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A (Smith) Spin on Christmas

24 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by in Concepts, Men

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night 2

BY BOB SMITH

Although Christmas is celebrated worldwide by millions, I believe little is known about the birth of Jesus.

A baby was born in the Middle East approximately two thousand years ago. His mother, Mary, was probably no more than 14 years old and either engaged, or only recently married, to a man named Joseph. No one knows how old Joseph was at the time – he could have been anywhere from 15 to 99.

The two had not yet slept together, so when he learned Mary was pregnant, Joseph planned to leave her and move on with his life. A compassionate man, he considered a private divorce because if he publicly denounced her as having been unfaithful, Mary could have been stoned to death. However, despite his reservations, Joseph relented and decided to stay – reportedly, an angel appeared in a dream and reassured him that Mary had done no wrong, and that, nonetheless, she was bearing a very special child.

The baby was born shortly thereafter, and they named him Jesus. Those bare facts aren’t seriously disputed (although many would quibble with whether an “angel” had actually appeared). But beyond that, little is certain about the circumstances of Jesus’ birth.

They say he was born in Bethlehem, but for the rest of his life, he was known as “Jesus of Nazareth,” which is eighty miles away. There appears to be scant or no historical support for the belief that Joseph had traveled to Bethlehem to be counted in the Roman tax census, when whatever property he owned (and on which the taxes would have been levied) was back in Nazareth. And it doesn’t make much sense for the couple to have embarked on a four (or more) day journey when Mary was so close to giving birth.

Many believe the Bethlehem birthplace was a fiction, created merely to make the birth of Jesus more closely conform to Old Testament prophecies about the coming of a great savior.

We don’t even know the exact year, or the exact month and day, when Jesus was born. Some say December 25 is unlikely for a number of reasons. For instance, the shepherds supposedly tending their flocks would not have had their sheep outdoors overnight during that cold and rainy time of the year. And December 25 was already popular as Saturnalia, a pagan holiday celebrating the birth of the sun god. Did the Roman Catholic Church pick December 25 as the date we commemorate the birth of the “son of God” (our very own “sun god”) as a convenient replacement for a holiday with which their doctrine disagreed?

It’s also unclear whether Jesus was born in a manger, as the story goes, or in someone’s home. And apart from Mary and Joseph, there appears to be little or no historical evidence for believing that anyone else attended the birth – if the magi were there at all, they likely arrived some time later. Some speculate that it could have been months before any “wise men” showed up bearing gifts. And while there may have been three of them, the historical record (the book of Matthew, the only known account of the magi and the “Christmas star”) merely refers to them in the plural, so there could have been two, four, or ten of them for all we know.

So what do we know? About two thousand years ago, a boy named Jesus was born in the Middle East. That’s not unusual – today, at least four people are born every second of every day. And his parents were poor; nothing new there. But we also know that the accounts of this boy’s life and death, and his teachings, have been preserved and passed on for centuries. And we also know that, whoever you think he was, Jesus has had, and continues to have, an enormous positive impact on the lives of billions of people.

Given the passage of millennia, and the fact that we’re talking about someone who many worship as the son of God, is it surprising that the story may have been “spun” by some, or that elements of fable have crept into the record? I think I can live with that.

No, Bob, There is No Santa Claus

18 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by in Confessional, Men

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Jimmy (partial face on the far left), Barbara, Karen, me, and older sister Mary in the back.

Jimmy (partial face on the far left), Barbara, Karen, me, and older sister Mary in the back.

BY BOB SMITH

I grew up in the 1960s, and until I was almost 10 years old, I absolutely believed in Santa Claus.

My older brother, Jim, and I shared a bedroom that was right over our garage, so it was chilly in there on winter nights, and you could always hear the door below rumbling open when Dad got home late. Our beds were under the two windows, and during the holidays each had a plastic plug-in candle glowing on the sill. I recall burrowing under the covers on Christmas Eve, asking Jim if he thought Santa would come soon.

“I dunno,” he murmured, staring somberly at the ceiling. “I guess so.” His face was an orange mask in the electric candlelight. “Sure he’s comin’.”

Jim, 10 years old, already suspected that Santa, like the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Bigfoot, was a fiction.

“How’s he get in? We don’t have a fireplace,” I said, worried.

“I dunno,” he smiled in the half-dark. “Maybe he’s got a key.”

