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SNOMG

That’s the best name that anyone came up with for Chicago’s recent run-in with Mother Nature, SNOMG. I wanted to call it Snowbamapalooza, but it never really caught on.

So we finally got the alley shoveled out this morning, with seven adults and teens working on it. Has the city plowed our street yet? Ha. We’ve been getting nice little emails from the alderman about the standard rank of priority plowing, but no sign of it happening. The sidewalks are all passable, because basically no one went to work yesterday, and we all got out and pitched in. You can tell which neighbors were drinking when they snow-blowed, because their paths are a little more twisty.

But what the hell? Third biggest snowfall on record, and they can’t plow the sidestreets yet? What a bunch of clucks.

On Tuesday night, when the storm was just beginning, a neighbor, my wife and I strapped on the XC skis and headed up the block to a park. It was so totally awesome!! The wind was probably between 40-60 mph, but it helped immensely to have ski goggles. The wind blew the snow over the baseball diamonds ferociously, and you could easily imagine documentaries about the Antarctica with the sinister way the snow traveled. The wind chill might’ve been pretty low, but with windproof clothes, it wasn’t bad at all. Sorry to have forgotten my camera, but the pictures wouldn’t have told much. The park is small, with only a couple small hills or berms, but the thrill was being out in a tropical snow storm, with THUNDERSNOW lighting up the night.

We saw a couple other people out for a gambol, and a few brought their dogs out VERY briefly. After about 90 mins, we three came back and found a guy who’s SUV was stuck in the alley. He had to go all of 75 yards, and he still managed to get himself stuck three times. And this was BEFORE the snow got heavy.

The kids and wife have had two days off of school. Tomorrow, the regular schedule kicks in again, and this will just be an inconvenience to deal with, but for 36 hours, it was one of the wildest events ever in Chicago. (As long as you weren’t marooned in your car on Lake Shore Drive. For some great pictures of that, check out the Facebook album by my friend Will Byington here.)

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My New Yorker Captions are Unprintable

Am I the only one who hates The New Yorker caption contest?

Every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday (with luck), the week’s issue of The New Yorker gets shoved into our mailbox. And when my kids come home, the first thing they’ll turn to when they see the mag is the back page.

There, for the uninitiated, is the Cartoon Caption Contest page. Which I loathe like little else.

I don’t know why it is. Maybe it’s the faux populism that the contest seems to exude. Here’s The New Yorker, letting all of its readers decide what the high-larious caption to the high-concept panel ought to be. It’s almost like being at the Algonquin Round Table — but more akin to yelling punchlines at George Kauffman from the next table.

In a more desperate way, the nightly TV newscast lets viewers send in pictures of cloud formations, and twitter/text their votes about whether taxes are bad or the home team is unbeatable. It’s the dialog that all established media now think will make them indispensable to people’s lives. The only problem is, most viewers can’t take a memorable picture, and most readers can’t write a caption.

Each week, a couple thousand captions are mailed in. Almost without fail, of the three finalists, one caption will be an execrable pun, one will be a play on words that takes three extra miles to get to its point (which wasn’t funny to start with), and one caption has close to the right tone — dry, multiple-layered, au courant but not cliché, and somewhat Gotham-y. By Gotham-y, I mean that it has to do with a stiff upper lip in the face of decay or danger or failure, or a smart-alecky retort that tries to wrangle the absurd to a mundane level. Anything that might refer to a shopping mall, fast food, an open space, a highway without gridlock, or Bass Pro Shops is never going to make it to the winner’s circle.

I’ve read that each of the cartoons used for the contest had already been submitted to the magazine by the cartoonist with a real caption. A caption they actually worked on and shaped with the writer’s innate skill of timing and economy. I’d really would like to know what that caption was. Whatever entries from readers are published might be close, or might be completely off-target, but I’ll never know exactly what the original caption was, and that makes me feel like I missed something. Maybe that makes me a snob, as if reading the magazine didn’t already accomplish that.

But as a professional writer and humorist, I’ve had too many instances of people in person and in print who work really really hard to prove that they are just as funny as me, even though I’ve never challenged them about it. Do people feel the need to show engineers that they know about torque and materials stress? Show dentists that they know how to administer Novocain?

It’s the whole “I crack everyone up at the board meetings — do you think I should try out as a stand-up comedian?” syndrome. If you have to ASK whether you should be a stand-up comedian, then you are sane, and ergo don’t have what it takes to be one. It’s the same with being a cartoonist. Someone is trying to make a living at it, while others are turning it into a parlor game. I feel bad for both sides.

