Looking Backward

How It Was: Deck the Halls

December 10, 2008 by John

The time: late fall, 1990.

The place: Ashland, Virginia.

A young(ish) man sits at a card table by his bedroom window. He is temporarily jobless, by choice, and living on accumulated savings while he writes what will become his first book.

And he is panicking, inwardly, because nowhere in his budget is there sufficient flexibility for anything like Christmas presents for his family…

I think back on it now and know, know with certainty, that the panic was silly (if not foolish). Nevertheless, panicky I was.

And then I suddenly thought to myself: Well, self, you are after all presuming to be a writer. Surely you can put that to use. Give them something unique, something written, something true (if fuzzily factual)…

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Perfect Moments: The Boy, The Boy’s Father, The Sandwich

November 30, 2008 by John

When The Boy grew up, he would tell people — with slight hesitation, thinking first of pizza — that his favorite food of all was sandwiches.

But there was a time when this was not true. There was a time when all that The Boy knew of sandwiches was what his mother made for him, and what he learned to make for himself:

Peanut butter and jelly, of course; tuna (with mayonnaise, lettuce optional); American cheese (in casual or formal versions, with jelly or mayonnaise respectively); ham and cheese (margarine and mustard); liverwurst (sometimes with cheese, always with mustard). Regardless of specific ingredients, these sandwiches all had one feature in common:

White bread.

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Important Thanksgiving Week Message

November 25, 2008 by John

…no, not important to you. (Er, not to denigrate your importance.) This is important to me.

See, I’ve got this one recipe I cook once, sometimes twice every year. It’s a recipe for Sour Cream Pumpkin Pie. I’ve made it every year since first finding it in a “holiday recipes” brochure from an actual God-do-they-still-exist? A&P grocery store in Clinton, NJ, in 1986 or so. So you’d think I’d have committed it to memory by now.

You would think wrong. (Er, not to denigrate your intelligence.) After all (I tell myself, by way of excuses), I make it only once a year.

In any case, every year around now I go through the same torture of not having the recipe on hand. After, oh, eight years or so, the brochure started to fall apart. Eventually that specific page did become separated from the others, and for a few years it managed to get lost in a stack of recipes (mostly culled by The Missus) from newspapers and magazines — whence I would excavate it, after a half-hour or more of feverish fieldwork.

Finally, worried that I might lose it altogether, I typed it up and made about a dozen copies, which I then proceeded to secure in various locations around the house where I might think to look for them every year: inside other cookbooks, in various pantries and cupboards, even upstairs on the shelf over my computer. “Just in case,” you see, and a good thing too because as far as I know I am now down to my last copy. (It’s the one I found just this morning — the day of the Thanksgiving-grocery-shopping excursion — on the shelf over my computer.)

So this is for me: a permanent place for me to find the recipe every year.

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How It Was: Rake’s Progress

November 22, 2008 by John

The number of reasons people start up blogs probably verges on uncountable. But the most common reason — wanna bet? — is surely, “Ummm… I don’t know.” If you dig deeper, you’ll probably get something like this: “Well, I didn’t know at first. But as it’s worked out, I’m actually blogging mostly about X.”

With Running After My Hat, I sort of reversed that process.

As of today, as you can tell just by lurking for a few days, the blog is pretty much about… umm… well…

*crickets*

But when I started it up in the spring, I had a grand vision of what I would accomplish. I meant to launch an experiment in electronic publishing — not that no one else had never done the same thing, but that I hadn’t.

Specifically, I wanted to introduce to some portion of the world a series of booklets which I wrote over a few years in the early 1990s. Collectively, the series goes by the title How It Was. (Several variants have popped up from time to time, the most durable being Jersey Boy: How It Was.) Each booklet is a quasi-memoir of growing up in a particular small town in a particular corner of southern New Jersey in a particular decade of the mid-20th century.

The protagonist of How It Was, identified only as The Boy, has an entirely secret inner life which he superimposes on his daily activities. A bicycle becomes a World War II bomber, for instance; and, for another instance, he views (many of) his teachers with a baffled but stubborn suspicion utterly at odds with his compliant exterior.

