Family – Page 21

The Others Next Door

July 13, 2008 by John Leave a Comment

The Orange and the Green Stewart Neville (who participates as “Conduit” in the blogalogue at various writerly sites) is an Irishman with a hard-boiled fictional voice and a voice of sweet reason — or at least reason, period — when not constrained by a “Once upon a time… The End” frame.

His post yesterday offers up a case in point.

Here in the USA — which at least used to be an open-minded melting pot (maybe not in these days of fences and quotas and such) — we of course celebrate, for good or ill, a handful of ethnicity-inspired holidays: St. Patrick’s Day, Columbus Day, Kwaanza, Bastille Day. But the Twelfth of July? Here’s Stuart:

One day in the Northern Irish calendar is more divisive than any other. A few words of explanation for my American friends: The 12th of July is a national holiday in Northern Ireland that commemorates the victory of the Protestant King William of Orange over the Catholic forces of King James at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

Yep, more than three hundred years have passed, and we still haven’t let it go.

The day is marked by parades throughout Northern Ireland, organised by Orange Lodges, featuring marching bands, much flag waving, and general bluster. When I was a little boy, the Twelfth was one of the highlights of the year, bettered only by Christmas and Easter. It’s hard to describe the feeling of a big bass drum being hammered to within an inch of destruction, the way it pounds your chest, along with the crackle of side drums, and the piercing melodies of dozens of not-quite-in-tune flutes. If you’re walking along, you can’t help but fall into step with the music.

What I don’t know about Irish history could fit in a stadium. (Think about it.) But there was something very familiar to me in this description of parades from Stuart’s childhood.

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We Interrupt This Routine…

July 3, 2008 by John Leave a Comment

Pitch black - scary, isn't it?

Since I started working on Merry-Go-Round last August, I’ve been sticking more or less to the same morning routine: shut off alarm (which goes off between 4 and 5am); stagger into the bathroom — the path illuminated, faintly, by a night light; slip back into the bedroom (carefully, mustn’t awaken The slumbering Missus); grope around on my nightstand for glasses and hearing aid and the stretchy thingum I use to keep my hair out of my eyes; stoop down to pick up the lap desk and current reading material and (usually) Merry-Go-Round excerpt I’m working on at the time; tiptoe out of the bedroom; proceed to kitchen to heat up hot water for tea; etc.

This morning, things didn’t quite work out that way. This morning, just as I returned from the bathroom to the nightstand, the power went off. I couldn’t see a thing. Total blackness. Burgeoning panic.

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Sing, Sing, Sing

June 13, 2008 by John Leave a Comment

Happy Father's Day This Sunday is Father’s Day in the US. Last week, 20 years ago, my Dad died. I thought a fitting tribute to both of these occasions would be to post here a short story which was, in many ways, a story of my Dad (although none of the actual events described in it occurred to him). That’s Dad in the photo at the left, circa 1943-44, when he was in training for a while at Texas A&M.

Below, I’ll excerpt the first couple-three pages of the quite old-fashioned story, whose title is “Sing, Sing, Sing.” It’s gone through many versions by now, the earliest written in the autumn of that year of 1988. The version which appears here is simply the most recent.

If you like that much of the story, feel free to download the complete version, in PDF form (146KB); a link to that appears at the end of the excerpt.

(Note: For what it’s worth, there has never to my knowledge been a newspaper named the New York Messenger. Should you go on to read the whole story, there’s never been a book called The Big Hall: The Good Times of Benny Goodman, either, or an author named Robert G. Ehling.)

Update (2008-08-07): I’ve done a more complete breakdown of the “Sing, Sing, Sing” performance, including full-length clips of the three main segments (which together make up a “triptych,” as the fictional Big Hall calls it).

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Forty Years On

June 5, 2008 by John Leave a Comment

Portion of artwork by Tina Berning, for the NY Times From the NY Times, RFK’s kids remember him:

Kerry Kennedy

But most of all, he believed it imperative to question authority, and those who failed that lesson did so at their peril.

Joseph P. Kennedy II

Robert Kennedy had a wonderful way of allowing others to tell him how the world looked through their eyes.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend

The long table was set with linen, silver and crystal. Painted portraits of my brothers and sisters hung on the walls. And suddenly, my father entered. He looked haunted and started talking to me, shaking his head in distress as he described the people he’d met in the Delta. “I was with a family who live in a shack the size of this dining room,” he told me.

And yeah, I know: ANYBODY’s kids tend to look at their parents in a manner that’s biased, one way or another. And yeah, I know: children of privilege, easy for them to say, etc. etc.