Mostly, I fell bad reading those awful, awful puns.

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Happy Belated Birthday, Ernie!

Don’t know where the week went (or maybe I do, but aint tellin’), so I apologize for a lack of posting. I even forgot to wish Ernie Harwell a happy birthday, which would’ve been on Tuesday.

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Wish I Was Out There on a Slow Friday

At this moment in Chicago, it’s one degree outside. That’s weird to type. Sounds more like geometry than weather. “Two Degrees”, “one below”, “minus two”–yeah, all those roll off the tongue or keyboard. But not “It’s one degree.” Seems like it should lead to more comments or explanation, but it doesn’t.

With a couple exceptions, it’s been below freezing around here since Thanksgiving. The ice on the lake at the cottage must be like a mile thick now. At Christmastime it was strong enough to hold our weight walking all the way across, which was a first in my memory. It was smooth and clear and free of snow or scraping piles of frost. It gave me the chance to try ice fishing for the first time. Here I am with my trusty ice dog:

Man, did my dog have fun running around on the ice. He’s 12 or 13, but he acted like a mad dog out there, running full bore and slipping and crashing. Getting a walk in cold weather doesn’t thrill him, but playing out there with him has always been a joy.

I wish I were out there now, instead of splitting my attention between 15 things around the basement mezzanine office and getting very little done. Of course, out there I’d be getting NOTHING done, but it would have my full attention!

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January Lassitude

Freezing mornings. Long stretches of silence. Ice-covered streets. This is a time of year I love. It’s also the time of year I go a little stir-crazy in my basement and start to think that I’ve got to get some kind of job.

Teaching. Editing. Stacking shelves. Anything seems good. Anything that will get me out into the world and interacting with people. Anything where someone is expecting me to show up.

I know. It’s not like I live on a ranch in Manitoba. I’m not drinking at 10 and eying the shotgun. And it sounds a little snobby to say that I think I need a job to mingle. I realize I’m very fortunate to still be able to live off my earnings. I know most writers would kill to have the time I have to scribble. But there it is.

Except this year feels a little different. The yearning to show up and be needed someplace is a little less acute. The cause of this might be that I’m the househusband now, and I’m doing most of the cooking, washing and chauffeuring of offspring. I’ve got a part-time job to keep me busy, and the family needs me because I’m keeping things on an even keel for everyone. Without me, there’d be a lot more frozen dinners and general screaming about where to find clean underwear.

Maybe my mind is also finally used to the fact that I go through this every January. I’ll bug friends for contacts and make phone calls and almost seriously consider interviewing for a teaching job. But now I realize that my reasons for doing so are half-assed and temporary. When March comes around, I’ll feel less constrained and a little more alive.

Right now, I’m not so productive. The writing projects I’m in the midst of feel like long slogs with no real roadmap or purpose. Piles of bookkeeping and paperwork clutter up the office like carcasses that need to be disposed of (especially now that I’ve got my e-books up and I have to start acting like a PR person, accountant and publisher). And around early afternoon, I start to think like a domestic engineer and get my June Cleaver on.

But it doesn’t seem too bad this year. I’ve got a feeling productivity will come, if I just keep pushing, and in the end, I won’t have shortchanged anyone who would hire me with my distractable frame of mind and self-centered habits.

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White Out: A Sidetrip to Starvation Lake

Earlier this fall, Bryan Gruley released the second book in his mystery series about a journalist in a small northern Michigan town. I liked the first title, Starvation Lake, very much, but like the second, The Hanging Tree, even more. Which is odd because the mechanics of the second mystery are a little less satisfying than the first. But the characters in The Hanging Tree were so deftly scripted, and their daily lives laid out with such believability, that I think the book is just terrific.

I’m not the only one, either. It was named one of the Michigan Notable Books of the Year, and listed as one of the Best Mysteries of the Year by Kirkus Reviews. There are probably a couple other accolades I’ve forgotten, but hey, call his publicist.

Bryan’s a friend of mine, so sure, I’m going to give his book a plug. But I also sincerely like these books. You don’t have to be a Michigander or a hockey fan to enjoy them (though it helps — I’m only one of those two). Bryan is a terrific storyteller with a deep personal affection for his characters and the lives they find themselves in, something that can’t be faked.

A couple months ago, I joked with Bryan about organizing excursions to Starvation Lake, Michigan, to show all the sites to the book’s fans. (Jon Berendt made this a sort of cottage industry with Savannah after writing Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.) Bryan scoffed at the idea, and made a self-deprecating comment about needing a few more readers.

