Three Or More

 

Dad only did it the one time, raise pigs. There were three of them all from the same litter. He brought them home, built a pen, and told us explicitly not to name them. These were not pets. These were or would be hogs. Meat. Not pets. The pigs were money, an investment, not pets like the dogs, the cats, the ponies and horses. Don't get too attached. Think of them like the chickens. None of us much cared for the chickens which were dirty, dumb, work. Think of the pigs like that. The pigs were work. It was Dad of course who eventually named the pigs Curly, Moe, and Larry.

Always hustling, my dad. Always looking not for a way to get over but just to keep on. He worked in a factory. He sold cars in the yard, sold dog feed, heavy wooden picnic tables, dog houses, eventually antiques and junk. Had chickens for awhile and sold eggs. And just the once, three pigs.

"Smarter than dogs," he told us and we -- I -- did not believe him. The pigs would eventually follow him very much like dogs, huge filthy dogs, wherever he went outside. He would talk to them and they would answer. No idea what they found to talk about. Perhaps they discussed mortality, utility, sacrifice, the weather. I wanted nothing to do with the pigs, or Dad's rescued raccoon, or the hunting dogs, or the bloodhounds he had for awhile. I wasn't a dog person. Not an animal person. That was my Dad, likewise my brother, my sister. Animals understood them and they loved the animals. Dad grew up on a farm mostly. He was never without at least a dog. For years he rescued rather sad, often elderly horses. He and my sister loved the horses. He got me an irascible pony once. We did not get along. We did not become pals. Even my mother, a town girl, eventually, briefly had a dog until the beloved Buster got hit on the road. "Never again," she said and meant it. We had a barn so cats just were. 

I don't much feel the need to defend my rejection of domestic animals. It seems to me that there are plenty of people in the world to love a dog. I have friends to this day who will never be without a cat for very long despite the vet bills, the ill tempered harassment in the wee hours, the stains, the stinky food. I like people with children, I like children, I like dogs, generally. I can appreciate the symbiosis without feeling the necessity myself. I am glad of all the good parents I know, all the people devoted to their pets. (Blame the false equivalence on the pet people. I'm not the one talking "fur-babies.") I respect the people willing to devote themselves to animal causes and the people devoted to the care of other living things. I understand the mutual benefit, I've just never felt the need. 

I know Montaigne had a dog. I'd bet Shakespeare was more of a cat person -- though how would we know? Just an instinct, but I've always pictured a cat trailing ink across the desk, hanging out in Shakespeare's rented rooms in London, maybe haunting the wings in The Globe. Blame Robert Lawson, the author of Ben and Me: An Astonishing Life of Ben Franklin and His Good Mouse Amos, Mr. Revere and I (about a horse,) The Fabulous Flight, etc. Very popular children's books in my childhood, popular theme, narrating animals. Still works. People, grown people, love that shit. As an adult I'm not much for talking dogs, or crime-solving cats, but I get it. Animals make humans, actual and fictional more interesting. For me, and for me as a bookseller it's like heterosexual romance, or dystopian science fiction, or gastronomical engineering. I don't begrudge people much. You want to better understand laundry? Study beetles? Buy a book. Enjoy. And I am willing to concede, at least anecdotally that people with children know a love unlike any I will ever experience, that people with pets are, if not generally better than the rest of us, then perhaps at least less likely to be crazy. (Exception noted: the animal hoarders. I think we can all agree that that's just gross. If you can't use your kitchen because: kittens, chicks, dog shit, you are a bad person.) 

Also worth registering that in my experience every relationship involving a parrot is inherently creepy. Yes, birds are funny and parrots are smart (like pigs?) but that is some ugly, aggressive, codependent, imprinting going on right there. The only pets I've encountered that I have actually wished away altogether if not straight to Hell? Two gray parrots who made life miserable for anyone not their human -- the human who happened to own the bookstore where I worked for a time. Made hot, cranky toddlers sound like singing angels, those wretched birds. Messier in every way too. I remember listing used books online and describing "parrot damage." Never again.

Someone asked me what was my best Christmas in retail. I've never hesitated before. 1986. I was managing a little branch store near the Stock Exchange in San Francisco. We were only open during the day because after the Exchange closed and the banks closed an hour later, the whole neighborhood emptied out like there was a daily evacuation order. There were a few bars and restaurants that stayed open later, but generally the place was a ghost town after six. Every year there was an internal debate about extending the bookstore's hours for the holidays. All booksellers are cockeyed optimists. Whatever our individual politics (generally more liberal than not) or religious feeling (?) as a rule we have great hopes of the Christmas Season -- something we have long since learned to stop calling December. Even people who don't buy books buy (bought?) books in December. Think about it. What else is dry, fits in a suitcase, is both more personal and less likely to disappoint at least in theory?  One asks a bookseller what's popular, what Aunt Gertrude might like, what to get a six year old one does not know well and a bookseller will have an answer. Dads like books. Girls like books. That's the way people think (thought?) and who are we, those of us in the trade to dissuade people making such potentially profitable assumptions? 

For any who weren't there or do not choose to remember, the eighties were hideous: the big hair, the big glasses, the leg-warmers and tracksuits, the triumph of bubblegum pop, the VHS revolution, the greed, the Reagans, AIDS. Everything is eventually laundered by nostalgia and I'm sure there are people reading this who will defend Nu Shooz and Murder, She Wrote and aerosol deodorants. There are people somewhere in the world who still love the cave woman novels of Jean M. Auel. As I hope people might have stopped saying by now, you be you. 

What I remember about the eighties generally is by no means all bad. I found a fella, made a home together, got a job I liked, made friends, marched, volunteered, lived a pretty good life in the most beautiful city in America. I also remember a generation dying unnecessarily all around me, fear, prejudice, yuppies. Those were new then; the young urban professionals. Hard now to imagine a time when the world didn't cater to the every whim of young people with money. Back then the country was still unapologetically being run by old white men. Still is, but back then they didn't bother to pretend otherwise, or to much care what the rest of us might think about that, or the damage done. They owned The Shining City on the Hill, the president, Ford Motor Company, manifest destiny. And the yuppies? The yuppies weren't so much the children of those old white men as aspirants to to their money and power. And lots of people -- lots -- thought that was a good thing. Honestly, millions of young people read The Official Preppy Handbook and completely without irony started dressing and thinking like WASPS because that was the way to get ahead; become the power that oppresses you, conform to the dominant culture's rules, adopt the shibboleths  and display the totems of the class that broke your grandpa's union and kept your parents out of the country clubs. For God's sake, there were black yuppies, immigrant yuppies and Jewish yuppies, gays. It was mind-blowing to think that the children of the hippies and the daughters of the failed Equal Rights Amendment all went to work in suits and sneakers and voted Republican after Nixon, but they did. 

And in the bookstore I was managing, the yuppies were my customers. There were still the honest office workers; bank tellers, secretaries, maintenance and construction workers who bought our books and browsed our magazine racks on their lunch hours. Working people buy what they need where rich people browse, and ask for discounts. Still true. Oh, executives from Haliburton might order 500 copies of the latest management manual to help their minions Get to Yes or Un-limit their Power or be more like that ruthless jack-'o-lantern, Jack "Chainsaw" Welch. There was good money in that sort of thing, those corporate indoctrination orders, but not to be counted on. The yuppies were the big news in the eighties. Yuppies spent their own money on ridiculous alcohols and smelly cigars and designer crap and yes, expensive books. Yuppies bought books to display on their glass and chrome coffee-tables. They bought expensive computer books and fine editions and elaborate gardening books for their mothers. They bought Tom Clancy and Judith Krantz and self improvement books and futurist screeds and books about the economic rising of Japan and oh so much. And they paid retail and did not bat an eye. The yuppies were perhaps the last generation who attached status to books, who conspicuously consumed print and read on the train. (And when in their thirties and early forties they finally had children, they all taught their kids that reading was important, like soccer practice and flute lessons; regularly scheduled leisure. Books were an activity! Arrange them by color! Then the internet happened to us all.) 

Weird to think I might miss yuppies even a little bit, isn't it? In the first place they are of course still with us only now they are very much the old white Republicans they strove to be, even the black ones, the Jewish ones, the gays. What I miss about them is the money they spent in bookstores, specially when they were drunk and they all seemed to drink a lot. Thus what I've always described as my favorite retail Christmas, the year before Black Monday, the last real hoorah of yuppie excess, Christmas, 1986. Amazon wasn't even in Bezos' garage then. Computer screens were black with acid green print that burned one's retinas. People Christmas shopped by going to stores. Those were the days!

I was alone that last extended hour after we would normally have been closed. 

The idea of holiday hours was already quaint. It assumed a working population that still had a quitting bell and Christmas bonuses. Working in the Financial District and who our customers were made holiday hours silly, but we did it anyway. I didn't have the heart or the budget to make anyone else stay for that last hour from seven until eight, Christmas Eve. I stayed. I smoked, I'm ashamed to say, and read and I probably started planning post-holiday returns. At the last minute they came, three young male masters of the universe, yuppies to the tips of their black leather lace-ups. Drunk. Happy. Late. They had money and they were ready to spend.

Not exactly wise men in the state they were in and much as they might have fancied themselves kings, they came not bearing gifts but in search of them, last minute, unthinking of the hour. (Later, the whole "just in time" management thing? that had to have been a yuppie. It was a lifestyle; the way they ate and drank, the way they made and spent money, presumably the way they made love.) There were three of them, so let's call them Curly, Moe, and Larry. Moe was their obvious leader, bossy and a little mean. Curly was a little fat and the only one who was anywhere near to being as funny as they all thought they were. Larry was put upon and a little homely and probably the drunkest of the bunch. Moe came into the bookstore because we were the last shop in the neighborhood that was still open. The other two came with. I'd never seen then before and I'd never see them again. They weren't very nice. I was... the help. They kept asking me my name and then forgetting it. They thought it was weirdly hilarious that I was working by myself on Christmas Eve. Moe decided then and there that he wanted a book to give for a present, something nice. Didn't care what really. I went through my usual paces, trying to get some idea of who the book was meant for. A girlfriend? A relative? A boss? Doesn't matter and it didn't much at the time. I made a few suggestions. 

Here's where the magic happened. 

Everything I suggested? Moe said "yes." So I made more suggestions; art books, novels, history. All good. He'd take one of each. Everything Moe got, Curly and Larry had to have it too. Three of everything. (That's how long ago it was, the bookstore had three of nearly everything.) I got bolder. I suggested the most expensive books in the shop and told them that these were the most expensive books in the shop. They actually found this information exhilarating rather than off-putting. If I didn't have three, they would fight over who got to keep the one I had. 

I don't remember what they bought. Doesn't matter now, as I've said it didn't much matter then, at least to them. Expensive. That was what mattered. They actually spent more than a thousand dollars apiece. On books. In 1986. For a lark. A thousand dollars in that little store was a good day. This was a very good day indeed. After probably half an hour, when the boys started running out of steam I called them a cab and helped them load in their purchases. Took awhile. No idea if the books ever made it home with them. No idea if come the morning they ended up giving anyone anything out of all those shopping bags. I didn't even wrap the books! Who knows, who cares? The books were nice. The boys were not. I call them "boys" now because I am old. At the time they may have been older than me. I was pretty young to be managing even a small, satellite bookstore. They certainly behaved like boys, kids with credit cards and no curfew. I must tell you that at the time, I did not feel bad selling those books to those drunk guys. It was exhilarating. One doesn't have much chance to be ruthless in my line of work. I killed it. It was the eighties.

