The Most Wonderfullest Christmas Ever

I have celebrated and enjoyed many Christmases over my three score and ten plus years.  Some of the very best involved watching my children dash down the stairs to see what Santa had placed beneath the tree.  Another favorite occurred a few days before Christmas when Polley flew out from St. Louis to spend time with me and my family before she returned to be with hers for the holiday.  We took the bus to New York City, ate at the Top of the Sixes, a revolving restaurant atop one of Manhattan’s sleek steel buildings, and huddled in the same spot Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr stood in An Affair to Remember on the top of the Empire State Building, our breaths mingling in the chilly December air.  As we walked home from the bus stop, I watched the snowflakes lace her eyelashes and I knew that Christmas had come early; I knew I already had my gift that year, a gift I still treasure every day.

All those Christmases were special but there is one that I am constantly revisiting in my daydreams and in my soul’s recounting.  Let me tell you about it.  But before I do, I must warn you.  You have to believe in magic in order to understand this story.  Not the magic of a Dave Copperfield, or a Houdini or a David Blaine, fine magicians all.  I refer to the magic borne of childhood wonder, the unexplainable occurrences that make a child believe in a world, in a universe, that is excitingly mysterious and which is supported by a fundamental goodness, a world in which faith supercedes cynicism.

My parents were products of the Great Depression, a time of utter uncertainty and a period where harsh realities made hope a struggle.  My mother’s mother died in the Great Spanish Flu epidemic when my mother was five or six, and my father joined the Civilian Conservation Corps to help support his family.  Christmas day for both my folks was just another day in the struggle to survive.  When my father returned from World War II, he married my mother who later gave birth to me, and, four years later, to my brother Jimmy.   We lived in the Bronx until I was about nine or ten and then, my parents seeking a home in an environment where they could open the front door on a Saturday and let their kids disappear into a safe exploration of childhood, moved to a quiet suburb in New Jersey. 

So confident that the world they provided us was secure and free from danger, that even at that young age I was allowed to take the bus by myself up to Union City and West New York.  I would stroll up and down Bergenline Boulevard to see what Christmas gifts I could purchase with the few dollars I made in after school jobs and with the fifty cents allowance I received for completing family chores.

 

There was a magic that I inhaled with every breath as I stopped at various store windows, comparing prices of gifts to the small stash I harbored in my pocket.  And it was the magic of anticipation, highlighted by the holiday music pouring out of various venues, from Perry Como to Alvin and the Chipmunks that lightened my spirit.  And it was not just the magic of anticipation of what was to be received, but of what was to be given.  The days before Christmas were filled with the delight in expectation of the smiles I would draw on the faces of my mother and my father and my younger brother Jimmy.  Wouldn’t Mom gasp as she unwrapped the faux leather purse I chose?  Wouldn’t Dad’s jaw drop as he opened the package containing the fishing lures, the red and white Daredevils I picked out?  Wouldn’t Jimmy squeal in glee as he tore off the wrapping paper from his cork pop gun? 

Anticipation is ninety percent of the holiday.  Christmas morning Jimmy and I, tossing and turning in our beds, would wait and wait and wait until we heard our parents call to us to come downstairs.  In our pajamas we would race to the tree, a spruce or pine aglow with twinkling lights and ornaments and tinsel, examine the colorful packages and pick the ones tagged with our names.  As we unwrapped, we would smell the rich odor of coffee percolating and bacon and home fries sizzling and hot chocolate brewing.  It was a day of exclamations of surprise, some false, some true, and a day of play and warmth.

But this one Christmas, things were different. Very different.  Later, much later, I realized that my parents, survivors of the depression and the war, distrusted happiness.  You were supposed to make the most out of a bad deal, and the bad deal was a harsh reality that blocked out every other truth.  Not having been loved as they loved Jimmy and me, they found it difficult to be secure in the feelings they had for each other.  So one night a couple of days before Christmas, my father came home late.  Very late.

“You were supposed to take me Christmas shopping!” My mother stood in the kitchen, hands on hips, body vertically braced.

My father took off his navy peacoat.  “I had to visit my mother.”

My grandmother lived in the Bronx, and she would often call on her sons to drive out to her apartment to unclog a sink or translate a bill she did not believe she incurred or fix some household device.  She did not like my mother.  Her culture believed orphans did not make good spouses.

“You took her shopping!!!  What about shopping for your own kids?!”