I thought that not only unlikely, but impractical in the extreme — how could Santa possibly carry enough keys to get into all the houses he needed to visit on Christmas Eve?

“We got a chimney, right?”

“Right — but it’s for the heating system,” Jim replied, clearly enjoying my dilemma. “If Santa came in that way, he’d get stuck inside the furnace.”

“How does Santa know which houses have a chimney he can use, and which ones don’t?”

“Whatta you think, Bobby?” he grumbled, tired of baiting me.

“I don’t know. Magic or somethin.”

“Yeah, okay, Bobby — that’s how Santa gets inside all the houses in the world, and delivers a gazillion toys and other stuff, all in one night. Call it magic.”

At age eight and a half, that was good enough for me.

Jimmy, Santa, me, and my older sister Mary.

Jimmy, Santa, me, and my older sister Mary.

The next year, two weeks before Christmas, I raised the subject again. By now, we’d seen “Miracle on 34th Street” and I knew Santa’s existence was a real subject of debate. I’d heard rumblings around the schoolyard too — the ranks of nonbelievers were growing.

It was a Saturday afternoon. Mom had gone to the store, and Dad was upstairs asleep. For the past few years, right after Thanksgiving, he’d taken a part-time job stocking shelves at the local toy store. He always got home after we were in bed, so on Saturday he got to sleep late.

Jimmy tugged at my sleeve, urging me down the basement stairs. Nothing amiss — Mom’s sewing machine was off in one corner, and the washer and dryer in another. In the center of the room were two long folding tables pushed together and piled with junk.

“Over here,” Jimmy whispered, pointing at one lumpy pile covered with a sheet. He lifted the bottom, peered up, and waved me inside. I could hear my breath in the dim humid space, and my heart kicked over in my chest — the sheet hid a stack of games and toys in gaily-colored boxes.

“There’s Christmas,” he smiled, triumphant. “There’s no such thing as Santa.”

It was as if he’d said the sun wouldn’t come up any more, or that grass didn’t grow in the spring. At the same time, though, it made total sense. I couldn’t deny the obvious.

A few nights later, as we slept in the orange glow, I heard the rumble of the garage door. I could hear Mom’s voice and Dad laughing about something, so I knelt at the head of my bed and peered out the window. Up close I could see the fake wax drips molded into the body of the candle, and the bulb, like a miniature sun, warmed my cheek.

Dad’s brown Fairlane was backed up to the garage with the trunk open, and he and Mom were carrying boxes into the basement.

“That’s the last of it,” Dad said, slamming the trunk lid. “I’m done with that place.”

“Till next year!” Mom prompted, smacking him affectionately on the cheek.

Dad worked for the electric company, climbing poles for a living. We lived okay, but he didn’t make enough money to buy all the toys and dolls and bicycles six (later seven) kids expected to see under the tree at Christmas. The shelf-stocking job was four nights a week, 6 t 10, and they paid him in toys.

Jimmy was wrong. There was a Santa Claus, and he was full of magic. He came into our house right through the garage door.

Santa delivered.

Santa delivered.

Two Men Walked In to a Gun Show

19 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by in Men, Words

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IMG_1614BY BOB SMITH

Maria and I recently visited Susan and Mark, old friends of ours who live in North Carolina, and we were at a loss for something to fill a Saturday afternoon. The women wanted to go to shopping for drapes to match the cushions, or vice versa, which to me seemed only marginally less painful than having a root canal. Mark agreed, and as he flipped through the local paper we found the answer: a gun and knife show.

Neither of us owns guns or non-kitchen knives, so we figured we’d get an education.

The show was held in a cavernous building that must have been two hundred yards on a side. The admission fee was ten bucks, and there were two lines to get in: one for unarmed customers, and one for those “carrying.” It was perfectly okay to bring a gun. They just wanted to be sure it wasn’t loaded when you walked through the door.

However, they didn’t frisk anyone to see if they had a pocketful of bullets. And there were a dozen vendors inside eagerly selling every variety of ammunition, clips, autoloaders, silencers, scopes, and other deadly accessories, so if someone had come to the gun show with mayhem in mind, there wasn’t much to stop them. Except, I suppose, the deterrent effect of the other 200 gun-loving patrons, surrounded by weaponry, who presumably would turn the shooter into a multi-ventilated shadow of his or her former self before too many shots had been fired.