Hogs. Meat. Money. 

My father didn't drink. Always said he knew too many mean drunks, like his brother. One Christmas when he was still working at the car lot, before he took the job at the mill, my father got drunk. Actually, the owner and the other salesmen took him out and got him drunk, on purpose. By the time they brought him home we all crowded agog around Mum in the doorway as they unloaded Dad, our first dishwasher, stuffed animals bigger than his kids, a miniature pool table, lord knows what all. Mother the family economist was not pleased. We were thrilled and probably a little scared. Kept the dishwasher and the miniature pool table as I remember. The owner of the car lot evidently knew a guy. Great price, honest. Nothing but bargains. Never saw Dad drunk again.

I should finish the story of the pigs. As pigs do, they all got to be enormous. My father could clean and butcher game. Don't know that he'd ever butchered a hog. He did not talk about it the day it happened. It was winter, I think. While he was at work and we were at school, Dad arranged with the Amish to come out and kill and butcher the hogs. I remember coming home to find the business largely done. Most of the meat was sold. The Amish took cash, the skins, the offal and the blood. I remember the blood in a big zinc metal tub that it took two men to lift. I'm sure we ate at least some of the meat and none of us any the wiser, except maybe Dad. I did not choose to think much about the meat we ate.

Like I said, Dad never raised pigs again. It was a lot of work and it wasn't cheap. Moreover I don't think he much cared for the killing even though he was an avid hunter and we regularly ate what he shot. He was always quite reverent when he talked about the woods and the animals he killed and brought home. He detested waste, and cruelty, and the disregard of nature. (He could never understand how I could look at a perfectly good dog and not want to know it better or how I'd never learned the names of flowers.) That I suspect was his obvious mistake with the pigs, getting to know them too well. Maybe not. Maybe I'm the one being overly sentimental. I don't know that he saw any contradiction in wanting to understand an animal, to be kind to it, and also intending to eat it. If this was indeed something he discussed with the hogs I will never know. I should think my father too much of a gentleman to worry a pig. If he asked their pardon that last morning I'm sure he did so in such a way as to spare their feelings as much as his. In my father's world view, we are individually responsible for the harm we do, even if the harm seems to us necessary. When he arranged the death of Curly, Moe, and Larry the hogs, he did so in such a way as to make their deaths as quick and efficient as he might. Again, he didn't spare their lives but he tried in his way that they should not suffer unduly. I think he thought being there himself would only make it worse. And yes, maybe he thought to spare himself what he could. I can't think any the less of the man for not wanting to be there when the hogs died. I believe he loved them.

We do rather too little of this, our species, love the things we eat, respect the thing that feeds us. We expect consideration without extending it to other living things. We not only assume the right to eat the world around us but also to be understood to be better than everything we eat. We refuse our own complicity in waste and exploitation, consumption, and are deeply shocked by the very idea of consequences. Not because we are unaware, mind, but because our awareness somehow elevates everything we do. Top o' the food chain. We are not humble, humans, are we? (If humility were natural to us, religions wouldn't need to jaw about it so.) Most obviously, we are maybe too removed now from our food. Not an original thought, I know, but think about the distance we will go to not acknowledge that our chicken was a bird before it was nuggets, that people picked our tomatoes, that gasoline and plastic came from the ground, that if the end of us is indeed nigh it will be a suicide. It is easy to forget what our fathers knew. His life was not much like mine. Rather, I've made mine as unlike his as I could.

Seems I'm just as slow as the rest to know the value of the things I've been given or at what price they've been purchased. (Does that make me a yuppie?)

We also, some of us, move through the world as if every dog should love us, every clerk defer, and every hog be happy to be our ham. And it is not just to the natural world we feel ourselves entitled. Art and culture and literature are things to which we can lay claim so long as we can afford the subscription, the canvas, the rights. As Americans we are taught that we deserve anything for which we are willing to pay good money: Picassos and extra plum sauce and automatic rifles. Everything is be owned. If there's anything we can't have it is because someone must have got it first. Or they're keeping it from us, the bastards. No easy thing then to not be everything we might remember disdaining in others.

Even though it is basically what I've just said, it isn't right to call the yuppies pigs, because it is unkind, and not just to the pigs. That was the thing about the eighties, it made it harder to be kind, as well as hip to be square. Maybe every generation comes of age when it decides it needn't be new  -- or nice -- anymore. As I was coming up everything old was not just new again but it all came back with harder edges, less give. What was the "Reagan revolution" after all but reruns and reaction? What was Ronnie himself but an Eisenhower emptied of character, content, humanity? As a young man I watched indifference to the suffering of others become a winning political strategy, an economic theory of expanding inequality put ruthlessly into practice, the triumph of selfishness as a moral and ethical good. I mean there were always cranks and capitalist fanatics, but who knew they were setting the economic agenda for my adult like? In the eighties American went mean rather than mad, or rather admitted we were always mean, and did it with a smile. Suddenly everything we were and had been led directly, naturally and inevitably to Ronald Reagan, deregulation, dead fags, flag lapel pins, the end of communism, and the barbarism that would culminate in Trump. Hard to be unaffected. Seems I wasn't.

So it is I think that for years I could unselfconsciously describe that last Christmas before Black Monday as my best. Made a lot of unexpected money that night. Also, in a small way, got over on the yuppies, right? Oink. I am no little ashamed of having told that story so often. Maybe make this the last time.

The very next Christmas after Black Monday, we stayed open late again and to even less purpose. Again I was left largely alone. Made no money at all. That last hour open on Christmas Eve exactly one customer came in. Wasn't a customer actually. It was just a guy who came in to get warm. I think he was a bus driver. I remember a uniform. He asked if it was okay to just hang out a little. I said sure, but I'm sure it annoyed me a little. Nobody had a phone on them them. Bookstores did not play music. It was deathly quiet. I smoked. I coughed. He cleared his throat. Finally I told him I had to close because I did. He said thanks and slipped out. I closed out the register, turned out the lights, locked the door and caught my bus home.

Which Christmas was worse, now I think about it. 

So now I have to reconsider my answer, don't I? Also? I had thought that my worst Christmas ever was when I was furloughed during the pandemic. Wasn't sure there would be a bookstore or if they'd have me back. I spent Christmas Eve at home. All day. Didn't talk to anyone. Barely spoke to my husband. Nevertheless we ate well. We were warm, safe. Plenty to read. So maybe I got that wrong too.

Maybe we are no better off than when we do the least harm and take only what we need. I might have learned that at home. Maybe I forgot. Maybe we all do, now and then. The past is dangerous place. Go in thinking you know just where you'll come out again and that isn't necessarily true, is it? Now I wish that I had at least told that bus driver Merry Christmas. Maybe I did. Don't remember. 

The other day I saw a guy in my neighborhood, a guy roughly my age, walking three dogs that I sensed were either not usually his responsibility, or at least that this task was unfamiliar. They were small dogs and at least one of them, a dachshund, looked rather elderly. The walker wasn't being obviously impatient; he wasn't tugging their leashes or yelling at the dogs. He just trailed after them as they roamed the sidewalk. The man did look tired. It was very early in the morning and he was not dressed for other work, or the weather. Typical of Seattle in the summer he was wearing flip-flops and shorts with a heavy hoodie. It was cold out, a little wet. I guess the guy looked like somebody doing somebody else a favor. Not a dog person. I'll say that. What made the scene memorable was that he had one of those blue plastic bags people use to pick up poop and he already had it on his free hand, which he held almost above his head, like he was either unsure of the usual procedure or was trying to remind the dogs of why they were there. 

"How 'bout here?" I heard him ask every time one or more of the dogs stopped to sniff something. "How 'bout here?" They seemed to pay him no mind, the way dogs don't. The last thing I heard him say when they turned my corner and went out of my view was, "I have things to DO." 

Don't we all, brother. I do sympathize. Still not a dog person myself. At least the guy was trying. I admire that. (And that bush in my front yard that the dachshund found so intriguing? That's rosemary. The one next to that is a hydrangea. Trying, see?) 

Hideous Angels

 

“Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.”

-- William Shakespeare, Macbeth,  Act 4 Scene 3

Kids make ugly shit. It's adorable. Seriously, I don't have kids or participate in the raising of anybody else's and yet if I could I would furnish at least one room in my house exclusively with ugly shit kids made: paintings that look like chemical spills, clothespin dragonflies, wonky solar systems, Papier-mâché volcanoes, birdhouses FEMA would condemn, ashtrays that look like turds -- and I don't even smoke anymore! I would enlarge their terrifying animal drawings and make wallpaper. I'd cut windows to a kid's notion of geometry and make a clock with the numbers crowded in one corner. I would have furniture made to look like a four-year-old's ideal of a perfect bed and flat chairs with too many legs. It would be glorious and beautiful and useless and a little terrifying, just like children, just like childhood.

The aesthetics of children before they've reached the age of reason have been studied by wise and learned scholars and there would seem to be a consensus that there is more that is good, or bad in a better way than most of us will ever make again. Once all our houses are square with triangle roofs and we can spell correctly and write without inverting our R and trailing our S we have lost if not so much as we've gained, then at least something wonderful and forever. Parents are wired to find their own children and all their works fascinating. For a brief time this is objectively true.

So appreciating kids' arts & crafts without keeping a kid clothed and fed isn't as crazy as it sounds. Why this stuff can be so aesthetically satisfying to me isn't to do with prodigies or savants. For a long time, at least when I was reading, drawing, or writing, I was "exceptional for my age." That is exactly the kind of accolade out of which one ages naturally. (After a certain age one may hear that phrase again but now for still being able to touch one's toes or remembering the name of the sitting President.) Looking through the stuff of mine that my father saved I was touched that he'd kept so much. I was struck by just how nearly good -- objectively and not for my age -- it all was without actually being at all interesting. Drawings, stories, "book reports," it was none of it unstudied or spontaneous. I could see immediately the books and the shows from which I drew, how hard I'd worked at making everything as much like my models as I could. Admirable but not interesting. Ironically the very thing my father saw in all my art, namely the effort, the thing that made him think it worth preserving, was the very thing that makes nearly none of it now worth keeping. Whereas a little "bird" in colored pencil handed me one day by the six-year-old son of a coworker at my desk, I have secretly kept ever since. I still take it out occasionally to study and admire. No actual bird was ever colored so, had such disproportionately large purple feet, or both eyes on the same side of its tiny head, and nearly no real bird was ever so beautiful.

I went to elementary school so long ago that teachers were actually supplied by the taxpayer with construction paper. Imagine that. Safety scissors -- mother's comfort and artist's bane -- glue pots, pencils, paints, appeared as a matter of course for projects large and small. True, our textbooks were ancient and not of the best. (In the late sixties we were still learning to read from a Dick and Jane dressed in sturdy, Depression era leather shoes and those inelastic wool socks that pooled at the ankle. Might as well have been depicted in ruffs and farthingales.) That said, there was then a abundance in public education the like of which we are unlikely to ever see again; music instruction, art, library books, paper actually to burn, and popsicle sticks enough to reproduce the abbey at Mont-Saint-Michel at third scale - if anyone at Highland Elementary had ever heard of Mont-Saint-Michel which they had not.