But there was no one like him. I bet his kids would have had these kinds of memories no matter what station in life he and they had been born to (or how he exited).

(Also from the Times, here’s the obituary (1.2MB PDF).)

Mr. Excitement

June 2, 2008 by John Leave a Comment

So, The Missus indulged herself by going on a beach mini-weekend with a girlfriend.

Of course I pounced on the opportunity for a hedonistic erstwhile-bachelor weekend of my own.

And before you get your collective backs up (or, alternatively, let your collective imagination run riot): no, I didn’t do anything that a stereotypical bachelor does. Even an erstwhile stereotypical bachelor. Here’s how I spent the last couple days:

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Where It Was

April 25, 2008 by John 2 Comments

As I’ve mentioned, the events of the How It Was series of booklets took place in the real world as well as in the world of The Boy’s imagination (then and now). The real town where all this happened is in southern New Jersey, on the Delaware River and a few miles north of Philadelphia.

The Missus knows how tightly I cling to memories of that place and time and, accordingly, has set up on eBay some kind of early-warning system for herself, to let her know that something tagged with the town’s highly unusual (almost certainly unique) name has come on the market.

This past Christmas, she came up with some winners: a series of maps, dated 1876, and a couple of postcards. (That’s a thumbnail of one of the maps at the top of this post; click on it for the original as scanned, which will open in a new window or tab.) My friend Jimmy still lives in that area, and occasionally drops me a line to let me know of some item of interest. Recently, the local post office celebrated its 150th anniversary, and issued a series of commemorative postcards — reproductions of the originals; Jimmy sent me a few of them.

One of the things I’d like to do sometimes here at Running After My Hat is to try filling in some background on the town — not necessarily what it’s like now, or even how it really was… but at least how it was in The Boy’s latter-day memory. I’m going to start with this map — a larger-scale, annotated version of -which you can see “below the fold.”

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Formative years, formative “places,” formative people

April 24, 2008 by John Leave a Comment

Over there on the right, in the “Family/Friends/Alter Egos” portion of the blogroll, you’ll see a couple names you may recognize.

The most likely such candidate would be Diana Gabaldon, creator of the hugely successful series of quote-unquote “romance” novels beginning with Outlander (original title, and title as published in the UK, Cross-stitch).

You may or may not know of Floyd Kemske, also an author — creator of a series of what he called “corporate nightmares”: fantastic (literally so) extrapolations of what the worst of business might wreak on society.

(For instance, Lifetime Employment, the first book in the series, concerns a company which — as the title suggests — guarantees lifetime employment to all its employees, managers, and so on. So then, with no real turnover or attrition, how do employees move up the career ladder? By killing their higher-ups.)

It’s been many years since I’ve talked to either Diana or Floyd — indeed, I’ve never spoken to Floyd, although I’ve known him for 17-18 years now. Occasionally, a brief flurry of email reassures me that they’re still out there. Diana, there’s little doubt of, in truth; the woman is everywhere. Floyd, well, I dunno; we last exchanged email a little over a year ago. If you follow the link to his Web site, you will find much that’s interesting, but nothing (as far as I can tell) more recent than a few years old.

My point in bringing these folks up — what I really have “in common” with them, aside from the loose association that we are all or have been writers — is where we met: on the “old” CompuServe Literary Forum.

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How It Was

April 20, 2008 by John 3 Comments

Objects in mirror... The year was 1990. I’d taken a leave of absence from work, and moved from New Jersey to Virginia, to a little town where no one I knew lived and only one or two people I knew had even heard of. (I’ll tell that whole story later.) I’d been in Ashland for a few months, living on savings and nothing else, while working on my first book.

Suddenly: crisis.

Oh, no: This wasn’t the sort of crisis which threatened life or even limb. Governments would not stand or fall depending on the outcome; there was no weeping or gnashing of teeth involved. (Well, perhaps a little gnashing of teeth. But all of that was highly localized.) No, it was just the late 20th-century WASP preoccupation which loomed as every calendar year rolled, inexorably, to its end: What in the hell was I going to get everybody for Christmas?

I couldn’t afford to buy anything. I had no handicraft skills. (There would be no handknit scarves, no lathe-turned lamps.) And although I’d moved several hours away from everyone in my family, I’d moved only several hours away: it wasn’t like I could count on my simple, y’know, being there to be gift enough to assuage my conscience.

When it got right down to it, in fact, unless my family wanted databases built or COBOL, Fortran, or C programs written, I had absolutely nothing to give them.

But, hmm, I could write a little…
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