And the fight was on.  Jimmy and I huddled on the top steps of our stairs and listened to the accusations and recriminations, a litany of offences committed over what seemed like centuries of their mutual past.  They yelled and yelled some more, and each cry a dagger to our psyches.  Jimmy and I shrank with each threat and counter threat.   We crawled off to our separate beds and covered our heads with our blankets.  I heard Jimmy crying.

The next morning we tentatively came downstairs.  My mother sat at the kitchen table reading the newspaper and sipping coffee.  When she heard us, she got up and filled two bowls with farina.  My father had already gone to work.  We had no school, and that was worse because school would have made the time go faster and help us forget that Christmas was not to be that year.  The radio was taunting us with “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”   We half-heartedly played with our toys that day.  I read my biography of Jim Bowie.

My parents did not speak at all to each other that evening nor the next day, Christmas Eve.  Dinner Christmas Eve was lentil soup which I hated.  Jimmy and I tried to stay clear of both our parents because we knew that intense silence, that ocean of quiet hostility between the two of them, was deafening to us.  Jimmy and I walked into the garage and there, leaning in the corner, was a fraser fir my father brought back from one of his hunting trips.  Jimmy grabbed my hand.

The tree would not stand decorated and lit in our living room this year. Nor would there be gifts under it.  We had long ago discovered our parents’ best hiding places, and those places stood bare.  No Christmas breakfast, no Christmas dinner, and no Christmas laughter. The house felt empty.

At least I had my gift for my brother.  And what to do with the gifts I already bought for my Mom and Dad?

My parents were still not speaking when Jimmy and I trudged up to bed.  The radio was playing “Silent Night,” and we both covered our ears as we crawled under our blankets.  I lay staring at the ceiling and thinking about what I had done so wrong that this non-Christmas came to be.  What should I have done to make my parents happy?  Why wasn’t I a good person?  You know.  Kids blame themselves for the state of the world.

I heard Jimmy sniffling in his bed.  I called to him, “You wanna crawl in next to me?”

He stifled a sob.  Paused a bit.  “Yes.”

Jimmy slid in next to me. I put my arm around his shoulder.  “It’s okay, Jimmy.  It’s okay.”

He buried his head in my shoulder and whimpered. “It’s Christmas.  But it’s not.”   I looked out our window at the dark blue night sky and dreaded Christmas day.  Somehow we both drifted off into a dreamless sleep.

The first thing I remember about that Christmas morning was a bright ray of December sunshine warming my cheek.  My brother still lay next to me. 

A wave of smells teased my nostrils.  There was the earthy smell of coffee, but there were other odors that I recognized but should not have been there considering the circumstances.  I heard “Sleigh Ride” blaring on the radio downstairs.  

“Jimmy!!  Jimmy!!  Get up!”
Jimmy pulled the blanket over his head. “I don’t want to get up.”

“We have to get up sometime. Come on!”

Then, from downstairs, we heard our father’s voice.  It was the first full sentence we had heard from him in days.  “Hey, you two.  Get up and come down here.  It’s Christmas.”

Jimmy and I looked at each other.  Tentatively we walked to the top of the stairs and leaned over.

There, at the bottom of the staircase stood my mother and my father, his arm wrapped around her waist, smiles adorning both faces, both pairs of eyes twinkling.  We could see in the living room the fraser fir upright and festooned with red, green, blue and white blinking lights and ornaments galore and, of course, tinsel.  Somehow during the night my parents had reconciled. It was pure magic. The radio played “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”

My brother and I raced down the stairs, Jimmy wrapping his arms around my mother’s thighs.   My father put his hand on my shoulder. 

“Let’s have breakfast.  We have eggs, Italian sausage, hot chocolate and”

My brother interrupted, “With marshmallows?”
“Of course, with marshmallows.”

I sat down at the kitchen table, and, hard as I tried to prevent them, tears formed in the corners of my eyes. 

My dad plopped down a heap of home fries on my plate.  “After breakfast we’ll all play some Scrabble.”  He looked at me.  “And after that, maybe Monopoly.” He knew that was my favorite game. “And a few rounds of NAVY.”  NAVY was fhe forerunnner of the popular game Battleship, only played with paper and pencil.

My mother dropped a few marshmallows on Jimmy’s hot chocolate.  “And your father says that since we didn’t have time to get a ham or turkey for Christmas dinner…”  she shot my dad that dagger glance that most mothers develop and which could stop a charging rhino at five paces…”We are all going to Chinatown for dinner!”  Wow!  On special occasions my father would take us to a Chinese restaurant where he could feed the whole family on good food for ten bucks. 