We felt bad for the kids who didn't get to go to public school, which happened even then. We understood that their parents were god-struck maniacs without televisions (!) who kept their car radios tuned to the screaming preacher channel, and dressed their girls like Granny in the Tweety Bird cartoons. (Little House on the Prairie, the TV hit, came a little later, in 1974 and made gingham cool in the preteen set.) This was back before John Birchers were packed onto the Supreme Court and suddenly it was okay for my property taxes to pay the tuition at some church-basement Baptist kindergarten. You know, the kind of non-public school where the kiddies learn that Jesus was not a Jew, and America is God's Kingdom. Back then, if you wanted to keep your children down on the farm as it were, you had to pay the preacher's not-so-secret mistress yourself to teach the little ones that only communists read comic books and listened to those colored dance records. The kids in public schools? We were the lucky ones. We got more stuff, including opportunities and even ideas. It's not as if we weren't taught conformity. We were. But it was less draconian, if not subtle.

For example, hand-turkeys. I now think that one of the ways kids unlearn what makes their art interesting and individual is when they are taught to all make the same thing the same way. Some of this is good and necessary. You want your kid to make upper and lower case look like everybody else's upper and lower. You want your kid to sing in tune if possible, and to take turns, and spell. I don't know, but maybe every parent secretly wants their kid to not go the same direction in a dance recital because, come on, isn't that the best? And I should think everybody wants their kid to bring home a hand-turkey in November, but maybe the wise ones want it to look a little weird, no? 

You trace around the fingers of your non-dominant hand with a crayon or a marker. (Back in my day, there was a residual distrust of the sinister, so I'm pretty sure we all had to make our turkeys face right. Lessons on lessons.) Some people would be made to then cut your handprint out and stick the outline on another piece of paper. Maybe just draw over it on the same paper. Different methods, similar results. The outline gave you the shape of the turkey: fingers were feathers, thumb the neck and head, feet added under. The result was then colored, decorated, decked in all the turkey's native glory. If the teacher was uptight the browns had to be brown. Those of a more liberal inclination allowed for not just yellows and reds but purples, pinks, blues -- all of which I would point out are present in reality when the light falls right. 

I remember my own turkey as sadly traditionalist in both its coloration and shape, the kind of thing you would expect in a recognizable hand-turkey, the kind of bird that would please the teacher and not need explanation at home. ("Oh! What a good turkey!") I also remember a few peacocks sneaking into the flock, maybe a couple of dinosaurs. Not everybody stayed inside the lines. I very much did. I was all about being good then. It's a little disappointing to think how much that mattered to me once, but give the kid a break. I suspect he already sensed he was going to disappoint elsewhere someday and not just his spelling. 

We also cut out Pilgrim hats. Historically regrettable, but easy shapes; hat, hatband, buckle. We made flags for anything patriotic, jack-o-lanterns, stars and Santa hats for Christmas. Later we made planets, and I made a papier-mâché triceratops so massive it broke in half getting it into my mother's car for the ride to school. Grim ride. Bad day.

I said above that I would be into decorating a whole room with this sort of thing and I meant it, but I don't know that I would want anything I made in it except maybe the broken dinosaur. That thing was impressive and it was not anatomically correct even before the masking-tape surgery that put its head awkwardly back on. Ambitious, that's what it was, but also sadly mud-colored and boxy. It was made with actual boxes after all. Later it made a lovely blaze on the burn-pile. I remember that. That was exciting. (It was too big to keep in my room if we ever wanted to get to the closet again, and it was sad to see after the accident anyway, badly balanced and always tipping forward on its face. Poor beast. It was time.)

Of all the things I made as a child, the only one that survived in any public way and for many years was one hideous angel. I should mention that we were angel people. In my experience, families are either angel people or star people. Star people allowed for some variation from the straight up five pointed glass star to stars with halos to stars with actual lights. I would include abstract tree-topper families in with the star people simply because that business of diminishing globes ending in a sharp point always suggested a star as the point of departure, at least to me. Yes, the onion roofs on Russian churches and the Kremlin also come to mind, but really, I think those toppers were more to do with Bethlehem's one  famous traffic signal than with inverted icicles or snow or that sort of thing. Maybe I'm wrong. We were angel people. What do I know? 

One year our angel lost her head. Happens. She was old. I think she'd also lost a hand, at least one hand. Glue was applied but she was never right again. With all the confidence of an already "artistic" boy, I determined to make her replacement. Have I mentioned the stunning variety of uses to which we then put the cardboard tubes out of paper-towels and toilet-rolls?!

Rilke said, "every angel is terrifying." Mine was. She was beautiful. This is her story.

Angel hair. Anyone else remember angel hair? It was spun clouds of fiberglass thread. It was pretty and pretty deadly. And real tinsel? Remember that? Tinsel was very thin metal then, "icicles" too, and that stuff would actually cut you and potentially kill your cat and we all used it and we all thought it was just lovely. Asbestos snow. Actual asbestos. Styrofoam was big then too. Don't see a lot of that anymore, which I'm sure is a good thing. For years my Dad got tiny settlement-checks as part of the big asbestosis case. (Factory work not snow inhalation.) One likes to think we are learning, but in my childhood all but the manufacturers were largely unaware of everything that could kill us. People smoked everywhere. We decorated cakes with silver BBs and we ate them and no one knew or much cared what they were made from or that their only flavor was "hard." Pipe-cleaners had made a comeback too even as actual pipes were disappearing. Bristled wires in various fun colors. We used pipe-cleaners for everything. So flexible. Any art supply, any discount store back in the day, there were Styrofoam balls big as your head and small enough they had to be bagged, and every size in such abundance that there were tall wire cages and big bins to keep the stuff from drifting down the aisles. Styrofoam wreaths, Styrofoam Santa, reindeer, trees! We painted it, stuck things into it, we even thought it looked good naked; just Styrofoam "snowballs" piled up like civil war ordinance. 

My angel had angel hair, sort of an up-do with a red ribbon. Red. Christmas. Made perfect sense. Cotton balls would have been a safer choice but that would have looked more colonial than ethereal. She had a bow at her throat too, same red ribbon. It was a motif. (Need I point out that all true Christmas angels are girls, despite so many boy angels named in the text? Weren't quite ready yet for Christmas drag and one needed a full skirt up which to shove the top branch.) Almost goes without saying that her body was a toilet-paper tube, the basic building-block of juvenile American engineering before Lego. Her robes were a plain white paper cone, white paper wings, white pipe-cleaner arms with loop hands folded in prayer. Gold pipe-cleaner halo, of course. Her head was a Styrofoam ball of just slightly too big a size. I painted her face on: arced rather than arched brows, closed eyes represented by rickrack lashes, two dot nose, and a bold red lip to match her ribbons. If there was more of Dolly's Jolene than the evangel about her, that was for the adults to keep to themselves. 

Among the many flaws which escaped my attention her inaugural Christmas, I would note that the difference between treated and untreated Styrofoam -- the former had a flat, glossy surface, the latter did not. Guess which one I put paint on? This meant that the cosmetic details of her mug quickly ate into the surface a bit, giving her a weirdly skeletal look. My model for making my angel was after all not an angel, but the ghosts we'd made in school for Halloween. Thus the inspiration of the decorative ribbons to indicate the change in holiday. Red. Christmas. Not blood. Who said anything about a garotte?! Anyway, I think she had buttons too. Not a ghost. It's a dress. See? Buttons, in the front so you could see them, just like dresses.

Hers was a fragile beauty at the best of times. Her face continued to fall in over time. Bad posture plagued her all her life and she often looked drunk. Presumably the sway of The Holy Spirit rather than the influence of strong spirits. Whatever one puts on top of an actual as opposed to an artificial tree is subject to the bend of the branch. Unlike the commercially produced angels and stars, there really wasn't much thought given to grip or balance. And so her many attempts to end her own life, poor dear. Up she went. Down she came, repeatedly. So many interventions. So maybe she was drunk. Sad certainly. And remember, all the brightest angels fell. 

If you haven't tripped to the fact yet, yes, my angel went onto the top of the tree. It could be argued that perfectly good parents might have thanked their son and even praised his effort without then feeling the need to place this particular project atop the family Christmas tree. Further, having done so once, with the best of intentions in the world they might then have contrived to lose the thing before Christmas rolled around again, no questions asked. No one would fault the parent employing such stratagems to spare the general discomfort of visitors, but no. Until the day in my own adolescence when I could not look at that by then bedraggled and sadly crippled thing again and took her down, my angel stayed. I think I tried to throw her away. (Teenagers are beastly.) Rescued from the trash, she lived on some time in semi-retirement on a lower branch and then on an end-table until one night she was finally done away with in the dark of night, much to my parents' grief and fury. Grief and fury were kind of the go-to response to me in my teens. I get it. It would be years before I understood the value of what I had discarded in embarrassment. 

As precious as all this may sound, you should know that ours was never a family immune to sarcasm or quick to let go of an inside joke. You made a funny looking ashtray at summer camp, we laughed at the ashtray and kept it forever. Didn't mean such objects were unloved. Quite the contrary. Every lopsided pin-cushion, every wonky clay mug, if one of us made a thing, the thing stayed even when we laughed at it, because we laughed at nearly everything. They kept my angel because they loved her, faults and all. Hideous as she actually was, with all the jokes about angels working the corner and walking the stroll and all looking better in the dark, she was loved for who she was and not just because, so to speak, she came home on my arm. 

Our house was nearly as full of strays as the yard and the barn. Kids, old people, animals, junk, none of us, none of them, none of it need be perfect to be welcome. Useless and unlovely were never reasons to not be sat right out front where everybody could see. Animate and not, it was all of it life and that was and is never less than messy. Some dogs can only run sideways. Some old friends lose the thread or fart when they walk. Some chairs tip. Some angels are ugly. If it wasn't funny you'd cry, wouldn't you?  Cry if you have to. There's a lot of yard if you need privacy and room to walk in. Look around you though. Have you ever seen the like? That cat is not right. The feet on that baby, she's going to be a runner! Just look at Aunt Ruth, will you. New glasses make her eyes the size of pie-plates. If Uncle Buster's pants rode up any higher that belt would be a necktie. Red's a funny bastard, ain't he? 

See that angel? Brad made it! What do you think of her bowtie?! He don't like it anymore but I think she looks great. Riding a little low on her left side now, but she's hanging on.

See that angel?

It is in the nature of angels to be largely unseen. Every actual appearance is presumably intended to startle. There is some justice then in having made and unmade an angel better loved than looking. Chesterton said somewhere that angels could fly because they took themselves so lightly. Never meant to linger, but then neither is childhood, neither are we. 

In Defense of 7-Up Salad

 

7-Up salad is real good. 

Really, that should be enough for you people, that the fat guy endorsed it, but I understand your hesitation. It's true that nothing served at the Christmas dinners of my childhood would fit any recognized definition of that word "salad." (From the Old French salade ((14c.)) "raw herbs cut up and variously dressed," deriving from the Latin sal for salt -- so, no.) These were sweet salads we ate -- though not as desserts -- and they all start with flavored gelatin: lime, orange, yellow, red. The worst ones, the ones people remember with a shiver, had shredded carrots in them, or worse, canned peas. (I still remember putting my first foot wrong at my first bourgeois dinner party when I referred to the elaborate aspic dish as a "jello salad." The hostess, she was not amused.) The good jello salads, the best ones were layered: fruited jello, then cream cheese or "whipped topping," nuts or candied orange rind, some even had cottage cheese. The 7-Up salad was the queen among peasants: lime or lemon jello made with soda pop instead of water, mixed with crushed pineapple, then a layer of something (pistachio pudding mix?) mixed with whipped cream (that sounds wrong,) crowned by layer of cream cheese mixed with the pineapple juice and sprinkled with chopped walnuts. Kinda what I remember anyway. Something like that. I don't know the actual recipe. So sue me. It's been years.

