Do You See Watt I See?

There’s a wealth of interesting information about the National Christmas Tree and its associated “Pageant of Peace” within a massive Wikipedia entry that numbered a whopping 31 (ironically tree-killing) pages when I printed it out. And that didn’t count all the pages of footnotes I elected not to print.

I discovered, for instance, that this heartwarming symbol of nation unity and peace on Earth was a product of pure capitalism, conceived in the 1920s by an electric-industry trade group to promote its fledgling product. I learned that attendance lagged at the annual lighting ceremony during the years when President Truman flipped a remote switch from Independence, Missouri. This forced Harry to return to the White House for the 1952 lighting—a development about which he presumably was not wild. I found out that the 1969 and 1971 lighting ceremonies were disrupted by hecklers—Vietnam War protesters in the first case and nattering nabobs of anti-Spiro Agnew negativism in the second, because the vice president was doing the honors that year. I also learned that in 1978, First Daughter Amy Carter took a break from advising her dad about the dangers of nuclear proliferation in order to begin a First- or Second-Family tradition of topping off the tree with an ornament.

(If you’re counting, that’s a least three references in one paragraph—“wild about Harry,” a Spiro Agnew quote and a President Carter statement—that no reader under 50 likely will understand. Fortunately, if that's the right word, I probably haven't a single reader in that demographic.)

To me, the key page of the Wikipedia entry is number 20, which features a photograph that literally illustrates what I perversely love about the National Christmas Tree and its trappings—which occupy (currently, but not always) a small square of land on the Ellipse just south of the White House in the heart of Washington, DC.  That one photograph both solved a mystery for me and hints at—without quite telling the whole story—the big, ugly, but amusing truth about the whole operation that Wikipedia declines to acknowledge. That truth is this: The National Christmas tree, and everything that surrounds it, is hideously, godawfully tacky.

Let me to describe to you the photograph to which I’m referring. (Because, as you know unless you’re the very rare newcomer to this site, I’m too low-tech and lazy to have any idea how to post photographs, or even to have much interest in doing so. Use your damn imagination, and get the hell off my lawn.) The photo shows a big evergreen (or fir, or whatever) that’s trapped inside a framework of mesh wiring. Beside it sit a couple of wood crates on which the words “National Tree Train” are written. The photo caption reads as follows: “The model railroad train is ready to be unpacked and set up at the base of the 2012 US National Christmas Tree. An undecorated ‘state tree’ is to the right.”

Where to start? First, I alluded above to a “mystery.” I’d been wondering in recent years if I’d only thought the National Christmas Tree was an actual tree, as opposed to what it really looks like against the night sky: a huge triangular mass of lights resembling a monster version of the gaudy aluminum trees Snoopy hawks in the Charlie Brown Christmas special while the horrified round-headed kid decries the commercial greed-fest Christmas has become.

I mean, I seemed to remember, walking through the Ellipse at other times of year, there being a real, living tree at that spot. But then, every December when I’d arrive to marvel at the obscene Vegas-of-the-East spectacle that is the Pageant of Peace—with its giant, formless, zillion-watt “tree;”  its rows of smaller, bland, identical-looking "state" trees; its mixed-messages side-by-side nativity scene and Santa’s workshop; its fascinatingly Hades-like fire pit (an apocalyptic conflagration that seemingly might at any moment jump its hole and threaten the presidential mansion); and a jerry-rigged stage on which amateur-hour entertainers churned out holiday standards over a bad sound system—I’d see zero evidence of an actual living pine tree. In fact, the star of this yearly light show looks like nothing so much as the wet dream that had consumed Coolidge-era power-industry executives: Complete obliteration of the natural world, replaced by a constellation of glorious artificial light.

When I saw that photograph on the Wikipedia page (a quick aside: I don’t go to Wikipedia for evidence-based facts, but I do seek it out for the kind of detail that only obsessive citizen-researchers will happily spent vast volunteer hours compiling) it confirmed what I’d sort of suspected, but what had seemed too weird to quite believe: There really IS a tree underneath those uniform strings of diagonal lights and ornaments. But that living organism is utterly undecorated and dark. It is the irrelevant guts of a bedazzling, 100% -fake superstructure.

This bit of Internet intelligence reinforced everything that, to me, is bizarrely wonderful about the Pageant of Peace—despite the sad absence nowadays of the Yule log/fire pit, which was bulldozed in 2012 as allegedly incompatible with a reconfigured “site plan,” according to the National Park Service, which oversees the site. (I’m guessing what really happened was that President Obama suddenly realized in December 2011, gazing from his back portico to the Circle of Hell raging almost literally in his backyard, “There is a freaking inferno just beyond a flimsy fence that millions of right-wing nuts who irrationally hate me easily could stoke and fan in my direction.” Whereupon a presidential order was issued to fill in the pit, ideally with NRA President Wayne Lapierre having been thrown into it beforehand.)

I again lamented the fire pit’s absence this past Sunday night, when I made my annual pilgrimage to the site. I also didn’t see the nativity scene or Santa’s workshop, for that matter. But it’s possible I missed them both, as the crowds were crushing and there was a tented area to which I never got. (Another great irony is that the Pageant of Peace—a term coined in the 1950s to emphasize the “goodwill toward men” biblical aspect of Christmas—isn’t remotely peaceful. The place is packed with locals and tourists chattering away in a multitude of languages. You can’t move an inch without somebody’s camera-phone nearly hitting you in the eye. And the musical acts intermittently add a further level of noise.)

Still, this time as every year, there was much for me to enjoy. The central “tree” was every bit as blindingly, geometrically absurd as always. The 56 smaller trees (one for each state, the District of Columbia and five US territories), though in theory uniquely decorated, again looked thoroughly uniform. This is because—as presumably dictated by the Park Service—all the lighting and decoration is standardized, except for a few clear plastic ornaments on each tree that contain drawings or other artwork that’s been created by schoolchildren from that state, district or area. The problem is, given the size of the ornaments and the lighting, it’s nearly impossible to discern these unique details even upon close inspection—let alone from any distance. This is another compelling feature of the ludicrous spectacle that is the Pageant of Peace.

Then there are the trains—per that photo on the Wikipedia page. There’s not just one set of train tracks laid at the base of the National Christmas Tree. There are several. They collectively form a crazy quilt of locomotive madness, with trains chugging through a zig-zaggy landscape of toy villages and scenery that defies rhyme or reason. It is as if the Park Service noted the empty space surrounding the Triangle of Electricity and summoned a particularly disorganized model train enthusiast from his basement lair to please populate the area. Don’t get me wrong: Kids, even in 2015, love choo choos—as do nostalgic adults. I heard many happy exclamations. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the trains, per se. What I am saying that they add to the air of vaguely themed chaos.

This year’s music didn’t disappoint, either. While I don’t wish to disparage the generous donation of time by unpaid musicians and singers, who brave the weather to entertain the throngs—and it was actually cold Sunday night, atypical of this global-warming December—the Park Service always seems to get exactly the level of talent it doesn’t pay for. What I heard a few nights ago was a brass band that sounded like a Victorian nightmare—the kind of ensemble that might have propelled scared-straight Ebenezer Scrooge straight back to deep-humbug mode.

The brass band’s missed notes still echoed in my ears as I turned around, en route to my car, to give the National Light Show, 2015 edition, one last look. What is it that I cherish so about this crazy conglomeration of clutter, this national Hoarders episode? For one thing, it’s resoundingly retro in this increasingly too-cool-for-school world of super-high-tech gadgetry. There’s nothing sleek or sophisticated about this annual event. It remains, by and large, the same as it ever was. Furthermore, it actually forces people to get out of their houses and cars, put on their coats, and stand around outside.

