December 2002 Archives

LBJs

*Though I've been in full vacation mode, I've been a relatively handy guy around the house these past few days, replacing lightbulbs, doing dishes, etc. My main project, however, has been getting pictures onto the walls. We got a new sofa and easy chair for the den about two months ago and rearranged the entire room. In order to accomplish this feat, I took most of the art off the walls and hadn't gotten around to putting it back up. Then we got a couple of presents from my folks--one an Andrew Wyeth print (one of my favorite of his paintings, "Distant Thunder") that they were getting rid of, and the other a Christmas present: a beautifully framed Audubon lithograph of the Foolish Guillemot-Murre, nowadays better known (much to my regret) as the Common Murre or the Thin-Billed Murre. I'm quite delighted, even astonished, to have gotten this last, and have given it a place of pride over the new easy chair. It's sitting between the Colin See-Peynton woodcut ("Brown Trout Rising") that we snagged in Bath in 1999 and the print of the pen-and-ink sketch my Aunt Linda did of a Goliath beetle specimen. (We do really need to get the latter into a better frame, though.) The room now looks far more occupied.

*I've acquired a frightening number of books in recent weeks, ranging from graphic novels (the first Top 10 collection and The Cartoon History of the Universe, Vol. III) to collections by old favorites (Harlan Ellison's Slippage) to well-reviewed nonfiction (Charles Seife's Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea) to what-the-hell-this-looks-interesting debut novels (Jim Munroe's intriguingly titled Flyboy Action Figure Comes with Gasmask). Naturally I'm in the middle of a library book, Tony Horwitz's fascinating and hilarious Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Kirk Has Gone Before. I'm closing in on 60 books completed since March 1st--I total 'em up every birthday--and probably don't need to buy another one before my birthday.

*I'm still amazed by this statement, but it's true: my parents have never seen A Christmas Story. We discovered this at my brother's place on the 24th, right after we'd decided to go out for Chinese. It was snowing in D.C., so driving seemed iffy, and the Shanghai Garden was right around the corner, so we went for it. That immediately brought most of us memories of the scene in ACS when the family is being caroled by the Chinese waiters who can't quite get the "fa-la-la" thing right, but my folks didn't know what we were talking about. We were shocked. The Old Man pulling his Major Award out of the crate... Flick sticking his tongue to the flagpole... Randy being immobilized by his snowsuit... Ralphie's Lifebuoy diet... Little Orphan Annie's secret coded message... these have become part of the American landscape, surely. Luckily, TNT was running a 24-hour marathon of the movie, so Mom & Dad were able to see a good bit of it, and they discovered when they returned home that some friends had given the a copy as a gift.

*Speaking of my brother, he and his wife are, as you may have heard, going to be parents within a few weeks. Rumor says it's a boy, and the name will be Darrell Lamont, but this may be disinformation. Pam claims she may want to spell it "LaMont" instead.

*I feel a major book culling coming. Since our state is currently undergoing a budget shortfall of prodigious proportions, the local public library will be unable to buy ANY new titles this year, not in books or audio-visual materials, nor will it be renewing any magazine subscriptions. That sounds like a cry for us to donate some titles. And of course we'll be renewing the subscription to The Readerville Journal when it runs out...

*Back in 1999, Kelly and I both rhapsodized loudly and frequently over our favorite British candy, Terry's Chocolate Oranges. Aunt Susan, who was traveling with us, apparently took note. This Xmas she gave me a dark chocolate orange, which is at the moment in the pantry; I have not yet followed the instructions on the label: "WHACK AND UNWRAP." She also delighted Kelly by finding her individually wrapped milk-chocolate slices, the box of which says "PRE-WHACKED" in large friendly letters.

*On December 22nd, the Fantasy League of Gentlemen/Gentlewomen held its annual meeting in Hillsborough, NC, but I must await a later time to provide a full report.

*At Woodberry's annual caroling party, I had a few glasses of wine and decided to try for the high G in "O Holy Night." I think I nailed it, but then again, I'd had a few glasses of wine.

*See y'all next year!

5:14 AM

Imre Komaromi died yesterday morning. He was only 56. He'd been diagnosed with congestive heart failure about four years ago, but I didn't know that, because I never met him.

Imre was Hungarian in descent, born in Austria in 1946. He and his parents moved to the U.S. when he was about six, and he didn't speak English at the time. Despite this, he became an avid reader as a kid, partly because of feeling "different" among his schoolmates, and developed a fondness for Walt Kelly's Pogo, a fondness the two of us shared. But I never got to look at a copy of the strip with him, because I never met him.