If you didn't grow up eating jello salads that may not sound good to you. It is, but nobody's going to make you eat it. I don't think people should be made to eat anything after the age of twelve. I also think you should eat what's put in front of you or not eat at all. Old school, as they say. I have for example been to a number of what I'd call hippy dinners. Again, you may not be familiar so I'll explain. This sort of thing can put one right off one's brown rice but these were meals prepared by very evolved persons who evidently felt salt was somehow a tool of the oppressor and a spice rack a sure sign of selling out to The Man. As unlikely as it may seem now, there was a time when nearly all my friends seemed to have either braids or a mustache or braids and a mustache, men and women. Even then I drew the line at braided mustaches. They washed but did not peel their carrots. "You lose all the vitamins, man," quoth one such committed soul. They were also obsessed with lentils, the hippies. In a world full of delicious legumes this reliance on just that one humble brown bean always seemed to me punishing. Lentils in a bowl, lentils on rice, and most to be dreaded, the lightly seasoned cold lentil salad. These people never seemed to have heard of a lemon, let alone crumbled feta. Long before it became a widely accepted if still much mistaken practice, hippies thought kale should be chewed raw. And chewed. And chewed. For some, mastication for its own sake would seem to have been both a penance and a pleasure. Inexplicable. Nevertheless if even that sad dish of tepid lentils was laid before me, I et 'em. As my mother would doubtless say, "You should've left before their suppertime." 

Eating other people's food was frowned upon when I was a child. This was not xenophobic. Other people where I grew up were still largely the same ethnically uninteresting people as one's relatives. No, the issue wasn't that other people made odd meals but rather that it was impolite to linger while visiting and in so doing reduce the stock of available vitals for folks who may not have enough. Get it? Kids of course cannot tell time until they turn twenty-one so I did eat at other family's tables. The only unfamiliarity I remember was the shocking idea that other people's mothers could not cook. Not that they didn't, mind you, but some simply weren't very good at it. Once bitten twice shy you'd think, wouldn't you? Remember though, couldn't tell time, specially on long summer days so yes, I ate unbuttered corn on the cob more than once (barbarous) and mashed potatoes made without milk (thoughtless) and green tomatoes neither breaded nor fried in deep grease (some people are animals!) Perhaps the most shocking thing I ever saw growing up wasn't the drawer of sex toys a friend from a deeply religious family once showed me in his parents' bedroom, but watching someone's mother actually weighing out each "portion" appropriate to each diner according to age and size. She actually trimmed the chop to the correct children's size for a nine year old. She subtracted peas until she had the measure she intended. She used an actual kitchen scale. No lie. Science. I could not have been more horrified if we had been served my friend's little brother roasted. Presumably she would have been careful to trim the fat. "A nice, juicy baby arm but just to the elbow for you, little man." I of course could not tell my mother this story for years as her only response would have been to tell me I shouldn't have been there at that hour, or in the woman's kitchen when she was trying to make a meal. When I did finally tell Mum about that lady's kitchen scale, my mother thought a minute and then said, "Well now, maybe she had the right idea. None of them was fat." I waited out the pause before she added, "Them poor kids." 

The working class corollary to not being caught at other people's supper time was of course to feed any and everyone within the sound of my mother's voice. You could hide but she'd find you. Telling her you weren't hungry was like telling her your parents were too poor to feed you or you had undiagnosed childhood leukemia.  "Are you sick, honey? I could make you some soup." I have seen the woman all but wrestle grown men out of their moving pick-ups in order to feed them whether they wanted to eat or not. Food is love, in case you missed the memo. Don't know how many times people came to our table unannounced, but no one ever left hungry. Money was often tight in my father's house and my mother was not above pretending she'd never intended to eat that delicious pork chop herself, that she'd "tasted too much" as she cooked and was already full. Also? She would not hesitate to snatch one of her own children back into the kitchen and tell him or her that for tonight, they did not like roast beef and she'd made them extra mashed potatoes and just eat what you got and do not say a word, you hear? There was always good bread and butter if you were still hungry. Eat that. 

Every family has just the one agreed-upon potato salad person (and if you disagree not only are you probably wrong, you will clearly never be that person so give it up. So you saw this new recipe in a magazine, did you? Well, you take that right back to the car. Nobody wants to eat that mess, baby.) Likewise there was always the woman who did Christmas dinner -- and Thanksgiving usually. Just the way it worked. It wasn't fair. Nobody voted. I'm sure there were good reasons, but usually, whoever she was, she was the best cook. Nobody would say such a thing out loud, but you knew. Why? Well, other people might have bigger dining rooms for instance or a newer stove or an actual bar in the family room, and yet every year everybody came to eat in the same little house, half of them on TV trays in the living room and all the kids in the kitchen. In my family this woman was my mother. I was glad of that even if her sister-in-law wasn't happy or an aunt complained. (Nobody cares about your nice new china "going to waste." Your turkey's dry and that green bean casserole is disgusting whatever you serve it in so go cry in your beer. Your third beer, by the way. People noticed.) My grandmothers were good cooks. My mother is a good cook. My sister and my sister-in-law are both good cooks. So's my husband. I've been lucky. Mum made Thanksgiving and Christmas for years because objectively she made the best Thanksgiving and Christmas. Simple as that. People helped or they didn't. Other people brought dishes we either ate or did not. Every year my mother made the family holiday meal, even when she was cleaning other people's houses or college dorm rooms, even when she was nursing old people, or so exhausted she cried mashing the potatoes (whipped actually, using an electric  hand-mixer, with real milk, salt, pepper, and enough real butter to grease a runway -- exactly as one is supposed to do. (There are only three excuses for lumpy mashed potatoes: 1) it is 1848 and no one has electricity yet, 2) there is an actual gun to your head, or 3) you are in some fancy, post-modern steakhouse preoccupied with some inauthentic idea of  rusticality, in which case both you and the fancy-pants chef are probably douches.) My grandmas cooked the holiday meals until they didn't anymore and my mother did. My sister-in-law now makes my mother's Christmas dinner. My sister-in-law was for many years a cook and a baker in good restaurants. My brother's a lucky man too.  Anyone who cooks Christmas dinner for an extended family is a hero.

For years my husband cooked a full Thanksgiving dinner for a whole crew of mostly gay men, then a few, then a couple, and then just us. Year before last we actually ordered from a very fancy joint and it was just shit, and really expensive shit at that. I wrote a stern email -- and I sent it, 'cause I can be a hard-ass like that. Christmas was usually less of a thing for us. He was raised Jehovah's Witness, or as he's called it before, The Only Black Church with Bad Music, and the Witnesses don't do Christmas. He also worked in the USPS for decades, specifically in facilities processing packages, and I work in retail. That sort of thing can wear down the good cheer of even the jolliest of old elves. Christmas at our house tends to be quiet by choice.

My husband's full Thanksgiving menu ran as follows:

Roasted turkey, oyster stuffing, giblet-gravy, homemade mac & cheese (if you are white, please consult a black person,) greens with ham-hocks, sweet potato casserole (no marshmallows because we aren't those people,) dinner rolls from scratch, canned cranberry sauce 'cause it turns out we missed it, and sweet potato pie. 

And when the cooking and the eating were done, please enjoy a rum and Coke, and yes, even if you had wine at dinner. (Also? Buy the good liquor, people. What are we, teenagers?! My late friend Peter told me once that if you plan to drink other than alone, when in a liquor store it should hurt a little when you get to the cash register or you are doing it wrong.)

After a meal like that, after decades of meals like that, I can't say I much missed the 7-Up salad. The year I moved in with my beloved was also the last year I spent Christmas with my family. He is my family now. Took a good twenty five years for everybody else to catch up with us. It takes the time it takes, children. I'm pretty sure that at least once after that first Christmas we could call our own because we had to, my mother made 7-Up salad for me when I visited. Haven't had it since. Like so many warmly remembered things, those cold salads might not have the same charm I remember. Bought a tub of that "whipped topping" we all loved back in the day, and not just for the re-useable plastic container. Tasted the stuff on some fresh strawberries. Didn't care for it at all. Kept the container though. Maybe that makes this simpler. I know that 7-Up salad was good, whether I might eat it now or not.

Lots of things like that: comic books, The Wonderful World of Disney, county fairs, roller coasters, Republican neighbors, banana bikes on hot asphalt. Doesn't mean those things altogether ceased to be good or that other people don't enjoy them still. Really what's changed is me. My palette, my appreciation of hot weather and cold weather, my tolerance for company and crowds, what I want for Christmas, that's what is different now. Reminded of this I find I am not unmoved by the inexorable grinding of time. Can't regret it. Does no good. Time's like teeth, as you get older you just get more grateful for what you still have. Simply put, I do not feel I have the time to spend regretting or recreating my childhood. What was good I try to remember. What wasn't I try to forget. 7-Up salad was good. End of story.

I still love Christmas, still watch the same movies, listen to all the music, reread the great stories. That is the best thing about art. Unlike us, unlike food and fashion and our ever more fragile Republic, art endures. Dickens' Carol can be counted upon. Marilyn Horne singing O Come, All Ye Faithful with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Johnny Mathis in a red sweater singing anything, Alastair Sim, Rankin/Bass, The Grinch, these are all things one need not love because of what they were to us once, though we do, I do, but because they are still good of themselves, like my husband's gravy. All but the gravy will outlast me (blame the gravy) and that is a very great good indeed. That is why a good book is even better than a good dinner. Doesn't mean one shouldn't have both. Try to anyway. Try the aspic. And try the jello salads. (Not the one with the carrot shavings or the canned peas. That shit is nasty.) 

Un-Churched

 

I could begin with an anecdote about some lovely old Methodist ladies I knew growing up. It's true, I knew 'em and they were nice -- mostly. Likewise the Presbyterians, the Lutherans, the Catholics, the Episcopalians, and a few of the Baptists. The Church of Christ were pretty quiet back in the day but about as close as we came to charismatics. That was pretty much the Sunday menu in my hometown. There were options though. There were at least three different Methodist scrums in the area and two Presbyterian, one rich and one poor, likewise the "nice" Baptists and the ones with the roadside sign on a wheeled trailer. There was certainly nothing new in the way of church then; no big-box mega-dudes, no non-denominational services outside of a Kiwanis meeting. Evangelists were on the Sunday morning tv or in tents. Most people you were likely to know were affiliated, however lax in attendance. And if you were new to them, people asked. Not if but where you went. If they knew your grandma they didn't have to ask. If you got the denomination you could pretty much guess the congregation by either the person's shoes or a rough idea of their address. Hilariously, "mixed marriages" tended to be described as such for pairing unalike Protestants, i.e. of different denominations, or even congregations. Catholics married Catholics, so far as you could tell. There might have been a Christian Science reading room somewhere. Never went in. Amish sold us our eggs and cheese. Mormons were as exotic as Marduk -- or atheists. Of Jews I knew not a one until high school.

I might also describe Bible Summer Camp as I went to more than one, or I might write about the night I answered an altar-call during a revival. I was probably twelve at the time, eleven or twelve. I could talk a bit about helping the Gideons hand out New Testaments to unsuspecting Cub Scouts, or describe the house and yard in town completely covered in Biblical quotes on hand-lettered wooden signs, or try to reconstruct my treasured conversations with a Presbyterian minister who was a lovely man, a history buff, and the father of a friend. (We talked about Churchill mostly, not God.)