As corny as it sounds, the Pageant of Peace really does, too, succeed, at least in a small way, in promoting goodwill on Earth. It brings people together in one place at one time to enjoy something—and to momentarily leave behind all the rancor and vitriol that increasing poisons America and the world. It scarcely matters whether that enjoyment springs from love of God, electricity, trains or timeless (call it evergreen) tackiness. It just makes a body feel good.

In that, it’s something of an annual Christmas miracle.

When Life Is for the (Calling) Birds

Earlier today I Googled “The Twelve Days of Christmas” for any mention of the little-discussed human trafficking aspect of the beloved English carol. I mean, the song’s essence is that there’s nothing like finding a bevy of enslaved people and trapped fowl under, around and above the Christmas tree, courtesy of your true love.

Was it once acceptable in English society, I’ve lately wondered, for people of means to pay a middle man to round up eight maids a-milking, nine ladies dancing, 10 lords a-leaping, 11 pipers piping and 12 drummers drumming; cram them into a enclosure decorated to resemble a huge gift box; and present to one’s significant other a cacophonous conglomeration of 50 people—who presumably were covered in the combined waste of 23 confined birds?

The Internet is strangely silent on the issue. When I entered the search term “Twelve Days of Christmas human trafficking,” I found only one other person's observation, similar to mine, that this carol is far from benign. What I did not find were any scholarly treatises on the economic conditions in Victorian England that might have induced families to sell their milking and dancing daughters to the monied gentry for presentation as gifts, or any theories from social historians as to why lords, pipers and drummers were preferred marks of these gift-giving fiends—as opposed to say, carpenters, haberdashers and other townsfolk with skills more useful around the manor than such specialties as (respectively) leaping, piping and drumming.

Anyway, the upshot is that I listen to a lot of Christmas music at this time of year—so often hearing the same 15 or 20 songs on WASH-FM, our local Christmas music station, that I’ve had a great deal of time to absorb, consider and, in some cases, question the lyrics. This is ground I first covered, by the way, in a December 30, 2010, blog post titled “Did You Hear What I Heard?”It is available for review at any time on this site, should you care to share my puzzlement over why a man as seemingly humble as Santa Claus would assign his own name to the lane on which he lives, or should you, too, wonder whether the Andy Williams-sung “Happy Holiday”—singular—should be condemned for implying that only the year-end celebrations of Christians matter.

In fact, this year I’ve been playing WASH-FM in the car and at home even more than I usually do, because I find all the nostalgic cheer to be a hugely welcome escape from the news of the day. While it’s no secret that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, it lately seems as if that hand basket is weighted with cannon balls and falling toward Hades at light speed.

As if such overwhelming problems as world terrorism, the refugee crisis and global warning aren’t upsetting enough, this morning I unwisely read an entire article in the Washington Post chronicling how a focus group of Donald Trump supporters backed the billionaire buffoon even more vociferously every time a moderator repeated and factually refuted one of their hero's moronically uniformed utterances. One guy even used the occasion to vow that he would not piss on the current president of the United States to extinguish the flames were our nation’s chief executive to find himself on fire.

Given the choice between 1) encountering such vitriol in print, online and/or on the air, and 2) singing along with the happy if often nonsensical holiday tunes I've known since childhood, the latter option has tended to win out.

What's more, should you listen really closely to words of Christmas songs, I find that you even can find ways to channel anger that are kind of fun rather than cancerous. Here’s a prime example: I’ve heard the holiday staple “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” approximately 18,000 times since Thanksgiving, and every time I hear the chorus I go apoplectic, albeit it in a bemused kind of way. This is the lyric: “Have a holly jolly Christmas/And in case you didn’t hear/Oh by golly, have a holly jolly Christmas this year.”

Think about that for a second. How in hell could you not have heard that you are wished a holly jolly Christmas?!  The singer—Burl Ives or whoever might be covering the song—just wished you a holly freaking jolly Christmas the previous sentence!! It’s like saying, “Get me that pen. Oh, and while you’re at it, get me that pen.” The message is unmistakable!. It’s the same message, expressed twice in immediate succession! How could you not have heard it the first time?! You want us to have a Christmas that not only is holly (whatever that means), but that is jolly, as well. We get it! Jeez!

I know, I know, it’s just a stupid Christmas song. It's not Shakespeare. Still, I’d much rather laugh while fuming about something so trivial than get red in the face, and sickened in the gut, contemplating some far darker joke, such as the sadly viable candidacy of would-be President Trump and his frothing followers.

Maybe Christmas music isn't your thing, whether that's because you're of a non-Christian background or you simply heard "Frosty the Snowman" one (or a hundred) too many times. My point is, we all must do what we can these days to preserve our sanity. Because the outlook for our country and the world is not good.

 In case you didn’t hear.

Departing Soon

The parameters and logistics have yet to be determined, but it already has a name: the Dead of Winter Tour.

There won’t be any media accounts or “merch” booths. This isn’t a concert series by the surviving members of a ’60s jam band.

It’ll be a personal trip to as many as four cemeteries in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It wouldn’t necessarily have needed to occur in the next few months. But then that name hit me, and a voice in my head channeled Starship Captain Jean-Luc Picard commanding “Make it so.”

Actually, it has grown into a tour. It began with a simple desire to revisit the graveyard in southern New Jersey’s Pine Barrens where my maternal grandmother has been interred since 1981 and my paternal grandfather joined her 16 years later. I last was there for my grandfather’s graveside service in 1997.

But I’ve also had it in mind for a while now to pay visits someday—separately or on the same trip—to the final resting places of a pair of memorable if utterly dyspeptic ladies I first encountered as a volunteer and ended up counting as friends. Both have been referenced in this blog. Helen was a client of Iona Senior Services in Northwest Washington who lived in DC. Mildred was a resident of Springhouse at Westwood, an assisted living facility in Bethesda.

Helen was the long-divorced wife of a doctor who, in her telling at least, left her for a younger woman and screwed her big-time in the settlement. She’d had multiple sclerosis since the early 1970s, which forced her to give up her job as a nurse and had consigned her to a wheelchair by the time I met her early in this century. The disease would cripple her much worse by the time she died in a nursing home a few years ago. When Helen still was living in her high-rise condo building near American University, I’d look across the back courtyard to the pool in which she told me she swam regularly before her body betrayed her.

Mildred, conversely, had no real physical issues until the last. But, whereas I could imagine Helen having experienced periods of pleasure in her younger years—she loved to talk about a trip to South America she’d taken in the late 1950s, and the many concerts and shows she’d attended at the Kennedy Center and other venues in the ’60s—I was pretty sure the stridently discontented Mildred who I knew in her '70s hadn’t been temperamentally or philosophically much different in her younger years.

To me, Mildred was the embodiment of the joke Woody Allen tells in Annie Hall, of the old Jewish woman who complains, “The food at this restaurant is terrible! And such small portions!” In fact, Mildred was an old Jewish woman. And, at holiday dessert parties thrown by Springhouse, Lynn and I more than once heard Mildred pronounce a piece of cake or pastry “lousy” while denouncing its chintzy size.

Mildred never married. I like to think she’d at least had some dates, but nothing she ever said suggested it. She had lived in Philadelphia most of her life, working in various secretarial and administrative jobs. The only trips I can ever recall her having talked about were to Florida and California. Both vacations were bitter disappointments. Florida was too hot, and Mildred didn’t like Floridians for reasons I no longer can remember. A girlfriend with whom Mildred had once worked invited her to California, but then mostly left her on her own once Mildred got there, the way she told the story.

Mildred’s widowed and decidedly infirm sister also lived at Springhouse. I seem to recall that’s why Mildred ended up there. The sister died years before Mildred did, leaving Mildred stranded in Bethesda, where she often rhapsodized about Philadelphia and wished she was back there. Although it was easy to imagine she’d ragged incessantly on Philly when she actually lived in the City of Brotherly Love.