The first table we visited was a knife display. These weren’t your grandma’s knives – there were razor-sharp mini-scimitars, Bowie knives longer than David Bowie’s list of hit songs, and tiny purse-friendly switchblades in designer neon colors. They even had a medieval-looking hand weapon that consisted of a leather-wrapped stick with one, two, or three spiked metal balls dangling from the end on an eight-inch chain.

I wanted a picture, and was positioning my smartphone over the table to snap a shot when a grizzled guy chomping an unlit cigar appeared on the other side of the table.

“No pictures of the flails,” he rumbled. Feeling foolish, I pocketed my phone and picked up the two-ball model, as if testing its heft.

“Pretty nice,” I said, clueless as to what to look for in a quality flail. “How much?”

“Single ball twenty bucks, two for thirty, three for forty. Stainless steel balls, genuine leather grip. Handle’s hardwood.”

He awaited my reply. In my khaki shorts, New Balance walking shoes, and gray cotton golf sweater, I didn’t fit his usual customer profile. We moved on.

A guy walked by with a rifle slung over his shoulder, and I realized why people brought weapons: sticking out of the barrel was a wooden dowel with a paper sign taped onto it reading: “FOR SALE OR TRADE.” It reminded me of the popgun rifle Wile E Coyote points at the Roadrunner that shoots out a flag reading “BANG” when he pulls the trigger.

The next table was arrayed with 50 rifles in a row, each chained to the next so you couldn’t raise them much above table height. Their burnished wooden stocks and oiled barrels gleamed in the harsh fluorescent lights. Similarly, the handgun tables had hundreds of sinister-looking weapons, from petite two-shot ladies’ pistols (the vendor’s description, not mine) to hulking hand cannons that would terrify Dirty Harry.

The sheer number and variety was staggering. We approached a rifle vendor and I picked up a small-bore shotgun. At a loss for words, and inspired perhaps by the walking FOR SALE gun signs, I asked, in my best Elmer Fudd voice:

“Excuse me – would this be good for hunting the wascally wabbit?”

The guy behind the table smiled thinly and turned away, clearly not interested in such nonsense.

I actually considered buying a self-defense baton. These are metal sticks that, when you flick your wrist, telescope in length from one foot to nearly three feet. Tapering to a dull point, it locks open and will only collapse again if you strike the tip solidly on a hard floor.

“Say you’re in a parking lot, and some guy’s comin’ at you with a broken beer bottle,” the seller proudly explained.”You can whip that open and give him a hot rap on the head or arm or leg or whatever, make him feel some real pain, from a couple feet away.”

He jabbed the end of the extended stick at my midsection and chuckled.

“And a poke with this here into some soft tissue can be very persuasive.”

I resented the insuinuation that my abs constituted “soft tissue,” or rather, that he could so readily discern that. But he was right: that hard metal stick created a well-defined, non-negotiable boundary between us.It seemed like a bargain for only 25 bucks. But then, I’ve been around for sixty years and haven’t yet found myself in need of a “soft tissue persuader” or head rapper.

So why would I need one now? I’ll just avoid honky tonk bars at closing time and save myself the money. I passed on the deceptively innocuous-sounding baton. But I couldn’t resist asking the vendor before I left:

“Could I use this to whack a wascally wabbit?”

On Pins and With Dr. ‘Needleman’

10 Tuesday Feb 2015

Posted by in Confessional, Men

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BY BOB SMITH

I’ve got osteoarthritis in my right hip, and when I mentioned to my older brother Jim that surgery was an option if pain management didn’t work, he started raving about acupuncture. Apparently he’d woken up with a sore hip a year ago, and limped in to see an acupuncturist who fixed it in one visit. He walked out the same day, pain free.

This was high praise, particularly since I knew that, as a boy, Jim would break into cold sweats and/or faint dead away whenever he got an inoculation. I didn’t like getting shots, either, but if I looked away and didn’t dwell on the fact that a pointy piece of steel had been stabbed into my flesh, it was no more painful than a mild bee sting. So I decided to give it a try.

I made an appointment with a local acupuncturist of Chinese descent who’s certified by what appears to be a reputable national organization. His office, reassuringly, was in a standard brick professional building, and Doctor Needleman (my pseudonym), was about my height and dressed in a casual shirt and khaki pants. He looked at my tongue, felt around my lower back, and pronounced that my kidney qi (“chee”) was low.