There were no presents under the tree.  That day, there did not need to be.  The magic sufficed.  As my brother Jimmy formed a brown moustache on his upper lip courtesy of his hot chocolate, he exclaimed, “This is the most wonderfullest Christmas ever!” For me it was and still is.

Happy Holidays

https://blog.ralphmaltese.com/2020/12/16/the-most-wonderf…t-christmas-ever/

Random Acts of Kindness

I was teaching high school language arts in a suburban district which was traumatized by a series of events related only by the depth of their debilitating effects on the community.  One of the mishaps included the death of a student.  Things were not going well in our country either. On a dark, dank, February morning, my fourth period Honors class, a truly smart cohort of nice people(a teacher’s dream), trudged into my classroom, and I could almost hear the mournful musical piece, The Volga Boatmen, playing in the background

We were studying Shakespeare’s contributions to the Renaissance in England, and a quick formative assessment of their faces and silent glares and limp body language told me that this was not going to be an engaging lesson.  My experience warned me that I had to address the affective domains of my students before I could ever help them wrestle with Shakespeare’s themes.  Willy would have to wait.

“Stop.  Please put your pens down, close your notebooks.”  You guys look as if someone told you that you could not bring your cell phones to church…..”

Scattered smiling and an occasional laugh.

“No, really.  I feel the sadness, too.  Let’s talk.”

Silence.  Then “Mr. M., it’s just that being an adult sucks big time.”

“Yeah.  The world’s a pretty sh…y place; I’m sorry Mr.M for using that term….but it’s true.”

 And the flow of words and hurt poured out.

“My parents keep telling me I have to work hard in school so I can prepare for my future.  What future?!!!  We’ll killing the planet so a few greedy people can become even richer,  Violence and crime are up.  Kids are getting stupidly high on drugs and killing each other.”

“Some idiot somewhere in the world can screw up and the next thing you know, countries are firing their nuclear weapons and blowing up the planet.”

“There’s just too much evil going around, Mr. M.  It’s everywhere, like what happened here last month.  I knew that kid.  When I was small, he was my swimming partner in summer camp.”

And so it went.  I let them vent. And that night I decided to push the Bard to the side for just a few days.  The Great Chain of Being, the socioeconomic stratified structure that glued Shakespeare’s world, would have to wait.  My world was more important at that moment.  I spent hours that night thinking about what I could do.

The next day I presented this assignment to my five classes. 

“All right, Gang.  I am dividing you up into groups of five people.  Each group will be assigned a venue.  The school bus, a supermarket, the bus loading platform in the high school, the school library, and the school cafeteria.  For the next three days, each of you assigned to one of those venues is to note any random act of kindness exhibited by your fellow students.  It may be someone helping a person carrying something, opening a door, helping to change a tire, helping a student find a book, etc.  Just list the event, time, location, and date.  Preferably the person being helped is a relative stranger.  The helper might know of the helpee, but the motive for helping is truly random.  Got it?  The more events observed, the better.”

On the third day, groups convened and shared their observations.  They were quite animated and excited.

“Hey, Mr. M., I saw this girl help a kid from Special Ed look at an Atlas in the library!”

“Yeah.  I saw that a few times!”

“So didI!”

 

“In Shoprite, I saw an old lady help a teenage girl who works there pick up fruit that had fallen on the floor!”

“This little kid who lives on my block, must be around four or five, helped a little girl get back up on her bicycle after she had fallen!”

 

“I watched a senior help a freshman Special Ed kid open his combination lock in the locker room!

And so it went.  I let them share.   We discussed random acts of kindness, and how we often overlook them when we consider the moral or ethical state of the world.  I do….overlook them, that is. 

A few weeks ago, as I shared with you on Facebook, a huge hole opened up in my soul and I plummeted into the abyss.  I had been hacked, my website destroyed.  It was just a blog, and nobody, I am certain, ever missed it.  But it was important to me for a number of reasons.  I enjoy writing….more so now with the advancement of Parkinson’s.  Aging and contracting Parkinson’s have combined to make loss a constant in my life.  As we get older, we tend to lose…..lose our sight, our hearing, our taste buds, our driving ability, our friends, our loved ones.  Parkinson’s adds the loss of muscle, the loss of walking, the loss of balance, the loss of passions, the loss of dignity.  I can no longer flyfish the way I used to, a passion that bordered on becoming an epiphany, an understanding and love of nature…you know, kind of a zen thing.  I coped with each loss by saying I can still…..still write….also a passion.  But what really saves me are the people I love.  Fortunately for me I have my soul mate Polley, and my wonderful children and grandchildren and amazing friends and relatives to spark up my days.  But the blog was/is important to me.  Like my fourth period students, I reacted to my deprivation of writing as they did to the events around them.