Imre became a U.S. citizen and loved his adopted country. He served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War, and he never lost his taste for its slightly exotic language, the peculiar turns of phrase and semi-Joycean vocabulary. (Perhaps it was the same strange flavor that he enjoyed in Pogo.) From time to time he'd wax nostalgic about a port of call, or a strange naval ritual, or even a piece of equipment with which his commanders had made him intimately familiar. I loved these tales of his experiences, but I never got to hear one.

Imre was an inveterate punster. Any comment could be turned into a play on words, often with a wee bit of sexual innuendo involved, and if a long shaggy-dog story could be constructed to frame the pun, so much the better. He was also a conservative in the best sense of the word: he believed in keeping good things around. He didn't always trust change, and his roots in the Catholic Church were deep and meaningful to him. At times his attitude could frustrate those who disagreed with him, but he was always willing to seek peace at the expense of righteousness. He once said of himself that his role was that of "the Ace bandage around the reflexively jerking left knee." It was a role he played beautifully and thoughtfully, with a little heat and a lot of light. I wish I'd gotten to see him play it in person.

Imre had been a teacher in the Missouri Corrections System, and his experiences teaching inmates in the prisons fascinated me and many others. He confronted on a daily basis some of the issues and people that we can easily ignore, and all too often do; there was a lot to learn from him, and based on what he taught me, he was a good teacher. But I never set foot in his classroom.

Imre had two children, a son and a daughter, both in their twenties. The former was also named "Imre," but was known by a nickname taken from Pogo, where all the young critters were referred to as "tads." He lives in Missouri, in the same town where Imre did. His daughter Ann is a professor--teachers run in families, as I well know--and teaches Russian literature in Philadelphia. His pride in them was fierce, his love for them fiercer still. He and their mother had divorced, and he had gone through several other relationships, but something seemed to swell up inside him whenever he mentioned either kid, as if he were a bullfrog ready to roar across a pond the size of the Atlantic. I hope Tad and Ann know how important they were to him; I'd like to meet them someday, so they can know he was important to a lot of us.

What makes Imre's death strange is that it comes here in the early days of the internet age, when people are just beginning to form communities online. We don't yet know quite how to handle the loss of a friend whose face we've never seen, whose voice we've never heard, but the loss is real. I knew Imre only through the pixels that appeared on my computer screen. My image of him is pieced together from the words he formed and sent to Readerville. I never shook his hand, or bought him a beer, or groaned when he made another joke about Tony Orlando and Dawn, or heard him shout something provocative about a book. I never went to his home. His family doesn't think of me as his friend. I didn't know him.

But I did. He was a writer in the most important sense of the word. He put words together in a way that imparted meaning to me; he demonstrated his emotions and his convictions to me; he provoked me into laughter and understanding and tears. I sometimes worry that writing is too imperfect a medium, that even the greatest authors can't give us a real understanding of what another experiences, that we can't really know each other through the written word. But when I think of what I learned from Imre in these last three years, I realize that we can.

I have met Imre, and he is us.

That's the worst possible pun I can come up with, and it's all for you, buddy.

1:53 PM

The Christmas tree is a big deal at our house. It always has been. My family has ignored or underplayed a wide variety of Christmas traditions, up to and including a belief in the divinity of Christ, but go without a tree? Never happen.

Why this should be true is something of a mystery. Maybe it's our way of celebrating the seasonal cycle of life that becomes stark and visible when winter comes and everything but the evergreens seems to shut down completely. It's also the least directly religious of the various icons in our living room (no matter how you slice it, the creche and the menorahs are pretty darned theistic) and it's somewhat relaxing not to have to confront the many, varied, and occasionally downright contradictory religious beliefs that exist within the family. There's also the undeniable aesthetic appeal: Christmas trees smell good, they're an appealingly regular shape, and they provide a handy place to display beautiful colored lights and other decorations.