I’d been there all of two minutes.

It reminded me of the joke about the guy who goes to the doctor to find out why he’s feeling poorly. He’s got carrots sticking out of his ears, and stringbeans and French fries jammed up his nose, and the doctor says “I can tell just by looking at you — you’re not eating right.” How could Needleman tell anything from such a cursory examination?

“Got low energy? Pee a lot?”

No to the first, and yes to the second, but the need to pee isn’t qi, it’s my 60-year-old prostate. He nodded knowingly.

“You get cold easily?”

“Only in New Jersey in January, which is why I’m in Florida, Doc,” I answered flippantly.

He told me to remove my shirt, socks, and shoes, and lie face down on the table with my hands relaxed on a chair positioned under the headrest. On the chair was one of those bells you see on a hotel front desk, which seemed random. Then the sticking began.

First Needleman palpated both sides of my spine, apparently identifying choice spots. Next I felt pressure and a hot jab of pain about midway down my back, punctuated by what felt like two gentle taps as he inserted the first needle. The pain subsided within two seconds.

He inserted at least twelve more needles going down both sides of my spine, and even a few into my left ankle and calf. Because I’d mentioned the arthritis in my left thumb, he put three there for good measure. I peeked and saw one hair-thin needle dangling from the meaty flesh at the base of my thumb, and closed my eyes again.

Except for the first needle, I felt no more than a mild pinch and slight pressure as he pushed them in. Then he spritzed my back with a cool liquid and swung a goosenecked heat lamp over the table.

“Okay, nap time,” he said cheerfully as he closed the door. “Thirty minutes. Just relax. Don’t move. Ring the bell if you need help.”

That wasn’t reassuring, although I couldn’t imagine what exactly might go wrong. He’d turned on a loud kitchen timer in harsh counterpoint to the piped-in flute and sitar meditation music that flowed into the room. As I began to feel the warmth of the heatlamp spreading across my back, I had the queasy sensation that something was going on in my body.

Needleman would say my qi was moving, but it’s just as likely I was overcome by the strangeness of lying there like a chubby white porcupine, waiting to see if panic would overtake me and make me ring the bell. But then, maybe 10 minutes later, I drifted into a deep calm. I no longer cared about the nest of needles sprouting from my skin, or my forced paralysis for a half hour, or even the timer’s relentless ticking — it all faded away. I was in a trance (or sleeping), dreaming about swimming with dolphins or how it would feel to be a loaf of freshly-baked bread.

Then Needleman was back, breezily plucking the metal pinpricks from my back. He asked how I felt, and I considered telling him I felt “perforated,” but that wasn’t true. My hip and thumb still hurt, but I felt better somehow. Was it all imaginary?

Have the Chinese been practicing acupuncture for millennia merely for its placebo effect? Could that many people be consistently fooled into believing they’re being helped when nothing is happening at all?

I’ve scheduled three more human pincushion sessions with Dr. Needleman to find out. I’ll keep you posted.

From Old Christmas Trees, New Dunes Grow

29 Thursday Jan 2015

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front end with tree

BY BOB SMITH

Twenty-five years ago when we first bought our house in Bradley Beach, a dingy wooden boardwalk ran the length of the town. It extended 20 feet out over the beach, suspended 12 feet above the sand on greasy, precarious-looking pilings. It was anchored on the inland side to a creosote-covered bulkhead built into the natural rise of the land, and, despite its tackiness, it seemed to be a permanent beachfront fixture.

During the dog days you could camp out under the shady boardwalk, provided you were willing to tolerate the tarry smell of the bulkhead and the spilled soda or cigarette butt that occasionally rained down from overhead. On hot nights they had music — a brass band, or a DJ spinning dance tunes — in the concrete bandshell just off the boardwalk at the foot of our street. Lost in a summer evening, we’d stand by the splintery railing and watch the waves foaming white at the waterline as the band marched through a Sousa medley.

Then in the ’90s a nasty nor’easter clawed up the whole thing, tossing its slats inland like tinder. It swept away a playground, swings and slides and all, and filled the town’s beachfront pool with sandy sludge and jagged shipwrecked sections of what once was the boardwalk. The bandshell had disintegrated overnight into a jumble of whitewashed rocks.