Helen, too, also was from Philadelphia. In fact, it wasn’t until I started seriously thinking about this Dead of Winter Tour that I was struck by how much the two women had in common—marital  status, religion, and collar hue (Helen’s was white, Mildred’s blue) notwithstanding. They not only came from the same city and held the same worldview—everybody had it in for them—but they were experts at ill-serving their best interests. They both treated worst the people on whom they depended the most.

Helen hired, then lost to temper flares, a succession of paid caregivers in the years that I knew her. Day nurses came and went. She berated her regular cab driver about his tardiness, lifestyle and weight until he finally stopped returning her calls. Volunteers felt her wrath, too. She reduced one kindly old woman from her Catholic Church to tears because the “stupid” octogenarian had brought the wrong groceries.

Similarly, Mildred always had some problem with Springhouse staff, and she wasn’t shy about expressing it. I’m not saying her criticisms always were off-base. At assisted living facilities, as anywhere else, you get the staff you pay for, and those places tend not to pay much. I understand that it’s maddening to be ignored because your aide is jabbering in a foreign tongue on her cell phone, engaged in an extended personal call during work hours. But Mildred, like Helen, never much had the patience with the old attracting-bees-with-honey approach. If, indeed, either woman even believed that was a valid way to get things done.  

But here’s the thing. I genuinely liked, and still miss, both of them. I’m not exactly sure why, because they drove me crazy in various ways, and Helen in particular could be mean. (She once reamed me a new you-know-what after I returned from a multi-store search with what I thought were precisely the lidded disposable cups she’d wanted. “They’re all wrong!” she screamed.) Neither woman liked having her narrative of woe or summary of another's incompetence challenged by any suggestion that maybe things weren’t quite that bad, or that perhaps so-and-so was just having a bad day.

But I did have some success distracting them from their negative narratives. I could make both women smile. Sometimes visually, more often inwardly. All it took was sitting and listening, which made them feel validated, I think, in a way they seldom did otherwise. They shared with me happy memories that few other people had bothered to solicit from them. And they rewarded me for my efforts. They asked after Lynn, our cats, later our dog. (Although Mildred hated cats, and made a point of telling me so.) They always thanked me for coming to see them. Honestly, I can’t think of a time that a visit didn’t end on a good note.

Anyway, when Mildred died, her niece ran a brief death notice that named the Jewish cemetery in Pennsylvania which she was buried. Helen had no local relatives, and had no obituary or death notice in any newspaper that I could find online. But I wrote to her sister in New Jersey, who gave me the burial site. At this moment I have no idea precisely where in the house either bit of information lies, but those cemetery names and locations are around here someplace. I just need to find them.

So, let’s recap. I started off this post by writing that I didn’t originally envision this as a winter tour. I simply wanted to visit my maternal grandparents’ graves. And I’ve had it in mind for a while now to seek out Helen’s and Mildred’s resting places—sometime. When this became a tour was when, maybe two months ago, I was leafing through some old scrapbooks my mom gave me and found the obituary of my paternal grandfather, who died in 1966, when I was 8 years old. So, now I know where he’s buried, too. (Not that I couldn’t have asked my parents, but I’d never really thought about it.)  Grandpa’s cemetery is in north-central New Jersey, which just happens to be within reasonable proximity of the other three graveyards. As soon as I realized this, the concept of a tour was born.

I’ll still need to work it all out: where I’ll stay along the way, how many days I’ll take off from work, whether I’ll really want to include all four cemeteries or perhaps add to the itinerary a visit with someone who’s alive. (I have a standing invitation to see a friend in New York City.) But I definitely want to do this.

It’s entirely for me. I’m agnostic at best about the afterlife. I don’t fancy that the departed will be interrupting their harp lessons in Heaven to look down with a big smile and thank me for making such a long drive. (I doubt Mildred could find much to smile about in the Great Beyond, anyway, presumably deeming both the bright color scheme and the relentlessly upbeat vibe hugely annoying.) I’m sure that I’ll talk to each dead person out loud while I’m on premises, because that’s what I do. (I once thanked Johnny Mercer for writing the lyrics to “Moon River” at Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah.) But I’ll doubt that anyone really is hearing me.

That won’t matter, though. I have few memories of Grandpa, although the ones I do retain are happy ones. (He took me out in a rowboat the last time I saw him; that’s etched on my mind.) I remember Nana and Papa vividly enough to miss them often—especially Papa, who lived to be 95, when I was 39 years old. As I’ve already stated, I miss both Helen and Mildred more now than I ever would’ve thought. I often run past Helen’s old building, and it still feels weird that she’s not there, keeping the doormen hopping with her endless requests and demands. Springhouse, meanwhile, now sits abandoned—awaiting demolition so an office-retail complex can be built on the site.

In a practical sense, I’ll be driving a few hundred miles to stand briefly before a few headstones or burial plaques and talk to myself. In an emotional sense, though, I’ll be touching base with people who were and important parts in my life—people who merit remembrance in deeds and not just words.

It feels appropriate that Thanksgiving is coming up. That's a sentiment that will carry into the forthcoming Dead of Winter Tour.

Fargo

“We’re usually the last state,” the young woman at the Fargo-Moorhead Convention and Visitor’s Bureau noted a few weeks ago, with a resignation that belied the inherent boosterism of her position.

This was after I told her I’d flown into Fargo’s Hector “International” Airport (quote marks mine) the previous afternoon for the express purpose of adding North Dakota and bordering Minnesota (in which Moorhead alliteratively sits) to the list of states in which I’d run.

As usual, I’d gone into far more detail than anyone wanted, having been asked the quite reasonable question, “What brings you to Fargo?” It isn’t as if Fargo is a commercial hub to which I’d likely been sent by my Washington, DC-area employer to close some big multinational deal. I clearly was too old and nerdy looking to have been lured to North Dakota by the promise of a high-paying if back-breaking job in the oil fields. And anyway, I was in the wrong part of a very large state for that. The only reference to North Dakota’s boon industry I would see during the course of my four days in the area were T-shirts at the airport that read “North Dakota: It’s One Fracking Thing After Another.”

It no doubt also seemed unlikely to this young woman that I’d flown all the way to Fargo to pay cult homage to the eponymous 1996 film, despite the visitors center’s more or less obligatory display of the actual movie-prop wood chipper just 10 or 15 feet behind us. I’d seen the dark comedy when it came out nearly 20 years ago, and I well recalled that a couple of bungling crooks fed a body into the device in one memorable scene. This was dutifully memorialized by a fake foot sticking out of the chipper’s chute at the visitors center. But hadn’t that film, its title aside, been set primarily in Minnesota? And hadn’t the movie’s buzz expired way back in the Clinton administration—never mind that it recently spawned a cable TV series that critics seem to love but few people seem to watch?

Well, she had asked what brought me to Fargo, so I gave her the whole story. About how “running,” to me, doesn’t mean participating in an organized race, or even running with another human being. About how I don’t record my speed—I am in fact incredibly slow—but do record my duration. About how, by my own definition—self-imposed rules I am duty-bound to follow—a “run” means shuffling along at my own plodding pace for a minimum of one uninterrupted hour, entirely within a given state’s borders. About how I developed the goal of running in all 50 states when I realized, somewhere around age 50, that I already was about three-fifths of the way to my goal by virtue of personal and work-related travel. About how his was the reason I'd driven several years ago to Harlan, Kentucky, where I had the misfortune of eating the worst Chinese dinner imaginable. About how this also was why I’d run, pre-dawn, in downtown Fargo that very morning and would, the next morning, drive into Minnesota, park my rental car, and add that state to my list—thereby reducing the magic number for legend-in-my-own-mind status to 14.