On the whole, however, I suspect that our tree is important because we say it's important. When I was a boy, it was something all four of us did together; Dad might be traveling for the office for most of December, and David and I might be overscheduled with basketball practices or play rehearsals, but we would by god reserve one night for all of us to go out, pick a tree, set it up, and decorate it. To emphasize this singular commitment, Mom got into the habit of buying each member of the family an ornament; it's a habit she indulges still, meaning that every year our tree is more crowded than the last. Most of these ornaments have our names on them, along with the year they first appeared on the tree, and each has some personal connection to the life of the recipient that year. In 1986, for example, Kelly and I received a joint ornament: two small figures snuggling in a bed bearing the legend "Our First Christmas Together." In 1991, I started my teaching career at Pine Forest Senior High School, where I was also the varsity (read: only) soccer coach; Mom therefore gave me a small Snoopy with a soccer ball. Taking such ornaments out of the box is therefore a ritual that takes us back to all the previous Christmases, and all the familial emotions we recall from the year before, and the year before, and the year before; the buildup of sentiment is not merely additive, but exponential.

Many of my ornaments are, naturally, birds. My first ornament, a silver wooden die-cut bird with "P.C. 1964" painted on it, always hangs near the top, where I can see it easily, because it carries so much sentimental value with it. My sons and my wife know how important it is to me to put that bird on the tree. I hope they also know how important it is that they be there to watch me do it.

There are relatively few solid foundations in our modern American life; I'm not one who can easily place trust in a government or a church. But I can, and do, reach to the top of the tree every year and hang my bird, secure in the knowledge that the people I love are around me, whether in the flesh or in spirit, as they stand before their own trees hanging their own ornaments. There I stand; I can do no otherwise.

8:14 PM

A few nights ago, Kelly and I introduced our sons to one of my favorite movies: Bill Forsyth's Local Hero. It has been a part of my life for two decades now, and it has been a staple of the various lists I've occasionally posted or thrown out into conversations, but this viewing was an experience different than any other I've had with a film.

I first found out about the movie through a rather odd channel: a guitarist. Les Britt, the brilliant, gifted, and occasionally obsessive guitarist who anchored the John Santa Band in the early eighties, was a huge fan of Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits. Soon after I'd joined the band (as keyboardist and sometime singer), Les showed up at practice with an imported twelve-inch single of a Knopfler instrumental called "Going Home (Theme of the Local Hero)." He played it for us and we were suitably impressed--great melody, wonderful snarly guitar licks, lilting sax, and even some great-sounding synthetic drums. I noted that it came from a movie soundtrack and didn't think much else about it.

Soon afterwards, I spotted the bright yellow cover of the soundtrack album in the "heavy rotation" box at WXYC, where I was a student announcer at the time. I quickly discovered that the album contained a number of intriguing tracks in a variety of styles: a soft jazz slowdance called "Smooching," a synthesizer-washed folk tune called "The Mist-Covered Mountains," a twanging rockabilly thumper by the name of "Freeway Flyer," and even a soft modern country tune titled "The Way It Always Starts" with vocals by Gerry Rafferty. But "Going Home" and its acoustic-guitar-and-keyboards version, "Wild Theme," were the tunes that really stirred me. I played the album a lot, sometimes even when it wasn't technically supposed to come up in the rotation during my shift. I also began to think that a movie with music this good was worth checking out.

The movie finally turned up one Friday at the Varsity Theater downtown, but I didn't realize it until late that evening and couldn't find anyone to go see it with me. With time running out, I did something I'd never done before: went to the movies alone. I sometimes wonder if I would have reacted to the film in the same way if I'd seen it with someone else. As it was, I fell under Forsyth's spell completely. The quirky characters, the rich and improbable accents, the stunning scenery, the swirling strains of the music... I wanted to be in the village with Mac more than I would have believed possible.

And so I went. In the spring of 1984, I left my exchange-year-home in Manchester and traveled to the north of Britain to seek out the names listed in tiny print at the end of the film: Morar, Arisaig, Pennan. I found Morar and Arisaig in the western part of Scotland, an area I'd visited with my parents nearly two years before. I had fond memories of the beauties of Oban and the lochs of the Great Glen, but I was burning to find the beaches where Mac had picked through the tidal pools and the rocks where Danny had sat and watched Marina gliding through the water. I had persuaded some of my American friends to make the trip, and I'd done so largely by stressing the attractions of Oban and Edinburgh, but to me the real goal was to travel the so-called Road to the Isles, out toward Skye, and find the little village, the ceilidh hall, the improbably red phone box.

I found some beaches. I found some rocks. I saw some stunning beauties. But I never did find that village, or its phone box.