The town got smart after that. They permanently filled in the slimy hole that had been the pool and laid out a 25-foot wide brick promenade just west of the bulkhead. So apart from the broad wooden stairs that extended down from the bulkhead to the beach every couple of blocks, our boardwalk was entirely boardless.

And they made our first dunes.

First they built a 10-foot wide corridor of hurricane fencing on the sand about 50 feet east of the brick promenade. The wired-together wooden slats, a rickety shadow of the former boardwalk, ran the entire length of the town’s beach. Inside the hurricane fencing they laid all the discarded Christmas trees from that season, filling it to the top with fragrant evergreens going brown.

The trees formed a natural barrier that trapped blowing sand. Over the next decade, the trees disappeared under slowly-growing mounds that grew into dunes 15 feet high and wide, sprouting grass and small shrubs. The hurricane fencing was mostly gobbled up, and the scrabbly dune edges were now punctuated with metal signs warning everyone to “KEEP OFF.”

Then came Sandy, a storm whose remarkable ferocity made the nor’easter’s of the ’90s seem like mild squalls. In the space of 24 hours, Sandy completely dismantled the entire mile of dunes in Bradley Beach. Ten years’ worth of foliage, and the fencing, and the signs, were rudely stripped away. Then the storm literally pushed thousands of tons of sand 50 feet inland, flush against the bulkhead.

If you had stepped off the brick promenade toward the ocean the day before the storm, you would have fallen 12 feet to the beach below. But the day after Sandy, you could step eastward off the brick promenade onto smooth, solid sand. The tops of the dunes above that level had been neatly sliced off by the storm and deposited in drifts, like newly-fallen snow, across the width of Ocean Avenue another twenty yards inland.

Although the dunes were gone, much of the storm’s fury had been spent destroying them. As a result, Bradley Beach was spared the widespread damage to homes and businesses that befell neighboring towns without that protection.

So I’m happy to report that now, more than two years later, they’re at it again. On a frigid day on the beach two weeks ago, a guy in a front loader was picking up discarded Christmas trees from a pile and depositing them into a hurricane fence enclosure that’ll grow into our next sand dune. As long as Mother Nature gives us a few years’ head start before the inevitable next killer storm, the town should have a fighting chance.

trees in fence

This Ex-Hippie is Old: My Hip is Osteoarthritic

21 Wednesday Jan 2015

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Is this my future anatomy?

Does my future include a prosthetic device?

BY BOB SMITH

I’ve had a persistent low-grade ache in my right thigh for over a year now. I wrote it off to too much running and not enough stretching, but lately the pain has gotten worse.  So I started getting regular massages, switched from the treadmill to the elliptical trainer, and did flexibility exercises hoping to erase the problem, but nothing changed.

Then, like Ebenezer Scrooge, I had a Christmas Eve miracle and revelation.

Every year we host an elaborate Christmas Eve feast featuring all sorts of seafood as well as fresh, crisp-crust bread and exquisite pastries from the local bakery.  But to get any of those goodies without waiting on line for an hour, you have to get to the bakery as soon as they open on Christmas Eve morning.  My over-50 body forces me to toddle out of bed every night in the wee hours to use the bathroom, so I’m the natural for that crack of dawn bakery run.

When I got there at 5:50 the lights in the main serving area weren’t on yet, but I saw activity inside. My right leg tends to stiffen up if I’m sitting still for a while, so rather than leaping out of the car and running across the street as I would have years ago, I carefully eased out of the driver’s seat and stood for a second to gauge the pain and let the stiffness dissipate. Not too bad – after a couple of seconds it felt fine, and I walked into the bakery with only a slight hitch in my step.

Incredibly, there were already three people on line, waiting in semi-darkness for the women bustling behind the counter to recognize the start of business. By the time I had my three dozen rolls and box of pastries ten minutes later, there were eight people behind me on a line, growing by the minute, that was snaking out the door. I’d dodged the bullet.

When I got home, because of my achy leg and partly out of just plain laziness, I decided I’d carry everything (including my convenience store coffee and newspapers) in one trip.

That took some planning: first I put the coffee on the hood of the car, leaving the house keys hanging from my left pinky. Then I put my left arm around the bulging bag of warm rolls, and with my right hand folded the newspapers under my left arm.  I slid my right index finger under the red and white twine on the pastries so the box dangled below my hand, then carefully kicked the door shut using my pain-free left leg.