And yet, for all his self-fantasies as (alternately) a hero and a villain and a vacillating sprinter between those two extremes, The Boy remains consistently (and unconsciously) a soft-hearted romantic, touched with nostalgia decades before he deserves it.

Each booklet in the How It Was series describes events in a particular season of a single year — seasons as The Boy recognizes them: Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Christmas. Actual, “true” events interleave with ones which never happened, or happened much later; The actual Boy ranged in age from around eight to around twelve, while The fictional Boy ages no more than a year — he may be ten, plus or minus a year.

Early readers of the book (those outside The (actual) Boy’s family) sometimes are put off by what one once described as the “arch” tone. But The (actual) Boy is gratified by how easily they seem to get sucked in as they read along.

I posted an excerpt (a long one) from the Spring booklet early in RAMH‘s (so far) short life, but since then I’ve pretty much ignored the whole subject (and ignored electronic publishing, for that matter). Yet at this time of year, even (or especially) with North Florida temperatures dropping overnight into the 20s, I can’t help thinking of New Jersey in the fall, 40-odd years ago. And so now feels the right time to revisit How It Was, with an excerpt (a much shorter one) from the Autumn booklet.

This is a brief portion of the section called “Rake’s Progress.” By this time in the Autumn storyline, The Boy has successfully negotiated the first few months of the school year. He’s gotten through Halloween, triumphantly (in his own eyes).

And that secret inner life is running in high gear: trying, desperately, to justify the annual torture of raking up the leaves from the front yard, shifting them from the yard to the street, along the curb, where they will soon be burned. (More innocent times, those. Sigh.)

Enjoy.

Flange: The Gargoyle’s Back Story

November 20, 2008 by John

Flange, contemplating topics for first post [I introduced you to my new co-blogger, a gargoyle named (well, his name is pronounced this way) Flange, just the other day. In this, his inaugural post, Flange wanted to give you some idea how he got where he is, i.e., as a professional gargoyle. When and if needed, I’ll interject brief commentary and/or supply footnotes.]

Was born, me, a small granite child. Parents, mine, were three, very common among people, my: mother, father, bother. Please, not to insert “r” that word, in. “Bother,” just.

Humans not know, no they not, about habits, mating of people Flj, such as. Flj explain. Try to:

Mother, father, you know, same with you. Join together, sacred mating ritual But “bother” how pronounced, third parent type—

John: Flange, Flange, Flange — for crissake, this is painful to watch! Aside from which, you’re beating the hell out of my keyboard. Why don’t we do this — why don’t you just tell me what you want to say and I’ll key it in for you? Maybe translate a little as I go along—

Flange: That kay with Flj. Not change meaning, you, no? Flj’s voice, unique, preserve, you, right? Flj have pride, authorial, too! Kay. Your way, have it. The human, you are. “Boss,” ha ha ha.

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Attach Imagination to Mouth. Turn Ignition. GO.

November 19, 2008 by John

When my niece was a couple-three years old, she went through this engaging stretch of weeks, maybe months, during which she improvised neverending stories. For some reason these tended to involve creatures like the Frankenstein monster, Dracula, and so on. (That may have been attributable to my sister’s macabre sensibilities.)

For instance, a story (told, and told, and told… from the back seat of a car) might go something like this:

Once upon a time Frankenstein was walking through the woods AND THEN it started to rain AND THEN Dracula flew down and got Frankenstein AND THEN Dracula and Frankenstein went to a party and monsters were all there AND THEN the sun came out and it was like Sesame Street…

And so on, and on, and on, all the AND THENs providing the transitional links between hundreds of what might otherwise seem, to my unimaginative adult mind, to be discontinuous stories. (They also, and perhaps by unconscious intent, made the plot as a whole uninterruptible.)

I loved that.

This urge to free-associate stories seems a common phase which kids go through — not all kids, but many of them. Should you need evidence I offer, first, this brief and enormously popular (over nine million views and counting!) video from earlier this year: a three-year-old little girl summarizes the plot of Star Wars, Episode IV (this was the original film in the franchise, remember, first released in 1977 simply as Star Wars).

