nights. That button-down generation of white-collar professionals had a need to blow off steam, and in those days, alcohol was the drug of choice.

The more the better.

I wrote to my new friend with whom I shared common memories… “I remember your Mom & Dad very well, mostly from epic cocktail parties at our house. Your dad was dark & handsome with movie star good looks, your Mom petite and cute with a lot of Jackie Kennedy fashion going on. That “Leopard skin pillbox hat”, long dark hair and a mini skirt.

Mother made me pass the platter of hors-d'oeuvre around in the crowd just because I was the youngest child and easiest to manipulate. Your Mom and Mrs. Nelson used to comment jealously about how long my eyelashes were, the envy of any woman. What young boy wants to hear that? I hated such talk. Things went from bad to worse when Mrs. Barnes, eyes rolling in opposite directions and hot breath blowing straight out of the Old Grand Dad distillery, moved in for a kiss wherever she could plant one.  

Bobbing and weaving, I usually managed to slip away with little more than a lipstick smear on my forehead.

That was a time when it was a point of pride to get everyone cross-eyed plastered before they drove home at the end of the night. It was the mark of a successful party. Drinks were mixed 1-part soda to 3 parts straight booze. 

Things got crazy. 

One particularly cold, overcast January night, I had shoveled a recent heavy snow out of our driveway in anticipation of a cocktail party that Mom and Dad had planned. Bliwise Liquors was always a few hundred dollars richer when Dad drove away. I helped pack the cavernous trunk of our ford Fairlane 500, a winged booze runner flying back home.

An ice storm started coating everything just as the last guest made it safely to our house. Tall mountains of shoveled snow already flanked the entrance to our driveway. They became heavily encased in ice.

Your parents drove a brand-new T-Bird. Beautiful, but at the end of the night, somewhat unfamiliar with the new car, jammed roughly into reverse, going backward too fast, it wound up as the cherry on top of the peak of one of those snow mountains. The ice storm had stopped, but everything was covered in an inch or two of clear ice, frozen solid and hard as steel. 

That hardened peak acted as a fulcrum for the car. I was giddy with excitement when revelers came outside, slipping and sliding without coats or winter gear, all quite inebriated, to help get the new car with your Dad inside, off of the mountain top. They did, but not before everyone spent too much time illustrating just how perfectly balanced the car was up there. You could see-saw it up and down or spin it in any direction with no more than a thumb and forefinger. A very cool party trick and end-of-the-night crowd pleaser for a bunch of drunks and a young boy. I don’t think your dad enjoyed that part very much, he just wanted down.

They managed to get the car off the fulcrum and onto the road.

No one died.

Over the next week, stories circulated about your folks drive home after that ice storm, how their car went off the road a few blocks away and slid side wise, slowly down the hill of a neighbor’s side yard, winding up in the bushes under their bedroom window. Fortunately, the Andersons weren’t home.

It was said that escape from the useless vehicle, and from the Arctic environment itself, was only made possible by the ingenious use of your mom’s stiletto heels as ice spikes. Rumors spread like wildfire when another neighbor heard a car horn blaring away and spotted a barefoot, mini-skirted Jackie Kennedy clinging to the ankles of Montgomery Clift who was digging blue-sequined high-heels into ice while clawing his way up that side hill at the Anderson house.  

The rumors were never confirmed but it was generally agreed: that was one hell of a party.

No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem...

In the mid 1980’s, we renovated that tiny log cabin with its bowed floors, sinking foundation, and impossibly petrified pine beams.

Built in 1729 on property that had been part of a land grant from Lord Fairfax, it was a poor farmers house back then. The two-story frame house, circa 1852, was added on as a summer place.

We bought the house and five acres for $80K.

Nothing worked. The pluming froze solid every winter, so we showered at a local college or splurged on a local hotel room when we were lusting for modern facilities. The funky wiring and scattered space heaters tried their best to burn the house down. Manly man that I am, I knocked the cap off the chimney on the left while bragging about my tree felling skills. A large cedar wasn’t listening and came down hard, exactly where it wasn’t supposed to go.