My left hand was still free (except for the keys on my pinky), so I used that to awkwardly reach down and grab the coffee cup from the hood while still hugging the bag of rolls and squeezing my armpit on the newspapers. I figured once I got up the steps, I could put the pastry box on the side table by the door, take the keys from my left pinky with my right hand, and unlock the door. Mission accomplished!

But my hip had other plans.

I began to climb the steps, but because of the pain I failed to raise my right foot above the riser, and tripped. Because I was walking so slowly, I fell in slow motion. The box of pastries rocked, my finger released the string, and the heavy box slid away across the step, unharmed, as my right hand came down to break my fall.

As my left side came down, I somehow placed the tall Styrofoam cup of coffee onto the porch without spilling a drop. Simultaneously, my arm splayed out and the bag of rolls plopped onto the step ahead of me – remaining upright and jostling, but not dislodging, any of the rolls sticking out of the top. Even the newspapers had fallen from under my arm onto the step in a neatly folded stack.

I stood there, feeling foolish, with the house keys waggling on my pinky.

The Christmas Eve miracle: I’d spilled nothing and was unhurt. The revelation: I’d fallen climbing my own front steps, and could have been badly injured. So I made an appointment with my doctor, got an x-ray, and a week ago was diagnosed with osteoarthritis of the right hip. So now I’m officially old, with an old person’s chronic ailment, an old person limp, and maybe a need for an old person remedy: a new hip.  We’ll see.

But it’s all good. Like Scrooge, I’m thrilled to be alive — even if it means hobbling around like Tiny Tim.

An ‘Exit’ Strategy for Terminally Ill

15 Thursday Jan 2015

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Exit

BY BOB SMITH

I read an article recently in The New York Times about a not-for-profit organization called Final Exit Network (FEN), whose slogan is “Supporting the Human Right to a Death With Dignity.” Humans have a “right” to death with dignity? Tell that to the freight train bearing down on your disabled vehicle stuck on the tracks, with you inside unable to unclick the seatbelt.

Of course, the FEN’s specific focus is narrower: “to work toward obtaining the basic human right of competent adults to choose to end their lives on their own terms when they suffer from irreversible physical illness, intractable pain, or a constellation of chronic, progressive physical disabilities.”

To fulfill that mission, the FEN will tell you how to end your life. They have what they call the Exit Guide program — kind of the opposite of a life coach — where qualified individuals receive “relevant information, home visits if possible and a compassionate presence for individual and family.” First you must join FEN and submit an application, along with a doctor’s evaluation of your condition and prognosis — like a note from Mom telling the teacher it’s okay to send you home early. If you’re sick enough, and if you can attest that neither your family nor your primary caregiver will interfere, the FEN folks will assign you an Exit Guide.

From the guide, you’ll get “detailed information about the method [FEN] recommend[s], and the inexpensive equipment you will need to obtain.” Because in many places it’s a crime to help someone die, FEN never supplies equipment, but the guide “will provide you with information on all alternatives for care at the end of life, including all legal methods of self-deliverance that will produce a peaceful, quick, certain and painless death.”

And what do they often recommend? Asphyxiation by inhalation of helium.
You get a tank of helium, the same stuff they use at the party store to make festive floating balloons. You attach vinyl tubing to the tank, and run the open end into a large plastic baking or turkey brining bag. Then you securely tape the bag around your neck, and turn on the gas.

I can’t decide whether or not this is right or wrong, necessary or not. Instinctively it seems abhorrent; unthinkable. But then, I’m not living in the constant hell of pain that the people who seek out FEN’s services apparently seem to be enduring.

But I’m uneasy with the associations the helium exit brings to mind. I’ve seen people at parties inhale a lungful of helium, which allows them to talk for a few seconds in high-pitched, squeaky cartoon voices. It’s pretty funny to see a burly guy transformed into Tweety Bird at a party. But is it dignified to die that way? I guess if you’re in the bag making your exit, you’re not talking much.

And the bag itself, used to bake a roast, or to brine a turkey, is usually such a happy thing. You put something really good into it and it comes out better. When you’re done using that bag for its intended purpose, you’re warm, well-fed, and very happy. Even the vinyl tubing is a party accessory — it’s just like the tubing that attaches the plastic spigot to the beer keg at our summer parties.