“So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread”

                                           Richard Cory

And then an amazing thing happened.  Many of you expressed sincere empathy at my misfortune.  It really touched me.  And then another totally amazing thing happened.  Dawn McGee, a former teaching colleague and all-in-all great human being, contacted a former student who is a very very special person.  He then contacted me. (I will respect his desire for anonymity.)   I will refer to this angel of mercy as RV. RV’s superb technical skills are only surpassed by his humanity..  He took days to recover my databases and other elements of my website. He performed what my web host tech team said could not be accomplished.  RV even discovered the exact time I was hacked.

I asked him several times if I could pay him for his efforts and his time.  I knew I could never pay him for his goodness.  He repeatedly refused.  He has a reputation for being what one of my high school teachers called a “Beautiful Souler.” 

As I told my students, you will not find the goodness of the world in the headlines or on the evening news.  What we hear nightly are the bad things.  Serial killings, demolishing storms, bankruptcies, corrupt politicians.  Why the emphasis on evil?  Because bad happenings sell.  Bad news is big business.  Many people thrive on hearing bad news, perhaps, just perhaps, because they survive their own plights by vicariously experiencing some other poor life form’s misfortune.  In any case, don’t expect to hear on national television: “Breaking news:  Tomorrow will be a beautiful day, with mild temperatures and sunshine!”  Or, “A family in Idaho helped a family from Tucson move into their new home.”  OR Senator NiceGuy told the truth at a hearing.” Or “RV resurrected Ralph’s blog website.”

RV attitude and actions recalled the lesson I tried to teach my students.  You won’t find the goodness of the human race in the headlines.  You have to watch the daily life of the people around you to realize that goodness does thrive amongst us.  This does not mean we excuse the problems in our culture.  We still need to cope with climate change, crime, and bloated politicians.  I am simply advocating a reality check.

A deeply felt gratitude to all of you who commiserated with my plight, and a special thanks to Dawn for her kindness.  And to RV;I will never forget your graciousness and your gift of humanity to me. You make this a better planet because of who and what you are.

In the immortal words of Jerry Stiller who plays George Costanza’s father Frank on Seinfeld.

                 “I’M BACK, BABY!!”

Home is Not a Place

Polley and I took stock of all the “must do’s” we have done in recent months and decided it was time to pursue the “want to’s.”  It was her idea to spend a few days in the Adirondack Mountains, my Bronx home away from home, my sanctuary from the unstable vicissitudes of urban elementary school cultures.

My father would drive the family from the congested three room Bronx apartment redolent with automobile exhaust and Mrs. Poderecki’s cabbage soup in Apt. 4D, to the Tupper Lake area where the air was so clean inhaling it felt like drinking ice cold water from a mountain stream. The trip up the New York Thruway and Route 9 took us from scenes of city buses belching black smoke and cough-splattered dirty white opaque windows that masked the riders, to lakes which so clearly mirrored the surrounding mountains and trees that one became disoriented as to which was real and which was the reflection.

Even though Tupper Lake did not have the entertainment gravitas of Saranac Lake or the panache of Lake Placid, we enjoyed shopping in the IGA and having a breakfast of eggs, pancakes, hash browns, and corn beef hash at the Lumberjack restaurant.  The locals were kind and helpful and pleasant in conversation. My brother Jimmy and I would swim in Little Wolf Pond and catch bullheads in the evening.  Most of all, we inhaled the cool, crisp air that convinced me that I could overcome any challenge, any obstacle, any taunt hurled in my direction.  If the air inspired my spirit, the green mountains thick with pine trees and cradling the deep, dark blue lakes and ponds, calmed my soul. The sky always seemed to be an ocean painted a Madonna blue, and puffy ivory white clouds always sailed that water. The big plus over Saranac Lake and Lake Placid was my father’s ability to afford staying in Tupper Lake.He would rent a rustic cabin, usually one that looked like it was built with Lincoln Logs, with a small kitchenette so we could cook our meals.  Our favorite rental was a three room (two bedrooms and a kitchen/living/dining room) white Cape Cod-like cabin with bright red shutters; a cabin nestled in a grove of white birch trees on Little Wolf Pond. Often the centerpieces of these meals were the fish we caught from our usual fishing spots, one of which was located on the Raquette River at the Settin’ Pole Dam. The dam had three huge, whitish gray, concrete pillars that held the gates which controlled the flow of water into the river below.  We climbed over the railing and strolled, fishing rod in hand, down the metal walkway to the middle pillar and cast into the white foaming water that gushed beneath us.