But I personally wanted to see the fictional town of Starvation Lake. Somehow the descriptions in the second book challenged my assumptions and made it hard to visualize it further. The road is where? You can see THAT from HERE? Etc.

So over Christmas break on the way back from skiing up north, I took my family on a little side trip to the actual Starvation Lake. We got off US 131 in Mancelona, hoping to come at it from the north. Things were pretty snow covered up there. I don’t know how many of you live in places where there are official snowmobile paths laid crossing the highway, but there were plenty up there. We went about 5 miles, realized we missed the turnoff, turned around and went down a road that wasn’t exactly paved but had farmhouses on it. So, you know, civilization.

Well, it stayed snow covered, then it veered back west when we wanted to go south. So I forged ahead on what looked like a single-lane road, not uncommon in the country. It was pretty rutty and rocky. We passed another farmhouse or two as the trees got to be a little thicker. it was a guessing game which roads were more “official” and likely to coincide with the map. I saw some stop signs in the distance, which was comforting, but they weren’t standard size. Maybe the county was saving money on the back roads by putting up mini-signs? Some routes were very evidently for snow-mobiles, and some not so evidently.

found at Visitgaylord.comEveryone in the car but me was getting worried that we’d be sending Christmas Eve either stuck in the frost-bitten Michigan outback or in a hospital from an accident. I’ve been on slippier roads, but not recently and not sober. I turned east on what looked like a major road–by that I mean it was wide and had tracks on it and everything–and followed that winding path until we dead-ended at a small oil pump bobbing it’s head arthritically amid the snow and dried cattails.

Okay, at this point I was persuaded that maybe this Kit Carson route wasn’t the best way to go, so we tried to find our way back. I did a Y-turn at the oil pump and didn’t end up stuck. Chalk one up for 35 years of winter driving. Just before a fork in the road, we caught a glimpse of a half-dozen snowmobilers blasting through the snow about 20 yards away. I slowed and stopped and gave the right of way, as if we were both on the roads designated for us. I still resolutely denied that I was driving on a snowmobile trail. I was on the road for the oil trucks, y’betcha.

I found our way back to a road with a real name (I’m pretty good with directions), and we drove all the way back to Mancelona. But I absolutely had to see the place by now, even though it was eating into our time to return and get ready for Christmas Eve. We took another left eastward off 131 and plowed on for a few miles. The road was still snow covered, but in certain patches you could see that there was indeed a paved road under it. Such City Slickers, needing pavement! After a while, we saw the sign for a Starvation Lake supper Club (“Champs”? I don’t remember), and followed the signs. They advertised “The Best Hamburgers in the World”, and judging by the cars in the lot, they must’ve been cooking something right (unless everyone was already getting tanked up for the holiday). We were still full from the gigantic bismarcks and bearclaws we’d bought in Petoskey at the beginning of the trip home, so we didn’t stop at the bar. I drove around Starvation Lake, hoping to maybe see the Gruley name on a mailbox or garage, but it was not to be. I even looked for the “hanging tree” the book is named after, but without luck. That will have to wait for another trip.

Found at http://www.twoeyeballs.com/art/zenphoto/the-fifty-u/michigan.jpg.phpI knew there was no real town called Starvation Lake. Bryan has said he modeled the town after another nearby city. Just guessing on the map, I thought he meant nearby Twin Lake. Which is good. Starvation Lake has exactly two commercial buildings. Both taverns. Twin Lake has two taverns AND a provisions store.

Bryan must have been modeling the town after the nearby city of Mancelona. That place has brick buildings housing diners and insurance companies and hardware stores and the like. But it’s a little too big, and it sits alongside the US highway and not on the shore of a good-sized glacier-carved lake, so it can’t help in painting a mental image for me. (BTW, the actual Starvation Lake was absolutely gorgeous in the winter sunlight, sunk below the bluffs and curving subtly so it can’t all be seen from any one vantage point.) For now, it’s all in Bryan’s head, and I’ll just have to reread the books if I want a snapshot.

Photo of snowmobile trail from www.visitGaylord.com.

Linoleum print of Michigan, one of a 50-state series, found at Two Eyeballs.

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As American as the Disgruntled Loner

Been reading so much for the past few days on the shooting in Tucson, way too much. A little bit has been about the actual incident, but most of it is about trying to figure out if anyone besides the shooter is to blame. What caused him to do it? Talk radio? Mein Kampf? Mental illness? Smoking pot (Thanks, David Frum, for never ignoring the truly ridiculous)?