Rousing herself from my long-winded explanation, the visitors center woman responded that it’s not that unusual for tourists to tell her a 50-state running goal has brought them to Fargo. But the lure, she said, almost always is the city’s annual marathon. These are runners whose goal it is to complete an organized 26.2-mile race in each of America’s 50 states. (I’m well aware that such people exist, but I have no interest in working myself that hard.) What these marathoners typically tell the visitors center staff, my host reported, is that North Dakota is their very last stop. The unspoken but unavoidable implication is that they’d deemed no other state in the union to be so godforsakenly unappealing or geographically remote. They’d gutted their way through the likes of Oklahoma and Arkansas, they’d sweated on the Mississippi Delta and bundled up for Alaska’s chill before finally gritting their teeth and conceding, “I have no choice. North Dakota it is.”

     

I didn’t really know how to respond, except to nod. I’d been in Fargo less than 24 hours at that point. The downtown area, I saw, has its charms. It features, among other things, an impressively restored old movie theater in which I later would see a film, and a sleek boutique hotel in which I later would spend a night. But that didn’t quite seem like a compelling counterpoint to the judgment of scores of marathoners. “There have got to be other states that suck more” didn’t strike me as a particularly helpful thing to say.

What I ultimately decided to do was to buy a T-shirt, and to sign the guest book. More on those things shortly.

First, though, it must be noted, for the record, that I thoroughly enjoyed my stay in Fargo, well beyond my visit to that historic theater and my stay at that charming boutique hotel. I toured worthwhile art museums in Fargo and Moorhead. I visited the Roger Maris Museum in West Acres Mall, which pays endearing tribute to a native son who broke Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record in 1961 only to be compared unfavorably, and with no little vitriol, to the beloved Bambino. (There is, of course, no mention of Maris’s record having later been shattered during Major League Baseball’s dark Steroids Era.)

I viewed a replica Viking boat in Moorhead that local Minnesotans valiantly sailed across the Great Lakes and all the way to Norway in 1982. Oh, and speaking of Norway, I ran very early one morning in lovely Fergus Falls, Minnesota, where I took my favorite photo of the entire trip: a bit of hilariously vulgar regionally themed graffiti, scrawled on the wall of a derelict warehouse. It juxtaposed a Norwegian flag with a disembodied Super Mario-looking head that had a crudely drawn dick and balls dangling from its mouth. Ha!

I dined at some very good restaurants in Fargo and conversed with  affable locals at dive bars. Also, my in-car soundtrack was a “classic vinyl” satellite radio station that immersed me throughout in Hendrix solos, Byrds harmonies, Van Morrison mysticisms and Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s flights of synthesizer fancy. This made me almost giddily happy at times.

Like all mid-sized cities lacking an identifiable persona, Fargo has sought to brand itself. Not having much to work with except an old movie featuring the brutal disposal of a body and its own sense that you’d have to be crazy to choose Fargo as a vacation destination, the tagline of this campaign is “North of Normal.” North Dakota is north, all right, in both name and geography, abutting the Canadian border. But there’s really nothing discernibly abnormal about it. Like everywhere else in contemporary America, it features many more miles of faceless retail than it does architecturally striking downtown blocks. All the young people have tattoos. The citizenry can stand to lose a pound or thirty. Ubiquitous signage touts the local sports team—in this case the North Dakota State University Bison.

Still, Fargo hardly struck me as the booby prize of all places in America. When I heard, “We’re usually the last state,” I thought, “Awww! Chins up!”

So, I bought one of those “Fargo: North of Normal” T-shirts. I will wear it in utterly normal Bethesda, in hopes, for the city of Fargo’s sake, that those who see it will imagine the city to be awash in noir quirkiness, perhaps patrolled by a pregnant sheriff who resembles actress Frances McDormand.

What I wrote in the guestbook was this: “I was born without a right hand. I’m staying away from that da*m wood chipper, as I can’t afford to lose more limbs!” Sure, I probably was trying too hard. But I left the visitors center hoping that subsequent tourists might read the entry, chuckle a little bit, and maybe—just maybe—think to themselves, “Now, that was north of normal.”  

Apocalypse Now

I hate to repeat myself, but the news is repeating itself so loudly that I feel compelled to follow suit.

Today’s post was going to be about something else entirely. Something funny and nostalgic. But both ongoing and very recent events have overwhelmed my ability and desire to amuse, and looking back in time is too difficult when the horrors of the present and the future feel so inescapable.

So, I’m afraid you’re about to read, not for the first time on this blog, about my outraged resignation over the madness of American’s gun culture. And also, even more cheerily, we’ll revisit my conviction that the planet is in an inexorable downward spiral. One that makes me glad I’m nearing 60 and may not—hopefully will not—live to experience the worst of it.

What’s that? You’re thinking, “The guy posts nothing for nearly two months, only to climb back onto this nihilistic soapbox?!” You suddenly remembered something else you need to do right now, somewhere else you need to be?

I get that. I don’t blame you, if you’d rather not read on. On many days I can push the abundant signs of impending catastrophe far enough back in my brain to try to write entertainingly about the mundanities of my daily life or the absurd manifestations of pop culture. Maybe the next time opportunity and motivation coincide to place me at the keyboard, I’ll be in a lighter mood. Watch this space. Have a good day. Catch you later.

But, should you choose to keep reading, here’s what’s on my mind today.

My current mental clusterf*** began yesterday at work, when I checked my phone to see if I’d gotten any texts. (Not that I’m that popular, mind you. But, for example, Lynn sometimes writes to remind me to call my parents, or to pay a bill, or to do something else for which I seem to require backup memory.) I’d received no texts, but I had gotten an alert from the BBC that two members of an American TV news team had been shot and killed while on camera.

(A quick aside: Although I welcome the BBC’s interest in keeping me informed on world events, I continue to find it ironic that an overseas news service frequently provides my first word on all the horrible things that are happening in my own country. While I never asked for the Beeb’s updates, they started appearing on my phone when I downloaded the BBC news app. I sometimes wonder if it’s the Brits’ way of saying, “Hey, you were the ones who insisted on breaking from us and going your own way. Be careful what you wish for.”)

Anyway, back to that news item. It’s a huge international story already now, of course, just a day later. How an asshole maniac with a legally obtained gun and anger-management issues did what so many identically described Americans before him have done—killed innocent people just because he wanted to and could, given this country’s laughably toothless gun laws—but this time did it to a reporter and a videographer while they were covering a story live on camera. And then how the gunman proudly posted the video to his Facebook page. Already this morning there was a commentary in the Washington Post about how this is the New Face of Violence, in which homicidal narcissists share the glory of their bloodletting with all their imagined fans via social media.

I was thinking about this earlier this morning, driving home from a morning run in DC. My mind was all over the place, ranging from the practical to balancing social responsibility against personal safety.

The gunman in the Virginia killings had worn a body camera, posted the video to Facebook, and faxed to a news source a bitter, incoherent and self-contradictory manifesto. Wow, I thought. I don’t even know where you’d buy a body camera. I’m not on Facebook. I have no idea how to post video footage anywhere. Also, when’s the last time I sent a fax? What’s that procedure for that? Does all this mean I’m just a Luddite doofus, or that I’m, conversely, admirably ill-suited to conducting 21st-century terrorism?

But then I came back to what, if anything, I can do to fight gun violence, or at least to meaningfully voice my contempt for the status quo. As I’ve written before in this space, the National Rifle Association is so rich and powerful, and its grasp on the balls (or lady parts) of federal and state lawmakers so tight, as to make abundantly forlorn any hope of enacting significant restrictions on firearms purchases and use. It didn’t happen after Columbine, Virginia Tech, Charleston, you name the bloody tragedy. So why would it happen now? But what I’ve personally wanted to do for a long time is to slap a pro-gun control bumper sticker onto my car. Today, I am thinking my sticker should unambiguously state my true stance and read: “Repeal the Second Amendment!”