When I think about it, and I do still think about it, my time amidst the Christians was by and large not an unhappy experience and I suppose I must say now that I still count Christians, active Christians among my oldest friends. So far as I can say, religious faith is for me no bar to friendship and affection. One can be as I am and still love some of God's people. 

The problem here is how to get in without making a scene. Holidays are best, but Easter isn't good. Too high, too holy, too near the cross. It ain't just chocolate bunnies and egg hunts. I almost hate to say it, but Christmas is about the only way to do this without undue fuss, so with apologies to the churched and the unfaithful equally for going to Bethlehem maybe one time too many, Christmas it is.

Nobody's made to feel funny at Christmas Eve Mass. As I understand it, this was often the one night, or one of two that Father saw one's actual father in church. Same in my grandmother's congregation at Blacktown Balm Methodist, membership more than one hundred, attendance more usually fewer than fifty. But come the Christmas Eve pageant and farmers nobody'd seen outside the feed-store or the auction-barn cleaned their boots and put on a starched white shirt. Oh, there were men who went every week, mind. Retired fellows, lonely, men of a specially pious nature, coupled mostly but a few single, some even of a marriageable age. We'll get back to the last directly, but for now it's worth mentioning just how a rare a single man was at church. Considering the to-do that was made about them, it's clear why the shy ones might have avoided being regularly on the Sunday rolls. Come Christmas week though and you'd have thought church was as popular as a dog-race or a dice-game. Christmas, everybody's welcome. Put it another way, come Christmas there's nearly no way to put anyone out.

Christmas pageants proper have had their day in American literature and deservedly so. Who doesn't feel for the kid who has to be a sheep? Shepherds in bathrobes, towels tied on their heads, three kings in paper beards, angels in wire-hanger-wings? A real baby in the manger sounds better than it ever proves to be and Sunday school classes aren't generally known for their production values, but there is certain magic to any dress-up involving little ones, just as there is real charm in children's voices raised imperfectly in familiar song. And then there is the text:

"And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed..."

 Great lead. Good stuff.

In my time I have been to Christmas services, not counting straight-up concerts, in probably two dozen different churches of various denominations and in at least four states. It's true that I haven't set foot in a church save for funerals for a decade or more, but there was a time when I made a point to wander into one church and another, famous and not, and I counted myself specially lucky if I hit a holiday service; fewer questions and reliably better music in my experience. Generally I'm a Gospel fan but not much for hymns and nothing is so likely to make me pray for death as the feeble wheeze of contemporary "praise songs." (If Gospel is greens, think unsalted kale chips.) Christmas music I love.

Yes to the secular -- the novelty numbers excepted -- but much as I love my chestnuts roasted on an open fire and my sleigh-bells ringing, I also love sacred music and the Christmas calendar. Sing-along Messiahs have rather ruined some of the fun, but generally everything is better in Christmas robes. Choral glories, boy soloists, women's choirs, pipe organs, here a Gay Men's Chorus and there a full orchestra & Handel or Vaughn Williams, and I am made happy. Not a snob. I also love kids at the railing trying to keep time with the piano and an unsuspected Irish tenor in the back pew belting gesu bambino over the congregants cowed heads. Sacred music of nearly every stripe is better somehow in a crowd. There is a freedom in numbers, a sense of occasion and anonymity that loosens inhibitions. A crowd can communicate and amplify joy as well as drown out the sharp sopranos. 

This would be why I've avoided Easter here, as the solemnity of The Passion quite rightly colors even the most innocent, most sincere exuberance in The Resurrection. Church Easter is adult. Christmas is simpler. 

So here's my thought. If you are unchurched, like me and or an atheist or LGBTQ+ or in any other way -- like me -- outside of Christianity, consider attending a Christmas or a Christmas Eve service. Depending on the size of the congregation, and the location, no one or nearly no one will question your presence there. And if they do, for the most part all you need to do is not explain yourself over-much. Say you're just glad to be there. Tell whoever is asking how much you appreciate the atmosphere, compliment the pastor or the priest, wish every one well and a Merry Christmas. Worse comes to worst, all they can do is ask you to leave, but I bet they won't -- not at Christmas. 

Now, why would you want to do any such thing as go to church at all let alone Christmas Week? Because we all of us need to understand something. We need to know, to be reminded what it is to be safe in church. That's it. Just that. One cannot know from just the one visit what it is that makes someone we either do not know or the people who may choose not to know us go to church. We may remember church fondly or not, may have once been a part of rather than apart from the religion around us. We may think we understand what other people see in it. May not have a clue. For some of us even crossing that threshold may be braver than we are prepared to be or it may be something we have vowed to never do again. We may have tried entirely too hard for too long to either conform or to understand and make others understand why we cannot. One may have been tested too much, lost too much, or we may simply not much care. I get any and all of that. Frankly I am weary of trying to understand the people who do not try to understand me. Too much of my life has been wasted on the extension of sympathy to those who are overtly hostile to my happiness and well-being or who would deny my very existence. My general rule nowadays is, sadly, fuck 'em. But to be and to feel safe in a place that does not really welcome you is powerful. It isn't about them.

Doesn't much matter where, to listen to music together is powerful. To listen to poetry together is powerful. To be in community is human. Sometimes it is good to be in someone else's. But specifically to be with other people who do not know us as we know ourselves, who would reject us, who may have hurt us, and to be in that moment with them anonymously but without dishonesty can be liberating. To find them as near to their best as you are likely to get and to see them happy and even happy to see you, and then to go back after into your own life unharmed re-establishes the possibility of safety elsewhere. I could tell you that this is a chance to appreciate your common humanity but that's as maybe. If you grew up in anything like the same America I did and you go to church at Christmas time, you may find you will have a good time, and you may also find as I did that you need never spare these people another anxious thought. You may disagree. 

Christians can still hurt you. Some of them, in some places the majority of them intend to. Just today they have undone fifty years of established precedent and reverted to an interpretation of the law and of the nation that refutes the autonomy of women's bodies. A sitting Supreme Court Justice in 2022, a black man, felt empowered to suggest that states have the right to go even further backwards and undo my marriage, deny access to contraception, and restore sodomy laws. Privacy is not recognized in the Constitution these people read. The enemies of progress, of science, of the separation of church and state, the enemies of federalism and of secularism won today and they did it if not in the name of Christianity then in defense of their personal religious beliefs and at the expense of reason, compassion, and the majority opinion in this country. The only rights that matter to these Justices are the right to make money and the right to impose their vicious, thoughtless, ugly religion upon the faithful and the heathen alike. The angrily, proudly churched, if not The Church, won, and we are reminded again that we are all of us at the mercy of their wrathful, rigid, and angry little god.

I can't say that I've lived through worse, though I am old enough to have lived through Bowers vs Hardwick in 1986, which said I was not safe in my own home from being prosecuted for having sex with another man, but I also lived through Lawrence vs Texas in 1996 which overturned that ruling. 

Personally I have survived the junior high school teacher who told me that "people like that" meaning people like me killed themselves to spare their families shame. I've survived the churches that told my friends I was satanic and told parents that their gay children are abominations. I survived the bullies who put me in a trash can and rolled me down a hall, who regularly shoved me into lockers and called me a faggot and once drove my bike off the street and into a metal fence. I survived the gang of kids who threatened to throw me off of the Tenth Street Bridge for being gay and "against god."

I saw friends get secret abortions and others struggle to escape their abusive homes, churches, parents, partners. I've seen the damage done by the churched at every level of our civil society and I've been told, time and again that the fault was mine for not trying harder to understand why they hate me and wish my friends dead so as to save imaginary innocents.

For every Christian I've seen do a good deed from faith, I've seen movements rise from those same churches intent to do me harm, to deny my rights as a citizen, to control and oppress women, to expel the exile and the refugee, to laud the rich and reward the greedy and to perpetuate racism, violence, and ignorance. For every kindness that came from faith, I've seen the same pieties warp, and cripple, and confine. I would today be done with the lot. I would be grateful to escape for good and all the frame in which this hateful, hypocritical mob will insist that I see my own country, my place.

 So why on earth should I be thinking about Christmas? Because I am trying to cede these people as little of my country, my history, and my own autonomy as possible. I don't need to be told again that not all Christians are this or that many Christians are that and that I mustn't judge these because of what those do. I know all this. I no more need my Christian friends to justify their faith to me than I still feel the need to talk any of them out of it. Believe just as you like. Talk about it or don't. Apologize or defend or argue just as you feel the need. I am not your enemy. See to your own house. Maybe don't argue the prejudices in my atheism or try to dissuade me of my anger or calm my outrage and you'll have more time to fight your fellow Christians for the truth as you see it of Christ Jesus. Maybe you can wrestle the Cross from those who use it as a bludgeon. Maybe not. Not my fight.

Once when I was in college I went to a mass at a Russian Orthodox church. Their Christmas falls on a different day and I didn't go knowing this but instead just followed a crowd into a service. I was dressed okay. No intention of causing offense. Not there to mock but to watch. It was all very moving and beautiful. The music was simple and wonderful. Only time I remember priests singing well. It smelled wonderful, everything glittered and shone. Everyone was incredibly nice to the boy who only spoke English.

Years later, in San Francisco I went one Sunday to Mass at a famous Mission church. It wasn't Christmas time, but not long after and there was still something festive in the decorations and the atmosphere. I heard Mass in Spanish for the first and only time, which frankly made it sound lovely, and heard contemporary church music which was just as disappointing in Spanish as in English. Everybody was nice.

I went once with my Grandmother to a Christmas service at her church long after I knew I had no need of it nor any church of my own. The service was much as I remembered it. The minister was shockingly a woman and more shocking than that, clearly of my own tribe, though no one would say so. Kids still sang at the railing. It was very much as it had always been. I felt fine while I was there and grateful when it was over, just as I remembered. I saw at least one single man there still of a marriageable age, not coupled, with what appeared to be his parents. He made rather a point of not making eye contact with me and I felt for him.

Again, I mention these examples not to reassure any one of us that we are really welcome there. I do not believe that we are, not as we are, even if you might believe as I no longer do. You may feel differently. You may know better. I only want to share my own experience and to suggest what I learned which is this: not only did the roof not fall in, and I did not catch fire but I found to my surprise that I could enjoy being there as myself and be unchanged in both my convictions and my person. I was safe even there just as I am. I could be touched and untouched, in their company but not of it. I could appreciate the occasion, the music, and even the company and then walk away. That is what I learned -- finally -- in church.

Maybe it would have been different on any common Sunday. I might have heard a sermon again on my sinful nature. I might hear another homily defending unironically the suppression of birth control and abortion as a holy mission to save lives. I might be asked why I was there with the same suspicion of heresy that forbade me from entering a beautiful little wooden church in Orange County, California. All of those experiences I have also had, and today they feel far more representative of the churched than my more pleasant memories of Christmas Eves past. Both I know are true. 

I would like to say that the churched have no power over me but that is not true. The truth confirmed again today is that they maintain a power disproportionate to their numbers and their right. It is a power I am confident that they plan to exercise again. They must be resisted. They are wrong in fact and in law. They hate me, and probably you too if you are reading this. They will shake your hand and then cut it off. I am reminded today just how conditional is their much vaunted love.  

I want nothing more to do with them, just as they have repeatedly shown they want nothing from me save my obedience or failing that, my nonexistence. Today I wish not one of them well, these churched and churlish bigots. Not one. More than ever I wish them and all their works, their churches and little god gone. Allow me my anger. Unlike those six pious liars I can and will do no one harm for the sake of my personal feelings. Again unlike them I will not pretend to neutrality. I cannot forgive them. Remember? I am not a Christian. I am not obliged. 