Thank God I’m not in a position to consider using FEN’s services. I just wish they’d come up with a “method of self-deliverance” that doesn’t make me think of so many silly, happy things. Death with dignity? Maybe. But please, not death with Daffy Duck.

Tree Disposal, and Other Post-Holiday Musings

02 Friday Jan 2015

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tree

BY BOB SMITH

If Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year, as the song claims, the time following Christmas and New Year’s must be the most dreary.

The days are short and cold (in New Jersey, anyway), and any anticipation of upcoming holiday gifts and celebrations is gone.

Then there’s the Christmas tree, still gaudy and lit for a party that ended last week; a houseguest past its prime.

How long do you leave it up? The traditional date in many Catholic households is January 6, the feast of the Epiphany. But the unofficial date in our house is when the tree starts to die. Once it stops taking up water, or we stop giving it water (it’s a chicken and egg thing), it really starts drying out. So when we see a circular green halo of fallen needles on the floor, it’s time to kick the tree to the curb.

As if blindfolding a hostage, a lot of people put a jumbo white plastic bag over their tree before they drag it out for the garbageman. But what does that accomplish? The tree doesn’t need protection from the elements, and the trash collectors know it’s rubbish whether you bag it or not – it’s just a dead evergreen.

Is the big white bag just a way to avoid extra cleanup, by preventing the tree from dropping dried needles everywhere? I say put one less plastic bag into the world and sweep up after yourself. But hey, I also like the way the vacuum cleaner smells, even a month later, stuffed with those fragrant needles.

Whenever you take it down, and however you dispose of it, the tree disappears, and the ornaments and lights go back in their boxes. We squirrel them away in a corner of the basement, along with the Santa statuettes, metal greeting card holders shaped like reindeer, angels, holly sprigs, candles, and other festive paraphernalia that’s been strewn about our house for the past month.

Thankfully, the Christmas carols and pop songs that have been playing ad nauseum on every radio station, elevator speaker, and department store Muzak track since Black Friday stop dead after Christmas Day, not to be heard again until next November. But in the lull between Christmas and New Year’s, the popular radio stations trot out and overplay a 1980 Dan Fogelberg song called “Same Old Lang Syne,” in which he describes a chance Christmas Eve encounter with an old sweetheart.

The song depresses the hell out of me, mainly because it’s snowing in the beginning of the song. But by the end, when the former lovers have reminisced until there’s nothing more to say and he’s walking home alone, the snow turns into rain. And following that lyric, the song trails off into a lonely saxopohone solo of “Auld Lang Syne.”

New Year’s Eve comes and you have a date or you don’t. You stay up until midnight or not, drink or abstain, and, with varying degrees of conviction, make resolutions that for the most part evaporate like hoarfrost on New Year’s morning.

By the time January 2 rolls around, I’m quietly glad it’s all over, even though this signals the start of months of bleak weather with no major holidays in sight.

But in the end, it’s all good. Whether you’re looking back at the old year with regret or fondness, or forward to the new with anything from trepidation to boundless joy, be grateful – you’re still looking.

My Thanksgiving Leftovers Include Extra ‘Thanks’

08 Monday Dec 2014

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Overstuffed.

BY BOB SMITH

Thanksgiving’s over, and we’re just now getting ready to trash the last leftovers haunting our refrigerator. Pies seem to keep for a very long time, begging to be eaten because, although they may grow dry and crusty around the edges, the centers are still sweet. Week-old stuffing and string beans, on the other hand, have lost all their charms, slowly dissolving into too-moist masses of faded flavor.

We’ve got to clear that stuff out to make way for the invasion of Christmas foods a mere three weeks from now. We’ll dutifully keep those leftovers for a week, then discard them to make room for the New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day feast-leavings. It’s a tough season for those of us fortunate enough to be faced with the problem of far too much of everything.

Somewhere along the way it feels like we’ve missed the message. Did anyone actually give thanks on Thanksgiving? I don’t mean a pro forma prayer recited over an overladen table as a gang of relatives salivated, hovering over plates with utensils in hand, half listening to broadcast football and hoping you don’t drone on too long.

No, I mean really give thanks. As in sitting alone and quietly reflecting on the many blessings, great and small, that fill your life. My list includes a loving wife, and our uniquely beautiful, funny, and wonderful children; my six siblings and elderly Mom whom I love dearly; a spacious, comfortable home; clean clothes; enough food in our two refrigerators and basement freezer to feed an African village for a month; a really good car; a clean bill of health. A sweet dog who wags his stubby tail like a runaway metronome whenever we come home.