My mother was a good fisherperson and when we drove to the dam, she would be one of the first to jump out of the car, grab her fishing rod and scramble out to the middle concrete pillar of Settin’ Pole Dam.  We would each use a different bait—my father liked to tempt the fish with minnows, Jimmy liked worms, though he liked playing with them more than using them to fish; my mother’s favorite tended toward big nightcrawlers, large tan-red segmented worms that my father and I gathered from our lawn the night before.  I enjoyed slinging spinners.  On one trip we were all getting frustrated since we knew our quarry was there, but there were no takes.  My little brother Jimmy got bored easily, and walked along the river’s edge, picking up rocks and throwing them in the water.  “Maybe I’ll bean one!” 

My mother captured a yellowish green grasshopper and walked back to the middle pillar of Settin’ Pole Dam.

We watched as she baited the hook with the grasshopper and cast into the pool below.  Within seconds she hauled in a nice ten inch smallmouth.  We all shouted and ran into the tall grass grabbing grasshoppers and stuffing them in our shirt pockets.  I carried all that we had collected and brought them out to my mother who was reeling in fish after fish, throwing most back and only keeping several for dinner.  I didn’t even fish. Nor did my father.  We just enjoyed watching my mother smile broadly as she hooked one fish after another, until, abruptly, suddenly, as often happens while fishing, it just stopped.

We let the rest of the grasshoppers go, Jimmy went back to throwing rocks and collecting frogs which he put in the empty bait bucket.  My mother looked at my father.  Her eyes implored him to find a solution.  “Just need two or even just one more fish to have a nice dinner for all of us tonight.” 

He looked down at his worn work shoes.  “Okay.  I’ll drive back into town and buy some minnows.”  We all knew that minnows worked the best at Settin’ Pole Dam, but my father thought it was almost a crime against humanity to pay for bait, and silver minnows were expensive. 

“Jimmy,” my dad called out, “Want to come with us to town to get minnows?” 

Jimmy nodded and ran up and climbed in the back seat. My mother stayed behind.  “I’ll just stay here and relax and watch the water. Don’t forget the bait bucket!”  I grabbed the handle of the bait bucket and climbed into the dark brown Nash.  Twenty minutes later we were in front of Galloway’s Bait Store.  It wasn’t really a store in the conventional sense.  The structure was someone’s home, a large grayish white two story frame.

All the bait was in the backyard, stored in several checkerboard-like square concrete pools, each pool containing a different bait.  Narrow walkways separated the pools.

My father knocked on the front door, and Mrs. Galloway remembered us from previous visits.  She was a tall, fortyish, matronly woman wearing a gray house dress with a yellow tulip pattern and a white sweater draped on her shoulders. She stood atop two banana yellow high heels laced with brown bows. Her reading glasses perched on the top of her dark brown hair. “Hi, fellas, come on in. What can I getcha?” 

My father struggled mightily to get the words out. “Two dozen minnows, please?” 

“What size?”

My father looked down at me, then at Mrs. Galloway.  “Medium.”

“Well good!  I can fix you up.”

“Give me your bait bucket.  Two dozen you say?  Medium?”

I handed her the bait bucket. “Yes, Ma’am.”“Fine. Follow me!”  We followed her through the hallway, past her living room, through her kitchen and out the back.  In one swift motion she opened the screen door and grabbed a small net off a kitchen hook.  In the back yard were several concrete troughs laid out like small, narrow swimming pools.  To access any one pool, Mrs. Galloway would have to walk on a narrow walkway between troughs holding different size minnows

Crawfish		Medium Minnows		Small Minnows
Hellgrammites		Larger Minnows		Small Minnows
Big Minnows		Big Minnows		Big Minnows

 

Then she turned to face us.  “What size do you want?” She had forgotten our order from thirty seconds earlier.

“Medium.” My father’s voice was barely a whisper.

“Fine.  How many you want?”

More tightness in his voice.  “Two dozen.”. 