Maybe by Christmas I will want to sing again rather than scream. Maybe by then I will again feel the urge to wander into a church. Maybe not. Maybe by then I will feel strong enough to walk among the churched and feel safe within myself and among them. Maybe not. They are again doing their level best to make me unwelcome. Should I not judge them by their deeds? Ought I to take them at their word?

Perhaps they have finally taught me how to hate. Wouldn't that be a pity? Come Christmas we'll see.

Remembering a Boss

Richard Labonte

We were asked to contribute 100 to 150 words to a memorial for Richard Labonte, the man who hired me to manage A Different Light Bookstore in West Hollywood years ago. I was suggested as a possible contributor by a mutual friend. The job and the bookstore are now long gone and Richard had long since retired back to Canada. Other than irregular communication on social media, I hadn't seen the man for twenty-five years. He had announced his diagnosis in February and then in what seemed a very short time thereafter I read of his death. 

Another death nearer to home intervened and I neglected to write anything about Richard until I was reminded of the deadline. Turns out I don't know what one hundred words looks like. I sent something off in an email as quickly as I could and heard back the following day from the editor, who had very kindly shaped what I'd written into something of a serviceable length. (Not the first time an editor proved helpful. That of itself is something of a tribute to Richard's memory as it was as an editor of countless LGBTQ+ books that he may well be best remembered.)  

Now that's done, I thought I might share what I'd written without the necessary constraints of the published memorial. I would add the caveat that my acquaintance with the great man was professional rather than personal and as noted, brief. Once I was hired to manage the West Hollywood store, Richard returned to his other responsibilities in San Francisco. We spoke regularly on the phone, though it was just as likely that I would speak with his business partner Norman, himself busy at the branch in New York. Truth is that I'd never had a manager's title in a bookstore where I was left so much alone. I saw either man only when business brought them to the door, though this happened more than one might think. They both still had deep roots in the Southern California gay community. In addition to their guidance, and Richard's advice in particular, I was very lucky to have joined a well established and very professional crew at that bookstore. 

I was less lucky in my timing. It was a difficult period for independent bookstores -- but then when is it not? I've been a bookseller for more than thirty-five years and it has always been so. In the nineties we were still most worried about the chain bookstores, but the internet was already starting to undermine the bricks and mortar business model. It was getting particularly hard for smaller, specialty shops. When I started there were enough women's bookstores to have their own review. LBGTQ+ shops were open then on either coast and there were more than a few in-between. The anonymity of ordering online would undo nearly all of this.

I was only in at the end. It wasn't easy. I am grateful though to have been there at all. For that opportunity I have to thank Richard LaBonte. Here then is more than I wrote or would say anywhere but here.

Gallantry isn't a very common adjective in the book trade, or anywhere nowadays come to that. It has the musty smell of a page from Walter Scott. The word is to do with gentle manners and good graces, but it has a martial tune; to be described so one must be not just polite but brave. I can't think of a better for my old boss.

He hired me largely on the recommendation of mutual friends. I think I must have looked pretty good on paper. I had some management experience, knew books and bookstores, but I was still young and Richard had no reason to know me from Adam. I knew something of him of course: writer, bookseller, award-winning editor, already something of an éminence grise. (Now I think of it, he was younger then than I am now. Sobering thought.) My friend B. had made me aware of the job opening and it was his enthusiasm and his letter of recommendation that carried me there. The rest was up to me. As it turned out, I very much wanted the job on offer, very much wanted to work at A Different Light Bookstore. 

Almost every independent bookstore will talk a good community game at some point, even if the only community being served is, say, Historical Romance fans in the greater Loveland suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio. (Those non-Historical Romance readers in Mariemont don't know what they are missing, and frankly they can go suck eggs!) Community is born of  affinity, but sometimes it is necessity that makes us. Richard was one of the people who made A Different Light. There was a growing need for access to our literature, our art, our voices, to each other, and for safe and sober places to find ourselves and one another. A Different Light didn't come from the community, it helped to make that community just as it was intended it would, and the bookstore helped to sustain our community for three decades. Richard and his partners, their employees, their customers did that. How could I not want to be part of that?

It seemed the decision would be Richard's to make. The interview turned out to be mostly lunch, the first of many. I did my best to be charming. I don't know that I was, but I tried. Richard ate his lunch. I wouldn't say he was immune to charm, but he must have been used to it by then. He'd seen much brighter lights than mine, met every LGBTQ+ writer alive and had doubtlessly dealt with many real dazzlers for many years. As I remember it, I was sweaty in the Southern California heat, breathless from nervously chain-smoking all morning, and more than a little intimidated. Richard was quiet, even when he did speak, which wasn't much. In fact he seemed quite shy. He smiled. He squinted. He listened. We ate. I talked too loud, and too much, about too many things. He paid for lunch. We walked back to the bookstore and he shook my damp hand. A day or two later he hired anyway.  

That job was rather a leap for me and right into deeper waters than I knew. The company, like so many other independent and specialty bookstores at the time was not in a great place, or rather it was in three great places: West Hollywood, San Francisco, and New York, and that may have been at least one too many. The rents must have been increasingly prohibitive. Bookstores have seldom made anyone rich, even or particularly the owners. Still, it's been a living. Times were changing. By the late nineties LGBTQ+ books could be had from nearly any mainstream book retailer. The internet was already starting to let people buy books anonymously. Not even your postal carrier had to know you were reading books about, well... us. Of course A Different Light, in all it's incarnations was never just a bookstore. Community center, news vendor, host and town-crier for community events, the welcome calm between bars and dance clubs, the place served more purposes than common commerce.  I was reminded of this every day. (Why were we hosting an event for a ventriloquist? Did we not anticipate complaints from half our patrons when we agreed to the art show featuring paintings of big rainbow-colored penises? Do we want to stay open after hours so a porn company can film a scene involving Billy Dolls coming to life at night and, well, fucking?) I quickly learned that managing a bookstore that was so much more than a bookstore to so many, on and off the payroll was complicated. Richard was one of the people to remind me, more gently than most, of this fact -- and no, he didn't think we should let them film a porno in the store, even for an impressive fee, thanks. 

I don't think I've ever worked for anyone less likely to fire people, return an unsold book, or concern themselves about the dusting. Every manager has his or her or their darlings, staff and stock. Richard seemed to find very little unforgivable in either. Perhaps he was a different person in Silver Lake, where the first store had been, or in San Francisco where he spent more time when I worked for him. Don't know. It is important to say here that even in the atmosphere of mutual respect and support which he had done so much to cultivate, and even with the aging back-stock of self-published zines and more marginal titles from increasingly obscure sources, he was not a sentimentalist. His belief in the potential contributions of everyone to the greater good, his insistence on supporting and serving the community was completely sincere. He could also read numbers. When the time came, as it came more and more often during my tenure to let someone or something go, he never shirked. When there was anything particularly unpleasant that needed doing, he invariably offered to do it himself. I will admit that sometimes I let him.

First of many lessons from Richard? Trust that you can do what's asked of you. Having his trust and advice made a great difference, but he allowed people to do their work. Also? Everything worth doing is collaborative, one way or another. Maybe that's the same lesson. Our working relationship wasn't that long -- I've worked in the bookstore where I am now for nearly twenty years, and worked in my first for more than a dozen -- but it would take more space than I have to detail everything he taught me in that time. More than anything he was an example to anyone and everyone who came within his influence on how to be decent. He was a perfect example of why kindness wasn't a weakness, that one needn't be loud to be heard, that honesty should never preclude compassion. More than once it only occurred to me after we'd hung up the phone that I'd just had a sound thumping -- and deserved it. We never had anything between us that could be called an argument, let alone a fight.

He was a gallant man. I suspect the word would amuse more than please him. He had no pretentions, at least none that I ever saw. He said more with a glance and a shrug than anyone I ever met. He would look away, brush up his beard with his fingers, and listen always before he spoke. I learned that what he said mattered, but you had to get close to hear it. Always worth it. He was an entirely reliable wit, in his quiet way. About a famously difficult local author he once told me I should remember how hard it must be for this person to wake up every day "and not be an enfant terrible anymore -- at sixty five." 

My last year at A Different Light Bookstore was a bad one. Staff reductions, an actual flood, endless road construction in front of the bookstore, there was a lot with which to contend. With Richard's approval I gave an interview to a gay magazine describing the company's financial problems and the need for greater community support and the pull-quote of mine that they used? "Thank God for porn!"  To be fair, at that point videos and magazines were paying a lot of the bills we could still pay, but I was not terribly popular with some of my employers after that. Beyond what was happening in the company, my best friend died from what we used to call "AIDS complications," hours after I left his bedside in San Francisco and drove back to Southern California. I'd gone into debt, living in a motel during the week and learning to drive on the weekends, at thirty five, in order to commute the forty-four miles each way each day. Bought my first car. Had to do "debt consolidation," and attend what I couldn't help but call "failure school" wherein we learned that capitalism was good, we just weren't good at it, yet. I nearly died myself from a burst appendix. Took weeks to recover from the emergency surgery that put twenty two staples in my gut. And I came back to work just in time to find the store that I managed was being sold to someone I did not know, someone who lived "just around the corner," someone who would not require a manager, thank you very much, at least not me.

My time with Richard ended pretty much that same day. Not his fault. He was exceptionally supportive throughout and was always quick thereafter to offer support and a letter of recommendation and the like. For a long time I could not face any of the people I'd worked with at a Different Light. I let myself feel humiliated at what I could not help but see as my failure to make a go of it there. Stupid of me, all things considered, but it was what it was. I like to think I would know better now, but I don't know that that's true.

I do know that I remain genuinely grateful for the opportunity to work in that bookstore and for that man. 

One last lunch, well before I stumbled away. We were sitting in one of those open-air-dinning arrangements every other restaurant on smoggy Santa Monica Boulevard seemed to fancy lent their over-priced lunch menus an air of Parisian sophistication. We ordered immoderately for the first and only time. We had time. Richard and I had just had an unsurprisingly blunt conversation about the money and such. I was moaning about trying to staff a booth or restrict access to our tiny bathroom during Pride, etc. Richard asked me what I was reading. We talked about books. He told me stories I will not repeat, not because he was unkind in talking about anyone but because I like to remember that conversation as rather special. He talked about himself, about his favorite authors, about why he continued to read new work all the time and not just for the anthologies he edited. He talked more that day than any other I can remember in his company. I remember thinking even as it was happening that here was a man who knew more, who had read more than I ever might and yet it could all be so easy because his curiosity was genuine, his enthusiasm unchecked. He asked my opinion because he valued it. I wish I'd made notes. We laughed. I was dazzled, frankly.

I remember now what an impossible time that must have been for him professionally and personally. I cannot imagine how many demands must have been made on his time, how many people he had to worry about, what he must have been thinking about both before and after our lunch. That lunch was a gift. It was something I needed. What did the man have to set aside to give me that? And yet it was not forced or rehearsed or timed. Perhaps another lesson learned? Maybe the same one, again.

So, what have I learned? Well, I'm still at it, Richard. I am still trying to be the bookseller he was, something like as kind, nearly as honest. I like to think he would applaud the effort, even if he would probably demur at taking any credit. I think I've got this right when I tell you, he was a gallant gentleman. I will miss him being in the world. I will remember his example. Would that we all might.