There’s more — mundane but meaningful blessings like health and dental insurance coverage; a good mattress on the bed; lots of great books to read; two acoustic guitars that sing better than I do; a view of the ocean from our front porch; fresh parsley in the yard we’re still harvesting despite the coming cold.

Thanksgiving has become rote:  there’s a big parade in New York, a big meal on the table, football on TV, and almost unbearable hoopla over the start of the Christmas season. That was last week. Now it’s quiet, and every day, I’m quietly giving thanks.

 

A Thanksgiving Timeline

26 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Confessional, Food, Men

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bob and the turkey

BY BOB SMITH

Thanksgiving, always a happy time, has evolved in our family. When I was 10, Mom and Dad and my four sisters and two brothers, ranging in age from 1 to about 13, were all crowded into a small split level house with three bedrooms and one and a half baths. It was tight, but we made it work.

There was a standard menu for Thanksgiving Day — candied yams, onions in cream sauce, mashed potatoes so buttery they were yellow, green beans, and of course a massive, crispy-on-the outside turkey, plump with fragrant bread and raisin stuffing. The cranberry sauce was a gelatinous cylinder with ridges corresponding to the can from which it came.

Sometimes Uncle Howie from up the block would stop by before dinner, while his wife Dolores was busy in the kitchen at home. Howie owned a transmission repair shop and his fingers were permanently stained with grease. Dad would pour him a big double Scotch, and Howie would sit and sip it at the head of our dining room table.

“She threw me out again, Jimmy,” Howie laughed as he lit another one of the long menthol cigarettes he loved. “Can you believe it — I’m useless in the kitchen!”

That was the Thanksgiving drill pretty much through my graduation from high school: all of us at home, eating the same great Mom-made meal year after year. There was something comforting in the routine; the certainty of it all. It seemed like it would never change.

When I was in college, I had a steady girlfriend and so did my brother, so one or both of us had to stop by their parents’ house either before or after dinner. Sometimes I’d miss Howie’s visit, or skip dinner entirely. After dinner, if we could get away with it, Jim and I still poked our fingers into the carcass in the kitchen to find blobs of undiscovered stuffing, but the holiday routine was a little less predictable.

After college, when a few of us had gotten married and started having kids, Thanksgiving entered its next phase. Mom still made most of the food, but it was getting crowded in that little house, and her stove couldn’t handle all the side dishes. So we all started bringing sides, and desserts, and wine to help her out.

And, most importantly to Mom and Dad, we brought grandkids. To Mom’s and Dad’s delight, the cousins rolled around the living room, tickling and laughing (and crying and fighting too), while my brothers and sisters and I hung around all day eating and drinking together. This became our new immutable Thanksgiving routine.

But over time people started moving away, and some of the cousins got girlfriends or boyfriends whose parents had to be visited, and the roster of guests got spotty again. A number of us started having the holiday dinner at our own houses, to start our own family Thanksgiving tradition. So some years we were all together; others not. Howie no longer came by because he’d dropped dead of a stroke one Thanksgiving morning, right in his wife’s kitchen.

Then a few years later Dad got sick and died, and the holiday changed again. The first Thanksgiving after he’d passed, we all came together at the house, and it felt like a memorial dinner — more somber than festive. We kept that tradition up for a few years, and things got happy again. All of us brought the side dishes and wine and all the kids we could muster, helping  Mom put together a dinner that looked a lot like the dinners we’d had before.

But a chunk of life had drained out of Mom, who was visibly older and less capable than when Dad was alive. And her dementia was setting in too, so cooking Thanksgiving dinner soon became impossible for her.

So we entered the itinerant phase of our family Thanksgiving dinner: one year we would host at our house for Mom and anyone else who cared to come; another year it was at the home of one of my other siblings. Most years we weren’t all together; we were just too scattered. The unchanging routine in Cresskill had given way to new unchanging routines we’d all established in our own homes.

Now a number of my brothers and sisters and I are becoming grandparents. Pretty soon we’ll be the doting older folks clapping in the background as the kids play, letting the younger generation do the heavy lifting of cooking and cleaning up the feast.

The unchanging routine is changing again.