The arguments against doing so remain compelling, though. This is a nation of gun nuts— some of them less forgiving of even a little thing like a lone bumper sticker than are others. I frankly would expect my car to be vandalized were I to scratch this itch. I’d anticipate anything from keying the paint to smashing the windshield or shooting out a tire. I wouldn’t rule out violence against me, either, whether in the midst of a provoked argument or simply while pumping gas next to a highway that afforded my assailant a quick getaway.

See, this is why my admiration is boundless for the trailblazers, the whistle-blowers, the squeaky wheels in situations when making even the faintest of murmurs might constitute a death wish. I thank God (well, agnostically) for the likes of King, Gandhi, Mandela, Parks, Schindler, Jackie Robinson, and so many others who’ve helped institutionalize whatever fairness and justice exists in the world.

But as for me, hey, I’m just trying to stay alive. And to save my household from huge automotive repair costs at the least, and Lynn from widowhood at the worst.

Although, again, I hope to die before the plupart of the shit really hits the fan.

Which brings me to more happy news from the BBC.  As I was sitting in my car this morning—envisioning both the initial rush of receiving my defiant bumper sticker in the mail and my sheepish decision shortly thereafter to stick it in a drawer, so as not to place huge targets on my vehicle and forehead just to make a point—I heard a breaking story on my local public radio station’s broadcast of the BBC News Hour about the discovery in Austria of as many as 50 decomposing bodies in the back of a locked truck. They were thought to be Syrian refugees, who had fled unthinkable conditions in their own country only to be fatally victimized by human traffickers who had no regard or use for their clients once they’d gotten their money.

The BBC newsman was very effective at painting a picture with language: the unspeakable conditions inside the truck, the overpowering stench, the difficulty of rendering a quick and accurate body count with the bodily breakdowns so advanced and the assault on the senses so overwhelming. This, in turn, got me to thinking about the vastness of ongoing refugee crises in multiple corners of the globe—Africa and Asia as well as Europe.

Too many wars.  Too much human fallout. Too many conflicting government agendas for enough to get done to address the problems.

From there, the head begins to spin. At least mine does. The world’s population continues to grow exponentially, even as the climate steadily warms and finite resources such as water and fossil fuels keep being expended and alternative energy sources languish. California is parched. Wildfires rage throughout the western United States. Instances of mass starvation multiply around the world. Oh, and the threat of nuclear holocaust remain, too! We need Superman. We get Donald Trump. And it’s symptomatic of the way things are going—of the way reaction has replaced reason and candor trumps (pun intended) considered thought—that, to far too many people, the Donald Trumps of the world serve as superhero stand-ins.

So, yes, here I am today, repeating myself. America’s gun violence is insane—and inexorable. The Earth has survived external threats from wayward comets and all those UFOs people keep sighting, but it continues to implode from the damage done by its human inhabitants. I’m sorry to replay this broken record, but, let's face it, the song remains the same.

I’ll end with this. Last Sunday, I eagerly watched the initial episode of Fear the Walking Dead, a spinoff of and prequel to the TV series The Walking Dead, which I’ve been faithfully watching nearly since its inception a few years ago. Both shows are about a zombie apocalypse. But whereas the original series lurched into chaos that already was deeply in progress, the new series tracks the breakdown of society from the beginning, just as a lethal virus is spreading and the undead menace is quickly growing to the point of no return.

When it debuted, I saw the initial series as escapist fare. Scary, yes, but also reassuring, in that nothing going on in the real world was quite as bad as being relentlessly pursued by roving hordes of soulless cannibals. I’m watching this new series through different eyes, though, with a connective focus. In real life, the virus is aloft. There’s no cure in sight. Utter chaos appears inevitable, if on a longer timeline than that on TV.

Which is why sometimes, especially on days like today, I wonder if slapping a bumper sticker on my car that might get me killed really is such a bad idea. I mean, given what I might otherwise live to see.

               

   

Tongue-Tied

After dinner the other night, I pulled out a pen and pad and told Lynn I wanted to take some background notes on her fledgling efforts to learn Spanish. “I’m thinking of writing a blog post,” I explained.

“Are you going to mention what a huge baby you’re being about it?” she asked.

Rather than get all defensive, I conceded that this was exactly my intention—albeit while adding a bit of context.

In the evenings for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been catching up on my newspaper and magazine reading while Lynn has been doing Spanish-language exercises on her iPad on a website called Duolingo. She’s sitting on the couch in our sunroom and I’m in a chair at the other end of the coffee table. I’ll hear a woman’s voice say something in Spanish, then Lynn types something in response.

It wasn’t long before this routine started really annoying me. Initially I stewed silently, but then I asked Lynn if she could turn down the volume. I was finding the Spanish-speaking woman’s voice distracting, I told Lynn—even though I couldn’t quite make out the words, let alone translate them.

I wasn’t completely lying. I’m a slow reader, with mediocre retention at the best of times. Hearing Senora Duolingo periodically enunciate was proving to be at least as distracting as it is for me to read while the TV’s on, or while Lynn’s talking on the phone. I’m not the greatest multi-tasker. But distraction wasn’t the primary thing.

You’ve heard of countries that have mutual nonaggression pacts? Well, it’s always seemed to me that Lynn and I have a de facto mutual non-ambition pact. It is this unwritten treaty that she lately has been violating, in my eyes, by flagrantly engaging in intellectual betterment, to the detriment of my slack-jawed contentment with my own unchallenging life of the mind. 

There are many reasons Lynn and I have been a good match for going on 23 years of marriage, ranging from our similar interests and sensibilities to mutual attraction and shared distastes. But a big part of it, too, is that we’re intellectually compatible. We’re certainly not stupid, but neither one of us is a genius by any stretch. We each have our areas of particular interest and expertise. I know a lot more about things like history and geography than Lynn does, for example, while her knowledge of medicine, anatomy, nutrition and veterinary science far exceeds mine. It all kind of balances out.

I’m not saying we lack intellectual curiosity. Various things we read, or hear, or see pique our interest and prompt discussions that can get fairly deep at times. We’re not total dullards. But it’s not as if either of us ever is going to discover the cure for cancer, or even come up with a brilliant way to make a fortune. That’s partly because we’re not super smart, but it’s at least as much because all the lab activity and drawing of business plans that would be required to accomplish those things strikes us as Too Much Damn Work.

What’s that saying about the supposedly world-altering power of boldly asking “Why not” rather than passively stopping at “Why”?  Lynn and I look at people who are really driven—who are constantly busting their asses in single-minded pursuit of a goal—and ask, “Where’s the damn fire?”

It’s not like we’re burdens on society. Separately and together, we’ve been self-sufficient our entire adult lives, earning paychecks and never moving into our parents’ basement or onto the public assistance rolls. But moving up to the career ladder—or even drawing one, for that matter—hasn’t been our agenda. I’ve been in the same job for 15 years now because I like it pretty well, it’s sufficiently remunerative, it’s not unduly taxing and I’m not a big fan of new challenges. Lynn’s job history has been more varied, but she’s motivated by an identical desire to make working as painless as possible, as we wind down the road to the ultimate, glorious nirvana of retirement.

So, where does learning Spanish come into this? Another way in which Lynn and I historically have been two peas in a middling pod is shame of our monolinguality and concurrent refusal to do the work necessary to change it. Both Lynn and I took a lot of French in school, but we’ve retained virtually none of it. We’ve kind of hated ourselves for clinging to the island of English when seemingly everyone else in the world has managed to add our native tongue to their own, with maybe another language or two in thrown in for good measure.