Burned

 

Some people take photographs of their dogs. Well, we don't have a dog. Don't have a cat either. Don't have a child, a grandchild, or a parakeet. We don't dance on TikTok. Don't go to premieres, or do make-up tutorials, or troll online. We do cook, the beloved husband mostly, and I do like to eat. So like entirely too many people nowadays I will snap pictures of my dinner and post them to social media. (That pot roast looked good, child, it really did.) Flowers? Sure. I have photographed the flowers we planted in the side-yard, but only in close-up so no-one will see how I neglect them. People? That's more complicated. 

I have friends, mostly women, who don't like having their picture taken at all and I respect that. My mother still believes a "good" photograph should be taken no less than twenty feet from the subject. Anything nearer and she says, "Too close." Photos of me are easy. Would you prefer your ham hot or cold? Dishabille or turbaned in scarves? Despite my wide and noble brow and the gravitas lent by my white beard, point a camera at me and I will mince and roll my eyes and dance like Captain Spaulding. Give me an excuse, any excuse to put a flower pot on my head. I believe this is called a defense mechanism. Heaven forbid the photographer tell me I look handsome, or even that I am sporting a most becoming ensemble 'cause I will try a handstand. It can all look a bit desperate, largely because it is. Better they be made to laugh with me. Is that pathetic? I don't think so. Have you met the people who will never put on the paper party hat? Nobody says you have to wear it all night, sir. Besides, I come from a long line of people willing to mug for the camera. I treasure the photos of my parents wearing colanders. 

Mostly though I take pictures of my books.

Odd and not. I suppose if I built model trains or collected rare bottle caps I might take pictures of those but I don't. I read books. Better say that like every serious reader I know, I buy books with every intention of reading them and then I do -- so far as I am able. While collecting books is not an uncommon things to do -- yet -- the books I buy and read are not always books in which others will be specially interested. My friends are uniformly canny and polite, gallant even. Happy to "like" my pictures on social media, but  that doesn't mean they are necessarily looking for more information or suggestions of where they might find their own copies of The Letters of David Hume. It is a lesson learned. Friends share their enthusiasms too. Otherwise I would not now know even the little I now do of Ethiopian cuisine, anime, or Alban Berg. And I am grateful, though not equally for all three. Only fair. What friends do. And very good friends will even smile sweetly when I talk -- again -- about Walter Savage Landor. I admit it is not always an even exchange. I am lucky in my friends. So when I post yet more pictures of my books on social media I do not assume that because the pictures are "liked" that my books are, only that I am. That is mostly enough to make me happy. One does thrill a bit when somebody comments approvingly on a snapshot of one's library. What I find odd, even at my age, is that I still want the approval and admiration of others for being such a clever boy. Can one ever learn to not care? Evidently, no. Thus I suppose the sometimes sad spectacle of the aging autodidact on social media wondering if anyone noticed I was reading Montaigne in that picture of me in a kaftan.  Seems I am still the boy wandering the halls in Grove City Junior High School hoping to be noticed carrying a paperback  of Jean Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, hoping my teachers and peers might notice that I'm literate and think me special -- in a good way, for once. Same show, different venue. Still looking to find my tribe, though at least I now know who we are and that we are many. As for Sartre, I was not really up to it at fourteen -- nor I am now. I did read it though, after a fashion, something I will never do again. It was a long time before I learned one could simply stop reading a book one had started.

I still buy books I then find I cannot read. Some of course are simply bad. For we have the poorly written books always with us. Patience I have not much anymore. Many more books I now find are quite beyond me. As it turns out, reading the charming memoirs of a physicist does not mean I will ever have a grasp of physics. Six Easy Pieces indeed, Dr. Feynman? Well, speak for yourself. Even in subjects more congenial to my interests I will never be sufficiently conversant with the serious stuff of scholarship to discuss some things intelligently. There is no good way to tell someone that while I like Emily Dickinson just fine, I don't have a strong conviction when it comes to dashes -- but you go right ahead and tell me why they matter. I will listen. I'm sure you are right. No one is really waiting for my opinion of post-structuralism or my thoughts on enjambment, nor should they be. Regrettably, I mean it when I tell you -- I got nothing. One of the pitfalls of being so attracted to people smarter than myself has been learning to accept their disappointment in my limitations. I mean, I probably brought up Žižek in the first place. Sorry. Didn't mean to start a thing. You're disappointed? Imagine how I feel. But to not now and then at least try to read things beyond me would be like not being curious about the opinions of people I admire. Same thing, isn't it? Not their fault if I don't understand what they say. Sometimes it's just nice being taken so seriously. Sometimes not, but something, as they say, might rub off.

When I was very ill I found myself reading England Under Queen Anne, by George Macaulay Trevelyan. Three big volumes, with maps I never read because I can't read maps. I was still furloughed from my job at the time. Time I had. You should excuse the expression, I was under Queen Anne for awhile. Perfect example of more than one thing, reading Trevelyans. Not working I went a little Trevelyan crazy. George Otto Trevelyan was  G. M.'s dad and also the maternal nephew and biographer of Thomas Babington Macaulay. I've read quite a lot of Macaulay; history, essays, letters, and his nephew's biography. While I was home and in bed I read more than half of George Otto's rather wonderful history of the American Revolution in six volumes. I read G. M.'s biography of G. O. One thing leads to another, you see. Not all that long ago I had read a revelatory book called Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, by the Indian politician Shashi Tharoor. Lord Macaulay & co. do not come out of it well. I'd recently found another newish book titled Macaulay: Britain's Liberal Imperialist, by Zareer Masani which was more sympathetic to the old boy, but a very modern reading nonetheless. I of course then had to reread some actual Macaulay. Just who I am. Now what does any of this matter or mean to anyone other than me?

Short answer? Nothing. I wasn't studying these books. I wasn't preparing any larger project, or researching to write this essay or anything else. I was just reading. And yeah, I posted pictures. Must everything be made to matter by being shared? For instance I don't care what anyone's Wordle* score was today, but I don't begrudge anyone posting their victories. Candy Crush to curing ham at home, if you want to share your hobbies with the wide world, you go right ahead. Remember, like Fred Rogers, "I like you just as you are." So if I post a picture of  six rather dull, faded volumes of an out-of-print history I obviously saw something there that seemed worthy of note. Others needn't. The purpose served can sometimes be as simple as recording my own temporary preoccupations just to show how I've been passing my time and that time is passing with me still in it. Mostly when I put up a picture of my books, I'm just catching folks up on subjects more wholesome than the state of my mind or my bowels. I don't knit, after all. Love some that do, and I am genuinely pleased to see the progress of a beautiful scarf. I've benefited personally from this. I can't do this. I am impressed by those that can and do. (Also? Anyone who cans tomatoes, makes pickles, gardens, dusts, photographs nudes.) It's nice and necessary to be made happy by the things we do well and that do no harm, and good to hear from tribes other than one's own. (And what's more fun than a Venn diagram?!)

It's no great surprise that people can occasionally be mean. I work in retail, remember? I personally do not understand the urge to either mock or dismiss the small pleasures about which I and others post online. If it's not politics or policy or a challenge to one's personal morality, why get so exercised about avocado toast? I only recently learned that avocados are indeed problematic, but maybe don't call your aunt "a bad actor" for enjoying her breakfast. Also, I don't post open questions, or repost memes much. I am rarely looking for confrontation. I don't remember that I've ever captioned a photo with anything like: "I love New York in June, how about you?" Never posed under a sign saying, "tell me why I'm wrong," or "convince me otherwise." I was ( briefly, weirdly) a rhetoric major in college. I understand questions that do and don't invite answers. And one needn't "like" everything anymore than one need like everything. If you post videos of "adorable" spiders or people walking across glass bridges hanging over certain death, I may say to myself, "nope," but I don't take offense at your enthusiasm. Likewise I may have occasionally told folks, "You really MUST read William Topaz McGonagall!" but the imperative mood comes not on me much. You're not the boss of me and that works both ways, honey. I realize that there are in fact people online looking to be problematic so as to bemoan the collapsing hegemony of men who look very much like me, but I am not one of them. Not my tribe.

As to what constitutes problematic content, that has changed and it hasn't, sadly. If anything, the online censors are now busier than they have ever been in my experience policing for the hint of even the most wholesome sexual deviance. Not so much as a male nipple, even in marble, escapes the unthinking, all seeing eye of the robot censors. It seems sex is dirty again, just not in a fun way. Billionaires, poor lambs, are not to be bullied without howling at the unfairness of it all, at least not on the platforms they own -- which is all of them. What constitutes free speech or a threat seems to depend now on at whom one cocks a snook more than what is said. Conservative white male politicians are, as they have always been,  particularly sensitive -- and every potential aggression is amplified by the complete absence of irony from any and all corporate algorithms. Same as it ever was. What has changed is who lets the dogs out. Of course there are still the same sorry souls who sit in their virtual front windows and keep an eye out for impiety, socialism, provocative hemlines and the like. Busybodies and bullies never rest and now the world is on their front lawn just waiting to be told to get off the grass. Best avoided, but not always possible. One of the great benefits of the new virtual society is the ease with which one may slam the door in the face of biblical exhortation and the wrathful goon. You've been blocked, booger. Doesn't always work though. Ask any prominent woman in politics or public service just how supported they feel by social media policies against harassment. Meanwhile, try saying, "men are pigs" on Facebook. Go on, just try. However firmly your tongue may have been planted in your cheek, you are on your way to a time out, trust me. I share your indignation. As at least a three time loser myself, I will not be sharing your post. Sorry, friend. See you on the other side.

"Aye me, how many perils do enfold

The righteous man, to make him daily fall?"

-- Edmund Spencer

Were it not for the righteous among my wider acquaintance, I would never have been exposed to the complicated history of the delicious avocadoes mentioned above. Had someone not gently scolded a mutual friend who had posted a picture of their breakfast, I might never have learned the little I now know about "monocultures." I can't say I have gone on to sin no more, but I will admit to a blush when I order guacamole. All manner of errors in usage and custom, pronouns and privilege have been brought directly and or indirectly to my attention via social media, and for much am I sincerely grateful. It isn't anybody's job to explain to the old man sittin' in his favorite readin' chair just how the world spins, but I have found there are lots of lovely people in the world who are kindly willing to point me the way. Yes, there are the online scourges and with them I have little patience, but  one cannot but admire the fortitude of those still willing to teach. Thankless business, mostly, specially online. And yet people I often know only on the computer have offered me genuinely thoughtful and even useful instruction down the years on everything from the fascinating variants of academic geography to using the Ukrainian spelling of Kyiv. It may seem stupidly sunny if not a little dirty to say it this way, but I've actually learned a lot from being corrected. Not always persuaded, I admit, but usually glad of the opportunity to avoid looking any more foolish than needs be.

The distinction between real and virtual friends is not one I can make anymore. I am of an age when even before the pandemic I was not getting out much and stopped going out long since. My oldest friends are not often in the same city as me, or the same state. Some are not even in the same country. It would be lovely to see people and share a drink or a meal, go to a movie, but that is unlikely now, even if I didn't rush home to beloved husband every night after work. The great innovation of social media for the not-young is that one is able not only to renew and maintain long treasured friendships but also to make a new and often unlikely acquaintance, genuine friends who may live in Hawaii, or Milan, who may be decades older than me, or younger, or even famous. The common criticism of this broadening of the definition of friendship is that such relationships are inherently shallow and somehow dishonest for never having been tested by a road-trip, or a missed dinner invitation, or tolerating the company of a less than sympathetic spouse, or the chance to hold a noisy baby. This seems to me to mistake complication for virtue. Why must life, and love be a trial to be real? Are our sympathies so dull, our curiosity so prurient that we must be made to suffer with someone to feel for their suffering? Evidently among the young there is a performative aspect of social media posting: an arbitrary and impossible standard of beauty, a competitive need for "likes," a strong disincentive to admit struggles with illness, etc. Same show, different venue again. Old people? I believe the term is "over-sharing." In my "feed" I'm likelier to find a gruesome knee surgery update or a discussion of the comparative benefits of various mental health meds than a beauty product endorsement or instructions for a dance craze. In my circle, instant messaging tends to links to the Dickens Museum and enquiries after declining pets. Can feel pretty real pretty fast, folks. Who has time for curating one's reality when increasingly eager to keep hold of our diminishing stores? At this point I'm as honest as I'm ever likely to be, and so are my friends.