Nonetheless, Local Hero wouldn't release its grip on me. After I returned home and fell in love with Kelly, I took on the task of selecting music for our wedding. We chose the preludes and recessional with little difficulty, but we couldn't find a good theme to accompany her walk down the aisle. And then I thought of the slow, stately, droning version of "Going Home" played at the ceilidh, and I knew that had to be the song that led us into married life.

With that as our wedding processional, of course, we had to travel back down the Road to the Isles on our honeymoon. We tromped along the beaches below Loch Morar, and Kelly and I delighted in the streets and pubs of Mallaig, the last town before the ferry to Skye. We went to the Isle itself in a constant drizzle, marveled at the rainbow of seaweeds and rocks on its beaches, and helped deceive the parents of a young Atlantan on the ferry by posing in a photo with him--he'd told his parents he was traveling with friends so they wouldn't worry. And in some photo album somewhere, or so I like to think, Kelly and I are still smiling anonymously out at his family.

But we still didn't find the phone box. Maybe it's in Pennan.

Some sixteen years later, we fired up the VCR to watch the movie, this time with our kids. It opens in Houston--still an abrupt and surprising fact--and spends a leisurely amount of time in offices, airports, and laboratories in the early going. I was pleasantly absorbed in the story, watching out of the corner of my eye to see if the kids were bored by it all, or having trouble with the accents.

And then suddenly Danny and Mac were rolling down the Road to the Isles and I felt my heart in my throat.

The misty air, the curve of the hills, the greenness of summer grasses... the soft hum of a synthesizer, a wistful tune, as the car sped along... it was as if every day of the last two decades had been washed away and I was twenty again, but somehow everything important from those decades--wife, family, time, growth--was still with me. It was a moment where I felt nothing important had ever been lost, or ever could be lost. It took twenty years to make that moment, and I'm not sure who to thank for it--Forsyth, Knopfler, Kelly, the boys, or all of the above--but I'm grateful to know that such moments exist.

And the phone box? Oh, it exists, too. I'm quite sure. I've heard it ringing.

5:49 PM

We've had our first winter storm, and something on the order of four to six inches of snow now covers the landscape. You're just going to have to deal with it.

On snowy days, I'm always reminded of what may be my favorite book ever, The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. The young protagonist, Peter (the first character I ever met who shared my name), goes through a series of experiences that teach him (and the reader) a great deal about the world: certainly I learned that actions have unintended consequences (whacking a tree with a stick dumps a load of snow on Peter's head), that everyone has art in him (Peter learns how to make snow angels), and that the promise of eternity can be found even in the transient (Peter dreams that the snow has melted, but when he wakes up the next morning, new snow is falling).

I don't plan to have an epiphany every time there's a measurable snowfall, but I do seem to end up writing about it every time. After all, if there's one thing a Southern writer cannot do, it's ignore snow. Below the Mason-Dixon line, snow is an event rare enough to cry out for special attention, even in a northerly part of the South like central Virginia. It's not quite the magical once-a-century event it was for the citizens of Maycomb, Alabama, in To Kill a Mockingbird, but it's still a significant break in our routine. God calls time out, and we're all left standing around waiting for the world to come back from commercial.

It's less of a break here at Woodberry, of course, because classes aren't cancelled. I walked up the hill in this morning's driving snow and sleet, leaving my own children at home, in order to teach a speech class and an English class. I'll probably head home for a brief visit in a bit, then come back up the hill for my last class at 1:00, but except for the chances of getting hit by a snowball, it won't be that different a day from my typical Thursday.

But it will. Snow puts even the familiar and the mundane in a new package; the stuff underneath may be the same old crap, but there's still a gleeful sense of anticipation as you prepare to unwrap it. Anything could be inside.

It's worth remembering that when Bill Watterson brought Calvin and Hobbes to a close, he didn't do it by bringing Calvin's world in line with reality. Calvin didn't suddenly look at Hobbes and see the stuffed tiger that everyone else always saw; that would have been a heartbreaking ending, but one I could easily have expected. After all, when you're my age, you're supposed to cynically expect that everything fantastic and pure will eventually melt into slush and mud. I should have trusted Watterson not to let me down like that, and he didn't: in the final panel of the strip, a work of art as funny, thought-provoking, and beautiful as a dream, Calvin takes Hobbes on one final toboggan ride, barreling downhill into a landscape of pure white possibility, crying "It's a magical world... Let's go exploring!"

Happy snow day, everyone. I'm heading down the hill myself.

3:28 PM