Mrs. Galloway gracefully stepped out of her banana yellow shoes and gingerly stepped into the matrix of concrete pools, negotiating the narrow walkway past the pool with large minnows which was opposite the pool filled with even bigger minnows.  What happened next is duly recorded in my book, Mahogany Jim and the Nightcrawlers and Other Tales, and I will relate it here.

I watched as the lady in the gray house dress negotiated the narrow walkways between pools, net in right hand, bait bucket in left, a tightrope balancing act admired by Mahogany Jim and me.  Even my brother Jimmy was watching her progress, his hands folded behind his back.

The lady turned to face us.  “What size do you want?”  Mahogany Jim looked at me.  “Sometimes bass prefer the smaller size.”

I shrugged my shoulders.  “Big bait, big fish.”

It was not the answer Mahogany Jim wanted.  He turned toward the lady in the gray house dress.  “Medium.”

She nodded, turned around, put the bait bucket down on the narrow concrete pathway, and dipped her net into a concrete trough.  Up came a netful of medium sized shiners.  She stooped over to dump the load into the bucket, opened the lid, and out jumped one of Jimmy’s captive frogs,

 

arms and legs outstretched leaping toward the face of the lady in the gray house dress.  Scream.  The bucket went into the pool on the right, the netful of shiners went up in the air and into the pool on the left, (and were quickly gobbled in midair by the larger of their species) and the lady in the gray house dress went backwards into the pool behind her.  I think it was the trough with crayfish.

Frozen, it took a while for Mahogany Jim and me to spring into action, walk the narrow concrete pathways and help Mrs. Galloway out of the trough and onto the pathway with her hair hanging like a mop on her shoulders, her wet dress clinging to her body and an angry look on her face that would have stopped a charging rhino at five paces. She had a difficult time stepping out of the pool, despite, or perhaps because of, our help.  She may have slipped back into the pool once or twice.

Jimmy remained by the back porch, hands still folded behind his back, smiling.

Following our “rescue,” Mrs. Galloway brushed past us and into the house.  Mahogany Jim theorized that discretion dictated we not finish our negotiation.   I retrieved the bait bucket.  We slunk back to the Ford and drove back to Settin’ Pole Dam where my mother waited for the minnows.

As we got out of the car, I brought the empty bait bucket with me.  My mother looked at the swinging and obviously empty pail, spread her arms as if to ask, “So?   Where are the minnows?”
My father walked up to the dam.  “The bait store was all out.” 

Polley and I drove past Mrs. Galloway’s house, graying like the color of the overcast sky.  I could see crab grass and dandelions with pale yellow drooping heads growing in the bait troughs. 

There was no traffic as we moved silently and slowly down Main Street,

past the Lumberjack Restaurant, shuttered with pale brown moldy plywood and permanently closed for business.  Its emptiness hurt.  Covid and poor decisions by people who really tried to revive the area created a ghost town fog that shrouded our old haunts.

Just past the Lumberjack we made a right to enter Little Wolf Pond and drove down to where our red and white cabin used to be.  It had been “shabbified.”  The house next to it also felt the malaise that affected the area.

We continued on Route 3 West past the entrance to Little Wolf Lake and made the left onto the dirt road leading to Settin’ Pole Dam.  The County, to keep people safe from falling off the dam, put a chain link fence around the entrance to the pillars from which we had fished. I felt that same fence around my heart.  I stared for a long while at the dam, the river, and the sky.

I have learned in my seventies that Thomas Wolfe was right.  You Can’t Go Home Again.  The dam was just a dam, the fence just a fence, the river just flowing water.  “Home” is not a place.  It is a memory. And my memory is limited to thoughts.  I have reached the age when the ghosts have fled the haunts of my youth. Even the ghosts have to leave the physical place, as fewer live relatives and friends visit those sacred places where life was lived and enjoyed. Without the ghosts the place is just a geographic entry…a latitude and longitude. But in my mind I still see my father, my mother, and my brother enjoying the glory of being together at Settin’ Pole Dam.  I can recall conversations. I can picture movements and facial expressions, smiles and frowns and laughs. I can think the memory.  But visiting the past in space is not sufficient.  Something is missing.  I cannot feel the memory.  I cannot feel in my body and soul the joys of my youth.

And so that is another lesson that can be learned by old people. In fact, it is a revelation that only old people can learn. In the near future, I will be a forgotten ghost to my offspring. I wish them the wisdom to cherish memories of their youth and to value those around them, to understand that, if we are fortunate, life is the effort to create good and meaningful memories.   The best I can do is feel as much of the present as I can.