I’m hoping it makes people consider what kind of America they want to live in. Of course, I thought about that after the Oklahoma City Bombing, and after 9/11, that it might cause some soul-searching. I was wrong, or maybe I didn’t like the answer. Maybe the Price of Freedom (speech, guns, or from responsibility) is worth the price of a dead nine-yr-old, a federal judge, and some retirees. For some people, it probably is, but it’s time for everyone to come clean about it.

Come on, America — we KNOW ourselves. We know our neighbors and our second cousins. Do we really think that everyone here has evolved enough to resist being driven crazy by all this violent blather?

I’m glad Sarah Palin finally commented on the shooting, and not surprised that she acted defensively, meanly, lashing out against her critics instead of showing a little humanity and humility. Can you imagine what goes on in that head? Nine people dead, and still, it’s all about her. And to describe a media-manufactured “blood libel”? Good God, how ignorant. “Blood libel” — does anyone with more than a high school education vet her comments? I don’t know if I’m more repulsed by her ignorance or her narcissism, but the end result is the same. She’s shown herself to be incapable of responding to a crisis in any kind of useful way.

Of course, I don’t blame Palin for the shooting — she’s just the visible coiffed head of the GOP right now. She also happens to use violent rhetoric and images constantly, and loves showing off how poorly she can handle a hunting rifle. The whole conservative movement is to blame, for not calling out the elements within it that wave the bloody shirt and scream about revolution. I don’t blame the “Tea Partiers”–I blame SOME of the Tea Partiers who, in their rage that the country will soon have a non-white majority, wave their guns around and scream about taking their country back by force, “blood of tyrants watering the tree of liberty” and all that bullying crap. I’m glad that Rep. Clyburn from South Carolina pointed out the rhetorical calls for violence reminds him of the civil rights era, and how hot tempers and manipulative speeches can contribute to getting people killed.

Or as the guy at Driftglass said, It’s not just one of them, it’s ALL of them.

While there’s a bunch of renewed talk about gun control now, it will come to zilch. I doubt there will be even the slightest tightening of Arizona’s laws, about which I know nothing. We’ve been told giving up any gun rights will lead to tyranny, so now we’ll have to deal with the tyranny of fear.

What I would hope is that the massacre might start a conversation about mental illness and how we try and ignore it. We still don’t know if the shooter had had any type of treatment for what was happening to him, but we know for certain that nobody was surprised by his actions. His outbursts and his violent nihilism was obvious to everyone in his life, apparently. Was there any attempt to treat him? I read one story that half the people in his home county had had their treatments for mental illness discontinued this year. It’s not the common cold — you can’t tell people to “tough it out” and get on with their lives.

Ever since deinstitutionalism in the 1980s, we’ve all seen people wandering the streets who should be getting some psychiatric care. Do they all become assassins? Thankfully no, but the way we treat them as disposable is a reflection of how we value life in this country. We shouldn’t be surprised when someone acts savagely, when we treat so many people as less-than-human.

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Do I Sound More Suave in French?

Like I wrote in the post below, I was interviewed by the Swiss paper Le Temps about the whole bowdlerization-of-Huck-Finn dust-up going on. The reporter didn’t send me the PDF like she promised, so I went on the website this morning and found I’d said this:

Joint aux Etats-Unis, James Finn Garner, auteur du grinçant Politiquement correct: contes d’autrefois pour lecteurs d’aujourd’hui (traduit chez Grasset, 1995), se réjouit que la décision de la maison d’édition ait provoqué une telle polémique. «Il y a un vrai débat. Les gens en ont marre du politiquement correct. Et tout colorer en rose ne change pas le fait que l’Amérique reste un pays disloqué, inégal, encore très raciste.»

Hope I come off good. I think she’s quoting my most lurid comment, like that’s surprising or something. Here’s what Babelfish says I said:

Joint with the United States, Fine James Garner, author of squeaking Politically correct: tales of formerly for readers of today (translated at Grasset, 1995), is delighted that the decision of the publisher caused such a polemic. “There is a true debate. People have some enough of politically correct. And all to colour pink does not change yet the fact that America remains a dislocated country, unequal, very racist.”

Didn’t know my book was “squeaking”, but I’ll take it as a compliment.

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Glad to See Twain Can Still Rile ’em Up

Just got off the phone with a journalist from Le Temps, which is a big daily newspaper in Switzerland. She wanted my opinion on the bowdlerization of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which has dominated the news cycle during this slow week. I’m Mr. Politically Correct, after all, so I was flattered to be remembered and asked my opinion. At least her call forced me to think a little about the plan and my reactions to it.