We modernized the kitchen with new cabinets and appliances, including a dishwasher. Well water supplied the incoming needs but there was no easy way to tie into the wastewater for that dishwasher. I ran a hose from the dishwasher, across the kitchen floor, slithering like a thick blacksnake with its head out a circular hole cut into the baseboard. It drained into a low spot on the side yard. Hannah played in the toxic pool on warm days, which may explain a few things about Hannah.

The surrounding land was all owned by the Ashburn Timber Company. They no longer harvested lumber; no activity had gone on for many years before we bought our house. For us, the choice was between a new townhouse in Sterling, Va, or that old, funky farmstead.

It was never really a question. Carla and I loved the vibe from the second we walked in to the kitchen with its brick floor and Vermont castings wood stove. The remote location so close to Washington, D.C. was huge for us.

I commuted to my office on “K” Street, an hour or two on the infamous beltway, back and forth, while Carla stayed home with the kids. They home-schooled while Ohio the wonder dog stood guard.

The path became increasingly narrow on my long commute back home each night. One last turn onto a gravel road and then into a hidden driveway in the woods.

The layers of city stress and my own business melted away as I got closer to our rustic hide-a-way.

Eagles or Jackson Browne music often made the old wood house resonate like a huge guitar, increasing in volume as I walked across the damp front yard in my business shoes, drinking in big gulps of the cool, cedar scented air. Ohio escorted me to the front door.

Everything I ever wanted was inside.

We sold that house four years later to the Catholic Church. They gladly paid four times our original 80K. Who has more money than the Catholic Church anyway? Their plan was to build a rectory. The whole area was being snatched up by the developers of what is now the McMansion community of Ashburn Farms.

The cabin was a “protected property” which I had traced through 29 owners. We were #30.

Although I assumed the church would turn the cabin into a cute historic building for their parishioners, they had other intentions. Soon after they bought the place, they leveled it one dark night when no one was looking and plowed that particular “protected property” underground to hide the evidence.

For us, it had been the very least efficient or practical choice for a place to raise two little girls, but it was the one we loved more than any house we’ve owned before or since.

That was something of a magical time for us, those four years, in those remote Virginia woods.

Pal-O-Mine

Given the photographic evidence, I won’t deny that Pal-O-Mine gave me a few decent rides. (More than I can say about an ex-wife.) Begrudgingly, but we rode. That was 67 years ago. Coincidentally, that’s exactly the number of years I’ve given him a FREE ride. He's a freeloader, I’m his enabler. Everyone can get a job if they really want one bad enough. He should have been running track or working a stable for tips all these years. Hell, there’s always plow and cart work in rural America.

But this nag has a “Born To Lose” tattoo on his inner flank. I’m thinking: “Ain’t it the truth!”

Don’t ask me what I was doing around his inner flank.

See that rubber Panda in my right hand? It blasted toots out of a round metal ass-horn grommet in his bottom whenever I squeezed him, usually pointing the Panda gas directly at my nose. The rubber smell was chemical and foreign. I liked that.

Trauma unfolded later the same day that this picture was taken. We visited a family Mom knew whose son was having a birthday party, so Mom gave him my Panda. I had gotten that little fart factory two days prior for my own birthday and I definitely didn’t want to give him away. I thought “Happy Birthday, go fuck yourself.” would be a more appropriate present for some kid I didn’t even know. I was only four years old and had yet to acquire weapons that could put a quick stop to that kind of foolishness.

Am I’m still bitter about something that may seem so insignificant to well-adjusted people? I mean, that happened 67 years ago. Am I still pissed at my mother for giving my Panda to a stranger I’ve learned to resent deeply all these years?

Why yes, thank you for asking. I am.

Portraits On The Wall...

These portraits currently hang in my home, totally out of place. They are two of my 5th Great Grandparents, Jessie Pittman Lewis and his wife, Sarah. They were painted by a prominent Virginia portrait artist, John Toole, in 1842.

Even though they call for the backdrop of a stately mansion, all they get here is my little modular plunked down in an older subdivision composed of:

“Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.”

Hey, my ancestors should have had the foresight to pick a more impressive caretaker, 5 generations down the line.