Over the years, we’d periodically talk vaguely of immersing ourselves in French decades hence, when we were retired and didn’t have to append that mental burden to the cognitive demands of our day jobs.

Then, at some point, we started thinking that maybe Spanish was the language we should try to learn. We kept hearing that it’s easier to pick up than is any other foreign language, and “easy” is a word that’s very much in our wheelhouse. Also, even in the cosmopolitan Washington, DC, area, with its embassies and international organizations, one is far likelier to hear Spanish spoken on the street, at malls and in convenience stores than French or any other non-English tongue. I got to thinking about how I’d love to know what the construction guys at the 7-Eleven are saying, even it should turn out to be, “That dorky gringo has no muscle tone whatsoever! How is that possible?” At least then I could respond in Spanish, “Your mother has no muscle tone!” Not that that would make much sense, but I’d feel good being able to issue a retort. At least until the heckler beat me up for dishonoring his family.

In an uncharacteristic burst of effort, Lynn and I actually went so far, maybe 10 years ago, to enroll in an adult education course offered by the county one night a week at a local elementary school. The teacher, however, turned out to be this crazy Cuban women who thought the best way to teach Spanish to novice adults was complete immersion—no English at all. That went precisely as well as might be expected. Which suited us, because we quickly tired of taking notes, and drilling each other at home on nights when we could be watching TV.

That was the last attempt, half-hearted or not, by either of us to learn a foreign language until Lynn’s recent foray took me by surprise. In the meantime, I’d happily returned to the notion that we’d revisit the subject in retirement, or never. Then Gabriela entered Lynn’s life.

She’s a woman in Lynn’s Thursday-night yoga class. I haven’t met her. She’s from Uruguay and teaches Spanish at a private school. Her husband works at the International Monetary Fund. (These are the types of background details that brought out my pen and paper. Not that they’re particularly necessary—I could’ve simply written, “A woman from her yoga class is teaching Lynn Spanish”—but I pride myself on my reportorial skills, if not my foreign-language acumen.)

So, Gabriela somehow broke her ankle several weeks ago and is laid up at home this summer. One afternoon, Lynn brought her one of the variety of awesome soups that she makes. (Which could become the basis of a multimillion-dollar business for Lynn, if wasn’t for all the aforementioned work that would be required.) Gabriela and Lynn got to talking about all sorts of things that day, including Lynn’s interest in learning Spanish. Whereupon Gabriela offered to teach her—no charge, although perhaps with the ongoing expectation of soup. Whereupon, in turn, Lynn—the traitor!—assented.

Even worse, from my slacker point of view,  the missus has been zealously applying herself ever since, with a fervor the two of us more typically apply to handicapping contestants on The Next Food Network Star, or bitching about the broken American political system that we’re doing nothing personally to fix, or dreamily discussing our carefree retirement.

Which brings me back to those language exercises on the iPad. Per my request, Lynn has cut back on the volume, to the point where all I can hear from my chair are the low murmurs of Senora Duolingo and faint bells that sound when Lynn is responding to something. What continues to resonate much more loudly for me, however, is the feeling that my wife is violating our mutual non-ambition pact by aggressively pursuing something that seems incredibly hard to me. I feel kind of betrayed.

 

And yes, I’m being a huge baby about it. I’m trying to be less of one. Also, I’m trying to look at the upside. I mean, if she keeps at it, Lynn one day will be able to tell off the Latino guys at the 7-Eleven if they’re dissing me. Of course, on the other hand, she might find it amusing to use her Spanish to commiserate and pile on. Payback for my language truculence, perhaps.

How the hell would I know which she was doing? I wouldn’t. The thought annoys me. Not enough to take up Spanish, though.

    

Talk of the Town

A Starbucks queue is one of the unlikelier places, in the 21st century, for a spontaneous face-to-face conversation to break out. Anybody under 40 is staring down at his or her smartphone. Most people over that age either are doing the same or, like me, are crabbily wondering exactly when standing idly for a couple of minutes became unendurable.

There’s something about a quadruple homicide, though, that gets mouths to moving.

I’m referencing here a recent crime in DC that was noteworthy enough in its heinousness, but particularly in its specific location, to make not just the local but the national news. A rich industrialist and his wife, their 10-year-old son, and a 57-year-old housekeeper were held captive and later (after $40,000 had been delivered at the threatened homeowner’s behest) murdered in their own home, which is located in an upscale neighborhood in Northwest between the National Cathedral and the US Naval Observatory. The residence then was set afire in an unsuccessful attempt to cover up the crimes.

It didn’t take law enforcement long to link the murders to a former employee of the slain industrialist. His whereabouts quickly were traced to Brooklyn and then back to DC, where he was arrested in Northeast and now is in custody.

Even in Washington—a city well-used to all manner of crime, deceit and spectacle—the slaying of four people, including a child, within a half-mile of the vice president’s residence was attention-getting. So much so that it prompted two smartphone-wielding young women—20-ish, I’d say—to look up from their screens in the Starbucks line on New Mexico Avenue NW, near American University, and verbally express their shock to each other. Whereupon a woman roughly 50 years their senior offered them her Washington Post to Read All About It in old-school newsprint. As one of the young woman gingerly held the paper in front of her, like a dusty musket at a firearms museum, and read the headline—“Suspect in Quadruple Killings Captured in DC, Police Say”—I chimed in with, “Thank God the guy just had to have pizza.”

This was because the big break in the case was a fingerprint left on a Domino’s box by the man later arrested. According to police, just as the husband had been forced by his captor to order thousands of dollars in cash delivered to the residence, the wife had been forced, the night before she and the others were killed, to order a couple of pies from the Domino’s in the nearby Tenleytown neighborhood.  

(My friend Joey in Charlotte later commented by email that, for a man with such a flamboyant approach to killing, the alleged murderer has surprisingly pedestrian taste in pizza. My response was that you’d think a guy who was plotting out such an elaborate crime would’ve thought to pack himself a sandwich.)

The four of us in the Starbucks line last Friday morning agreed that the whole pizza thing did not exactly bespeak “criminal mastermind.” The older woman opined that death would be too good for the accused—torture being a necessary antecedent to capital punishment. The younger women seemed noncommittal—possibly because they don’t believe in the death penalty, but more likely because the incensed senior spit out the word “torture” with a demented glee that suggested she likely has wet dreams about Dick Cheney.

I elected not to share with the others the fact that I’d just completed a morning run past the murder scene—lest I seem, like the older lady, a little too personally invested in the whole sordid affair. But the fact is, I’d parked my car in Northwest that morning and set out for Woodland Drive—a street I knew well from past runs—with the express purpose of finding out exactly which house we were talking about here.

It wasn’t hard to spot. The patrol car out front, the abundant crime-scene tape, the burned-out shell behind that tape, and the scent of smoke in the air all conspired to give the location away. So, now I’ve got another Murder House past which to run on my morning rounds of the city and its close-in suburbs. As I’d noted in my blog post of June 2, 2012, “Grim-Reality TV,” it’s a tour of tragedy that also includes, but is not limited to, the Maryland house in which an ex-State Department employee bludgeoned his family to death in the 1970s, the wooded hillside in Rock Creek Park where slain internist Chandra Levy’s remains were found in 2002, and the Northwest DC house in which a promising Indian-American poet—a tenant of prize-winning novelist Howard Norman—stabbed to death her two-year-old son and then herself in 2003.

I’d brought my own Washington Post to Starbucks from home, so once I got my coffee I read the article the older woman had pointed out. I’d already heard the basics about the arrest on the radio, but the newspaper story held other interesting details. For one thing, the accused—one  Daron Dylon Wint, age 34—was traveling in a caravan when arrested, with a white box truck ahead of him. The two guys in the truck were believed to be relatives of Wint’s, and the truck contained “at least $10,000 in cash.” I’m not an attorney, but I sense that detail could bode ill for the defendant at the time of trial.