So if every now and again I get an unsolicited if thought-provoking link to an exposé on the methane from windy cows, or a sharp nudge in the comments on July 4th reminding me just what hypocrites certain Founder Fathers would seem to have been, I am ready! I've heard worse. Meant well. I can take it. Once in a great while I will still be taken to task for something I've said unthinkingly, or a book I'm reading too casually, or even my selections for my Book Club.

"Do we have to read books written by slave-owners?"

This in response to my choice of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Tolstoy. Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. 

"No, you don't," was my only answer to that question, I am now ashamed to say. Huff puff.

Took me the better part of the afternoon to come out from under my umbrage and back into the light of day. And a lovely Spring day it was: sun shining, last of the lilacs in the backyard, first buds on the rosebushes, birds back in the trees, tra-la. 

Now it's all very well to strive for magnanimity online and off, but it seems that I am still every bit as likely as the next old badger to put my back up when challenged. I was asked a question, with context, and I chose to growl and waddle right back into my stinking burrow, or in my case, my favorite, tatty reading chair to stew in my own indignation. I decided I was outraged, outraged I tell you, on behalf of Tolstoy -- who has been dead for more than one hundred years -- and angry because... Literature!

The awkward thing about having actively cultivated one's persona as a rather dear and genuinely harmless duffer is that one sometimes forgets just what hard work harmlessness can be.† Haven't quite mastered it. Sorry. I have however learned that emotions, however valid and even necessary they may be, etc., rarely answer actual questions. "What is Pi?" Consternation! "How high the moon?" Surprise and impatience! So I was unhappy with that question. Now I'm not. Too late, but I'm not, honestly. But why was I, and what happened in the meanwhile?  

Best to start with what was actually said rather than just what I heard. Here are the relevant bits:

"I've really been hoping to join your book club, but I've been waiting for a title that really got me excited... I'm sorry, but have you noticed that slavery seems to be a theme so far? The Count of Monte Cristo has slaves. Samuel Johnson owned a slave. Now Tolstoy -- who owned slaves. Do we have to read books by slave owners? I just can't."

First, it is important to note that the question came in a private message, not in a public space. Nice. Also? Note the enthusiasm for at least the idea of my virtual book club. Also nice. I fear my initial terse response seems to have got me "blocked," or "ghosted," or something of that sort because there's been no communication since from the Dixie cup on the other end of the string. My fault, so I'll say here what I hadn't the common curtesy to say before.

To begin then, an apology. I now realize that the question was sincere and deserved something more than my dismissal. For that I am genuinely sorry. I chose to read the above as a criticism of me, of my choices, my taste, rather than what it obviously is, a potential reader looking at the books I've chosen not as bad books but rather from a vantage I had not considered. Doesn't change my answer, but there is more to this than I acknowledged at the time, so let me try to unpick some of the particulars first before returning to the larger question.

(Spoiler alert.) The Count of Monte Cristo does indeed own slaves. He is made to say some pretty harsh things about their expendability, though the characters in question are revealed to be dearer to the protagonist than nearly anyone else in the story and are ultimately described as considerably better people than either the Count himself or the audience to whom these remarks were addressed. Both enslaved characters were purchased in order to save them. Both are admittedly used as players in Monte Cristo's revenge, but both are eventually set at liberty, as was always, we learn, part of the protagonist's plan. Worth noting also that the author, Alexandre Dumas was himself the grandson of Marie-Cessette Dumas, an African slave in Haiti, a fact that obviously shaped not only the author's life and reputation but clearly contributed much to the creation of Dumas greatest character, namely the great author himself. 

It's also true that Francis Barber when still just a boy was given to Samuel Johnson as a gift; a grotesque idea, if not an uncommon practice at the time. Note however that Samuel Johnson came to publicly call Francis his "son," loved and lived with and supported Barber, his wife and family financially, and made Barber his primary heir. It was Barber who cared for Johnson in his final illness and it was Barber's future with which Johnson on his much dreaded deathbed was most concerned. Please also note that Johnson was an early and vociferous critic of the institution of slavery and was himself a member of one of the first English abolition societies. To not read Johnson or Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson because of the way in which Francis Barber came into Johnson life is to miss one of the most admirable stories in the writer's much storied life, and a disservice to the truly noble character of both Sam and Francis Barber.

And then there is Tolstoy. This one really confounded me at first. He did indeed inherit hundreds of serfs when he came to his estate in 1847, aged 19. When the Russian serfs were freed in 1861, Tolstoy returned from his time in France -- where he met Hugo and Proudhon among others --  determined to relaunch the schools he'd already started for "his" serfs, among other projects for their improvement. I can't begin to summarize here the political and spiritual journey of one of the most important figures in western literature. Suffice it to say his philosophical writing on nonviolent resistance -- influenced in part by the work of the American abolitionist Adin Ballou -- would later be cited as a major influence in turn on both Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. There are few figures in history, let alone literature less deserving of dismissal with a single epithet.

All of which I might have said, had I not -- in a phrase I must tell you I hate -- been so "in my feelings."

Eventually though I was prompted to do a little research and take the time to consider the question of slavery in the work of all three authors for the first time. I am now sincerely grateful  to the person who brought this issue to my attention. This is exactly the kind of question one would hope to see brought up and discussed in a book club, mine anyway. (And slavery was discussed in the club with both of the first two selections.) I would hope I may yet be forgiven for not being able to get out of my own way and missing the opportunity to have this conversation.

I regret this not just on my own behalf. I might have learned something. Having raised the issue, my questioner might have had more to say I never had the chance to consider. There is also the very real possibility that that person may not have known what I know about Dumas, Johnson, and Tolstoy. Might have been the better for it. Maybe not. We'll never know now. I'll never know.

"'Oh Tigger, where are your manners?'

'I don't know, but I bet they are having more fun than I am.'"

-- A. A. Milne

Oh, fuck it. I'll just say it. That message was rude, wasn't it? (Wasn't it?) I mean, I was too, which is really what got us here, but is there really any way to read that paragraph without it sounding something like, "I'd love to come to your party, but I heard it'll be crawling with cops," or "Thanks for the invitation, but did you really not make anything for dinner without cilantro, peanuts, wine, or butter?" By now every old head has already been shaken over the new generation's conviction that punctuation in messages is overly emphatic, if not  hostile. Well, it is kinda their thing more than it is ours, messaging, isn't it? Like the rock and roll music and the marijuana cigarettes and the sincere commitment to saving the planet. To be honest, messaging is generally something the beloved husband and I use mostly to talk about dinner menus, grocery lists, and septuagenarian celebrities who have shockingly died so young. And we punctuate. Be fair, so did the other person with whom I am not having this conversation. Nice. So if I'm not offended on behalf Leo Tolstoy et al., then why am I still at least a little irked? Tone? 

Don't think quoting As You Like It would have necessarily done me much good in this instance -- as opposed to all the times it's helped me score at closing hour -- but here goes: "Your gentleness shall force / More than your force move us to gentleness." Am I wrong? If we oldsters might concede that full stops jar on the eyes of tender youth, might tender youth not talk at us like Red Guards who just found an Elvis poster, at least when they have questions or concerns about, say, our book club selections? Grandma's been sending money to televangelists? Dad wore his MAGA hat to your graduation? Mom put food-waste in the recycle by mistake? Your date calls you "babe" in public? Let fly your righteous anger, avenging angels of the new millennium! Though, maybe vary your colors a little, at least with well-meaning strangers, no? Remember, you and I did not bond at your birth. 

Someone roughly my age reminded me that we were righteous once ourselves. True. I was not always a joy to my elders. I did not always defer to experience. Another friend back in my school days once described the way I made new acquaintances as, "dive and rip." Age has mellowed me, like it does, but it hasn't made me entirely forget what it is to be young; to be subject to condescension from even those we might admire, to go unheard and unseen, to have to shout because sometimes the shout was all that was left in you. We must all of us I think be willing to argue with the gifts we've been given and try not just to be right but also to listen. It is still harder than it looks.

In that spirit I would contend that just as there is more than one reading of history and literature, there are better ways to suggest one look again or anew, ways to read the room as well as all the books in it, and most important to me, reasons to read even the books about which you may have heard troubling things. May not be the time. Okay. You're probably busy with more pressing, more material texts, but I would hope you might yet see your way to reading Tolstoy, serfs and all.

I suppose the three words I find hardest are the last. The finality of that last statement in the original message, "I just can't," makes me shake. I confess I find that hardest of all that was said to take in. Can't or won't or don't think you should? (You should -- probably the least persuasive word in the language -- but you should.) These books cannot now be read but with the reality of slavery somewhere in mind. Got it. Hadn't thought of them that way, as representative of that, but neither was the idea entirely new to me or the book club, as I've suggested. Nonetheless, wasn't thinking about it until I got that message. Can't not see it now, thank you. 

If I've only recently come to some understanding of how trauma works and how it can be located even in the most seemingly innocent entertainment, say the unsuspected page of even a Dumas novel, then clearly I still have work to do, and not just on my electronic manners. Thanks for the not entirely welcome reminder. Again, sorry I baulked, and barked.

Now, as it seems we are saying what ought to be obvious I will repeat, no, it is not my place to tell anyone what they must read -- unless they want to join my book club. And truly, all or nearly all are welcome, but maybe don't kick the door in next time. And I will promise not to kick anybody down the stairs because they spilled the tea.

In the end my primary emotion, well after the fact, is mostly sad-face-emoji. Is it not genuinely regrettable that a reader astute enough to point out the commonality of this ugly fact in three such diverse narratives from three such different writers should also find this sufficient cause to never read any of them? Have I read that right? I know good people who won't read any book with a dog in it for fear the dog will die, as they so often do, in books and out. Another book I recently bought with the idea of possibly reading it in the book club turns out to have been written by someone who enthusiastically joined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1933. Feels like a potential deal-breaker, doesn't it? (I hasten to add that the member who brought this to my attention recently, still professed a willingness to read the book if its merits exceeded the author's many sins, thus proving that she is a bigger person than me, bless her.) I will not however concede that any of the books we have read, or the book we are reading now, or the books I still hope to have us read hereafter, are anything less than the very opposite of what that message to me suggested. I refute the premise and deny the particulars, as no one who has actually read Dumas, Johnson, or Tolstoy could do so and not be moved by their greater goodness and humanity. That is as close to a reason as I have for the existence of book club. 

If nothing else, I have been reminded that I am at best more human than my profile. Turns out the jolly fellow pictured in the flowing scarves and silly hats can still be a pretty tetchy sonofabitch now and then. And he really wants you to like his books.

*Wouldn't be unhappy to see this reference age badly.

†See the latter diaries of Sofia Tolstoy for excellent examples of the harm done by an old gentleman's cultivated harmlessness.