The first picture here is of those same portraits hanging over the stairway wall of Lewis ancestors in the late 1800’s or very early 1900’s. That house still stands in Charlottesville, Va. Owned by The University of Virginia. It is used by their School of Architecture.

   

A family story has Confederate soldiers putting that particular Lewis ancestor, who built the house, up against a tree in the front yard with the intention of executing him for being a Northern sympathizer. Apparently, that didn’t happen though, so the bad seed continued to flourish for another 170 years, until today, when those portraits could wind up being rejected by both of my dear daughters.

Ruth wants modern stuff; Hannah doesn’t want any stuff at all. “I don’t want them, you take them.” “No, I can’t, you take them.”

Honestly, I’ve never been too delighted with these paintings either. Great, Great, Great, Great, Great Grandma Lewis looks like she would be about as much fun as an unseasoned boiled potato. I believe someone may have pooped in her cereal bowl just before she sat for these portraits.

 I’ll probably wind up donating them to UVA “on loan”. They would love to have them. Jessie was a prominent Revolutionary War soldier who is buried in what once was a family plot, now on UVA property. I helped clean up and restore those graves with my Grandpa Maverick in the late 1960’s.  There is currently a road marker down the hill, dedicated to the historic site.

Don't Want to Talk About it? I understand...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXe_dKepAlA&list=RDpXe_dKepAlA&index=1

You know perfectly well that there are a few things about yourself that you don’t want to discuss. Dark corners. Sex stuff, certainly, but also, personal habits, fears, and socially unacceptable every-day life behind the curtain.

Maybe a dinner out went South too quickly one night years ago when you wound up shitting in the bushes on someone’s lawn. OK, it was me who did that. But the thing that I feel guilty about, is that I don’t feel guilty. I mean, aside from the explosive relief, my memory reminds me of what a soothing and mandatory pause that was. I really heard the pulsing of the tree frogs, so frantic and unrelenting, that I usually blocked out. I remember thinking that it seemed like so much work, there must be an easier way for a tree frog to get laid.

A light wind swirled a snifter of fresh Cedar under my nose. The broken branch above me, still attached by twisted bark, swinging like a scarred red metronome. I had entered the area quickly, desperately pulling at my belt and breaking shit on the way in, well, and on the ground there too. But after brief seconds of explosive ecstasy, the experience turned into a wonderfully mellow moment. The breeze blew at my face, carrying a nasty message of human scat out behind me and into a neighborhood crowded with immaculate Victorian Tutors like a line of jagged foothills with slate roofs, pressed up by tectonic plates that ran parallel on both sides of the street. 

It was intoxicating for me, but then, I was intoxicated before I got there. Not so great for the homeowner out walking their unflappably curious dog when Princess Anne broke free the next morning. That turned out to be a horror show. But my point is, I probably should feel guilty but I don’t. It was a life high. You should have seen the moonlight reflecting soft prisms of color back from a fresh rain puddle on the sidewalk. You probably had to be squatting in just the right spot to get the full effect though.

Sometimes it’s just the way it is. In a local comedy club, a stand-up guy did a bit about flossing his teeth. He mimed a string of floss and used it to pluck tiny pieces of food out onto the imaginary tight-rope held high between his two hands. Looking at them like a father beaming at newborn triplet sons, he greedily, licked those babies back off the string and down the gullet. I was grossed out about it, comedy or not. Too close to the bone, or at least the bits of meat on it. But really, it’s just food coming out of the mouth and, after being acknowledged, going back in. Hey, we all want others to really see us, right?

It’s not just gross stuff that we protect from the judgment of the crowd though. Last Thursday afternoon while Carla was sleeping off her night shift, I sat in my truck, in my driveway, and wolfed down four miniatures and a Sierra Nevada Imperial IPA. I try to not drink too much, especially when Carla is out working or in a sleep coma, and I’m home alone. I’ve appointed myself to be my own governor. Everything in moderation, right? Including moderation. So I say that my doctor points out that I can have two drinks a day. I just save them up and have 14 on Saturday. But in an effort limit my constant justification for bad behavior, I go alcohol free, one month every quarter. I’ve done that for a few years now. But like all diets, when you tell yourself that you can’t have something, that’s when you obsess about it. Tell me I can’t have a chocolate éclair and I’ll think about it until I make a dedicated run to Publix, buy a four pack, and eat two in the parking lot. I don’t even like chocolate eclairs, but you shouldn’t have told me not to have any. It’s the same when I tell myself “no” as well. That’s why the hiatus of every third month evolved into “no drinking in the house” So now I can only have a drink when we go out somewhere.