More recently, along came the next one — likewise destined for online-video classic status. (I encountered it the other day, among the weekly 7-Imp’s 7 Kicks entries.) The monologue (a little over four minutes long) is in French, but the clip also includes English subtitles. Some of the characters will be familiar (vaguely) to anyone who’s been around little kids in recent decades. But as far as I know the plot is based on nothing at all other than what emerged, spontaneously and moment-by-moment, from the storyteller’s mind.

Knock me over with a feather. Plucked from the wings of a hippopotamus — in HEAVEN.

Ear Job (3): Tinnitus

November 18, 2008 by John

[This is the next installment in what appears to be a series of ongoing posts about my experiences with ears, hearing aids, and hearing in general. If you missed the earlier bits, feel free to backtrack to Part 2 (on hearing aids); there’s a link there to the first part.]

While preparing to write this post, I went back and read the previous two on the same topic. Lo and behold, I couldn’t help noticing what was, for me, a classic evasion. To wit:

If you were to write a shorthand transcript of my hearing-aid experiences based on nothing but those two posts — and you knew nothing about shorthand, but maybe just enough about HTML and such to be clever, if not outright dangerous — it might read something like this:

stuff leading up to first hearing aid
FIRST HEARING AID
mumblemumblemumblemumble
FIRST WHIZ-BANG HEARING AID
etc.

I’ve gotta clear up that mumblemumble stuff, if I’m to be honest here (with you and with myself).

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“A Guy I Know Once Told Me…”

November 12, 2008 by John

The Internet’s rife with urban rumors. (Because, after all, the Internet isn’t just the information superhighway; it’s also the bullsh!t highway. The highway doesn’t care what sort of traffic it carries as long as every bit of it pays the proper toll.)

But this post isn’t about Internet-based urban legends. It’s about offline word-of-mouth urban legends.

I suspect I’m not alone in my certainty that many of these have influenced my understanding of the universe, of people, of life. And I may have lots of company, too, in having no idea what portion of it might actually be true, as opposed to simply fun, convenient, or dangerous — and little intention (or time) to check it all out.

In the rest of this post I thought I’d try a little experiment. What follows are three urban legends, two “true” (in the sense that “a guy I know once really DID tell me”), and one made up just for this post. Furthermore, I won’t tell you which are the real ones and which, the impostor.

(One interesting possibility: that someone, somewhere, will (a) find this post via a search on a keyword which figures prominently in the bogus urban legend, (b) do a “find” within the post itself, looking for the keyword and hence skipping over all this background, and eventually (c) spread the false rumor as his/her own bit of “a guy once told me” folklore. Ah, posterity…)

Here goes:

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Dad (and Others), Somewhere and Sometime

November 11, 2008 by John

(1) Me — during work hours. Just came up for a breath of air.

(2) It’s me again. Actually working! See, I told you so!

(3) Here I am still working. I don’t know how I can work so hard!!

The above photos (taken somewhere in France, sometime in 1944), their captions penned in ink on the back, the handwriting in which the captions appear, and the voice in which I can hear the captions spoken — all are exquisitely familiar and completely alien to me. And I bet they are to some of you, too, even if the faces, places, and years are different.

Thanks, Dad.

Paying Attention to History

November 9, 2008 by John

If you’ve been visiting Running After My Hat for more than a few days, you already know about what you might politely call my serial attentiveness. Theoretically, this is a blog about writing. But then, oh, yeah — there’s stuff about music. And true, I rattle on sometimes about reading, too, but isn’t that sorta kinda like about writing? Oh, well, all right, yes I do post — but less often! — about tech stuff, and politics, and art and photography and poetry…

When working on a large-scale project like a book, similarly, I sometimes wander off the main road, suddenly absorbed in distractions of landscape and weather and architecture.

Oddly, this sometimes works to the advantage of the book in question (although, all right all right fine, it sometimes does not — and probably just as oddly).

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