Of course, substituting “Slave” for “nigger” in Huck Finn is ridiculous, but like many a ridiculous plan, someone is going to try it. The professor who is editing the volume says it’s intended for the teachers who want to use it in the classroom but are worried about lawsuits. I’m sympathetic to the teachers’ potential issues, but I have a suspicion that some people want the book to be a rollicking adventure story suitable for preteens, rather than the complex and often painful book it is. It’s not a book about a cracking fun raft ride, it’s about a young orphan’s moral growth and rejection of basically everything around him.

And Mark Twain is not our more literary version of Will Rogers. Just imagine the world of American letters without him, how arid and provincial and easily manageable the remaining writers would seem. We NEED the difficult, ornery, contradictory and flawed writer that Mark Twain was, because the era in which he grew up gave us a lot to be ashamed about. A lot that we need to remember.

Twain was a stickler for language, and he had the chance often in his life to change the offending word to something else. But nothing else had or still has the punch, the sting, the stink of human hate. “Nigger” is nowhere near the equivalent of “slave” (even though someone in the NYT asked why “slave” should be considered inoffensive in its own right). Nowhere near the dehumanization, the belittling, the oppression and pain. Was America built on the backs of slaves? Yep, right up til 1865. Was it built on the backs of niggers? Even more so, from sea to shining sea, and continues to this day. And, (not to diminish what black Americans have suffered) they come in many colors.

But I don’t think this new edition will gain any traction at all. For one thing, it’s still easy to pick up Huck Finn and enjoy it, so the original version will always attract readers who want to see what all the fuss is about. It’s not a fusty old cadaver of a book, it’s maddeningly alive. And until something else comes along, like Hemingway wrote, all American literature flows from it. I tried to explain this to the Swiss journalist, but probably didn’t do it adequately. For every person who might want to change the text, there are 50,000 of them who want to preserve it. (Now, if he’d made fun of religion or capitalism in it, like he did in his other lesser-known books, it might be a different story.)

It was gratifying to hear the reporter (who sounded kind of young, maybe in her 30s) talk about how people all over Europe and the rest of the world take a great deal of interest in American culture, and the perception that if America is anything, it’s a place where freedom of speech is a paramount virtue. She stumbled a bit when she almost said, “But America is still a racist country, right?” I agreed with her partially, that some parts (not just geographical) of the country will always be racist, but more to the point, it will always be an unequal society, which is why we can’t sanitize writers like Twain.

What’s more likely to diminish racism in America, editing out one word from a novel, or having people read the novel and be confronted all its pain and cruelty? The answer is obvious.

At least all this news coverage has unearthed a Twain quote I’d never heard before, which I really like: “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.”

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Great Comic Art Show Coming Up!

The show “Static Creep” will be opening on Friday, January 14 at the Los Manos Gallery in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood. It was put together by my friend Tony Akins, and will feature art from him and more than 20 artists, including:

Chris Burnham, Corinne Mucha, Jill Thompson, Gary Gianni, Andrew Pepoy, Alex Wald, Mike Norton, Hilary Barta, Dave Dorman, Jeffrey Brown, Jenny Frison, Sarah Becan, Nicole Hollander, Mitch O’Connell, Douglas Klauba, Heather McAdams, Lucy Knisley, Tim Seeley and Bill Reinhold.

If you can’t find someone in that group to love, you’re a pitiable wretch and it’s no wonder dogs and children avoid you.

Here’s Tony, speaking authoritatively in that booming voice of his:

StatiCCreep from Mieke Zuiderweg on Vimeo.

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A Monstrous Christmas Season

Spurred on by my limerick for “White Zombie”, Hilary Barta over at Limerwrecks has spent most of the season posting paeans to old horror movies. Here’s one I contributed for ol Doc Frankenstein:

His raising the dead’s not a living
and townsfolk are most unforgiving
But Doc isn’t crying
His monster’s undying
A gift that will never stop giving

Go over and enjoy the other ones.

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Free Stories for Christmas!

Some readers out there might know that every Christmas for the past 20 years or so, I have attempted to write some kind of Yule-themed story for my wife. The first story I ever had published, entitled “Jerry’s Last Fare” in the late Chicago Tribune Magazine, was also the first I ever wrote as a gift to my wife. For better or worse, I took it as an omen.

Since then, there has been a veritable Whitman’s Sampler of stories, some funny, some frightening, some strange. And since my wife is the understanding sort, she always accepts them enthusiastically, even when it’s obvious from the writing that my muse has been snowed in at Denver Airport.