Speaking of the trial, the other thing in the article that piqued my interest was the name of a one-time defense attorney of Wint’s who opined that his former client was “the last one I’d suspect of anything like this.” The lawyer’s name was Robin Ficker. As Joey put it in his email to me, “That Robin Ficker.”

Ficker is well known to sports fans like Joey because he achieved regional infamy decades ago as a heckler at Washington Bullets (now Wizards) basketball games. He is better known now to his fellow Montgomery County, Maryland, residents, like me, as an insufferable blowhard who’s perpetually running for political office and petitioning against pretty much all forms of government taxation, no matter how essential they might be to things like maintaining the public order and keeping the bridges from collapsing.

I hadn’t realized until I read that article that Robin Ficker’s day job is defense attorney, which strikes me as a surprisingly constructive societal role for him to be playing, although Ficker himself undoubtedly sees it as one more way of screwing with The Man. I’d have guessed that a guy with Ficker’s public skill set might, rather, be the proprietor of a bullhorn company, or headmaster of a training academy for Tea Party candidates.

Ficker had represented Wint, according to the Post, in “about six minor criminal and traffic cases,” and hadn’t seen his former client in 10 years. “He’s not a match for this type of activity at all,” Ficker said of the murders, before adding that line about Wint being “the last one I would suspect.”

First of all, the last person I’d expect to commit murder would be a nun or the Dalai Lama, not a guy who was in need of constant representation for criminal and traffic offenses, however “minor.” But second of all, you’d think a local defense attorney might have caught wind of some of Wint’s more recent run-ins with the law, like threatening the life of his own father (who received a restraining order), punching and groping a woman at a bar, and being rousted out from behind a gas station dumpster, where he was found to be carrying a machete and a pellet gun.

Sure, Wint is innocent until proven guilty, and all that. But he’s not the last guy I’d suspect of the murders on Woodland Drive. I'm just sayin’.   

In fact, I may bring that up if I’m on standing line at a Starbucks during the trial. Because I have a hunch that the kinds of juicy details that tend to come out during public testimony will get people talking.

Final Edition

Around this same time 23 years ago, I was an unmarried features writer for the daily newspaper in Savannah. To the extent that I was known professionally at all in Georgia’s “Coastal Empire”—which wasn’t much, believe me—it was for my movie reviews. I tended to be quite sarcastic and take many liberties with language and decorum, which I was free to do because it was a terrible paper with lax standards, and anything I wrote ran pretty much unedited.

(I still think I may have been the first movie reviewer to opine as to why films had been assigned their ratings. Newsies earned a PG for “contributing the dull-inquency of minors.” The R rating of the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead may have owed to a bare-breasted corpse, as “the undead know no modesty.” Reviewers do this sort of thing all the time now. Where’s my credit? I’m still bitter.)

Anyway, reporting never was my strong suit, as I couldn’t hand-write quickly and had trouble reading my own scrawl. That meant that I lost the meaty parts of lots of quotes. I should have tape-recorded everything, which is what I do in my job now. I can’t remember exactly why I didn’t. I guess tighter deadlines were part of it. Also, a recorder would’ve been one more thing to carry, and I had no more hands then than the one that I have now.

The thing I hated doing the most was person-on-the-street interviews. Sitting alone in dark theaters was exactly my comfort level; abandoning my anonymity to walk up to strangers was its antithesis. But one day this week in 1992, I volunteered to drive down to couple of local malls to ask people their opinions. The reason was that Johnny Carson was retiring.

It goes without saying that the entire broadcasting landscape was hugely different then. The television networks still were king, with very little meaningful competition. “Media” was a word unto itself, not the lesser addendum to “social.” This week, people have been taking to Twitter and Facebook to share their thoughts about the end of David Letterman’s run on late-night TV. But back then, if you wanted to know what people thought about, say, Carson signing off from The Tonight Show after a quarter-century at its helm, you looked to newspapers, media and the boob tube, because reporters had to ask those questions for you. You had no way to ask them yourself.

I needed to ask people about Johnny. I couldn’t quite imagine the world without him. Not that I stayed up to watch him that often, or even taped him, though I did have a VCR. But when I did see him, both Johnny and the world he’d created around himself delighted me. He was so funny, and quick, and skilled at interviewing whoever sat in his guest chairs. His facial expressions and comic timing were perfect, whether he was serving as Don Rickles’ foil or a leopard from the San Diego Zoo was pawing at his scalp. His putdowns of buffoonish Ed McMahon, garish hornblower Doc Severinsen and bland saxophonist Tommy Newsom were hilarious. His over-the-top shtick as Carnac the Magnificent struck me as unfailingly, well, magnificent.

Let’s just say I didn’t get out much in high school or college. On any of those many nights when I wasn’t out on dates, however, I always could count on Johnny to provide me with laughs. As I got older, I saw his show less and read more about how he wasn’t the nicest or warmest guy in real life. He himself joked on camera about his divorces, but it seemed that he was divorced from people in more ways than that. Those details never much bothered me, though. In fact, it seemed to me that Carson in some ways was battling his very nature in order to entertain us. Anyway, I didn’t want to have a drink with Johnny. I wanted him ride Ed, the purported lush, for having drunk a few too many.

It wasn’t that I expected the people I’d be interviewing that day to feel as sad about Johnny’s departure as did I. Jay Leno, Carson’s designated successor, had a lot of fans and was getting a lot of hype. Then as now, popular culture tilted young, and Johnny was not young. I expected older people to lament but accept his passing from the late-night scene, much as they lamented but accepted their own increasing marginalization and eventual death. Most people my age—I was 33 then—probably were readier than was I for a changing of the guard. Those who were 20-something and younger probably wouldn’t much care one way or the other. Maybe they were watching that hip Arsenio Hall on the upstart Fox network.

Well, sure enough, a couple of youngsters I questioned at the malls shrugged about Carson but praised Hall. (Interestingly, one 23-year-old added, “But Letterman’s the man.”) Most of Johnny’s biggest fans shared his age bracket. Several senior citizens told me it had been years since they’d stayed up until 11:30 pm—meaning that while they wished Carson well in retirement, they'd have no loss to lament. My favorite respondents were a 22-year-old guy named Mike Jacobson, who bucked his generational norm by asserting, “Jay Leno will never be a Johnny Carson,” and 50-something Suenell Williams, who swooned, “I catch Johnny two or three times a week. I love him. I’ll miss him.”

Overall, the local mood was captured by the next morning's headline: “Savannahians Have Mixed Feelings on Carson’s Departure.” My lead sentence was “Johnny, maybe we just knew ye for too long.”

I of course have been thinking of all this as David Letterman has signed off this week after an even longer run—33 years—on late-night TV. There are so many parallels and interconnections, given that Carson had been Letterman’s mentor and was Carson’s personal choice as successor. Although Letterman was—is—the decidedly edgier of the two comedians, they shared a certain comic sensibility. They even seemed to mirror each other personally in key ways. As was Carson, Letterman is intensely private and is known not to be particularly cuddly off the set. There’s evidence that both men have treated the women in their life badly, although Carson wasn’t forced by an extortion plot to come clean on his behavior.

Also, as I had Carson, I loved Letterman the Host. The biggest knock on him, though more in his earlier years, was that he could be mean to his guests. But he always was harder on himself than he was on anyone else, and often hysterically so. In his unpredictability and his determination to follow his own whims—whether laconically taking fast-food orders from perplexed motorists or dropping objects off tall buildings just to gauge their splat—he really did redefine late-night comedy.

Again, I won’t pretend that I watched Letterman all that often. But when I did, I quickly was sucked in. Even when I didn’t quite get what he was trying to do, or when it just wasn’t working. Like Carson, Letterman reveled in his work. He aimed to please, both himself and the viewer, possibly in part because the rest of his life was a mixed emotional bag. There, too, were echoes of Carson.