I think to myself, well, I did my time on the elliptical, vacuumed two rugs, paid bills, walked the dogs, wrote a little bit, made spaghetti sauce, (containerized, labeled, and put into the freezer) and took a long shower. Then I think that I should say hi to Donna, Connie, or Greg, whichever one is working at The Shores package store. I can never keep their schedules straight. They know what I want though, a pint of Tito’s and a cold Dogfish Head. I wish I could bottle the smell of that store as it hits me when I’m ten feet in. the place is so packed with alcohol that the whole store smells fresh and antiseptic, with a twist of lime. I guess I’m an alcoholic because it makes me salivate. I would love to wear it in a spray on.

But I had to drink in my truck, in my driveway, while listening to a “Life and Songs of Emmylou Harris” CD. Not exactly hard duty. But after a “no drinking in the house” rule, I had no choice, right? The thing is, I don’t feel guilty about sitting there, sun shade blocking the windshield, safe, celebratory, not hurting anyone, and most definitely not feeling guilty, unless I’m pleading guilty to loving life.

And speaking of love, and some of the passions we think it best to keep to ourselves, I’ve always been fascinated by TV preachers, shilling for God’s love. They take the fun out of my “spot the alien” game though. They pretty much can’t hide it. But often the music for me, is one is of my secret pleasures that I don’t talk about much. It may be thought of as corny in its sometimes forced effervescence, with the focus on god’s love, but I’m there for the music, not the message. How can someone not like Gospel music and great four part harmonies, even if you think the whole shtick is not from anywhere you know of near your little piece of planet earth? Like the Coneheads, maybe all these people are from France! They’re strange…because they’re from France! I watch some of the Bill Gather shows, the Country Family Reunion, The Oak Ridge Boys and other gospel groups, because I’m passionate about the harmonies. All shapes and sizes and permutations of harmonic interplay, but especially four part.

Check out this performance by Jake Hess and Hovie Lister with The Statesmen. They were a gospel quartet that, along with The Blackwood Brothers, dominated Southern Gospel Music throughout the fifties and sixties. I love watching them with their alien ways and messages, spot on harmonies and an exuberant showmanship that was part Barber Shop and part Carnival Barker mixed in the blood of Jesus. Elvis loved them too but didn’t talk about it until later in his career.

I pull the shades and watch these guys and it gives me a lot of joy to do it. But I don’t admit it openly.

Oh, another thing that I don’t want the finger of proper society wagging at me about: I don’t clean the burners on my gas stove. They just get dirty again with incinerated food spillovers, so I don’t fight it. Each burner reaches up from a bed of micro-coals. These days one large piece of Rotini glows bright red like a second pilot light under the front-right burner when I cook.

Are you judging me? I didn’t think so. Not if you do a mental inventory of your own little passion play. What personal stuff do you not talk about? Did you secretly look through your spouse’s phone messages just to see wazzzzzzzzzsupppp? Drop a cooked meal on the floor and still serve it? Are you a Richard Simmons or Vin Diesel fan? I understand your reluctance to talk about that one. Do you sniff your lady's underwear if you find it lying there obviously begging for it when she’s out and you just wanted to reminisce? There are about 10,000 things you keep close when you think about the glass house thing and all…

So here is a guilty pleasure of mine, (but I don’t feel any guilt), I love Gospel music, but don’t let that get around. It’s just between us.

Check out this performance with the eternally beaming Jake Hess and the snake oil salesman look of the late, great Hovie Lister on the piano. 

But please don’t tell anyone I listen to these guys, shit on people’s lawns, drink in the driveway, or love The Statesmen Gospel Quartet. They’re all among those things I don’t want to discuss other than with the closest and most understanding of friends.