Some of these stories you’ll never see, and you’re lucky for that, but a few of them aren’t bad. In fact, three of them have been set up as separate pages for this blog. It’s hard to notice the links to them at the right, so I thought I’d pull them out here:

“Mr. Dickens Buys a Comb”–in which our hero, Victorian in taste if not in time, has to navigate the perils of a megastore at Christmas to buy himself an article of personal hygiene.

“Chex Mix Confidential”–What is it about Chex mix? Why is it so impossibly addictive? Why do people get in heated arguments about the correct way to make it? This bare-knuckle police procedural blows the lid off the whole enterprise.

“The Marketeers at Christmas”–in which two nameless, shameless, witless advertising men spitball ideas about how to link Christmas with a corn-borer pesticide.

Please enjoy these little presents, and pass them forward if you do to anyone who would like them.

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Groovy Ghosts of Christmases Past

Some people’s Christmas memories smell like gingerbread, or pine trees, or egg nog.

Mine smells like English Leather cologne.

All my early childhood Christmases have melted into a blur. I can remember some gifts, and the decorations in the house (some of which I’ve inherited), but if we didn’t have photographs of those years, my memory vault would be even more empty than it is now. I remember sledding and tobogganing during the break, and trying to skate and giving up because no one would teach me and my knees couldn’t take the punishment, and hot chocolate in the warming house by the skating rink. I remember too when I was 4 or 5 and I pulled the whole tree down on top of myself. I couldn’t move, pinned not only by the nominal weight of the tree but also by the horror of my mistake and the guilt of somehow defiling our whole Christmas by my carelessness. The needles pricked, too.

Real strong memories of the Christmas SEASON, however, only begin for me around 1970. I would be 10 years old then, and whatever was going on in childhood was being replaced by hints of what teenage and adult life would bring. I had two older brothers, and watching them operate from a distance (which was the only way they’d let me) offered tantalizing hints of what was to come.

I remember shopping for my eldest brother, who would be 15 at this time. He wanted a copy of the LP “Steppenwolf 7”. It had a VERY psychedelic cover, with skulls and seascapes and the band acting tough. I could’ve bought it at Dearborn Music, a steady old store that’s still running, but instead I ventured to The Happy Apple, the “head shop” that had opened in town. Inside was run-of-the-mill hippie stuff: black light posters, clothes, candles, those brass bells on a cord that everyone was selling for some reason. They might have been selling something more illicit, but I was too young to know. All I know is, I felt pretty damn cool to be walking down our main shopping drag with the bag from The Happy Apple, with its drippy letters and fat, happy, purple, and obviously stoned apple mascot.

My next eldest brother would’ve been in junior high around that time, so he was concerned about hygiene and smelling good for the ladies. This is where the smell of English Leather comes in. I remember buying him a big bottle of the stuff, in a cedar box. There must have been six or seven ounces of the concoction, enough to supply a whole Polish disco. He might have never used it, but the smell of it permeated our dresser for years. besides, it was enough to have the feeling that I had nudged him a little along maturity by buying it for him (it was probably my failsafe present for him for years, regardless of whether he ever opened the bottle.)

Many of the other gifts of that time also had a distinct counter-culture vibe to them. Designs were getting bolder, sleeker. The Panasonic Ball radio was pretty “boss”, and lasted a surprisingly long time. Puzzles like SOMA were much cooler than the board games we used to get. Even the jigsaw puzzles in our stockings were getting cooler, in round shape with fantastical characters on them like giant Mer-men. We received macracmé belts and string art kits, because we were a pretty crafty family.

(Evidence of 1960s Christmas crafty: angel figurines made from turning down the pages of Readers Digest and spray-painting the books to make cone-shaped stand-alone items. Evidence of 1970s Christmas craft: Candles, candles, candles!)

And late at night, when everyone was asleep, I got to stay up late and watch “The Tonight Show”. It seemed like a swinging time back then. The men, including Johnny, were wearing sideburns and flashy jackets. The women were dressed up as if they were headed to a party, and everyone smoked and told double entendres that even my juvenile imagination thought were hilarious and naughty. (A year or two later, I found my first “Holiday” issue of Playboy, and enjoyed a full mental assault on what I thought grown-up Christmases would eventually be like: lascivious office parties, jazz concerts, slick cocktails, and naked women playing pool in my wood-paneled study.)

Innocence at Christmas? Sorry, it never grabbed my attention.