Lynn and I actually caught a Late Show taping at the famed Ed Sullivan Theatre many years ago. Waiting on line outside with all the other happy fans on that February afternoon was a kind of New York dream. The show itself was an unmemorable one, but we didn’t care. We’d seen Dave in his natural habitat! Afterward we souvenir-shopped next door and had our photo taken with the Bangladeshi guys who’s been featured in several of Letterman’s on-camera gallivants through the neighborhood. It was winter, but the sun was shining. I’ll never forget it.

So, I felt I had to watch Letterman’s final show in real time, even though I knew it would be available—immediately afterward and in perpetuity—on any number of platforms, to use a word that didn’t exist in that meaning in 1992. If you care at all about Dave’s exit, you either watched it yourself, or read a review of it, or perhaps checked out the final, all-star top 10 list on YouTube. It certainly wasn’t the funniest Late Show ever, but to me it was kind of perfect.

Most of the jokes were at Dave’s own expense, and most of the sentiment was deflected onto his sidekicks and staff, of whom he was sincerely and movingly appreciative. Highlight reels captured some of his best bits over the years. He closed it all out with a dizzying, rapid-fire flash of Scenes From a Career as Foo Fighters—the band that had cancelled a South American tour to be his first post-heart surgery musical guests in 2000—played their deeply affecting song “Everlong.” Among its lyrics are these words: “And I wonder/If anything could ever feel this real forever/If anything could ever be this good again.”

I wonder that, too. Much as I did 23 years ago. Except that this week’s late-night departure has the added resonance, for me, of the final line in my long-ago newspaper story.

“I hate to see him go,” silver-haired Herbert Smith told the much-younger me, “because it means I’m getting old.”

   

I'll Tell It To You Straight

This morning I asked Lynn if she could remember the name of the gay guy we’d met on a plane and subsequently tried to befriend—because we thought such a relationship would add to our social diversity, be fun, and make us feel cooler about ourselves. The plan went dreadfully awry when we visited him at his Northern Virginia condo and found him to be terrestrially uninteresting. I’m not sure what we were expecting, but it was definitely something gayer and more exotic than what we found. We all sat around talking about boring crap that I can’t remember anymore. He gave us a tour of his place, which was not diverse at all, looking like approximately 500 other condos in that particular development.

To be fair, I’m sure Lynn and I were way more interesting on the plane, when we were garrulous and heady with excitement at the prospect of having a gay friend, than we were in Northern Virginia, where our disillusionment no doubt made us listless and dull conversationalists. By the time shortly thereafter when that acquaintanceship ran its course, it wasn’t as if Plane Guy was begging us for another shot, sobbing that he’d display at least 50% more homosexuality the next time if only we’d give him another chance.

To the contrary, I’m sure he was thinking, “Am I just imagining that those two dullards were a hoot on the plane?”

So, this morning Lynn told me his name had been Alfred. That didn’t sound right to me. More ethnic, I seemed to recall. “Alfredo?” she ventured. Yes! I’m pretty sure yes, anyway. And that might have been part of the lure—that we’d have not just a gay friend, but one whose first name suggested creamy deliciousness. Not that we personally wanted to get creamily delicious with him, you understand.

Anyway, the reason I’d asked Lynn his name is because something happened a few days ago that was tied to this whole straight-people-craving-gay-mascots thing, which is awful and embarrassing and smacks of bad sitcom plots, but which I’m owning up to it right here and now.

There’s this woman with whom I became acquainted through my job, because she wrote a very engaging book about her work as a physical therapist, and I asked her to write an essay about those experiences for the physical therapy-themed magazine for which I’m a writer/editor. She lives in the DC area. I’m being purposely vague with these details because of the embarrassment referenced above. While it’s unlikely she ever would read this post, and while I’m sure that the few regular readers of this blog who know some of the story already wouldn’t blab to her, you never know who could just happen to stumble upon Lassitude Come Home and expose my heterosexual foolishness in some frighteningly viral way.

The PT—that’s what physical therapists tend to call themselves, although apparently in Delaware in the 1970s it meant “prick tease,” per my loyal reader NY Friend—and I exchanged several friendly emails during the essay-writing process. She did a great job on the piece, for which she received no pay, but it did alert the 90,000-plus members of the American Physical Therapy Association to the fact that she has a book available for sale.

Although the book touches in only a minor way on the author’s sexuality, the fact that she’s gay does come out, if you’ll pardon the expression. And this, of course, intrigued me. It wasn’t the only thing that interested me about the author—I admired her work as a PT, and her ability to write so interestingly and often humorously about it—but there also was that gay-friend itch of mine that longed to be scratched. (An image that perhaps sends a sexually ambiguous message, but you know what I mean.)

Sure, the whole Alfredo thing, all those years ago, had ended with a whimper, not a bang. But that situation had been a three-way with a guy, while this would be one-one-one with a dyke, and … oh my God, enough with the double entrendres! Suffice it to say, I had reasons to think this relationship could work. Both of us write, after all. Our senses of humor jibed well over email. She digs women. Me, too! Et cetera.

So, I proposed that we meet in person. She was game. We met for lunch in Bethesda on one of my Fridays off. But everything was off from the get-go. The conversation was strained from beginning to end. I think we both were trying too hard. She wanted to impress this editor guy who gives good email, and I wanted to impress this PT, book author, and aficionado of same-sex-intercourse. Our jokes fell flat. Every inquiry seemed to yield a brief, inarticulate answer. Our parting “Let’s do this again” rang hollow.

Still, we did do it again. The next time was at a bar off the Maryland Beltway, nearer to where she lives with her partner, who’d become her wife since that lunch meeting in Bethesda. We talked about work, family (they have two kids), her love of swimming and her swim team, my running and my 50-states list. I think we both assumed that alcohol would liven things up and increase the comfort level. It didn’t work. Again, I don’t quite know what I’d expected. Ellen DeGeneres, maybe?

Not surprisingly, there was zero contact between us for a few months after that. But then, a few days ago, I was driving to work, listening to the debut CD by this Australian singer-songwriter named Courtney Barnett. The recording had made a few year’s best lists, so I’d decided to check it out. She can really rock, and her lyrics cleverly embrace life’s mundanities. (The CD’s title says it all: Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit.) There’s one song that made me think of the PT the very first time I heard it, because it’s set at a pool and involves swimming.

Then I read a short feature in Rolling Stone about Courtney Barnett, and learned, among other things, that she’s gay. Nothing in her lyrics had tipped me off, although, as it turned out, I’d missed something. I’m not always quick on the uptake when it comes to song meanings, but the swimming-pool song clearly is about how the singer has an unrequited crush on another person at the pool. Another swimmer who—I realized the next time I listened, driving to work that morning—is also a woman! The song is about a girl-on-girl crush!

This was the revelation I had during my morning commute—that this tune involves both swimming and lesbianism, and that I must, as soon as I got to the office, link the PT to a YouTube video of the song being performed, cut and paste the lyrics, and present it all in an email that would be much funnier than I had been in either of our face-to-face meetings.

With great excitement, I sent the email. Less than 10 minutes later, the PT responded.

“I LOVE IT! (I just posted it on my swim team’s Face book page.) Thanks for making me look cool and hip. And that CD title just makes me laugh.”

There was a bit more to the message, but those were the lines that mattered.

I’d done it! I’d had a genuine bonding moment with a Person of Gayness! I’d even come across, improbably enough, as someone who conversant in what’s “cool and hip”!

She asked me what I’d been up to, but she pointedly did not suggest that we get together.

You can bet that I didn’t bring it up, either, when I responded.

It was perfect.